not in the laws that it could be found, for true justice is immutable
and laws are changeable. It is with laws as with all the rest (!). For
if laws are beneficent what is the good of deputies and senators to
change them? And if they are bad what is the good of magistrates to
apply them?"

Having thus "demonstrated" "liberty," Etievant passes on to "equality."

From the zoophytes to men, all beings are provided with more or less
perfect organs destined to serve them. All these beings have therefore
the right to make use of their organs according to the evident will of
mother Nature. "So for our legs we have the right to all the space they
can traverse; for our lungs to all the air we can breathe; for our
stomach to all the food we can digest; for our brain to all we can
think, or assimilate of the thoughts of others; for our faculty of
elocution to all we can say; for our ears to all we can hear; and we
have a right to all this because we have a right to life, and because
all this constitutes life. These are the true rights of man! No need to
decree them, they exist as the sun exists. They are written in no
constitution, in no law, but they are inscribed in ineffaceable letters
in the great book of Nature and are imprescriptible. From the
cheese-mite to the elephant, from the blade of grass to the oak, from
the atom to the star, everything proclaims it."

If these are not "metaphysical conceptions," and of the very worst type,
a miserable caricature of the metaphysical materialism of the eighteenth
century, if this is the "philosophy of evolution," then we must confess
that it has nothing in common with the scientific movement of our day.

Let us hear another authority, and quote the now famous book of Jean
Grave, "La Societe mourante et l'Anarchie," which was recently condemned
by French judges, who thought it dangerous, while it is only supremely
ridiculous.

"Anarchy means the negation of authority. Now, Government claims to base
the legitimacy of its existence upon the necessity of defending social
institutions: the family, religion, property, etc. It has created a vast
machinery in order to assure its exercise and its sanction. The chief
are: the law, the magistracy, the army, the legislature, executive
powers, etc. So that the Anarchist idea, forced to reply to everything,
was obliged to attack all social prejudices, to become thoroughly
penetrated by all human knowledge, in order to demonstrate that its
con