The present increasing political chaos is a good omen in Anarchistic eyes,—not because it is chaos, but because it is the forerunner, more or less immediate, of a truer social order.
Reaching Colfax, Iowa, on a Sunday, during his recent Western stumping-tour, General Butler, being called on for a speech from the car platform, declined to respond. I cannot talk politics on Sunday,
objected the presidential candidate of the organ of the National Liberal League.
Liberty is in receipt, from Mr. William Potts, secretary of the Civil Service Reform Association of New York, of interesting documents setting forth what that organization has accomplished, and of a postal card, upon which I am requested to state whether Liberty is in sympathy with a reform of the Civil Service upon the basis of competitive and other examinations to test the fitness of applicants and appointments simply upon grounds of fitness, and not for partisan reasons.
I returned the postal card to Mr. Secretary Potts, with the following announcement upon it of my adhesion to his movement: Liberty regards all civil government based on compulsory taxation as necessarily and essentially a fraud, and is interested to see it get as poor service as possible. In Liberty’s opinion no poorer service could be given it than that which would result from the system of competitive examinations, and on that ground only Liberty sympathizes with your proposed reform.
It is interesting to note contrasts of opinion. The attention of Liberty’s readers has already been called to the humanitarian wish of the Providence Press that such men as Elisée Reclus
might be promptly shot.
Now, one would suppose that to justify this wish one of two things must be true,—either Reclus must be a very wicked man or his writings must be very disastrous in their effects. But both of these things are questioned by a journal quite as reputable as the Press, the Boston Transcript, which says: Such an Anarchist as Reclus may shame us by his blameless life and his work, but in this country his words will have very little effect.
Between these seemingly contradictory views I am forced to the opinion of my friend, Mr. Seaver, of the Investigator, that before Reclus is shot, it may be well to read what he says.
Blunt’s Wind and Whirlwind is the occasion of a similar discrepancy of view among the critics. For instance, Mrs. Sara A. Underwood tells the readers of the Index that it is by no means an extraordinary production, just a fair, every-day sort of thing, while John Boyle O’Reilly in the Pilot pronounces it a poem of remarkable strength and noble purpose
to the submlimity
of which no extract can do justice.
But this second contrast is less puzzling than the first to those who read these critics, for all such know in advance how much higher must be the poetical standard adopted by a person of Mrs. Underwood’s lofty imaginative faculty and musical nature than that which satisfies the discordant and prosaic soul of Boyle O’Reilly.
George Chainey, everything by turns and nothing long, has joined the Spiritualists. I wish him joy of his pottage.
Though Donn Piatt, in his letter to John Swinton reprinted in another column, overestimates the importance of the tariff question and misapprehends the Democratic party’s intentions regarding it, he sizes up
Ben Butler most accurately and graphically shows the absurdity of the prevalent idea that there is anything Jeffersonian about that worshipper of Power.
Mr. Ross Winans has begun vigorous prosecution of crofters for trespass on his Scotch game preserve of a quarter of a million acres. Mr. Winans and other preservers of game are devoid of understanding. If they persist in depriving the crofter of the small pleasure of poaching for pheasants, they will put into his head the idea that it is his duty to go gunning for larger game.
Governor St. John is a reputable man, and as for the cause he represents though it may not be universally approved of, it certainly is not immoral.—[New York Sun.] Any attempt to interfere with the personal rights of others, any use of force to compel them to conform to our views of right in matters affecting their own conduct, is a violation of Liberty. Any violation of Liberty is immoral. The cause of prohibition is the cause of tyranny. Prohibition certainly is immoral.
Mr. Jones, the wealthy iron-manufacturer who is attending to the financial business of one of the swindling devices known as a political party, says that manufacturers must be governed by a cold, deliberate calculation of cost.
That is well enough perhaps, but what will become of Mr. Jones’s swindling schemes when the laborer and the capitalist shall be governed literally by deliberate calculation of cost? What Mr. Jones really means is that industry must be governed by cold calculation of the capitalist’s interest. He uses the word cost
without understanding it. He should, some day, calculate the cost of the political chicanery he is engaged in promoting.
The Boston Herald, which enjoys the distinction of being one of the most ignorant and narrow-minded journals of its class, says there is no descent from Thomas Carlyle to Oscar Wilde. Wilde,
says the Herald, is a crank; so was Carlyle. The Scotch philosopher was a man of brains. So is the æsthete. Both believed in advertising themselves, and both were fond of posing for popular admiration! Where is the descent?
If the extensively misinformed person who is employed to disseminate ignorance through the editorial columns of the Herald would take the trouble to read Carlyle’s writings and borrow brains enough to understand them, he would discover that the author of Sartor Resartus was one of the cranks by which the world is turned, and that he devoted his life and genius to something quite different from posing for popular admiration. The descent from Carlyle to Wilde is even greater than that from Socrates to Alcibiades, but I have no doubt that the Herald editor admires Wilde more than he does the other three. Wilde has brains, but the Herald cannot tell how they have been used to any purpose as yet. It knows the young man only as an eccentric clothes-rack.
If the people of the United States, (meaning the majority
) want to put Mr. Blaine in the White House, says the New York Herald, they have a right to do so. The Herald says Blaine is a bad man and a calamity to the country, and yet declares that, if a majority of the people want a bad man to govern the minority, it is perfectly right that the bad man should so govern. In the Herald’s ethics, the difference between right and wrong is purely arithmetical. One vote is enough to make a virtue of the blackest crime.
If Eleanor Marx Aveling, the daughter of Karl Marx, is as badly informed on other subjects as on that of her father’s own writings, she will not make John Swinton as reliable a foreign correspondent as that worthy editor desires and deserves. In her letter of August 23 to his Paper she says: This same dear old friend [F. Engels] is just now very hard at work supervising a German translation of my father’s work in answer to Proudhon’s La Misère de la Philosophie.
Let me inform Eleanor that Proudhon never wrote any such work, and consequently her father could not have answered it. What her father did do—and he might have been in better business—was to write a work called La Misère de la Philosophie in attempted answer to that unanswerable work of Proudhon, Système des Contradictions Economiques, ou, Philosophie de la Misère.
Edgeworth
is considerably annoyed and not a little frightened because I have published Elisée Reclus’s Anarchist on Anarchiy, feeling, evidently, a friendly anxiety lest Liberty shall be compromised by Reclus’s denunciation of private property, and is sending out notes of warning in all directions to forestall misapprehension. I assure my good friend that he might be using that brilliant pen of his more advantageously. I published Reclus’s essay because on the whole it tells mightily for Liberty, just as I sell and publish many other things of right tendencies which nevertheless contain sometimes serious errors and inconsistencies, trusting confidently to the great body of Liberty’s propaganda to preserve the equilibrium and overcome with its resistless current all reactionary eddies. In this instance, however, I removed all danger of compromise by the insertion of one or two foot-notes showing how tender I am on the point of individual possession. Be not afraid of error, Edgeworth;
it is a pitifully weak thing. I must protest, too, against the same writer’s frequent apologies for Proudhon, at least until he has read and understood Proudhon’s writings. Property is robbery
is more than a superficial satire on dishonest practices;
it is the motto of a profound philosophy with which Edgeworth
is substantially in sympathy and in behalf of which he is doing most admirable service. Edgeworth
has not yet comprehended Proudhon’s use of the word property,
and will not until he reads What is Property? Even then he may think it an unwise use. Perhaps; but in answer I point to results. The persistence and growth of the revolutionary force in Europe, so far as it is due at all to individual thought and work, is the consequence of the scientific (note this adjective, State Socialists!) sanity of Proudhon’s thought and methods in contrast with the mysticism of the Lerouxs, the Blancs, the Owens, the Fouriers, the Cabets, and all the rest of the illuminati.