moil of the streets has something
repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of
thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not
all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same
interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek
happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by
one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one
another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his
own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the
crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a
glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his
private interest becomes the more repellant and offensive, the more these
individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however
much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow
self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it
is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in
the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads,
of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here
carried out to its utmost extreme.

Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is
here openly declared. Just as in Stirner's recent book, people regard
each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end
of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that
the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while
to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.

What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true
of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on
one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare,
every man's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering
under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed
that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they
manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole
crazy fabric still hangs together.

Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence
and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried
on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state