I am moved to work off a dreamy fragment respecting the Ideal and the Real. In a recent number of INSTEAD OF A MAGAZINE, with the patronizing tolerance (veiled contempt) habitual to those conscious of their superiority, we are given the old and oft-repeated reminder that: Anarchism is the great ideal as an ideal, but so is the millenium: neither of them present a practical working hypothesis by which we can unite to overhtrow capitalism and all its evil brood.

Everything is a mark of that of which it is the mark; so it is that acceptance and adoption of political absolutism, in some of its forms, as the fundamental rock upon which all effective organization and cooperative associations of people must be founded, is a mark of superior intelligence and practicability of Archists, while the rejection of this idea on the part of anarchists marks them as dreaming impracticables. Those who are intelligent and practical have no illusions respecting the nature of incentives whereby individual members of the race are moved to associate and cooperate; they indulge no impractical dreams and thereby delude themselves into unworkable schemes for man’s regulation and control to the end that individuals of the race may be moulded into good men and aggregated into amiable groups.

It is not that human kind as individuals feel the need of each for others; it is not because of need common to all that each becomes animated with irresistible longing and desire for fellowship, and is thereby moved to seek another or others and join together in groups; and that self-interest is adequate to move mankind to recognize and adopt such plan of action as will assure and secure peaceable union into effective organizations—that is an ideal of ideals—a dream of dreams—like unto the messianic millenium. Archists are too intelligent and practical to waste thought or time over chimerical visions.

Things not of the essence of ideals, but of practical reals, reside only in constituted authority. Thousands of years of uninterrupted trial give testimony to the fact that community of personal interest has nothing to do with aggregating people into groups that they have become so aggregated is due to [13] the compelling force of an external archon. The existing order is the result; but while it is almost universally admitted by archists themselves that the existing order is horribly unfit for human-kind to live in, it is asserted that the evils from which people everywhere and under all forms of political absolutism suffer are not due to any error of principle, but to wrong methods of applying it: despotism will prove purely beneficent if only the compelling power is wisely administered. The result of thousands of years of trial has been failure dreadful and complete but reliance upon compulsion remains the only resource that is real and practical; all else is ideal and impractical; no other way presents a working hypothesis by which we can unite to overthrow capitalism and its evil brood. Otherwise it remains impossible to convince the numbskull masses, and without the masses you can do nothing.

That individuals composing societies should select, choose, do for themselves, succeed or fail, and as a result of employment of personal powers of origination and initiative slowly grow to the stature of greatest competence and efficiency,—according to the intelligent who are practical—is an unworkable proposition: an impossible ideal. The Real resides in the fact that an iron rule of tutelage is required, and individuals shall have only so much of liberty and do only that which shall be prescribed by the Archon; so that after the manner of a man lifting himself by his bootstraps, Humanity shall suddenly and at once be given an uplift.

At all times, under all circumstances and in respect of all things undertaken and tried, all forms of political absolutism have miserably failed, but the intelligent and practical remain full of courage and undaunted; for does not there remain the grand resource embodied in the despotism of Democracy—not the democracy of old, but the New Democracy of the here and now, a democracy which is to institute and set in motion the machinery of a political absolutism which shall be as comprehensive as human thought, and all who live within the sphere of its beneficence will be suject to a people’s Rule.

The archon of the New Democracy will not in itself be different from the archon of any other form of despotism. It will not have automorphic powers nor automatic power, but will be shaped by men and functionally administered by men. Nothing of difficulty is involved in this however; of course under a People’s Rule those who give form to the political machine and those who administer its functions will be selected and chosen from the numbskull masses! But once an individual numbskull is separated from the numbskull masses, invested with the insignia of political office and clothed with the purple of political power there will be no more of the a-wisdom of numbskulls: an immediate and most brilliant change of nature will be effected thereby, and thereafter the long-eared wisdom of those devoted to practical Reals will be the grand force whereby everything shall be consistently ordered. One who loves one’s fellows, who is intelligent and practical will not take up with the ideals of anarchism, but will devote all energy to the reals of the New Democracy.