Page:The State Its Historic Role.djvu/39

 How many men have died in prisons, how many have been transported to Australia, shot and hanged, to reconquer the right of combination, which (I am not tired of repenting) every man, free or serf, practiced freely, before the State had laid its heavy hand on societies.

But was it the workman only who was treated in this fashion?

Think of the struggles the bourgeoisie itself had to carry on against the State in order to conquer the right of constituting themselves into commercial societies; a right which the State only conceded when it discovered in it an easy method of creating monopolies to the advantage of its creatures and to refill its treasury. And the struggles for the right to write, to speak, or simply to think differently from what the State orders through its academies, universities or churches? And the struggles for the right to teach, be it only reading, a right which the State reserves to itself without making use of it! And the struggles even to obtain the right of amusing oneself in common; not to mention those wars which would still have to be fought for conquering the right to choose one's judge or one's law (a thing which was before the growth of the State of daily occurrence), or the struggles that separate us from the day when they will burn the book of infamous punishments, invented by the spirit of the inquisition and of the despotic empires of the East, and known under the name of penal code!

Then look at taxation, an institution of purely State origin, that formidable weapon which the State makes use of in Europe as well as in young societies in the United States to keep the masses under its heel, to favour friends, to ruin the greater number to the advantage of those who govern, and to uphold the old divisions and castes.

Then take the wars, without which States can neither constitute themselves nor stand—wars that become fatal, inevitable, as soon as we admit that a certain region (because it is a State) can have interests opposed to those of its neighbours Think of past wars and of those we are threatened with before the conquered races will be admitted to breathe freely; of wars for commercial markets; of wars to create colonial empires. And in France we only know too well what servitude each war, whether victorious or not, brings in its train.

And what is worse than all that I have enumerated, is that the education we all receive from the State, at school and later on in our life, has so vitiated our brains that the idea of liberty itself goes astray and is travestied into servitude.

Sad is the sight of those who believe themselves to be revolutionists, vowing their deepest hatred to Anarchists—because the Anarchists