Laws of the state are as faulty and as faultily administered as those of the family. Most of them have to be speedily and repeatedly “amended,” many repealed, and of those permitted to stand, the greater number fall into disuse and are forgotten. Those who have to be entrusted with the duty of administering them have all the limitations of intelligence and defects of character by which the rest of us also are distinguished from the angels. In the wise governor, the just judge, the honest sheriff or the patient constable we have as rare a phenomenon as the faultless father. The good God has not given us a special kind of men upon whom to devolve the duty of seeing to the observance of the understandings that we call laws. Like all else that men do, this work is badly done. The best that we can hope for through all the failures, the injustice, the disheartening damage to individual rights and interests, is a fairly good general result, enabling us to walk abroad among our fellows unafraid, to meet even the tribesmen from another valley without too imminent a peril of braining and evisceration. Of that small security the anarchist would deprive us. But without that nothing is of value and we shall be willing to renounce the anarchist. Our system of civilization, being the natural outgrowth of our moral and intellectual natures, is open to criticism and subject to revision. Our laws, being of human origin, are faulty and their application is disappointing. Dissent, dissatisfaction, deprecation, proposals for a better system fortified with better laws more intelligently administered—these are permissible and should be welcome. The decent socialist (when he is not carried away by zeal to pool issues with the anarchist) may have that in him which it does us good to hear. Wrong in all else, he may be right in showing us wherein we ourselves are wrong. Anyhow, his desire is amendment, and so long as his paths are peace he has the right to walk therein, exhorting as he goes. The French communist who does not preach Petroleum and It Rectified is to be regarded with more than amusement, more than compassion. There is room for him and his fad; there are hospitable ears for his boast that Jesus Christ would have been a communist if there had been communes. They really “did not know everything down in Judee.” But for the anarchist, whose aim is not amendment, but destruction—not welfare to the race, but mischief to a part of it—not happiness for the future, but revenge for the past—for that animal there should be no close season, for that savage no reservation. Society has not the right to grant life to one who denies the right to live. The proponent of reversion to the _régime_ of lacking noses should lack a nose. V