Ross Winn

“ Anarchist ideals have not yet reached the masses. But those ideals so dominate the best minds and the highest thought of the world that their influence is reaching far and wide, unconsciously and unperceived. In the dawn of a new conscience and a new philosophy of life, now breaking upon the world's heart and brain, the political State is in the throes of its final dissolution. Ignorance, spurred on by power and privilege, shrieks in vain against the new order, Anarchy, whose herald star is rising in the east. Government is in the grasp of awakened thought. ”

“ Governmentalists, authoritarians, believers in force and violence—worshippers at the shrine of brute force, never tire of repeating the assertion that government is an absolute concomitant of civilization, and the only force whereby social order is to be upheld. However, even a very casual examination of the various forms of public thought reveals the surprising fact that there is an universal mistrust of government, and from nowhere do we hear a note of satisfaction with the workings of our political machinery. ”

“ Today the masses have reached an intellectual development that makes the foundations of government extremely insecure. It is this general diffusion of knowledge among the people that results in the present universal agitation for governmental reforms. But, as an evil cannot be reformed, save by being destroyed, so all attempts to reform and improve the political state by substituting one set of rulers for another, or by changing its form, must always fail. ”