Page:Instead of a Book, Tucker.djvu/445

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IMETHODS.
429

The invader, whether an individual or a government, forfeits all claim to consideration from the invaded. This truth is independent of the character of the invasion. It makes no difference in what direction the individual finds his freedom arbitrarily limited; he has a right to vindicate it in any case, and he will be justified in vindicating it by whatever means are available. The right to take unoccupied land and cultivate it is as unquestionable as the right to speak one's thoughts, and resistance offered to any violation of the former is no less self-defence than resistance offered to the violation of the latter. In point of morality one is as good as the other. But with freedom of speech it is possible to obtain freedom of the land and all the other freedoms, while without it there is no hope save in terrorism. Hence the expediency—yes, the necessity—of terrorism to obtain the one; hence the uselessness and folly of employing it to obtain the other. So, when Mr. Bax says that the Russian who shall kill the Czar will act wisely, but that the Englishman who should kill Salisbury would act foolishly, he wins Liberty's approval; but when he makes this Russian a saint and this Englishman a knave, this approval must be accompanied by protest.


THE BEAST OF COMMUNISM.

[Liberty, March 27, 1886.]

Henri Rochefort is reported to have said to an interviewer the other day: "Anarchists are merely criminals. They are robbers. They want no government whatever, so that, when they meet you on the street, they can knock you down and rob you." This infamous and libellous charge is a very sweeping one; I only wish that I could honestly meet it with as sweeping a denial. And I can, if I restrict the word Anarchist as it always has been restricted in these columns, and as it ought to be restricted everywhere and always. Confining the word Anarchist so as to include none but those who deny all external authority over the individual, whether that of the present State or that of some industrial collectivity or commune which the future may produce, I can look Henri Rochefort in the face and say: "You lie!" For of all these men I do not recall even one who, in any ordinary sense of the term, can be justly styled a robber.

But unfortunately, in the minds of the people at large, this