Paul Eltzbacher

“ Has not the proprietor the right to give his goods to whomever he [81] will, to let his neighbor burn without crying fire, to oppose the public good, to squander his patrimony, to exploit the laborer and hold him to ransom, to produce bad goods and sell them badly? Can he be judicially constrained to use his property well? can he be disturbed in the abuse of it? What am I saying? Is not property, precisely because it is full of abuse, the most sacred thing in the world for the legislator? Can one conceive of a property whose use the police power should determine, whose abuse it should repress? ”

“ But men will be held together in society no longer by a supreme authority, but by the legally binding force of contract. Complete humanity can be attained only in a free society. "My liberty, or, what means the same, my human dignity, consists in my being entitled, as man, to obey no other man and to act only on my own judgment." [375] "I myself am a free man only so far as I recognize the humanity and liberty of all the men who surround me. In respecting their humanity I respect my own. A cannibal, who treats his prisoner as a wild beast and eats him, is himself not a man, but a beast. ”

“ The characteristics of the State correspond to the low stage of evolution to which it belongs.
The State enslaves the governed. "The State is force; nay, it is the silly parading of force. It does not propose to win love or to make converts; if it puts its finger into anything, it does so only in an unfriendly way; for its essence consists not in persuasion, but in command and compulsion. However much pains it may take, it cannot conceal the fact that it is the legal maimer of our will, the constant negation of our liberty. ”

“ The State as well as the law, then, exists, not by the individual's recognizing it as favorable to his welfare, but rather by his counting it sacred, by "our being entangled in the error that it is an I, as which it applies to itself the name of a 'moral, mystical, or political person.' I, who really am I, must pull off this lion's skin of the I from the parading thistle-eater." ”

“ Are you willing to join their league? to form a part of their society? Do you promise to respect the honor, the liberty, the goods, of your brothers? Do you promise never to appropriate [72] to yourself, neither by violence, by fraud, by usury, nor by speculation, another's product or possession? Do you promise never to lie and deceive, neither in court, in trade, nor in any of your dealings? You are free to accept or to refuse.
"If you refuse, you form a part of the society of savages. Having left the fellowship of the human race, you come under suspicion. Nothing protects you. ”

“ At the same time the State depraves those who govern. "It is characteristic of privilege, and of every privileged position, that they poison the minds and hearts of men. He who is politically or economically privileged has his mind and heart depraved. This is a law of social life, which admits of no exceptions and is applicable to entire nations as well as to classes, corporations, and individuals. It is the law of equality, the foremost of the conditions of liberty and humanity." ”

“ One must not wonder if in the first moment of their uprising the people kill many oppressors and exploiters—this misfortune, which is of no more importance anyhow than the damage done by a thunderstorm, can perhaps not be avoided. But this natural fact will be neither moral nor even useful. Political massacres have never killed parties; particularly have they always shown themselves impotent against the privileged classes; for authority is vested far less in men than in the position which the privileged acquire by any institutions, particularly by the State and private property. ”

“ To brand the policy of terrorism and assassination as immoral is ridiculously weak. 'Liberty' does not assume to set any limit on the right of an invaded individual to choose his own methods of defence. The invader, whether an individual or a government, forfeits all claim to consideration from the invaded. This truth is independent of the character of the invasion. It makes no difference in what direction the individual finds his freedom arbitrarily limited; he has a right to vindicate it in any case, and he will be justified in vindicating it by whatever means are available. ”

“ But the revolution can never cross the frontiers and become general unless it has in it the foundations for this generality; that is, unless it is pronouncedly socialistic, and, by equality and justice, destroys the State and establishes liberty. For nothing can better inspire and uplift the sole true power of the century, the laborers, than the complete liberation of labor and the shattering of all institutions for the protection of hereditary property and of capital. ”

“ Now, because liberty has not the power to bring this about, there are people who say: We will have no liberty, for we must have absolute equality. I am not of them. If I can go through life free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbor, equally free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich; it will not make all men equally rich. ”

“ Like almost all monopolists, it supplies a worthless, or nearly worthless, article. Just as the monopolist of a food product often furnishes poison instead of nutriment, so the State takes advantage of its monopoly of defence to furnish invasion instead of protection. Just as the patrons of the one pay to be poisoned, so the patrons of the other pay to be enslaved. And the State exceeds all its fellow-monopolists in the extent of its villany because it enjoys the unique privilege of compelling all people to buy its product whether they want it or not. ”

“ Unless, indeed, the State, in desperation, shall see fit to make its laws regarding imprisonment for taxes more rigorous, and then, if our Anarchist be a determined man, we shall find out how far a republican government, 'deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed,' is ready to go to procure that 'consent,'—whether it will stop at solitary confinement in a dark cell or join with the czar of Russia in administering torture by electricity. The farther it shall go the better it will be for Anarchy, as every student of the history of reform well knows. ”

“ There is not a tyrant in the civilized world to-day who would not do anything in his power to precipitate a bloody revolution rather than see himself confronted by any large fraction of his subjects determined not to obey. An insurrection is easily quelled, but no army is willing or able to train its guns on inoffensive people who do not even gather in the street but stay at home and stand back on their rights. ”

“ II. If once men are convinced that justice commands the change, then will "despotism fall of itself by its very uselessness." [202] The State and property disappear, law is transformed, and the new condition of things begins.
"The Revolution does not act after the fashion of the old governmental, aristocratic, or dynastic principle. It is Right, the balance of forces, equality. It has no conquests to pursue, no nations to reduce to servitude, no frontiers to defend, no fortresses to build, no armies to feed, no laurels to pluck, no preponderance to maintain. ”

“ It creates an army of office-holders who sit like spiders in their webs and have never seen the world except through the dingy panes of their office-window. The immense and ever-increasing sums that the State collects from the people are never sufficient: it lives at the expense of future generations, and steers with all its might toward bankruptcy. 'State' is tantamount to 'war'; one State seeks to weaken and ruin another in order to force upon the latter its law, its policy, its commercial treaties, and to enrich itself at its expense ”

“ In view of the threatened league of all privileged interests and all reactionary powers in Europe, in view of the terrible instrumentalities that a shrewd organization puts at their disposal, in view of the deep chasm that to-day yawns between the bourgeoisie and the laborers everywhere, no revolution can count on success if it does not speedily extend itself beyond the individual nation to all other nations. ”

“ Church, law, military power, and wealth acquired by plunder, have for centuries made common cause, have in slow labor piled stone on stone, encroachment on encroachment, and thus created the monstrous institution which has finally fixed itself in every corner of social life—nay, in the brains and hearts of men—and which we call the State. ”

“ Men of courage, willing not only to speak but to act; pure characters who prefer prison, exile, and death to a life that contradicts their principles; bold natures who know that in order to win one must dare,—these are the advance-guard who open the fight long before the masses are ripe to lift the banner of insurrection openly and to seek their rights arms in hand. In the midst of the complaining, talking, discussing, comes a mutinous deed by one or more persons, which incarnates the longings of all. ”

“ Even when it commands the good, it makes this valueless by commanding it; for every command slaps liberty in the face; as soon as the good is commanded, it is transformed into the evil in the eyes of true (that is, human, by no means divine) morality, of the dignity of man, of liberty; for man's liberty, morality, and dignity consist precisely in doing the good not because he is commanded to but because he recognizes it, wills it, and loves it. ”

“ This unequal distribution of commodities is altogether opposed to the general welfare. It hampers intellectual progress. "Accumulated property treads the powers of thought in the dust, extinguishes the sparks of genius, and reduces the great mass of mankind to be immersed in sordid cares, beside depriving the rich of the most salubrious and effectual motives to activity." [92] And the rich man can buy with his superfluity "nothing but glitter and envy, nothing but the dismal pleasure of restoring to the poor man as alms that to which reason gives him an undeniable right." ”

“ The revolution will not be made by anybody. "Revolutions are never made, neither by individuals nor yet by secret societies. They come about automatically, in a measure; the power of things, the current of events and facts, produces them. They are long preparing in the depth of the obscure consciousness of the masses—then they break out suddenly, not seldom on apparently slight occasion." ”

“ Is it to be inferred that this oppression is inseparably connected with the existence of human society?" [366] Certainly not! "The great, true goal of history, the only one for which there is justification, is our humanization and deliverance, the genuine liberty and prosperity of all socially-living men." [367] "In the triumph of humanity is at the same time the goal and the essential meaning of history, and this triumph can be brought about only by liberty." [368] "As in the past the State was historically necessary evil, it must just as necessarily, sooner or later, disappear altogether." ”

“ The collectivism of the future society "by no means demands the setting up of any supreme authority. In the name of liberty, on which alone an economic or a political organization can be founded, we shall always protest against everything that looks even remotely similar to Communism or State Socialism." [403] "I would have the organization of society, and of the collective or social property, from below upward by the voice of free union, not from above downward by means of any authority." ”

“ Thus the impulse given by individuals will provoke a movement that goes on faster and faster, wider and wider, avalanche-like, suddenly sweeps along the masses, and brings about the new order of life. [1162] Then the time is come "when all men are filled with God, shun war, beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; that is, in our language, when the prisons and fortresses are empty, when the gallows, rifles, and cannon are out of use. What seemed a dream has found its fulfilment in a new form of life." ”

“ One might reply that in peasant ownership of land, at least, private property has good effects. [549] "But the golden age is over for the small farmer. To-day he hardly knows how to make both ends meet. He gets into debt, becomes a victim of the cattle-dealer, the real-estate jobber, the usurer; notes and mortgages ruin whole villages, even more than the frightful taxes imposed by State and commune. Small proprietorship is in a desperate condition; and even if the small farmer is still owner in name, he is in fact nothing more than a tenant paying rent to money-dealers and usurers." ”

“ It is an arbitrary command when Cortes with his Spaniards commands the Mexicans to bring out their gold, or when a band of robbers forbids a frightened peasantry to betray their hiding-place; here a human will decides, indeed, but a will that relates only to other men, and not at the same time to those whose will it is. A resolution is presented when I have decided to get up at six every morning, or to leave off smoking, or to finish a piece of work within a specified time—here a human will is indeed the standard, but it relates only to him whose will it is, not at all to others. ”

“ That question can be asked only by one who does not see how meaningless and miserable is his life as an individual life, and who imagines that he shall 'not die'. But I know that a life for the sake of one's own happiness is the greatest folly, and that such an aimless life can be followed only by an aimless death. And therefore I fear nothing. I shall die like everybody, like even those who do not fulfil Christ's teaching, but my life and my death will have a meaning for me and for others. ”

“ The Republic is the organization by which, all opinions and all activities remaining free, the People, by the very divergence of opinions and of wills, thinks and acts as a single man. In the Republic every citizen, in doing what he wishes and nothing but what he wishes, participates directly in legislation and government, just as he participates in the production and circulation of wealth. There every citizen is king; for he has plenary power, he reigns and governs. The Republic is a positive anarchy. ”

“ The State belongs to a low stage of evolution.
"Man takes the first step from his bestial existence to a human existence by religion; but so long as he remains religious he will never reach his goal; for every religion condemns him to absurdity, guides him into a wrong course, and makes him seek the divine in place of the human." [353] "All religions, with their gods, demigods, and prophets, their Messiahs and saints, are products of the credulous fancy of men who had not yet come to the full development and entire possession of their intellectual powers." ”

“ It would be other men that would be enslaved, and they would be coerced into other things, but there would exist not merely the same but a still more cruel condition of violence and enslavement; for the combat would have fanned the flames of hatred, strengthened the means of enslavement, and evolved new ones. Thus it has been after all revolutions, insurrections, and conspiracies, after all violent changes of government. Every fight only puts stronger means of enslavement in the hands of the men who at a given time are in power. ”

“ If one would make a thorough revolution, therefore, one must attack things and relationships, destroy property and the State: then there is no need of destroying men and exposing one's self to the inevitable reaction which the slaughtering of men always has provoked and always will provoke in every society. ”