A MODERN SYMPOSIUM
adopt. The activities of men that are freest in the society in which we live are those of art and science and amusement. And all these are, I will not say regulated by, but expressed in, voluntary organizations, clubs, academies, societies, what you will. The Royal Society and the British Association are types of the right way of organizing; and it is a way that should and must be applied throughout the whole structure. Every trade and business should be conducted by a society voluntarily formed of all those who choose to engage in it, electing and removing their own officials, determining their own policy, and co-operating by free arrangement with other similar bodies. A complex interweaving of such associations, with order everywhere, compulsion nowhere, is the form of society to which I look forward, and which I see already growing up within the hard skin of the older organisms. Rules there will be but not laws, rules gladly obeyed because they will have been freely adopted, and because there will be no compulsion upon anyone to remain within the brotherhood that approves and maintains them. Anarchy is not the absence of order, it is absence of force; it
[55]
