But when, driven to the necessity of admitting the evil functioning of the social organization to which we are subjected, honest opponents of the Anarchistic idea confess that this organization needs to be transformed and allow that the means so far proposed are illusory, they think they have made an enormous concession, and they seek most earnestly for new and better remedies to apply. They even go so far as to acknowledge that an Anarchistic society is the most magnificent ideal which can be hoped for from human evolution. But⁠—there is always a but⁠—overcome by inherited prejudices, the legacy of our ancestors and nurtured by education, relations, and apathy, they hasten to add that it is scarcely realizable⁠—and forever remain in a state of speculation.

“Bad as it is, society still ensures a relative degree of security, a certain rate of progress, which a revolution might sacrifice. Let us,” say they, “seek gradually to improve what we have; slowly, indeed, but surely.” If we answer them that there are people who suffer, perish, through this so-called security, this so-called civilization, they do not hesitate to admit that the capitalist class is ignoble in its exploitation; that by its rapacity it justifies the revolt of the exploited; some even admit that the revolution is inevitable, “but,” they add, “it is to be regretted, for the revolt may be defeated and ourselves thrown backward. Doubtless,” they say, “it is very easy to establish the diagnosis of a disease, but to cure it, is another thing; and the difficulties are very much greater in sociology, for we are still in the infancy of the science concerning it. The rational and experimental method only can lead to any results, and Anarchism is in no sense scientific; it is a pure speculation emanating from praiseworthy sentiments but based upon no experimentation.”

At first sight this reasoning seems logical; it is indeed true that when the disease is known only by its effects one cannot determine its real causes; but after its starting-point is actually known, its therapeutics is easy. If up till then there has been hesitation, trying first this remedy and then that, it is because the effects of such remedies upon such and such a conjunction of physical troubles were known; but as different causes may occasion the same pathological disturbance, it followed that what was good in one case was ineffectual or injurious in another. This is the reason why medicine in our days is rather empirical research than real science when it is a question of curing. It is also the reason why in social therapeutics, in which the same hiatuses, the same ignorance have existed, revolutions have broken out which have come to nothing, reforms have been attempted which yielded no results⁠—reforms fluctuating from one system to another, without preventing the growth of misery, without stopping the exploitation of the masses. The effects were sought to be destroyed without troubling as to the causes which produced them, and which allowed them to continue; the governmental label was changed, certain purifications of the official staff were effected, and afterward there was much astonishment because the evils complained of, and which it was supposed would thus be gotten rid of, reappeared more vigorous than ever, after an insignificant interruption, and resumed their normal course as if nothing had happened.

Nowadays it is understood in medicine that the best way of combating disease is to prevent it, by suppressing, through a thorough understanding of hygiene, the causes which engender it. The Anarchists are attempting to effect the same operation in social hygiene. They have sought for the causes of the diseases from which human society is suffering, traced them to their sources, renounced universal panaceas⁠—which they leave to political charlatans⁠—and fortified with the knowledge gained from the comparative study of systems in operation and proposed reforms, they proclaim to the people:⁠—

“The evils from which you suffer flow from the vicious organization of society, authority and property are the motors of all this enginery which is crushing you; in vain will you change the wheels, replace them, alter them⁠—their function is to grind you in their whirling teeth; you will be ground as long as you do not destroy them together with the principles whence they derive their strength, authority and property. Get rid of the causes if you do not want to experience the effects.”

In physiology, when, after considerable groping in darkness the causes of a disease which up till then had been known only by its effects, are at length discovered, it may happen that the method of curing it is completely reversed; what had before been forbidden to the patient may now be prescribed for him, and what had been prescribed before may now be forbidden. In politics this is called a revolution. It happens that the innovators are treated as madmen and visionaries by the regulars; they are accused of putting the patient’s life in danger, of disregarding a mass of hypotheses, each one more convincing than the other. And these clamors pursue them until repeated results compel those who have no confidence save in the formulas of the past to be silent. The physician who experiments with a new method, does on a small scale what the Anarchists want to do on a large scale with our entire society; when he leaves the beaten paths of routine to apply the new data he must not heed the outcries of retrogrades, if he be certain of his science, his studies, his observations. It is the same in sociology. Is it the fault of the Anarchists if society is so organized that people cannot do what they please without running against a prohibitory law or coming in conflict with a central power which claims to know what is wanted better than the persons interested, to furnish them with what it deems useful for them and deny them what it judges harmful? Society has been so organized that people cannot get out of it without overthrowing it; let the bourgeoisie not complain if in order to be free people dream first of breaking down what stands in their way.

In order to experiment one must go from theory to practice, and even in the most carefully established calculations there will always be an unknown quantity which timorous spirits will use as an argument for rejecting all innovation. Must one be condemned to inaction because of reactionists? The cause of the evil being discovered there is nothing to do but run the surgeon’s knife into the tumor, that its generative causes may be extirpated; and surgery every day teaches us not to shrink from the ablation of growths or organs which are atrophied, parasitical, or gangrened. Why should we fear to operate upon and to destroy what everybody except those who live thereby agrees is bad or of evil promise? We know that right here we shall be answered that society cannot be treated as an individual; that the latter may disappear without any perturbations resulting, while the overturning of society may lead to a loss or setback for all humanity, etc.; and then they begin talking to us again about the necessity of acting slowly, gradually, by the pathway of reforms. That is what they call the experimental method!

Ah, well! Whatever our opponents say, it is they who are the empiricists; the experiments they have been making for centuries with the reforms and plasters which they recommend to us, prove to us that there are no true and effective reforms save those which attack the institutions, the bases, upon which society rests. Now, to touch institutions is the Revolution. The bourgeoisie, which holds the power, will not allow its own existence to be imperiled; so long as it holds the power it will make use of it to defend the system of organization which forms its strength. From the moment it should perceive that universal suffrage would tend to take its authority away, its bureaucracy, magistracy, police, and army would immediately be put in motion to arrest the destroying flood. The only reforms it will allow to be adopted will, therefore, be those which will not touch the institutions whence its privileges are derived; the only remedies it will consent to have tried are those which will attempt to mitigate the evils without attacking the causes. Such are the reforms we have seen adopted since the existence of universal suffrage⁠—the projects which at present serve as platforms for the political parties; reforms which so long as they are projects only, set the worker floating on an ocean of felicities, but which being adopted, lead to no sensible results⁠—lucky, indeed, if they do not become a new means of exploitation and enslavement in the hands of our masters.

Ah! It is because society is so organized that everything beautiful and good must finally concentrate in the hands of those who possess capital. Every fresh step in progress profits him, and him only, who has the wherewithal to put it into operation. Does there arise a new invention which enables production to go on more rapidly and with less expense? He who possesses will profit by it to diminish his working force, the eliminated part of which, thrown upon the street, will go to swell the somber army of the unemployed, the starving, while the rest will continue to toil as hard, as long, as before, even seeing their wages reduced in consequence of the competition waged against them by those who have been thrown out of the workshop. That is what your experimenting proves to us; that is what the reforms which have been tried have done; and these are the irrefutable objections we have to offer against all the projects that may be presented to us;⁠—which proves very conclusively that we are right in retorting the epithet of “empiricists” upon those who claim that the ideas of Anarchism are not established by the experimental method. Moreover the strongest objection which such persons have so far been able to bring against the Anarchists is to say to them, “Your theories are very fine, but they cannot be realized.” This is not an argument. “Why can they not be realized?” we ask, and instead of answering us with reasons they bring forward their fears. They tell us that with man’s evil nature it is to be feared that he would profit by his liberty to stop working altogether; that when no mediating power existed it might happen that the stronger would exploit the weaker, etc. The Anarchists have shown the lack of foundation for these fears by proving that this evil tendency in man, these shortcomings in his character, are stimulated and encouraged by the present social organization which sets one against the other, forcing them to tear from each other the pittance it apportions with such exceeding parsimony. They also show, and support their assertions with proofs, that every social system based upon authority cannot but beget evil effects; since power is vested in persons subject to the same defects as other men, it is clear that if men do not know how to govern themselves, still less do they know how to govern others.

The great objection which remains consists, then, in assertion that as Anarchism has not so far been put to the test, it is condemned to remain a pure speculation, since it cannot be tried without overturning what has been proven to be bad. This is not serious and will not bear discussion. Because our forefathers allowed themselves to be exploited, should we, therefore, submit to exploitation? Because they bowed their necks to the yoke of authority should we, therefore, continue to be driven by the goad of power? Because the ideal of liberty and justice, after having been a vague and undefined aspiration of humanity, barely begins to shape itself in our days, must we renounce its application and wait till there are no more fearful ones? You agree that our ideal is beautiful. It is possible if individuals desire, and know how to conform their actions to it; this also you admit, and we ask no more. Those, then, who want to realize it, can only spread it, group together, stand shoulder to shoulder; and on the day they are numerous enough to overthrow all obstacles, they have only to live, according to their affinities and tendencies.

We want to be free: so much the worse for the slaves who, trembling at the idea of losing their chains, rally around their masters; we need not listen to their lamentations, for after all they will be with us when we have become the stronger. We want to be free: so much the worse for those who still want masters, and the more so that the masters usually want none of them except to pit them against others. Yes; the empiricists are those who want to destroy the effects, leaving the causes in existence, those who propose emollients when the operator’s scalpel is needed, those who seek to put the patient asleep, hoping that nature alone will act, while a small operation would relieve the patient immediately. It is surprising how people cheat themselves with words, how aphorisms seem to acquire weight when it is a question of preaching routine and fear of innovation. “One must go forward by carefully feeling one’s way,” they tell us; “humanity never advances by sudden leaps.” They forget that here it is three or four thousand years, for the Latin races only, that these experiments and step-by-step policies have been going on, that the exploited have awaited the realization of the promises made to them, have waxed passionate and struggled to obtain the same reforms forever promised though their situation has in nowise altered. We always suffer from the same evils, and now they propose to apply the same old poultices under the name of “the rational method.” Intelligence has grown, science has broadened, industry has widened to an immeasurable scope; pleasures have been refined and multiplied; but who profits by this progress?⁠—Always the idle, possessing minority! Who famishes in order to produce without profiting thereby?⁠—Always the spoliated masses! Ever since humanity has formed itself into societies, the exploited have made their complaints and lamentations heard; they have struggled without pause or relaxation to obtain concessions from their masters, which might soften their lot; they have prostrated themselves like flunkeys or again stood proudly erect, importuned at times like beggars or again recovered strength when the measure of poverty and oppression, being full, forced them to revolt, making death preferable to their existing condition. And yet this condition has always remained the same. Often their masters have been compelled to make room for them in legislative halls; often they have had to grant the reforms demanded; very often they themselves have been compelled to put restrictions upon their exploitations and authority. Have the governed been less oppressed, the exploited less squeezed? Has not poverty been as intense as ever, wealth concentrated in the hands of a privileged few, day by day becoming fewer?

Well, then, to propose to poor wretches to keep on with the experimental method, confining demands to new reforms just as empirical, (since those which would be likely to destroy the generating cause must be renounced for fear of the revolution) is to ask the mass of the workers to consent to be exploited indefinitely, seeing that the experience of the past proves to us that so long as the organic bases of society are unchanged these so-called reforms will always turn to the profit of those who hold wealth and power.

Finally, this: our opponents, when honest, do not hesitate to admit the present social organization is bad, vicious, and arbitrary, the bourgeoisie deriving their luxury and idleness solely from the poverty and overwork it imposes upon the toilers. They admit with us that the situation cannot last, that revolt is inevitable, that the social organization is forcing us into it; for there must necessarily come a time when the wretched will weary of starving while compelled to toil like beasts of burden. Well, then, since the conflict is inevitable⁠—and legitimate⁠—why exhaust strength in trying to avoid it? Why seek to make others hope for a pacific solution which you know to be impossible? Is not this a benevolent playing into the hands of the exploiters who seek to lull the intelligence of the workers to sleep by lying promises, in order to muzzle them more easily and lengthen the period of their exploitation? This is another of the consequences of the vicious social organization to which we are subjected, that he who is not squarely with the exploited and does not accept all their demands, finds himself necessarily on the side of the exploiters. All his good will and intentions in desiring to relieve our sufferings are nothing but narcotics, which, while dulling the edge of the miseries of the poor, deliver us over, bound hand and foot, to our exploiters.

If the conflict be inevitable would it not be better to prepare for it by seeking to develop within the minds of all the idea of a regenerated future society which, after all, is admitted to be good?⁠—“If it were practicable,” add these well-meaning conservatives by way of corrective and as a concession to conservatism.⁠—Is not such enlightenment necessary in order that when the day is come, those who take part in the revolution, may be able to profit by the struggle they will be called upon to sustain; that they may know what institutions are hurting them and must be destroyed; that they may not once more be turned into ridicule by their exploiters? Would this not be more rational and scientific than to lose one’s time deploring what cannot be prevented; than to devote oneself to protecting what is acknowledged to be bad under the pretext that it might be worse? Is it not, in fact, an utter want of logic to claim that because new ideas have not yet been applied, their application must be indefinitely postponed, because we do not know what they might bring forth? Is it not reasoning under pressure of fear of the new, and apathy in breaking off acquired habits, to conclude that one must be satisfied with what he has, (though seeking to improve it meanwhile) for fear of greater evils?

It has been amply demonstrated that the present society cannot be improved so long as the bases of organization are not transformed. Now, to reject the application of a new idea with the excuse that it has not been tested, is to reason in an absolutely unscientific fashion, for it would condemn humanity to utter immobility, new ideas being always more or less in contradiction with the ideas of the majority at a given time; and every time a new discovery is made it must be experimented upon to determine its value. If we had already had the experience, it would no longer be a new idea; it would already have struggled to obtain the necessary tests; it would be already prepared for admission into current practice. And besides, (it is a trifle vulgar and has been said a thousand times, but it is profoundly true) if one has the smallpox he does not seek to improve it but to get rid of it. We are dying of poverty and spoliation, we want to get rid of what is killing us; what worse can we get afterwards?

I know that at this point our opponents will drag out the “chestnut” of “compromising progress, the triumphs of science lost in the cataclysm, the human mind risking retrogression as the consequence of the victory of the masses, more corrupt and less learned than the class in power.” Further on we shall show the inaneness of such a fear, but let us for the moment accept the argument, such as it is; what weight can it have with those who suffer unjustly and are tired of suffering? What do progress and the marvels of industry matter to those who are considered to be no more than their instruments, without ever profiting by them? What do science and the discoveries of the human mind matter to those who suffer and to whom society refuses the means of developing their intelligence, if these must forever help to bind them faster in their slavery and brutishness? Go, then, and tell them that you greatly deplore the misery in which they are steeped; that you pity them, with all your heart, for the sufferings they undergo; but that their sudden enfranchisement involving the risk of a setback to the march of progress, it is imperative that the great mass continue to accept toil and suffering, in order that an inconsiderable minority of scholars⁠—chosen from among another minority of parasitical possessors who absorb the product of all solely for their personal profit⁠—may have the facilities for laboring at the solution of scientific problems! Have the courage of your convictions, and go and talk this to those who are starving or whose strength is exhausted in forced and protracted labors, and see what sort of a welcome you will get! In vain would you add that their patience will not be lost⁠ ⁠… to future generations, that the latter, in the long run, will reap the fruit of their ancestors’ abnegation⁠ ⁠… when they have succeeded in finding and applying useful reforms; the starving would answer you that they relinquished Christianity because it promised them a paradise only after death; you others cannot even promise that to their descendants, and they are tired of toiling and suffering for others; they want to enjoy the fruits of their pains and labors, not in their posterity, but right away!⁠—And they are right.

If you do not want progress to be stranded, or the marvels of science to disappear, stop opposing the claims of the disinherited; instead of trying to prop up unhealthy and ruinous institutions, help us to clear the ground that no obstacle may irritate the popular wave, or seek to arrest it with stupid and unjust prejudice when it rushes to the assault of institutions which oppose it. Instead of ranging himself on the side of the defenders of the past, let whosoever thinks and really wants to work for the development of the human mind, array himself on the side of those who only ask to profit by their share of the happiness and light which they have helped to produce. Leave those who unjustly desire to monopolize all these joint products, the fruits of solidarity, to themselves; let these representatives of the past cling desperately to their stolen prerogatives, which evolution at every step shows to be unjust. Though you cannot thus avoid the cataclysm which their blind obstinacy makes inevitable, you may help to save from wreck those conquests of science which humanity could not, indeed, lose, without great damage. But know this: there are people who are suffering, dying of poverty, who can develop neither their bodies nor their minds, from whom all that which you fear may disappear has already been taken away; they are tired of being despoiled of it, they want to possess it also. Help them to get it; it will only be justice. This is the sole means of helping to preserve it. If you do not do this, blame nobody but yourselves and your own timorousness for the disasters which may follow the victory of the masses, if disasters there be.

Finally, as a last objection, we are told that, in spite of all, progress asserts itself; that the average level of the worker has been raised, that his intelligence has grown, his situation improved, his requirements have increased and found wherewith to be satisfied; that the law itself has evolved; the penal code gradually assuming a character plainly conformable to general utility. We shall review all these claims, and try to sift out what is really true in them.

It is evident that the moral level of the worker has been raised; his wants have increased with the facilities for satisfying them; nowadays he eats meat and drinks wine at every meal, which he did not do barely fifty years ago. But it must also be remembered that this depends more than anything else on his power of production having likewise increased enormously. It is nothing astonishing then if, expending more energy, he requires more nutritive aliment to restore it. Fifty years ago the workman wore a blouse for his Sunday dress and dined on vegetables and cheese, thinking he had broken the record of feasting when on a Monday, at the barrier, (fortifications about Paris, used as a rendezvous for pleasure parties), he had eaten a rabbit and drunk several bottles of wine; that lasted for a whole week and was naturally not repeated every Monday. But on the other hand while in the workshop, he was not harnessed to a machine which forced him to follow its accelerated movements. The greater part of all work being done by hand, he went on in his old-fashioned way, producing what he could; the employer was frequently his workmen’s chum, spending his holidays with them, asking no more of them than to give a stronger pull when he needed to deliver the work on time, and letting them go on comfortably the rest of the while. Today the workingman is no longer anything but a machine, utterly unacquainted with his exploiters most of the time; in this direction, therefore, there has been a moral loss.

His needs have grown⁠—that is sure; he wants a relative luxury which he formerly did without⁠—that is evident. But this results, as we have already seen, from the increase in the expenditure of his energies on the one hand, and on the other, from his intellectual development; whence it comes that though the relations between himself, and his exploiters rank him beneath them, he acquires a greater consciousness of his own worth and personal dignity. This luxury, these wants, he knows to be legitimate, for he has earned them.

Nor will anyone dare maintain that this increase in expenditures is superfluous on the part of the worker; no one will dare contest his right to partake of the wealth he has helped to create. Nobody but the economists of the old school are still stupid enough to charge him with improvidence, or have the effrontery to preach economy to those who can satisfy only the fewest of their desires. It would be still more out of place to reproach the worker with the new wants he has created for himself, since at the present moment he pays for them with the severest privations, and since that sort of prosperity⁠—altogether relative⁠—which he enjoyed during the period of the development of industry, is now barely maintained by a very limited number of the privileged employees of each corporation, while the great mass are again forced to live on wages which, in consequence of periods of enforced idleness, have been reduced to the same rate as fifty years ago.

While the needs of the workers have doubled, the means of production have been multiplied tenfold; the increase in wages and the reduction in the price of products would have enabled them to satisfy this increase of needs; but the capitalists alone have benefited most definitely and extensively by the excess of production, and today the worker with his new needs and the impossibility of satisfying them, on account of the multiplicity of his periods of enforced idleness, is more miserable than before; for over and above his misery he is conscious of not having deserved it, knowing that he alone is the producer of all which is consumed or possessed. What he also knows, is that if the stores are crammed with products, reducing him to idleness, it is because he and his are forced to deprive themselves and cannot consume as they wish. He knows that what creates his exploiters’ wealth creates poverty for him. Had he been allowed to consume at will, and had he not been driven to produce, the stores would not be crammed, there would be no periods of enforced idleness while he and his family are starving. This is what every worker must say to himself, who reflects, compares the results obtained and reasons upon the facts unfolded during his existence. Yes, the worker has developed; yes, he has seen the outflowering of progress, which vanishes when he seeks to grasp it; and the acuteness of his sensations has come to make him suffer today from what would scarcely have touched him formerly. And here again experience, far from making him hope for a gradual improvement, reveals to him an ever growing poverty, its increase becoming heavier and heavier, and always more debasing. Far from fearing an abrupt transformation, he who reflects will seek with all his might to hasten it.

There remains the alleged amelioration of the laws, their raison d’être conforming more and more to the general welfare rendering them protectors of public utility. And this again is an illusion, for the best laws are by their very nature falsified in practice, distorted from their purpose in the application. The penal code is always just as severe, weighs with equal vexation upon the poor, while remaining equally indulgent, equally benevolent to the privileged. The law is always just as ferocious towards him who steals a rabbit from his neighbor, but it lets the bankers who operate with millions “work” at their ease; the stockjobbers of the bourse, the lottery swindlers of the “General Union,” the Panama sharks, the “Mary-Renauds,” the “Mace Bernauds,” the founders of pepper mines and sugarloaf quarries, may catch suckers in perfect security; if some magistrate should venture to poke his nose into their affairs and ask for explanations, instead of having them brought before him between two constables, like vulgar Anarchists, he very humbly goes to them, taking good care to cut short his indiscretion, which he himself recognizes to be out of place. He is ready, however, to get even with the first wretch who may have helped himself to a meal without paying for it, because he had no cash.

All are equal before the law: that is understood. But let a drunkard make some slight resistance to the “cop” that is maltreating him, let him merely curse at him, and he will be sentenced for “resisting an officer in discharge of his duty;” let him complain that he has been robbed of his tobacco by some of these brutes who have left him half-dead on the station-house plank and he will have a narrow escape if they do not get him sentenced for “using violence” against them. It is notorious among those who frequent police courts that every person who is tried for “outrages” or “resistance” against the police, is always advised by his lawyer not to deny the accusation, even though false, but merely to throw himself on the mercy of the court. The maximum penalty is always given to those who are bold enough to contradict the conclusions of the magistrate, or the testimony of the police. The law is a fine thing! It is equitable! This is true in the sense that it may serve, in case the power changes hands, to strike tomorrow those who use it today.

Finally, if every branch of human knowledge be reviewed, it will be seen that all our aspirations are hindered by the present social organization; that the mass is always oppressed for the benefit of a small minority which takes more from the collectivity than it gives back. The fears set forth concerning the disappearance of certain things now existing in the advent of the revolution, relate only to things of whose nature the masses may have, can have, no knowledge, while as to positive facts, it is amply proven that they are bound to gain by a social transformation. Let us laugh at these tremblers, and fear not to redouble our blows against a society which can no longer defend itself save by the help of sophisms and lies.