the smallest hint on their part that Communism is to be tolerated for an instant in a civilized country, they will be handily bludgeoned by the common policeman, and haled off to the common gaol.* When you suggest to these people that the application of Communism to the bread supply is only an extension, involving no new principle, of its application to street lighting, they are bewildered. Instead of picturing the Communist man going to the common store, and thence taking his bread home with him, they instinctively imagine him bursting obstreperously into his neighbor's house and snatching the bread off his table on the "as much mine as yours" principlewhich, however, has an equally sharp edge for the thief's throat in the form "as much yours as mine." In fact, the average Englishman is only capable of understanding Communism when it is explained as a state of things under which everything is paid for out of the taxes, and taxes are paid in labor. And even then he will sometimes say, "How about the brainwork?" and begin the usual novice's criticism of Socialism in general.

Now a Communist Anarchist may demur to such a definition of Communism as I have just given; for it is evident that if there are to be taxes, there must be some authority to collect those taxes. I will not insist on the odious word taxes; but I submit that if any article-bread, for instance-be communized, by which I mean that there shall be public stores of bread, sufficient to satisfy everybody, to which all may come and take what they need without question or payment, wheat must be grown, mills must grind, and bakers must sweat daily in order to keep up the supply. Obviously, therefore, the common bread store will become bankrupt unless every consumer of the bread contributes to its support as much labor as the bread he consumes costs to produce. Communism or no Communism, he must pay or else leave somebody else to pay for him. Communism will cheapen bread for him-will save him the cost of scales and weights, coin, book-keepers, counter-hands, policemen, and other expenses of private property; but it will not do away with the cost of the bread and the store. Now supposing that voluntary co-operation and public spirit prove equal to the task of elaborately organizing the farming, milling and baking industries for the production of bread, how will these voluntary co-operators recover the cost of their operations from the public who are to consume their bread? If they are given powers to collect the cost from the public, and to enforce their demands by punishing non-payers for their dishonesty, then they at once become a State department levying a tax for public purposes; and the Communism of the bread supply becomes no more Anarchistic than our present Communistic supply of street lighting is Anarchistic. Unless the taxation is voluntary-unless the bread consumer is free to refuse payment without incurring any penalty save the reproaches of his conscience and his neighbors, the Anarchist ideal will remain unattained. Now the pressure of conscience and

Written in the 1887-92 period, during which Trafalgar Square was forcibly closed against public meetings by the Salisbury administration.

public opinion is by no means to be slighted. Millions of men and women, without any legal compulsion whatever, pay for the support of institutions of all sorts, from churches to tall hats, simply out of their need for standing well with their neighbors. But observe, this compulsion of public opinion derives most of its force from the difficulty of getting the wherewithal to buy bread without a reputation for respectability. Under Communism a man could snap his fingers at public opinion without starving for it. Besides, public opinion cannot for a moment be relied upon as a force which operates uniformly as a compulsion upon men to act morally. Its operation is for all practical purposes quite arbitrary, and is as often immoral as moral. It is just as hostile to the reformer as to the criminal. It hangs Anarchists and worships Nitrate Kings. It insists on a man wearing a tall hat and going to church, on his marrying the woman he lives with, and on his pretending to believe whatever the rest pretend to believe; and it enforces these ordinances in a sufficient majority of cases without help from the law: its tyranny, in fact, being so crushing that its little finger is often found to be thicker than the law's loins. But there is no sincere public opinion that a man should work for his daily bread if he can get it for nothing. Indeed it is just the other way: public opinion has been educated to regard the performance of daily manual labor as the lot of the despised classes. The common aspiration is to acquire property and leave off working. Even members of the professions rank below the independent gentry, so called because they are independent of their own labor. These prejudices are not confined to the middle and upper classes: they are rampant also among the workers. The man who works nine hours a day despises the man who works sixteen. A country gentleman may consider himself socially superior to his solicitor or his doctor; but they associate on much more cordial terms than shopmen and carmen, engine drivers and railway porters, bricklayers and hodmen, barmaids and general servants. One is almost tempted in this country to declare that the poorer the man the greater the snob, until you get down to those who are so oppressed that they have not enough self-respect even for snobbery, and thus are able to pluck out of the heart of their misery a certain irresponsibility which it would be a mockery to describe as genuine frankness and freedom. The moment you rise into the higher atmosphere of a pound a week, you find that envy, ostentation, tedious and insincere ceremony, love of petty titles, precedences and dignities, and all the detestable fruits of inequality of condition, flourish as rankly among those who lose as among those who gain by it. In fact, the notion that poverty favors virtue was clearly invented to persuade the poor that what they lost in this world they would gain in the next.

Kropotkine, too optimistically, as I think, disposes of the average man by attributing his unsocialism to the pressure of the corrupt system under which he groans. Remove that pressure, and he will think rightly, says Kropotkine. But if the natural man be indeed social as well as gregarious, how did the corruption and oppression

0

under which he groans ever arise? Could the institution of property as we know it ever have come into existence unless nearly every man had been, not merely willing, but openly and shamelessly eager to quarter himself idly on the labor of his fellows, and to domineer over them whenever the mysterious workings of economic law enabled him to do so? It is useless to think of man as a fallen angel. If the fallacies of absolute morality are to be admitted in the discussion at all, he must be considered rather as an obstinate and selfish devil, who is being slowly forced by the iron tyranny of Nature to recognize that in disregarding his neighbor's happiness he is taking the surest way to sacrifice his own. And under the present system he never can learn that lesson thoroughly, because he is an inveterate gambler, and knows that the present system gives him a chance, at odds of a hundred thousand to one or so against him, of becoming a millionaire, a condition which is to him the summit of earthly bliss, as from it he will be able to look down upon those who formerly bullied and patronized him. All this may sound harsh, especially to those who know how wholesomely real is the workman's knowledge of life compared to that of the gentleman, and how much more genuinely sympathetic he is in consequence. Indeed, it is obvious that if four-fifths of the population were habitually to do the utter worst in the way of selfishness that the present system invites them to do, society would not stand the strain for six weeks. So far, we can claim to be better than our institutions. But the fact that we are too good for complete Unsocialism by no means proves that we are good enough for Communism. The practical question remains, Could men trained under our present system be trusted to pay for their food scrupulously if they could take it for nothing with impunity? Clearly, if they did not so pay, Anarchist Communism would be bankrupt in two days. The answer is that all the evils against which Anarchism is directed are caused by men taking advantage of the institution of property to do this very thing-seize their subsistence without working for it. What reason is there for doubting that they would attempt to take exactly the same advantage of Anarchist Communism? And what reason is there to doubt that the community, finding its bread store bankrupt, would instantly pitch its Anarchism to the four winds, and come down on the defaulters with the strong hand of a law to make them pay, just as they are now compelled to pay their Income Tax? I submit, then, to our Communist Anarchist friends that Communism requires either external compulsion to labor, or else a social morality which the evils of existing society shew that we have failed as yet to attain. I do not deny the possibility of the final attainment of that degree of moralization; but I contend that the path to it lies through a transition system which, instead of offering fresh opportunities to men of getting their living idly, will destroy those opportunities altogether, and wean us from the habit of regarding such an anomaly as possible, much less honor. able.

It must not be supposed that the economic difficulties which I pointed out as fatal to Individualist Anarchism are entirely removed by Communism. It is true that if all the bread and coal in the country were thrown into a common store from which each man could take as much as he wanted whenever he pleased without direct payment, then no man could gain any advantage over his fellows from the fact that some farms and some coal-mines are better than others. And if every man could step into a train and travel whither he would without a ticket, no individual could speculate in the difference between the traffic from Charing Cross to the Mansion House and that from Ryde to Ventnor. One of the great advantages of Communism will undoubtedly be that huge masses of economic rent will be socialized by it automatically. All rent arising from the value of commodities in general use which can be produced, consumed, and replaced at the will of man to the full extent to which they are wanted, can be made rent free by communizing them. But there must remain outside this solution, first, the things which are not in sufficiently general use to be communized at all; second, things of which an unlimited free supply might prove a nuisance, such as gin or printing; and thirdly, things for which the demand exceeds the supply. The last is the instance in which the rent difficulty recurs. It would take an extraordinary course of demolition, reconstruction, and landscape gardening to make every dwelling house in London as desirable as a house in Park Lane, or facing Regent's Park, or overlooking the Embankment Gardens. And since everybody cannot be accommodated there, the exceptionally favored persons who occupy those sites will certainly be expected to render an equivalent for their privilege to those whom they exclude. Without this there would evidently be no true socialization of the habitation of London. This means, in practice, that a public department must let the houses out to the highest bidders, and collect the rents for public purposes. Such a department can hardly be called Anarchistic, however democratic it may be. I might go on to enlarge considerably on the limits to the practicability of direct Communism, which varies from commodity to commodity; but one difficulty, if insurmountable, is as conclusive as twenty.

It is sufficient for our present purpose to have shewn that Communism cannot be ideally Anarchistic, because it does not in the least do away with the necessity for compelling people to pay for what they consume; and even when the growth of human character removes that difficulty there will still remain the question of those commodities to which the simple Communist method of so-called "free distribution" is inapplicable. One practical point more requires a word; and that is the difficulty of communizing any branch of distribution without first collectivizing it. For instance, we might easily communize the postal service by simply announcing that in future letters would be carried without stamps just as they now are with them, the cost being thrown entirely upon imperial taxation. But if the postal service were, like most of our distributive business, in the hands of thousands of competing private traders, no such

change would be directly possible. Communism must grow out of Collectivism, not out of anarchic private enterprise. That is to say, it cannot grow directly out of the present system.

But must the transition system therefore be a system of despotic coercion? If so, it will be wrecked by the intense impulse of men to escape from the domination of their own kind. In 1888 a Russian subject, giving evidence before the Sweating Inquiry in the House of Lords, declared that he left the Russian dominion, where he worked thirteen hours a day, to work eighteen hours in England, because he is freer here. Reason is dumb when confronted with a man who, exhausted with thirteen hours' toil, will turn to for another five hours for the sake of being free to say that Mr. Gladstone is a better man than Lord Salisbury, and to read Mill, Spencer, and Reynold's Newspaper in the six hours left to him for sleep. It brings to mind the story of the American judge who tried to induce a runaway slave to return to the plantation by pointing out how much better he was treated there than the free wage-nigger of the Abolitionist states. "Yes," said the runaway; "but would you go back if you were in my place?" The judge turned Abolitionist at once. These things are not to be reasoned away. Man will submit to fate, circumstance, society, anything that comes impersonally over him; but against the personal oppressor, whether parent, schoolmaster, overseer, official chief, or king, he eternally rebels. Like the Russian, he will rather be compelled by "necessity" to agree to work eighteen hours, than ordered by a master to work thirteen. No modern nation, if deprived of personal liberty or national antonomy, would stop to think of its economic position. Establish a form of Socialism which shall deprive the people of their sense of personal liberty; and, though it double their rations and halve their working hours, they will begin to conspire against it before it is a year old. We only disapprove of monopolists: we hate masters.

Then, since we are too dishonest for Communism without taxation or compulsory labor, and too insubordinate to tolerate task work under personal compulsion, how can we order the transition so as to introduce just distribution without Communism, and maintain the incentive to labor without mastership? The answer is, by Democracy. And now, having taken a positive attitude at last, I must give up criticizing the Anarchists, and defend Democracy against their criticisms.

Democracy.

I now, accordingly, return to Mr. Tucker's criticism of State Socialism, which, for the sake of precision, had better be called SocialDemocracy. There is a Socialism-that of Bismarck; of the extinct young England party; of the advocates of moralized feudalism; and of mob contemners generally-which is not Social-Democracy, but Social-Despotism, and may be dismissed as essentially no more hopeful than a system of Moralized Criminality, Abstemious Gluttony, or Straightforward Mendacity would be. Mr. Tucker, as an American, passes it over as not worth powder and shot: he clearly indicates