John Arthur Andrews

“ 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 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. ”

“ ANARCHY is freedom. The literal meaning of the word "free" is to love or like; thus when we say that a man is free we imply that he is "to like," that is, he has only to like in order to decide what he will do, or try to do. Among the things which people in general like, is to avoid hurting others, and as sometimes to do a particular thing which one would like would come in conflict with this, it becomes a matter for consideration which course one likes the best. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ The moment when, instead of considering what they would really like best to do under the actual circumstances confronting them, people in their ignorance turned their will to work out the dictates of a rule, that moment they ceased to be free; and the fact that they adopted the rule of their own accord, could no more alter the nature of their condition, than the fact of a man having voluntarily chained himself up could prevent the resulting fact of his physical bondage. ”

“ Substitute the free choice of conduct by all humanity according to their respective needs for action, in place of having some ordinary persons endowed with monopolies of this and that portion of the choice of conduct and resulting destinies of the rest; substitute the enlightened instincts of self-preservation and fellow-feeling together as the standard of morality, in place of obedience; and if not all people are competent for such a life, those of not less than average intelligence and good will certainly are, and they are the community ”

“ And as under no conceivable condition of society is wrong impossible, the effect of law is necessarily to create a vested interest in all wrongs possible to occur in conformity with the modes it crystallises, for all who are in a position to profit by them at the expense of those who will suffer, and thus to constitute the latter mere cattle for the former; while freedom, by preserving the social elasticity, although it cannot prevent wrongs of a purely personal character from occurring if the elements are present, admits of no such wholesale wrong being foisted upon and overshadowing society. ”

“ The whole of law is exactly on a par with the contention of the rabid teetotallers who affirm that because one man may do wrong in drinking alcohol, everyone should be forbidden to drink it. Because a certain act committed by a person whose moral nature is deficient, or who is not sufficiently thoughtful in his conduct, may probably be, under those circumstances, an unjust act, moral and considerate men are to be forbidden to do that act under any circumstances! ”

“ If the latter, its moral value for arousing the morally dull to the fact that other people's feet ache when trodden on, is destroyed; especially when the aggrieved—directly or through sympathy—are forbidden to exercise their resentment, and instead of the aggriever being taught a lesson as between man and man, he is punished by strangers in the name of an impersonal power for breach of discipline; not for wronging others, for the law gives to all who can use the law to that purpose, the privilege of wronging others: but for doing a wrong, or for that matter a right, in a forbidden way. ”

“ Read Bakounine's GOD & THE STATE. Property is law in restraint of use and possession, and conferring on the person in whose favor the restriction is declared, authority over his fellow-beings to arbitrarily forbid or impose his own terms for, their use of particular things. The more a man owns, the more he owns you. Like other law in the beginning, it was instituted with good intentions, the idea being to secure to each person undisturbed possession of the things which habitually he resorted to or had reasonable expectation of using for the satisfaction of his needs. ”

“ We share no grief in the death-agony of a tiger or a human enemy whose life would threaten our own or make it insupportable. Then, since law in the nature of things takes away the exercise of fellow-feeling by which that feeling is developed, substituting, instead, comparison with codes, and since by building on false generalisation it creates antagonistic interests, which cannot be adhered to without consequently closing up the bodily avenues of love for one's neighbor as for oneself, it is law that is a hideous creator of wickedness. ”

“ Rules are all very well in their place as foundations for thoroughly optional special doings, and confined to the limited sphere of a circumscribed purpose, such as defining the structure of a game, the fun of which consists in seeing what can be done under specified limitations, and where the rule exists in the capacity of an assumed natural quality in an imaginary world which we can enter or leave at will; but as affecting doings in the real world, which are founded on facts that cannot be abrogated in that connection, they are wholly out of place. ”

“ Unless materially impossible, as in the case of a ship in mid-ocean whose further course has been called in question, where there is nothing for it but to stay on board, it should generally be optional with everyone whether to remain associated with what others decide on—though extraordinary emergencies might justify the majority in coercing the minority, or the minority in coercing the majority, if possible. It is all a matter for common sense to adjust without being trammelled by formalities and legalities. ”

“ It would moreover be as rational to allege that an honest man should not object to being chained up to prevent him from stealing, as that he should not object to being a bond-slave in his conduct to prevent him from doing wrong, and a bond-slave he is when he has to conform his actions to an imposed code to the exclusion of his own judgment of what accords with reason and human sentiment. ”

“ A child may be rightfully coerced, to avoid more serious harm to itself or others, but without authority, as you would force a friend who was drinking too much and behaving foolishly—nor for the mere whim of the parents or anyone else, but with full responsibility to everyone's sense of fairness and right. ”

“ And a man does, or abstains from doing, something, for one of two reasons: either because he concludes that this conduct is the most appropriate, or because such is the rule or law. The conduct may answer to both reasons, but the motive can be only one of them; if a man does a thing because he thinks it fitting, he does so whether it is in accord with law or not, and if he does it because such is the law, he does it whether it is fitting or not. This is regarding law as a moral standard of conduct. ”

“ Why should you pick out a few and bind yourselves that what they call right shall be right, and what they call wrong shall be wrong? People whose conduct is chosen for them are "selfish," because the only thing left them to think on is the immediate convenience or inconvenience of the result. People who choose their conduct for themselves exercise their social feelings in doing so, and are satisfied with any sacrifices they make to please their sympathies. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Even the hard-up swagman goes his way gloomily while he is alone, and asks for tucker seldom, but when two such come together, neither one shirks this most distasteful work, because it is for his mate as well as himself. ”

“ When the resulting evils have at some stage become intolerable, those below have from time to time revolted, either to bring things back to a fresh start, or to put the framing and administration of laws into the hands of supposedly impartial persons, or to take them directly into their own hands—expecting to thus remedy the evil, which, however, as pointed out, is in the very nature of law as imposing fallacies upon conduct ”

“ If, however, 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. ”

“ It is usually held up as the equivalent of all wickedness. But let us see.
Right and wrong are simply good and harm. We define as right whatever ministers to the pleasure which we find in others' welfare without depriving us of a greater amount of pleasure in our own being, and which those whom it is safe for us to associate with find reciprocally in our welfare; wrong that which acts oppositely. Our whole nervous structure makes it a physiological fact that we share in the joys and sufferings of each other. ”

“ Each must purify his own life from all taint of the evil, and have courage to ignore what is imposed, as the Catholics did before pagan and Protestant persecutors, Protestants before Catholic persecutors, and Atheists in face of both; as science has conquered religious persecution while the sects are still contending, so Anarchy, the applied science of society, will make its way with a rapidity and power impossible to barren creeds. ”

“ Hence, freedom tends to purity. Though ordinarily, the habitual sex partnership is accompanied by a domestic one, it is not essential or uniformly desirable. Seducing a person to quit or ignore an existing sexual partnership is, other things being equal, an act that would call forth the contempt of the lawless, on account of its inconsiderate character towards the other partner.
Children would not be the chattel slaves of the parents as they are now. They would be to all on the same footing as any other feeble and inexperienced stranger who might arrive and become the guest of the community. ”

“ Whatever difference there might be in the things to be undertaken for supplying your respective needs, you would conduct yourselves in the same free and happy way as when you first set out. And the fruits of your toil and skill, and of your way of life, would soon be comfort for all such as the few have by the woe of the many now. ”

“ And the swagman who exercises his bushmanship in discovering water or a good camping place, constructing a shelter, improving the bill of fare, making a knife or a billy from old waste, etc., feels, because his doings have a direct purpose, an immediate connection with the needs and welfare of him and his mates, a zest and relish of living such as he never experiences when, in employment, he spends his time doing something that so far as he is concerned might just as well be anything else, and receiving money with which he buys enjoyments that have no logical connection with his efforts. ”

“ No two occurrences are exactly alike in their causes and their effects, and the essence of law is that it takes all cases which have a single, and it may be the least important, point in resemblance, and directs them to be treated, in kind if not in degree, on the same footing. ”

“ Our everyday affairs might just as well be regulated by the rules of cricket or draughts as by property or other law; it is only a matter of depending on the complications to which the peculiar limitations of the game give rise, for our material prosperity or adversity. ”

“ Our innate sentiment for the welfare of the race teaches us that if a woman admits a man for the mere satisfaction of her own animal passion, it is natural and not in itself immoral; and if she does so in pursuance of a special affection it is usually positively moral, in as much as such affection ordinarily guides to the coupling most advantageous for the beneficial breeding of her species. ”

“ The moral sense of people at large will, to the utmost of what reasonable and humane men can do, ensure and defend to each the undisturbed opportunity to gratify his purposes with the things he has provided or placed himself in access to for that end ”