It is "of a relatively modern origin."[511] "The State is a historic formation which, in the life of all nations, has at a certain time gradually taken the place of free associations. Church, law, military power, and wealth acquired by plunder, have for centuries made common cause, have in slow labor piled stone on stone, encroachment on encroachment, and thus created the monstrous institution which has finally fixed itself in every corner of social life--nay, in the brains and hearts of men--and which we call the State."[512] It has now begun to decompose. "The peoples--especially those of the Latin races--are bent on destroying its authority, which merely hampers their free development; they want the independence of provinces, communes, and groups of laborers; they want not to submit to any dominion, but to league themselves together freely."[513] "The dissolution of the States is advancing at frightful speed. They have become decrepit graybeards, with wrinkled skins and tottering feet, gnawed by internal diseases and without understanding for the new thoughts; they are squandering the little strength that they still had left, living at the expense of their numbered years, and hastening their end by falling foul of each other like old women."[514] The moment of the State's disappearance is therefore close at hand.[515] Kropotkin says now that it will come in a few years,[516] now that it will come at the end of the nineteenth century.[517] II. _In the next stage of evolution, which, as has been shown, mankind must soon reach, the place of the State will be taken by a social human life on the basis of the legal norm that contracts must be lived up to._ Anarchism is the "inevitable"[518] "next phase,"[519] "higher form,"[520] of society. 1. Even after the State is done away men will live together socially; but they will no longer be held together in society by a governmental authority, but by the legally binding force of contract. "Free expansion of individuals into groups and of groups into associations, free organization from the simple to the complex as need and inclination are felt,"[521] will be the future form of society.