the government."—"By no means. I have just given you my serious and well-considered profession of faith. Although a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an Anarchist. Listen to me."
He then traces in a few pages the decline of the principle of authority, and arrives at the conclusion that, "in a given society, the authority of man over man is inversely proportional to the stage of intellectual development which that society has reached"; that, "just as the right of force and the right of artifice retreat before the steady advance of justice, and must finally be extinguished in equality, so the sovereignty of the will yields to the sovereignty of the reason, and must at last be lost in scientific Socialism"; and that, "as man seeks" justice in equality, so society seeks order in Anarchy."
This is the first instance on record, so far as I have been able to discover, of the use of the word Anarchy to denote, not political chaos, but the ideal form of society to which evolution tends. These words made Proudhon the father of the Anarchistic school of Socialism. His use of the word and its adoption by his followers gave it its true standing in political and scientific terminology. Proudhon, then, being the Anarchist par excellence, let us examine his attitude towards Communism in order to test thereby General Walker's assertion that "all Anarchistic philosophy presumes the Communistic reorganization of society " and that "Anarchism means Communism."
It probably will surprise many who know nothing of Proudhon save his declaration that "property is robbery" to learn that he was perhaps the most vigorous hater of Communism that ever lived on this planet. But the apparent inconsistency vanishes when you read his book and find that by property he means simply legally privileged wealth or the power of usury, and not at all the possession by the laborer of his products. Of such possession he was a stanch defender. Bearing this in mind, listen now to the few paragraphs which I shall read from "What is Property?" and which are separated only by a dozen pages from what I have already quoted from the same work:
I ought not to conceal the fact that property and communism have been considered always the only possible forms of society. This deplorable error has been the life of property. The disadvantages of communism are so obvious that its critics never have needed to employ much eloquence to thoroughly disgust men with it. The irreparability of the injustice which it causes, the violence which it does to attractions and repulsions, the yoke of iron which it fastens upon the will, the moral torture to which it subjects the conscience, the debilitating effect which it has upon society; and, to sum it all up, the pious and stupid uniformity
