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there are so many people who are only restrained by law and authority from waging war on the wretched, helpless others, it is rather surprising for them to have gone on allowing the weak helpless good to govern them and keep them from doing what they would like. If such exist, it is because the existence of law is protecting them from the risks of their disposition; and Nature demands a slaughter for the purification of the world from the living abortions and inhuman monstrosities that have been preserved through law from the doom which humanity, in its own defence, should have meted out to them. Let it be slaughter, then, if such indeed it would, but let me be free to try and slaughter whom I like to slaughter, and every other whom he likes to slaughter, and not be butcher-slaves massacring as somebody else pleases, and when that slaughter stops because there is nobody left alive that anybody else left alive would like to kill, the survivors will be only such as are capable and desirous of living together in peace and harmony. Let us have it, by all means, as soon as the people learn to abandon law—let those who can and wish to live in helpful brotherhood, or at least in peace and concord, exterminate their enemies, and have, even if it is only for a few generations, a life worth living! They can do it, for if wickedness were naturally pleasing to the bulk of mankind, they would not wish for law "to suppress evil." But in the absence of law, all the social feelings would, of a psychologic necessity, be enormously awakened, and I believe that when people learn to throw away the superstition of law, with its consequence of their stiffened and distorted attitude towards each other, many and indeed the most of those who are under existing conditions social enemies, will rise naturally to the glory of peace and good will. Men's mutual mistrust has furnished, in the various forms of law—rules, statutes, property, authority—the means for its own justification; so also their mutual confidence will not fail, in Liberty, to justify itself.
In the absence of law the one consideration taken by people as to their own or each others' welfare, must be in the broadest sense the bearing of their respective needs, feelings and purposes. For those who refuse this
