But beneath all this tough and apparently acrimonious strife a singular spirit of forbearance reigns. The majority will not force on a premature decision. Debate may rage fast and furious day after day, but at last the din dies. A common understanding is somehow attained, and the _mir_ pronounces its deliverance, which is accepted, in the rude belief of the peasants, as the decree of God Himself. In this way tens of thousands of Russian villages have been, no doubt, managing their own petty business with reasonable amity and success for centuries, and the political philosophy of Russian writers like Bakunin and Prince Krapotkin, who have propagated anarchism in the west of Europe, is merely the naïve suggestion that the form of government which answers not intolerably for the few trivial concerns of a primitive Russian village would answer best for the whole complex business of a great developed modern society. The anarchists carry their dislike to authority into other fields besides the political and industrial. They will have no invisible master or ruler any more than visible. They renounce both God and the devil, and generally with an energy beyond all other revolutionists. Some of the older socialists were believers; St. Simon, Fourier, Leroux and Louis Blanc were all theists; but it is rare to find one among the socialists of the present generation, and with the anarchists an aggressive atheism seems an essential part of their way of thinking. They will own no superior power or authority of any kind--employer, ruler, deity, or law. The Anarchist Congress of Geneva in 1882 issued a manifesto, which began thus:-- "Our enemy, it is our master. Anarchists--that is to say, men without chiefs--we fight against all who are invested or wish to invest themselves with any kind of power whatsoever. Our enemy is the landlord who owns the soil and makes the peasant drudge for his profit. Our enemy is the employer who owns the workshop, and has filled it with wage-serfs. Our enemy is the State, monarchical, oligarchic, democratic, working class, with its functionaries and its services of officers, magistrates, and police. Our enemy is every abstract authority, whether called Devil or Good God, in the name of which priests have so long governed good souls. Our enemy is the law, always made for the oppression of the weak by the strong, and for the justification and consecration of crime." Among other restraints, they entertain often a speculative opposition to the restraint of the legal family, and sometimes advocate a return to aboriginal promiscuity and relationship by mothers; but this is only an occasional element in their agitation. It is plain, however, that when law is believed to be oppression, crime and lawlessness come to be humanity.