While I do not wish to take any prominent part in the discussion now going on among Anarchists as to the status of the child in free society, I would like to place my own views on the matter on record.
I do not think that Mr. Tucker’s critics can successfully attack his position while admitting contract as the ethical basis of Anarchism. With so much conceded, the logic of his position seems hardly assailable. If the Anarchist’s only obligation is to a contract, invasion outside of that contract is no crime, and what he owns he certainly owns absolutely and may do as he will with.
I only feel that I have a right to speak on this subject because I do not accept contract as the ethical basis of Anarchism in the first place, and, in the second, do not regard children as the property of anybody.
What is this limited extent
? It is the liberty of the one who supports the dependent. For example: if in free society a cripple begs me to support him for charity’s sake, as he cannot earn his own, he, if I accept, at once becomes subject to me. Because I supply his food, I have a right to say what he shall eat; because I dress him, I can say what he shall wear; because I pay his doctor’s bills, I direct his hygienic habits; because I am responsible, to some extent, for damages he may inflict, I control to that extent his conduct. I have a right to do all this; otherwise I am his slave and he is my master. In short, my control over him is not that of an owner, but purely and altogether defensive.
Let it be observed that this dependent individual is not my property or my slave, even although his dependence may be the product of my labor,
—that is, I may have broken his limbs, or staved in his skull, and so made him dependent; nor have I, according to the logic of my position, any right to invade him in any way, even if there be no contract between us; nor have I any right to prevent his seceding from my support at any time, either to the support of another or to become independent.
Now, then, I have no difficulty whatever about this child question, because I class the child as a dependent individual. The parent has the right of defensive control over the child, and no other. As the defence of equal liberty is the legitimate business of Anarchists, any Anarchist will have a right to defend an invaded child against its parent or any one else. And any child will have the right at any time to secede from any parent or guardian and adopt another or become independent altogether; at which moment the right of parental control, in the rejected parent, ceases.
Anarchist parents will know perfectly well what they do when they set about begetting a child. They will know they are not producing property, but another individual with the rights of an individual, and they will know their right relations to that individual. The child is not an invader by forcing his dependence upon the parent; but the parent, having forced dependent life upon the child, is an invader, if refusing support to this dependent individual.
That a child is property is absurd. If property, then a slave. A doctrine that establishes slavery in Anarchy is certainly sufficiently reduced to an absurdity, but this is not all. My property is mine, always mine. My child, if my property, is not only my slave now, but my slave for life; and not only my slave for life, but may be sold to another to be his slave, or may be willed to heirs and assigns.
This doctrine, carried out logically, poisons Anarchism to its fountain-head, and reaffirms government in its intensest and most detestable form.