erished, impeded him, he has for the most part always regarded it as an inevitable and indispensable part of the divine machinery, as remote from his control as gravitation or the weather. All through the centuries he has blindly acceded to its insatiable demands, blindly conformed to its endless inhibitions, blindly sacrificed himself and his possessions to its alleged interests. Fed so long on this monotonous diet of subserviency, the State came quite naturally to imagine that there existed no law of God or man to which it was not superior—of which fatal delusion the consequences are today writ large in blood and fire across half the world.
The great underlying principle of English law, according to Dickens, is to make business for itself. The great underlying principle of the State, it might be said with equal truth, is to make power for itself. As Renan pointed out, "it knows but one thing—how to organize egotism." So preoccupied with this task has it been that it long ago forgot, if indeed it ever knew, that such a thing as the human soul exists. But now at last, aroused to rebellion by almost intolerable afflictions, the human soul begins to assert its supremacy. Of that duel the ultimate issue is certain and near at hand. The servant who has so long usurped the master's place must return below stairs; the instrument must finally yield to its creator.
But for all its crimes against humanity, the time is not yet when we can abolish the State entirely, as Ibsen urged, and "make willingness and spiritual kinship the only essentials in the case of a union." Eventually, unless moral progress is an illusion, that ideal will be realized. Mankind, however, has yet to serve a long and rigorous novitiate before it can be worthy of such a consummation. Philosophic anarchism is a creed that postulates too much nobility, too much self-restraint and self-abnegation, in common human nature to be immediately practicable. For a few decades (perhaps even a few generations) longer, Man must con-
