get into it, it is ruin to fall out, but if we stay in, we must submit. We must make contracts binding us to the other members of the organization, and we must keep them. But they fetter our liberty; we must spend our time at the bench, the counter, or the desk, and we cannot get away. Where is there any liberty, in the sense of unrestrained self-will, for the civilized man? The declaimers about the ills of civilization are not astray in their facts; the civilized man is the slave of the industrial organization, of contracts, of the market, of supply and demand—call it what you will, it is, after all, only the weight of existence, and liberty means for us just what it did for the savage; it means that we may maintain existence if we can.
Capital is necessary to civilized existence; so they tell us that we are nowadays the slaves of capital, because we cannot do what we want to do without it. We borrow it; then they say that we are the slaves of debt, or of "hard bargains," because we have made a contract which it is irksome to fulfil. We are the slaves of the market, because we cannot get a satisfactory price for our goods. We are the slaves of supply and demand, because we cannot get the wages we would like for our services. So we get in a rage and propose revolution, or, at least, state-intervention, because we supposed that we could do as we liked, and now we find that we cannot.
Who Is Free? Is It the Millionaire?
The uncivilized man is not free, because he is bound by the hardships of his condition, by tradition and custom, by superstition, and by ignorance. He can only escape from the limitations thus fastened upon him by education, and organized labor, systematically applied
