“The anarchists are citizens who, in an age when one preaches everywhere the liberty of opinions, have believed it their duty to recommend unlimited liberty. “Our only merit consists in speaking out openly what the masses are thinking. We are several millions of laborers, who wish absolute liberty, and nothing but liberty. “We wish liberty—that is to say, we demand for every human being the right and the means of doing that which pleases him, and of doing only that which pleases him; to satisfy integrally all his wants, without any other limits than natural impossibilities and the wants of neighbors equally respectable. “We wish liberty, and we believe its existence incompatible with the existence of any power whatsoever, whatever its origin and form—whether it be elected or imposed, monarchical or republican—whether inspired by divine right or by popular right, by anointment or universal suffrage. “The best governments are the worst. “The evil, in other terms, in the eyes of the anarchists, does not reside in one form of government more than in another; it is in the idea of government itself, in the principle of authority. “The substitution, in a word, in human relations, OF FREE CONTRACT, perpetually _revisable_ and _dissoluble_, is our ideal. “The anarchists propose to teach the people how to get along without government, as they already begin to learn how to get along without God. “They will learn, likewise, how to get along without property-holders. “No liberty without equality! No liberty in a society where the capital is centralized in the hands of a minority, which continually grows smaller. “We believe that capital—the common patrimony of humanity, since it is the fruit of the co-operation of contemporaneous generations—ought to be placed at the service of all. “We wish, in a word, equality—equality in fact, as corollary or rather as primordial condition of liberty. From each one according to his faculties, to each one according to his needs: that is what we wish sincerely, energetically. “Wicked and insane as people call us, we demand bread for all, science for all, work for all; for all, also, independence and justice.”[148] The anarchists believe in a kind of collectivism. Their ideal consists of independent communes united very loosely in a confederation. Of course, the confederation has no powers save such as are voluntarily granted it by each individual and during the time which it may please him to grant them. It is no government. It is simply combined action. There are groups and confederations within the communes based on similar principles.