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398 We are not informed to what extent it is possible to apply this principle in all its strictness.

Anarchism approves all means of disorganisation whereby revolutionary enthusiasm and the revolutionary spirit can be maintained and strengthened. Anarchism is revolutionism elevated into a principle.

Anarchists reject national organisation as well as the state. They are likewise opposed to patriotism, be this conceived in the narrower political or in the wider nationalistic sense. Nationality is the enemy no less than the state.

Similarly, ecclesiastical organisation, the church, and above all the state church, are repudiated. So-called ethical anarchism, however, frequently admits the permissibility of a sort of church, but this must be no more than an ethical union, not properly speaking religious. Certain anarchists, again, are astatists merely, and have no objection to other associations than those which partake of the nature of the state, or at least do not object to them on principle.

The question of economic organisation remains to be considered. The newer anarchists are communists or collectivists. In this domain the anarchists have to face the same problems as the socialists—the division of labour, the organisation of labour, the distribution of the product of labour, and so on.

The anarchist demands the renovation of society; he demands a new man and a new humanity; this involves the problem of the "new ethic." It was thus that Bakunin envisaged the task. Pisarev and Nietzsche might demand a revaluation of the old values, might look for the coming of the superman, or might formulate their wishes as they pleased; but they could not escape the inevitable ethical implication.

For the anarchists the problem of problems is this. Can the existing unjust social order, established and maintained by force, be forcibly swept away, so that the new order, in which force will be unknown, may take its place? Will the physical-force anarchist, the forcible expropriator, of to-day, be the peaceful brother of to-morrow? Anarchism is opposed on principle to the use of force; is it then permissible for the anarchist to slay and to expropriate; can Beelzebub cast out devils? The philosophic theorists of anarchism do their utmost to establish the right to kill. But they cannot get