present allowed to understand. They can be
enslaved by a system, as we are at present, because it happens to be
there, and nobody understands it. An intelligently worked Capitalist
system, as Comte saw, would give us all that most of us are intelligent
enough to want. What makes it produce such unspeakably vile results is
that it is an automatic system which is as little understood by those
who profit by it in money as by those who are starved and degraded by
it: our millionaires and statesmen are manifestly no more "captains
of industry" or scientific politicians than our bookmakers are
mathematicians. For some time past a significant word has been coming
into use as a substitute for Destiny, Fate, and Providence. It is "The
Machine": the machine that has no god in it. Why do governments do
nothing in spite of reports of Royal Commissions that establish the most
frightful urgency? Why do our philanthropic millionaires do nothing,
though they are ready to throw bucketfuls of gold into the streets? The
Machine will not let them. Always the Machine. In short, they dont know
how.

They try to reform Society as an old lady might try to restore a broken
down locomotive by prodding it with a knitting needle. And this is not
at all because they are born fools, but because they have been educated,
not into manhood and freedom, but into blindness and slavery by
their parents and schoolmasters, themselves the victims of a similar
misdirection, and consequently of The Machine. They do not want
liberty. They have not been educated to want it. They choose slavery and
inequality; and all the other evils are automatically added to them.

And yet we must have The Machine. It is only in unskilled hands under
ignorant direction that machinery is dangerous. We can no more govern
modern communities without political machinery than we can feed and
clothe them without industrial machinery. Shatter The Machine, and you
get Anarchy. And yet The Machine works so detestably at present that we
have people who advocate Anarchy and call themselves Anarchists.

The Provocation to Anarchism

What is valid in Anarchism is that all Governments try to simplify their
task by destroying liberty and glorifying authority in general and their
own deeds in particular. But the difficulty in combining law and
order with free institutions is not a natural one. It is a matter of
inculcation. If people are brought up to be slaves, it is useless and
dange