“But however great the ignorance of the people may be, when the pressure is too strong, they revolt. This is why our society is so unstable, why the laws are repeatedly violated by those who make them or by those who are charged to apply them, when their interest points that way; for, power being based on force, it is to force that all those resort who are in power and wish to maintain themselves there, as well as all those who are in pursuit of power.
“Made to be applied to all and to content everybody, the laws derange more or less every individual, who wishes, while he is under them, to abolish or relax them, but who wishes them more vigorous when it is his turn to apply them.
“Nevertheless, new aspirations do arise; and, when the antagonism becomes too great between these aspirations and the political laws, the door opens wide to disorders and to revolution.
“And it will always be the same so long as no other way is found to repair the harm done by a law recognised as bad than the application of a new law. This ignorance on the part of men makes human institutions, once established, resist changes. The names vary, but the things remain.
“Men, not having yet been able to arrive at a social conception other than that of authority, are condemned to turn in the same circle, and will be condemned to turn in the same circle so long as they shall not have altered their conception. Royalty, empire, dictatorship, republic, centralisation, federalism, communalism,—these are all at bottom so many phases of authority. Whether in the name of a single person or in the deceitful name of the majority, always the will of some is imposed on all.
[Illustration: JEAN GRAVE IN HIS WORKSHOP
“_There is no more intimate or engaging business interior in Paris._”]
“Furthermore, if the individual increases his knowledge in a continuous fashion, it is only in a very slow fashion. Still he has arrived to-day at the point where, to develop himself in his integrity, it is necessary that his autonomy be complete, that his aspirations express themselves freely, that he be permitted to cultivate them in all their breadth, that nothing fetter his free initiative and his evolution.
“And so it is that now, at last, anarchists draw from their study of the existing social organisation this important lesson: that human laws ought to disappear, carrying with them the legislative, executive, judicial, and repressive systems which impede human evolution by causing murderous crises in which many thousands of human beings perish, by delaying all humanity in its forward march, and, sometimes, even by dragging it backward.”