Page:The State Its Historic Role.djvu/40

 conception of liberty surpasses their own narrow and mean conception culled from State teaching. And yet this sight is a fact.

It is because the spirit of voluntary servitude has always been artfully nourished in young brains, and is so still, so as to perpetuate the slavery of the subject to the State.

Libertarian philosophy is suffocated by pseudo-Roman and Catholic State philosophy. History is vitiated from the first page where it lies about the Merovingian and Carlovingian dynasties, to its last page, on which it glorifies Jacobinism and ignores the people and their work in the creation of institutions. Natural sciences are perverted to the benefit of the dual idol Church and State. The psychology of the individual, and still more that of societies, is falsified in each of its assertions to justify the triple alliance of soldier, priest and executioner. Even morality, which for centuries in succession has preached obedience to the Church or to some so-called divine book, only emancipates itself today to preach servility to the State.—"You have no direct moral obligations towards your neighbour, not even a sentiment of solidarity; all your obligations are to the State,"—we are told, we are taught by this new religion of the old Roman and Caesarian divinity. Neighbours, comrades, companions, forget them! You must know them only through the intermediary of an organ of your State. And all of you must practise the virtue of being equally slaves to it.

And the glorification of State and discipline, at which Church and University, the press and political parties work, is so well preached that even revolutionists dare not look this fetish straight in the face.

The modern radical is a centralizer, a State partisan, a Jacobin to the core. And the Socialist walks in his footsteps. Like the Florentines at the end of the fifteenth century, who could only invoke the dictatorship of the State, to save them from the patricians, the Socialists know only how to invoke the same gods, the same dictatorship and the same State, to save us from the abominations of an economic system, created by that very State!

If you look still deeper into all the categories of facts which have been hardly touched upon this evening, if you see the State as it was in history, and as it is in its very essence to-day, and if you consider moreover that a social institution cannot serve all aims indifferently, because, like every other organ, it is developed for a certain purpose, and not for all purposes,—if you take all that into consideration, you will understand why we desire the abolition of the State.