Page:A Handbook of Anarchy.djvu/14

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practice it may please the individuals of the majority best to give way. Or the question may be sunk, or new ideas conceived, or new persons enlisted. Unless materially impossible, as in the case of a ship in mid-ocean whose further course has been called in question, where there is nothing for it but to stay on board, it should generally be optional with everyone whether to remain associated with what others decide on—though extraordinary emergencies might justify the majority in coercing the minority, or the minority in coercing the majority, if possible. It is all a matter for common sense to adjust without being trammelled by formalities and legalities.

An agent, delegate or representative in any matter would only be that of those who procured him to act. In dealing with another person's representative everyone is aware that he may be a misrepresentative, and would in Anarchy know therefore that he shared with the party "represented," the risk of the representative being false. The "represented" would be perfectly justified in repudiation if the representative had designedly or inadvertently committed them to something unreasonable or foreign to their purpose in sending him; or in so far as one fair man would justify another in revoking a promise made even personally, if the circumstances had materially varied in the meantime. A promise or agreement is simply an expression of definite intention, for the guidance of others concerned, and the whole moral question upon it is one of mutual sparing of inconvenience.

The relations of the sexes will be on the same footing of freedom. Here there are always two persons whose choice in the matter would require to be mutual. All persons are not alike sexually. Some are monogamous, others polygamous; some mating, others roving, but all these can find partners who can take them as they are, and the mating person forced against nature to go from one to another, the rover kept to one, the monogamist forced to consort habitually with several during the same period and the polygamist prevented from doing so, each loses respect for the other sex, and treats a sex-partner as a mere machine for gratifying his or her sensuality. Hence, freedom tends to purity. Though ordinarily, the habitual sex partnership is accompanied by a domestic