own conclusions as regards the different political forms of society, and especially the State. We are not impressed in the least by assertions such as the following: "The State is the affirmation of the idea of supreme Justice in Society," or "The State is the Instrument and the Bearer of Progress," or "Without State—no Society."
True to our method, we study the State with the same disposition of mind as if we studied a society of ants or bees, or of birds which have come to nest on the shores of an Arctic lake or sea. To repeat here the conclusions we have come to in consequence of such studies, would be needless. We would have to repeat what has been said by Anarchists from the times of Godwin till the present day, and which can be found with all necessary developments in a number of books and pamphlets.
Suffice it for our purpose to say that for our European civilisation (the civilisation of the last fifteen hundred years, to which civilisation we belong) the State is a form of society that was developed only since the sixteenth century, and this under the influence of a series of causes which one will find mentioned, for instance, in my essay, "The State: its Historic Rôle." Before that, and since the fall of the Roman Empire, the State—in its Roman form—did not exist. If we find it, nevertheless, in historical school-books, even at the outset of the barbarian period, it is a product of the imagination of historians who will draw the genealogical trees of kings—in France, up to the heads of the Merovingian bands, and in Russia, up to Rurik in 862. Real historians know that the State was reconstituted only upon the ruins of the mediæval free cities.
On the other side, the State, considered as a political power, State-Justice, the Church, and Capitalism are facts and conceptions which we cannot separate from each other. In the course of history these institutions have developed, supporting and reinforcing each other.
natural law: that very often the man who tries to go against Nature achieves his aim.
"Gravity makes physical bodies fall, but the same gravity makes a balloon rise [aviation with machines heavier than air is another recent example in point]. For us it is so simple; but the economists of the classical school seem to have the greatest trouble in understanding the scope of such an observation.
"The law of division of labour in lime will be some day the counterpart of the law of Adam Smith, and it will permit us to obtain the integration of work in the individual."
