and acute suffering to a life in which he would feel a hand upon his shoulder, an eye fixed upon his face and an order resounding in his ear all the time, continually forced onward by outside, foreign impulses, continually obliged to obey a foreign will—this life of external control with its perpetual licenses, would kill him in a short time probably.
Is this condition which I recommend as desirable, is it anarchy? Only an absent-minded or superficial reader could have deduced this conclusion from my preceding remarks. Anarchy, the absence of all government, is a creation of certain minds, incapable of correct observation. As soon as even two human beings settle down to dwell together, a government is necessarily formed, that is, forms and regulations of intercourse and behavior, consideration and subordination, become necessary. The natural condition of humanity is not that of an amorphous aggregation of matter, that is, without crystallization in its particles, but exactly the reverse, a mass whose atoms assume invariably certain regular forms owing to their inherent power of attraction. In every mixed mass of human beings, forming an apparent social chaos, a state is sure to be organizing itself, as crystals are sure to be developed immediately in any solution of crystallizable matter. The rational mind therefore does not demand anarchy, that is utterly inconceivable, but an autonomy, an oligarchy, a government of and for self, of limited extent, with the radical simplification of the present machinery of government, the suppression of all unnecessary wheels, the liberation of the individual from purposeless compulsion and the limitation of the demands of the community upon the citizen to that which is obviously indispensable to the fulfillment of its duties. The individual will thus be freed from what Herbert Spencer calls "The
