In a document found on the person of a recent anarchist arrested by the authorities in England, it is asserted that the purpose of the anarchists is to put down all political, religious, and military authority; to burn all churches, palaces, soldier-barracks, fortresses, provisions, and to destroy all that has lived till now by business-work without contributing to it. From such documents we are to understand that the anarchists take it for granted that all laws and institutions among civilized peoples have been imposed arbitrarily by those who govern upon those who are governed; that the parties to be governed have as much right to ignore them as the governing parties had to make them; that there is in the universe no moral order to which the political and social orders among men correspond; that every man has the privilege of setting up his own order; that every engineer has the right to ignore the rails laid for the flanges of his wheels on the long roads leading out from the turntable, and the inestimable subjective liberty of pulling open the throttle valve and running out into the country according to his own sweet will. Suppose all the anarchists in the world should be sent to some great island so that they could test their own theories, would they not be under the necessity of founding some sort of a government? They would have to construct roads, devise ways and means for lights, water, and for protection against individual violence. Would they not have to bind themselves together by some kind of social contract, or compact? If a number of men should unite themselves into a syndicate for the purpose of building houses without reference to the laws of gravity, if they should declare it as their set purpose to so build houses as that the center of gravity should fall in a line outside the base, the whole company would be tried for lunacy and confined in the insane asylum. So the most summary and straightforward methods should be adopted for ridding society of all that class of men who propose to manage human affairs without reference to the facts of man’s nature and the laws of the universe. It is a question whether they should be put into an insane asylum or into a jail, for it is hard to determine which they have the most of: insane stupidity or insane meanness. Society has made great advances, but every increment of progress has been along the lines of the eternal laws of the universe. Those laws were here before man appeared upon the stage of action; they will be here when he is gone. Men may doctor themselves with error about truth, and error about right, until they come to be great imbeciles; but the truth and the right will remain clear and immortal for the intellect and the will of the wise and the good. VIII.