ot only a modern Satan incarnate, but the eight other
devils as well, nothing could have delighted him more. And no doubt he
was inspired to this demon worship by his implacable hatred of
absolutism--whether it be in religion, which he considered as tyranny
over the mind, or in government, which he considered as tyranny over the
body. To Bakounin the two eternal enemies of man were the Government and
the Church, and no weapon was unworthy of use which promised in any
measure to assist in their entire and complete obliteration.

Absolutism was to Bakounin a universal destroyer of the best and the
noblest qualities in man. And, as it stands as an effective barrier to
the only social order that can lift man above the beast--that of perfect
liberty--so must the sincere warrior against absolutism become the
universal destroyer of any and everything associated with tyranny. How
far such a crusade leads one may be gathered from Bakounin's own words:
"The end of revolution can be no other," he declares, "than the
destruction of all powers--religious, monarchical, aristocratic, and
bourgeois--in Europe. Consequently, the destruction of all now existing
States, with all their institutions--political, juridical, bureaucratic,
and financial."[6] In another place he says: "It will be essential to
destroy everything, and especially and before all else, all property and
its inevitable corollary, the State."[7] "We want to destroy all
States," he repeats in still another place, "and all Churches, with all
their institutions and their laws of religion, politics, jurisprudence,
finance, police, universities, economics, and society, in order that all
these millions of poor, deceived, enslaved, tormented, exploited human
beings, delivered from all their official and officious directors and
benefactors, associations, and individuals, can at last breathe with
complete freedom."[8] All through life Bakounin clung tenaciously to
this immense idea of destruction, "terrible, total, inexorable, and
universal," for only after such a period of destructive terror--in which
every vestige of "the institutions of tyranny" shall be swept from the
earth--can "anarchy, that is to say, the complete manifestation of
unchained popular life,"[9] develop liberty, equality, and justice.
These were the means, and this was the end that Bakounin had in mind all
the days of his life from the time he convinced himself as a young man
that "the desire for destruction i