dom merely, but moral and economic freedom. If a government cannot permanently exist half slave and half free, how much less so can a human being!
More than this I shall not venture by way of prophecy. My purpose has been simply to indicate the problem, to accentuate the need of reform. Definite solutions I must leave to abler intellects. My present appearance is in the lowly capacity of Editor, and as such I fall back upon the precedent established or at least invoked by Carlyle: "Editors are not here, foremost of all, to say How.… An Editor's stipulated work is to apprise thee that it must be done. The 'way to do it,’—is to try it, knowing that thou shalt die if it be not done. There is the bare back, there is the web of cloth; thou shalt cut me a coat to cover the bare back, thou whose trade it is. ’Impossible?' Hapless Fraction, dost thou discern Fate there, half unveiling herself in the gloom of the future, with her gibbet-cords, her steel-whips, and very authentic Tailor's Hell, waiting to see whether it is ’possible’? Out with thy scissors, and cut that cloth or thy own windpipe!"
In considering the problem of the State the great thing, as Ibsen has pointed out, is not to allow one's self to be frightened by the venerableness of the institution. For those inclined to be thus frightened, as well as for a good many others, I have thought that a useful purpose might be served by bringing together a group of essays, written by some of the foremost thinkers of our time, which at least make plain that in neither its history nor its workings is the State a sacrosanct affair; that it is by no means an inerrant or irreproachable, even a reasonably efficient, social instrument; that under some other collective administrative arrangement humanity might achieve a far nobler and happier existence. The authors of these essays are of widely various, even directly antagonistic, social creeds; yet in the main points of their indictment against the State they are at one.
