Absolutism was to Bakounin a universal destroyer of the best and the noblest qualities in man. And, as it stands as an effective barrier to the only social order that can lift man above the beast--that of perfect liberty--so must the sincere warrior against absolutism become the universal destroyer of any and everything associated with tyranny. How far such a crusade leads one may be gathered from Bakounin's own words: "The end of revolution can be no other," he declares, "than the destruction of all powers--religious, monarchical, aristocratic, and bourgeois--in Europe. Consequently, the destruction of all now existing States, with all their institutions--political, juridical, bureaucratic, and financial."[6] In another place he says: "It will be essential to destroy everything, and especially and before all else, all property and its inevitable corollary, the State."[7] "We want to destroy all States," he repeats in still another place, "and all Churches, with all their institutions and their laws of religion, politics, jurisprudence, finance, police, universities, economics, and society, in order that all these millions of poor, deceived, enslaved, tormented, exploited human beings, delivered from all their official and officious directors and benefactors, associations, and individuals, can at last breathe with complete freedom."[8] All through life Bakounin clung tenaciously to this immense idea of destruction, "terrible, total, inexorable, and universal," for only after such a period of destructive terror--in which every vestige of "the institutions of tyranny" shall be swept from the earth--can "anarchy, that is to say, the complete manifestation of unchained popular life,"[9] develop liberty, equality, and justice. These were the means, and this was the end that Bakounin had in mind all the days of his life from the time he convinced himself as a young man that "the desire for destruction is at the same time a creative desire."[10]