I join Mr. Lloyd in congratulating our English friends on their contributions to the literature of Anarchism, but I do not join him in all his criticisms upon them. What he says of Mr. Seymour’s Two Anarchisms (which is modeled after Lesigne’s Two Socialisms) is perfectly sound both in its praise and its censure. But there is no foundation whatever for the exceptions which he takes to the motto adopted by Mr. Gilmour from Macaulay for his Creed of Liberty, or to Mr. Badcock’s contention that duty to self is an absurdity.

In considering the Macaulay motto some attention must be paid to the obvious meaning of the author. No man in his senses could be guilty of claiming that men will discard slavery for liberty before enough of them have grown sufficiently wise to understand the superiority of liberty to make it impossible for others to sustain slavery. Yet that is the meaning which Mr. Lloyd attributes to Macaulay. That author’s statement, on the contrary, is clearly to be interpreted as if it were worded as follows: If men are to wait for liberty till they become perfectly good and wise in slavery, they may indeed wait forever. Macaulay undoubtedly intended the reader to understand the adjectives good and wise as descriptive of those qualities in their entirety or perfection, and the idea that he desired to rebuke was that pernicious doctrine which Mr. Lloyd his always doing his best to countenance,—the doctrine that we shall have Anarchy when the millennium comes, and not before. Macaulay believed that liberty is a condition that furhters the development of goodness and wisdom,—a means as well as an end. Mr. Lloyd, on the contrary, often writes as if it were only an end.

True, he sometimes, as in his criticism on Mr. Seymour, writes exactly the other way. But then, consistency in thought is the last thing to be expected from Mr. Lloyd. Of all the prominent writers developed by the Anarchist movement Mr. Lloyd, though in some ways one of the best, is surely the most inconsistent, the most unreliable intellectually. He remains the poet even when writing prose. He sees the truth in flashes of exceeding brilliancy, and the next moment becomes again a dweller in the outer darkness. He seldom writes an article without undoing at the end all that he did at the beginning.

His interpretation of Mr. Badcock is as unwarranted—I could almost say as perverse—as his interpretation of Macaulay. When one expects to be criticised by Mr. Lloyd, he must never employ a style that is in the least elliptical, for that gentleman has no eye for that which is hidden between the lines. If Mr. Badcock had stated his view without any ellipsis, the sentence quoted by Mr. Lloyd would read as follows: The call of duty is an internal compelling force which overcomes the individual’s disinclination to take that course which seems to him likely to prove, in the long run, the least agreeable or the most disagreeable. When the position is put thus fully, Mr. Lloyd’s criticism upon it loses all its point. The man who is far-seeing enough to take nauseous medicine to recover health does not, in taking the dose, overcome his repugnance to the disagreeable. Such overcoming, in his case, could be accomplished only by refusing to take the dose and thereby bringing upon himself what he foresaw as the most disagreeable consequences. One who so takes medicine does not do it in obedience to the internal compelling force to which Mr. Badcock refers, and therefore does not act from a sense of duty. That philosophy which takes the name of Egoism while insisting on duty to self differs in no important sense from Moralism itself.

T.