“There is no more intimate or engaging
business interior in Paris.”
“Furthermore, if the individual increases his knowledge in a continuous fashion, it is only in a very slow fashion. Still he has arrived to-day at the point where, to develop himself in his integrity, it is necessary that his autonomy be complete, that his aspirations express themselves freely, that he be permitted to cultivate them in all their breadth, that nothing fetter his free initiative and his evolution.
“And so it is that now, at last, anarchists draw from their study of the existing social organisation this important lesson: that human laws ought to disappear, carrying with them the legislative, executive, judicial, and repressive systems which impede human evolution by causing murderous crises in which many thousands of human beings perish, by delaying all humanity in its forward march, and, sometimes, even by dragging it backward.”
“While the politicians have not got beyond this formula, which they believe the ne plus ultra of liberty,—‘l’individu libre dans la commune, la commune libre dans l’état,’—we know that these political forms are incompatible with liberty, since they tend always to submit a number of men to the same rule; and we formulate our device, ‘l’individu libre dans l’humanité libre,’—the individual, left free to attach himself according to his tendencies, his affinities, free to seek out those with whom his liberty and his aptitudes can accord, unfettered by the political organisations which are determined by geographical or territorial considerations.
“For man to develop himself freely in his physical, intellectual, and moral nature, for him to reveal all his capacities, it is necessary that each individual be able to satisfy all his physical, intellectual, and moral needs. And this satisfaction can only be assured to all if the soil, which is the creation of no one, is placed at the free disposition of whoever is capable of tilling it, and if the existing equipment, product of the labour of preceding generations, ceases to belong to a minority of parasites who exact a large tithe upon the resultant of its activity and the activity of those who work it.
“The earth too much cut up, on the one hand, to permit the small land-holders to employ the powerful machinery which would effectively second their efforts, appropriated in immense lots, on the other hand, by a class of idlers who secure, without work, an income from the production of those to whom they consent to rent,[2]—the earth nourishes its existing population with difficulty. And I have not counted the ignorance which is fostered by a defective education and which causes the greater part of the cultivators to cling to the traditional processes of cultivation,—processes which demand far too much work and effort for the results.
“Yet, in spite of these sources of waste, the earth would still manage to nourish, after a fashion, every living being if the middlemen were not there to warehouse the products and to speculate and gamble upon them, in such a way that the majority of persons are never in a condition to buy what they need. The fault, then, if all have not enough to eat, lies with the defective social organisation, and is not due to lack of production. A better distribution of products would alone be sufficient to give every one enough to eat, while a better management of the soil and a better use of the instruments of production would bring about abundance for all.
“A clearer comprehension of things will bring the peasant to understand that his interest, properly understood, is to unite his parcel of land with the parcels of his neighbours, to associate his efforts with their efforts, in order to diminish his toil and increase his production.