Page:Enrico Malatesta - Anarchy - James F. Morton - Is It All a Dream (1900).pdf/49

 Rh will take the place of all these. Men and women will put far more heart into their work, and will exercise their inventive faculties in an immeasurably superior manner, when no portion of the result of their labor is intercepted by employer, landlord, or tax gatherer. The result will not be a tendency toward isolation, as is fancied by some who strangely misread human nature. Rather will free men and women, once fairly rid of the unavoidable suspicions. which inevitably mark their attitude toward one another in this age of industrial warfare, find their common interest in far more intimate social and economic association than would be possible today. This would be the unavoidable consequence, not of a radical organic change in human nature, but of the needs of human nature as it exists today, under conditions of unrestricted freedom of development. It requires but the slightest knowledge of biology to recognize the elementary fact that social instincts are stronger in the long run than the anti-social instincts, and must survive in the, struggle for existence. Force government, with its manifod opportunities for robbery and oppression, its creation of class and caste divisions between man and man, its false ethics as exemplified in war and, capital punishment, its vile diplomatic intrigues, its hideous political corruption, and its unlimited supply of motives for friction, irritation, and hatred, is the worst possible stumbling-block in the pathway of the slowly evolving social consciousness.

For the foregoing reasons, it is clear that the logical evolutionist must, sooner or later, accept the premises of the Anarchist philosophy. Radical and idealistic as its teachings seem, they are founded on the undisputed conclusions of science. Being in harmony with the trend of human progress, and responsive to the needs of human nature, Anarchy offers itself to the world as the answer to its yearning questions and the realization of its loftiest aspirations.