as
public enemies. The entire independence of women, as equal citizens,
with no recognised relation to individual men, was the inevitable
outcome, logically and practically, of the Communistic principle; but
this only made matters worse. Attempts were of course made to restrain
multiplication by law, but this brought about inquisitions so utterly
intolerable that human nature revolted against them. The sectaries I
have mentioned--around whom, without adopting or even understanding
their principles, gradually gathered all the better elements of
society, every man of intellect and spirit who had not been murdered,
with a still larger proportion of women--seceded separately or in
considerable numbers at once; established themselves in those parts of
the planet whose less fertile soil or less genial climate had caused
them to be abandoned, and there organised societies on the old
principles of private ownership and the permanence of household ties.
By and by, as they visibly prospered, they attracted the envy and
greed of the Communists. They worked under whatever disadvantage could
be inflicted by climate and soil, but they had a much more than
countervailing advantage in mutual attachment, in freedom from the
bitter passions necessarily excited by the jealousy and incessant
mutual interference inseparable from the Communistic system, and in
their escape from the caprice and instability of popular
government--these societies, whether from wisdom or mere reaction,
submitting to the rule of one or a few chief magistrates selected by
the natural leaders of each community. Moreover, they had not merely
the adhesion of all the more able, ambitious, and intellectual who
seceded from a republic in which neither talent nor industry could
give comfort or advantage, but also the full benefit of inventive
genius, stimulated by the hope of wealth in addition to whatever
public spirit the habits of Communism had not extinguished. They
systematically encouraged the cultivation of science, which the
Communists had very early put down as a withdrawal of energy from the
labour due to the community at large. They had a monopoly of
machinery, of improvement, of invention both in agriculture, in
manufactures, and in self-defence. They devised weapons far more
destructive than those possessed by the old _regime_, and still more
superior to such as, after centuries of anarchy and decline, the
Communists were able to procure. Finally, when assa