Page:Instead of a Book, Tucker.djvu/481

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MISCELLANEOUS.
465

wing of the army of freedom as far as that wing will go. But it sternly refuses to right about face. Liberty hates Catholicism and loves Free Thought; but, when it finds Catholicism advocating and Free Thought opposing the principle of voluntaryism in education, it sustains Catholicism against Free Thought. Likewise, when it finds Liberals and Socialists of all varieties favoring eight-hour laws, government monopoly of money, land nationalization, protection, prohibition, race proscription. State administration of railways, telegraphs, mines, and factories, woman suffrage, man suffrage, common schools, marriage laws, and compulsory taxation, it brands them one and all as false to the principle of freedom, refuses to follow them in their retrogressive course, and keeps its own eyes and steps carefully towards the front. It knows that the only way to achieve freedom is to begin to take it. It is an important question, as Mr. Lewis says, what we shall attack first. On this point Liberty has its opinion also. It believes that the first point of attack should be the power of legally privileged capital to increase without work. And as the monopoly of the issue of money is the chief bulwark of this power, it turns its heaviest guns upon that. But it is impossible to successfully attack the money monopoly or any other monopoly or privilege, unless the general principle of freedom be first established. That is the reason why Liberty makes this principle its own guide and its test of the course of others.


A FABLE FOR MALTHUSIANS.

[Liberty, July 31, 1886.]

Of all the astonishing arguments developed by the interest- ing Malthusian discussion now in progress in Lucifer and Liberty the most singular, surprising, and short-sighted is that advanced by E. C. Walker in maintaining the identity of political and domestic economy so fair as the problem of population is concerned.

"The prosperity of the whole," he tells Miss Kelly, "exists only because of the prosperity of the parts."

"To speak of domestic economy," he tells Mr. J. F. Kelly, "as though it were something that could be considered apart from so-called national economy, is confusing and unautonomistic. There can be no 'public good' which is secured at the expense of the individual, at the sacrifice of the private