“And as no one has the right to sterilise, for his sole pleasure, the slightest parcel of land, so long as there is a single being who has not plenty to eat, the coming revolution will have for one of its objects to put the soil into the hands of those who shall wish to cultivate it and the farm machines into the hands of those who shall wish to operate them.
“All this, anarchy seeks to demonstrate to the peasant, explaining to him that the masters who impose upon him exploit likewise the workman of the towns, trying to make him comprehend that, far from considering the town workman as an enemy, he should stretch out his hand to him, to the end that they may aid each other in the struggle for life, and arrive thus at disembarrassing themselves of their common parasites.
“To the workman, anarchy demonstrates that he must not expect his enfranchisement to come from providential saviours, nor from the palliatives with which the puppets of politics, who wish to control his vote and so dominate him, try to dazzle him; that the emancipation of the individual can be brought about only by the individual’s own action, can result only from his own energy and his own efforts when, knowing how to act, he shall use his liberty in place of demanding it.”
“It is not alone to those who are dying of want that anarchy addresses itself. To satisfy one’s hunger is a primordial right which takes precedence over all other rights and stands at the head of the claims of a human being. But anarchy embraces all the aspirations and neglects no need. The list of its demands includes all the demands of humanity.
“Mirbeau, in his Mauvais Bergers, makes one of the characters proclaim to workmen on a strike their right to beauty. And, indeed, every being has a right not only to what sustains life, but also to whatever renders it easy, enlivens it, and embellishes it. They are rare, alas! in our social state, who can live their lives amply.
“Some there are whose physical needs are satisfied, but who are retarded in their evolution by a social organisation which is conditioned by the narrowness of conception of the average intellect,—artists, littérateurs, savants, all who think, suffer morally, if not physically, from the present order of things.
“Daily they are wounded by the pettinesses of current existence, and disheartened by the mediocrity of the public to whom they address themselves, and whom they must consider if they wish to sell their works,—a situation which conducts those who would not die of hunger to compromise, to vulgar and mediocre art.
“Their education has led many of them to believe that they are of an essence superior to the peasant, to the manual worker, from whom, for the matter of that, they are for the most part descended. They have been persuaded that it is necessary, if their ‘talent’ is to develop and their imagination is to have full swing, that the ‘vile multitude’ take upon its shoulders the heavy tasks, devote itself to serving them, and wear itself out in making, by its labour, life easy for them; that they must have, if their genius is to attain its complete fruition, the same atmosphere of luxury and of idleness as the aristocratic classes.
“A healthy conception of things teaches that a human being, to be complete, must exercise his limbs as well as his brain, that labour is degrading only because it has been made a sign of servitude, and that a man truly worthy of the name does not need to impose the cares of his existence on others.