Page:A Handbook of Anarchy.djvu/8

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consideration to others, there can only be war, and it is war now, only that the war is against those who refuse to give the false consideration demanded by rules, instead of the true consideration called for by real circumstances. But this war is not waged by the classes who profit by the vested interests in the subjection of their fellows which law in its very nature has created for the crafty and tyrannical. It is the people's own force which through their delusion is turned against such of them as dare to infringe the rules of their bondage. And what the people's own force can do blindly and irrationally, at the bidding and for the purposes of their oppressors, it can do consciously and intelligently, of free will, and for the people's own purposes. Who are all the police, soldiers, judges, gaolers and so on, but people like anyone else, and picked very much at random? So far as their position does not corrupt them, they are conscientiously endeavoring to administer and defend laws which nobody can understand, and they are privileged interferers, (since the hands of the people at large are tied) and tempted to curry favor with their "superiors" and the classes in whose interest they mainly exist. Surely then people in general here, there and everywhere, can far better administer and defend the principles of humanity, which every ordinary person can understand, and with a full sense of mutual responsibility undestroyed by privilege and unbiassed by servile dependence!

Anarchy is no blind dogma of non-interference, as it is sometimes misrepresented to be; I would even take a man by force and compel him to work for me, if occasion required—for instance, if my life or yours depended on the prompt repairing of an engine and his labor was necessary to its accomplishment, and he refused to help voluntarily; and I think every reasonable man would justify me in standing over that fellow with a whip in one hand and a pistol in the other till that engine was in working order—just as I think that nobody would justify me in interfering with him even by procuring his voluntary assistance, when I should obviously entail less hardship on myself and others by leaving him alone than on him by so interfering. Neither as it as others misrepresent it,