"What does this monstrous engine serve for, that we call 'State'? For preventing the exploitation of the laborer by the capitalist, of the peasant by the landlord? or for assuring us of work? for providing us food when the mother has nothing but water left for her child? No, a thousand times no."[499] But instead of this the State "meddles in all our affairs, pinions us from cradle to grave. It prescribes all our actions, it piles up mountains of laws and ordinances that bewilder the shrewdest lawyer. It creates an army of office-holders who sit like spiders in their webs and have never seen the world except through the dingy panes of their office-window. The immense and ever-increasing sums that the State collects from the people are never sufficient: it lives at the expense of future generations, and steers with all its might toward bankruptcy. 'State' is tantamount to 'war'; one State seeks to weaken and ruin another in order to force upon the latter its law, its policy, its commercial treaties, and to enrich itself at its expense; war is to-day the usual condition in Europe, there is a thirty years' supply of causes of war on hand. And civil war rages at the same time with foreign war; the State, which was originally to be a protection for all and especially for the weak, has to-day become a weapon of the rich against the exploited, of the propertied against the propertyless."[500] In these respects there is no distinction to be made between the different forms of the State. "Toward the end of the last century the French people overthrew the monarchy, and the last absolute king expiated on the scaffold his own crimes and those of his predecessors."[501] "Later all the countries of the Continent went through the same evolution: they overthrew their absolute monarchies and flung themselves into the arms of parliamentarism."[502] "Now it is being perceived that parliamentarism, which was entered upon with such great hopes, has everywhere become a tool for intrigue and personal enrichment, for efforts hostile to the people and to evolution."[503] "Precisely like any despot, the body of representatives of the people--be it called Parliament, Convention, or anything else; be it appointed by the prefects of a Bonaparte or elected with all conceivable freedom by an insurgent city--will always try to enlarge its competence, to strengthen its power by all sorts of meddling, and to displace the activity of the individual and the group by the law."[504] "It was only a forty years' movement, which occasionally even set fire to grain-fields, that could bring the English Parliament to secure to the tenant the value of the improvements made by him. But if it is a question of protecting the capitalist's interest, threatened by a disturbance or even by agitation,--ah, then every representative of the people is on hand, then it acts with more recklessness and cowardice than any despot. The six-hundred-headed beast without a name has outdone