Complete Life of William McKinley and Story of His Assassination: An Authentic and Official Memorial Edition, Containing Every Incident in the Career of the Immortal Statesman, Soldier, Orator and PatriotEverett, Marshall
History
Complete Life of William McKinley and Story of His Assassination: An Authentic and Official Memorial Edition, Containing Every Incident in the Career of the Immortal Statesman, Soldier, Orator and Patriot
Yet in behalf of this doctrine, which is in itself the anarchy of
belief, there have been sacrificed in the last quarter of a century more
than a hundred human lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth
of property by the most violent means. And, as far as can be judged by
an outsider, and as is admitted by the leading thinkers of the cult,
anarchism is not one whit the gainer by it.
According to Zenker, himself an anarchistic theorist, “anarchism means,
in its ideal sense, the perfect, unfettered self-government of the
individual, and consequently the absence of any kind of external
government.”
That such a state is possible not one of the anarchistic philosophers
has contended, and each has been eager to hold up his neighbor’s plan,
if not also his own, as a Utopia. Its realization, said Proudhon,
pioneer of the cult, would be an entirely new world, a new Eden, a land
of the perfect idealization of freedom and of equality. Yet Proudhon
wrote many books and made many addresses in behalf of his doctrine. Like
every other anarchist, he found his theory ending in a contradiction—as
soon as there was anarchy a new state would be built up.
For anarchy is of two classes, individualistic and communistic. The
first is the philosophy of the thinker, which has advanced as the object
of its being the attainment of “Liberty, not the daughter but the mother
of order.” That other anarchy is that which through the influence of
terrorism shall crumble empires and republics alike, while from their
dust shall rise a free people who shall be in no need of restraints at
the hands of their fellow-men. Disciples of this philosophy would build
communistic centers upon the ruins of government which violence should
have brought about.
Beginning with Proudhon, anarchy had no relationship to the secret
society of the assassin. Proudhon simply had criticised a society which
“seeks, in formula after formula, institution after institution, that
equilibrium which always escapes it, and at every attempt always causes
its luxury and its poverty to grow in equal proportion.” He had no
retributive bomb or dagger for the heads of state under which such
inequalities existed. He said, only: “Since equilibrium has never yet
been reached, it only remains for us to hope something from a complete
solution which synthetically unites theories, which gives back to labor
its effectiveness and to each of its organs its power. Hitherto
pauperism has been so inextricably connected with labor and want with
idleness that all our accusations against Providence only prove our
weakness.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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