Emma Goldman believes this. She does not belong with the rank and file of Anarchists. Cults and “isms” are too restrictive for her. “But you are an extreme Individualist,” the Socialists tell her. “No, I am not,” she answers them. “I hate your rigid Anglo-Saxon individualism. It is just because I am so deeply social that I put my hope in the individual.” It is because she hates injustice of any sort so passionately that she adopted Anarchism as the soundest method of combating it. If you have laws you must accept the abuses of law. Why not be more completely simple—why keep on pretending that we need a machinery which fosters tyrannies instead of giving freedom an unhandicapped path to begin upon its great responsibilities? This was the idealism upon which the American founders built—a minimum of government, at least, when that evil seemed to become a necessity. In her remarkable book that has just been published, Voltarine de Cleyre discusses this phase of the matter brilliantly in a chapter called “Anarchism and American Traditions.” There is no possibility of going into it minutely here, except to ask those who insist upon regarding Anarchism as an unconstructive force to read it. These are the things Emma Goldman is trying to preach. She does not expect to see a new order spring up in response to her vision; so the facetious ones who poke their stale jokes at the unspeakable humor of a communistic society might save their wit for more legitimate provocations. All she hopes is to quicken the consciousness of those through whom such changes will come—to improve the individual quality. It reminds you of Comte’s suggestion, at the time when he fell deliriously in love, that all the problems of society could be solved on that divine principle. It is like Tolstoy’s dream prophecy—his prediction of the time when there will be neither monogamy nor polygamy, but simply a poetogamy under which people may live freely and beautifully.