causes them all kinds of suffering and deprivation, was never needed by them and only corrupts those of them who come under its influence.
So that to try to prove to men that they cannot live without a Government, and that the injury the thieves and robbers among them may do is greater than the injury both material and spiritual which Government continually does by oppressing and corrupting them, is as strange as it would have been to try to prove to slaves that it was more profitable for them to be slaves than to be free, But just as, in the days of slavery, in spite of the obviously wretched condition the slaves were in, the slave-owners declared and created a belief that it was good for slaves to be slaves, and that they would be worse off if they were free (sometimes the slaves themselves became hypnotised and believed this) so now the Government, and people who profit by it, argue that Governments which rob and deprave men are necessary for their well-being, and men yield to this suggestion.
Men believe in it all, and must continue to do so; for not believing in the law of God, they must put their faith in human law. Absence of human law for them means the absence of all law; and life for men who recognise no law, is terrible. Therefore, for those who do not acknowledge the law of God, the absence of human law must seem terrible, and they do not wish to be deprived of it.
This lack of belief in the law of God, is the cause of the apparently curious phenomenon, that all the theoretical anarchists, clever and learned men—from Bakoúnin and Prudhon to Reclus, Max Stirner and Kropotkin—who prove with indisputable correctness and justice the unreasonableness and harmfulness of power, as soon as they begin to speak of the possibility of establishing a society without that human law which they reject, fall at once into indefiniteness, verbosity, rhetoric, and quite unfounded and fantastic hypotheses.
This arises from the fact that none of these theoretic anarchists accept that law of God common to all men, which it is
