Page:A Handbook of Anarchy.djvu/4

 are exactly alike in their causes and their effects, and the essence of law is that it takes all cases which have a single, and it may be the least important, point in resemblance, and directs them to be treated, in kind if not in degree, on the same footing. And as under no conceivable condition of society is wrong impossible, the effect of law is necessarily to create a vested interest in all wrongs possible to occur in conformity with the modes it crystallises, for all who are in a position to profit by them at the expense of those who will suffer, and thus to constitute the latter mere cattle for the former; while freedom, by preserving the social elasticity, although it cannot prevent wrongs of a purely personal character from occurring if the elements are present, admits of no such wholesale wrong being foisted upon and overshadowing society. The moment when, instead of considering what they would really like best to do under the actual circumstances confronting them, people in their ignorance turned their will to work out the dictates of a rule, that moment they ceased to be free; and the fact that they adopted the rule of their own accord, could no more alter the nature of their condition, than the fact of a man having voluntarily chained himself up could prevent the resulting fact of his physical bondage. The free man cannot owe obedience or support either to a personal ruler or to the fallacious exactions of any sort of superstition. The recognition of this fact is signified in expressing freedom by the word "Anarchy," which means literally "un-rule," or lawlessness.

Now what is lawlessness? It is usually held up as the equivalent of all wickedness. But let us see.

Right and wrong are simply good and harm. We define as right whatever ministers to the pleasure which we find in others' welfare without depriving us of a greater amount of pleasure in our own being, and which those whom it is safe for us to associate with find reciprocally in our welfare; wrong that which acts oppositely. Our whole nervous structure makes it a physiological fact that we share in the joys and sufferings of