r idealists.

According to the view common to all Anarchists, the fault of our
present circumstances, which scorn freedom and equality, lies not in
the natural limitation of mankind, but in the limitation entailed upon
him by society, that is, by his own faulty conceptions and ideas. It
is therefore only a question of convincing men that they hitherto have
erred, that they should see in the State their enemy and not their
protector and champion--and the world is at once turned upside down
"like an omelet," society as now constituted is annihilated, and
Anarchy is triumphant. Anarchists since Bakunin are of the opinion
that, in order to reach this end, there is no need of weary evolution
or of an education of the human race for Anarchy; on the contrary, it
can be set up at once, immediately, with these same men; it merely
requires the trifling circumstance that men should be convinced of its
truth. Therefore they despise every political means, and their whole
strategy, not excepting the propaganda of action, only aims at
convincing men of the nothingness of society as such, and of the harm
done by its institution. This fact can only be understood in view of
the purely idealist starting-point from which the Anarchists proceed.
The man to whom society is a fact, a reality, only recognises an
evolution that excludes any sudden leap, and above all, the leap into
annihilation.

A radical error (as Herbert Spencer remarks in the very book which
Ferri adduces as a proof of his Anarchist tendency) which prevails in
the mode of thought of almost all political and social parties, is the
delusion that there exist immediate and radical remedies for the evils
that oppress us. "Only do thus, and the evil will disappear"; or "act
according to my method and want will cease"; or "by such and such
regulations the trouble will undoubtedly be removed"--everywhere we
meet such fancies, or modes of action resulting from them. But the
foundation of them is wrong. You may remove causes that increase the
evil, you may change one evil into another, and you may, as frequently
occurs, even increase the evil by trying to cure it: but an immediate
cure is impossible. In the course of centuries mankind, owing to the
increase of numbers, has been compelled to expand from the original,
ancient condition, wherein small groups of men supported themselves
upon the free gifts of nature, into a civilised condition, in which
the things necessary to support