Emma Goldman preaches and practises the philosophy of freedom; she pushes through the network of a complicated society as if it were a cobweb instead of a steel structure; she brushes the cobwebs from her eyes and hair and calls back to the less daring ones that the air is more pure up there and "sunrise sometimes visible." Someone has put it this way: "Repudiating as she does practically every tenet of what the modern state holds good, she stands for some of the noblest traits in human nature." And no one who listens to her thoughtfully, whatever his opinion of her creed, will deny that she has nobility. Such qualities as courage--dauntless to the point of heartbreak; as sincerity, reverence, high-mindedness, self-reliance, helpfulness, generosity, strength, a capacity for love and work and life--all these are noble qualities, and Emma Goldman has them in the nth power. She has no pale traits like tact, gentleness, humility, meekness, compromise. She has "a hard, kind heart" instead of "a soft, cruel one." And she's such a splendid fighter! What is she fighting for? For the same things, concretely, that Nietzsche and Max Stirner fought for abstractly. She has nothing to say that they have not already said, perhaps; but the fact that she says it instead of putting it into books, that she hurls it from the platform straight into the minds and hearts of the eager, bewildered, or unfriendly people who listen to her, gives her personality and her message a unique value. She says it with the same unflinching violence to an audience of capitalists as to her friends the workers. And the substance of her gospel--I speak merely from the impressions of those two lectures and the very little reading I've done of her published work--is something of this sort: Radical changes in society, releasement from present injustices and miseries, can come about not through reform but through change; not through a patching up of the old order, but through a tearing down and a rebuilding. This process involves the repudiation of such "spooks" as Christianity, conventional morality, immortality, and all other "myths" that stand as obstacles to progress, freedom, health, truth, and beauty. One thus achieves that position beyond good and evil for which Nietzsche pleaded. But it is more fair to use Miss Goldman's own words. In writing of the failure of Christianity, for instance, she says: