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 Rh or to sustain some other equally vicious statute. The statute is the great science оf rascality by which some few trample upon and enslave the many. There are natural laws provided for every work of man. Natural laws are self-operating. They punish all who violate them, and reward all who obey them. They cannot be repealed, amended, dodged, or bribed, and it costs neither time, money, nor attention to apply them. It is time to stop legislating against them. We want to obey laws, not men, not the tricks of men. Statutes are human tricks. The law—the statute law—is the coward's weapon; the tool of the thief, and more: the shield and buckler of every gigantic villainy, and frightful parent of all crimes. Every great robbery that was ever perpetrated upon a people has been by virtue of and in the name of law. By this tool of thieves the great mass of the people who inhabit our planet have been robbed of their equal right to the use of the soil and of all other natural opportunities. In the name of this monster (statute law) large sections of our race have been bought and sold as chattels; by it the vast majority of the human race are today held in the industrial bondage of wage slavery, and in its name our fair earth has been times without number deluged in human blood. By the instrumentality of this tool, cowards and thieves, tyrants and usurpers are robbing their fellows of their substance, despoiling them of their natural rights, and depriving them of liberty. Man's legal rights are everywhere in collision with man's natural rights; hence the deep rooted and widespread unrest of modern civilization. The only sacred right of property is the natural right of the workingman to the product, which is the creation of his labor. The legal right of the capitalist to rent and interest and profit is the absolute denial of the natural right of labor. Free access to the means of production is the natural right to labor. Free access to the means of production is the natural right of every man able and willing to work. It is the legal right of the capitalist to refuse such access to labor, and to take from the laborer all the wealth he creates over and above a bare subsistence for allowing him the privilege of working.

A laborer has the natural right, to life, and as life is impossible without the means of production the equal right to live involves an equal right to the means of production. The legal right of the capitalist is virtually the assertion that one man has a greater right to life than another man, since it denies the equality of natural conditions. Our present social system, therefore, is based upon the legalization of robbery, slavery, and murder. The laborer who does not get more than a bare subsistence as the fruit of his toil is robbed. The laborer who is forced to beg for work and has to accept it on any terms or starve is a slave. The laborer who, being unable to get work, but who in turn has too much manhood to beg, steal, or become a pauper, is by the refined process of slow starvation murdered.

Laws—just laws—natural laws—are not made, they are discovered; law enacting is an insult to divine intelligence; and law enforcing is the impeachment of God's integrity and his power. I make, as an Anarchist, this declaration for the benefit of our Christian ministry, who, while professing loyalty to God's laws, never forget to pray and work for the supremacy of man's laws and man's government—those pious frauds who profess their faith in the "power" of God, while they employ the police, the militia, and other armed