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land with the land of his neighbors and work with men like himself, farmers, on such plans as their experience points out as best. In Anarchy no sheriff to foreclose a mortgage, or intermeddling committee to dictate the season's work, will ever molest the farmer.
Then the true desirability of rural life will become manifest.
By co-operative working of the land, and the village plan of living, the work can be reduced to the minimum for both the men and the women, and the greatest enjoyment be attainable.
Beautiful moon-lit nights, sweet scented meadows and the song of birds in the flowering shrubbery, as well as the golden grain and blushing ripe fruit, will be realities, delightful realities, to the young rustics, as they sing their songs of love and joy.
How shall we get it?
The farmer is strong and courageous, and in the revolutionary period just before us, depend upon it, every farmer that has caught a glimpse of these possibilities, who knows what the Anarchists want, will do his share of the work necessary to bring it about.
Courthouses and records have lost their sacredness in the eyes of the farmer who knows that their destruction means the abolition of his mortgage, and so repudiation will be accompanied by destruction of all evidences of indebtedness and exparte ownership.
Life on the farm might be all that poets have described it, instead of the constant and hopeless drudgery that it is today. But it cannot be such as a result of political reforms, or in fact of anything short of freedom—Anarchy.
To reach it we must not only think and desire but dare and do! And our doing must be effective and intelligent. To make it intelligent we must never miss an opportunity to spread our ideas, our literature, and our periodicals among the farmers.
Modern Commerce.
Many persons are wont to speak of our commerce in boastful tones and to point with pride to our great commercial centers, with their swarms of human beings hurrying here and there, crowding each other in the streets or toiling all day long in shop or mart, as though all this were the acme of economic arrangements, the greatest achievement of mankind and the source of all human joy. So constantly have the writers, the orators and the dramatists held this idea up to the popular gaze that public sentiment has learned to accept it as correct, and even those who suffer most from the effects of modern commerce feel their breasts swell with pride as they gaze at the pictures of commercial centers in the illustrated magazines, or hear the stump-speakers boast of our commercial greatness.
To the superficial, and the one who is awed into admiration by vastness, the tangle of telephone wires over the city streets, the lines of trucks and drays crowding each other in their hurrying from depot to warehouse or from warehouse to retail store, the heavy trains speeding across the continent, all these have an effect that is irresistible.
But if we look below the surface and behold the picture there presented; see the ships that are wrecked, or railroad trains that have collided; hear the sobs of the sailor's widow or the groans of the mangled breakman, all because in the fierce rush of commerce the ship went to sea in a storm, or care was not taken to avoid an accident on the railroad; see the worn and aged men who have grown old while they might yet be young; see the gray-haired men who have grown so because their cargoes happened to reach port a few days late; see the wretched hovels and miserable lives of many who have given all their energy to carry on this mad chase; see the producer of wheat hungry, and the producer of wool cold; and the
