son of Brutus had been born. Cut-and-dried notions of conduct are probably exactly commensurate with moral slackness. We do not require to deter people from what they do not want to do, nor to reward them for what they would do unrewarded. The very difficulty of acting spontaneously in any given way demands the formation of more or less unreasoning habits; the difficulty of forming desirable habits demands the coercive force of public opinion; and the insufficient power of mere opinion necessitates that appeal to brute force which is involved in all application of the law. The oversight of Ibsenian anarchists (whatever Ibsen's individual views on the subject) is that of imagining that duties, ideals, laws can be judged by examining their action in the individual case; for their use, their evolutional raison d'être, is only for the general run.

The champions of the Will of the Ego, whether represented by bluff Bernard Shaw or by ambiguous Maurice Barrès, start from the supposition that because the individual is a concrete existence, while the species is obviously an abstraction, the will of the individual can alone be a reality, and the will of the species must be a figment. They completely forget that there is not one concrete individual, but an infinite number of concrete individuals, and that what governs the world is, therefore, the roughly arranged will of all these concrete individuals. The single individual may will to live as hard as he can, will to expand, assimilate, reproduce, cultivate his moi, or anything else besides, but the accomplishment of that will of his-nay, the bare existence of himself and his will-depends entirely upon the will of the species. Without the permission of that abstract entity which he considers a figment, the concrete and only really real individual would never have realised his individual existence at all. This is not saying that his own will is not to react against the will of the species; for the will of the species is merely the averaged will of its component individuals, and as the individual will alters, so must the averaged will differ. The opinions and ideals and institutions of the present and the future are unconsciously, and in some cases consciously, modified, however infinitesimally, by the reactions of every living man and woman; and the more universal this atomic individual modification, the higher the civilisation, the greater the bulk of happiness attained and attainable. Meanwhile ideals, commandments, institutions are, each for its own time, so many roads, high roads, if not royal roads, to the maximum of good behaviour possible in any given condition. Without them, people would have to carry their virtuous potentialities through bogs and briars, where most of them would remain sticking. Succeeding generations, knowing more of the soil and employing more accurate measurements; making, moreover, free use of blasting powder, may build shorter and easier roads, along which fewer persons will die; roads also in a greater variety of directions, that every one may get

near his real destination. And the more each individual keeps his eyes open to the inconveniences and dangers of the existing reads to righteousness, and airs his criticisms thereof, the better: for the majority, which is as slow as the individual is quick, is not likely to destroy the old thoroughfares before having made itself new ones. The Ibsenian anarchists are right in reminding us that there is really nothing holy in such a road; for holiness is a quality, not of institutions, but of character, and a man can be equally holy along a new road as along an old one; alas! as holy along a wrong road as along a right one. But we, on the other hand, must remind the Ibsenians that new or old, right or wrong, such high roads are high roads, not to the advantage of the single individual at any given moment, but of the majority at most times, or, at least, of the majority composed of the most typical individuals.

II.

After our doubts regarding the validity of the ideals and institutions to which society expects each individual voluntarily to conform come doubts, even more necessary and natural, concerning the majesty of the methods by which society enforces its preference on such individuals as fail to conform spontaneously thereunto.

Such doubts as these are by no means due to the growth of sympathy only, to what is called, and sometimes really is, mere sentimental weakness. Together with disbelief in a theologically appointed universe, we have witnessed the growth of respect both for fact and for logic; and, as a consequence, we no longer regard the infringement of a human law as the rebellion to the will of God. We have replaced the notion of sin by the notion of crime, and the particular act which we happen to call a crime is no longer, in our eyes, a detached and spontaneously generated fact in a single individual life, but the result of a dozen converging causes, of which this individual character may be only one, while the constitution of surrounding society is sure to be another of the determinants. We recognise also that while, on the one hand, the capacity for committing certain acts intolerable to the majority does not imply an utter worthlessness of character in many other directions; on the other hand, the thorough-going perversity which renders an individual criminal an unmitigated evil to his fellow-creatures involves constitutional and irresistible tendencies which are incompatible with any notion of responsibility. All this comes to saying that the coercion and punishment of offenders has become a question not of morality, but of police; that it has ceased to be a sort of holy sacrifice to God, and grown to be a rough-and-ready way of getting rid of a nuisance. And this has altered our feelings from the self-complacency of a priest to the humiliation of an unwilling

scavenger. We are getting a little ashamed of the power to imprison, bully, outlaw, destroy either life or life's possibilities, which constitutes the secular arm of all theoretic morality.

Is such a feeling mistaken? Surely only inasmuch as it would turn a desirable possibility for the future into an unmanageable actuality in the present. Since, however much we may admit that bodily violence, and the kind of discipline dependent thereupon, are necessary in the present, and will be necessary for longer than we dare foresee in the future, we must open our eyes to the fact that all progress represents a constant diminution thereof; and we must be careful that all our methods (even the methods including authoritativeness and violence) shall tend to the eventual disappearance of violence towards human beings and authoritativeness towards adults, violence remaining our necessary method with brutes and authoritativeness with children, but even in these relations diminishing to the utmost. For violence, and the discipline founded on violence (as distinguished from self-discipline sprung from intelligence and adaptability) means not merely suffering, but wastefulness worse than suffering, because it entails it waste of the possibilities of adaptation in him who exerts it, as well as of constitutional improvement in him who suffers from it. Waste above all of the Reality, the reality which must be slightly different in every individual case, reality containing the possibilities of new arrangements and new faculties; reality which we cruelly disregard whenever we treat individual cases as merely typical, whenever we act on the one half of a case containing similarity, and neglect the other half of the case containing difference. Such wastefulness of method is necessary just in proportion as we are deficient in the power of seeing, feeling, sympathising, discriminating, deficient in the power of selecting, preferring, and postponing, the powers of selfsacrifice. Violence over body and over mind; violence against the will of others; violence against fact; these represent the friction in the imperfect mechanism of life; and progress is but the substitution of human mechanism more and more delicate and solid, through which the movement is ever greater, the friction ever less.

Meanwhile, do we possess a human mechanism as good as it might be? Tolstoi, Ibsen, the author of the very suggestive dialogues on Anarchy and Law, even egoistic decadents like Maurice Barrès, the whole heterogeneous crusade of doubt and rebellion, are doing good work in showing that we have not; in forcing us to consider what proportions of subtlety and clumsiness, of movement and of friction, of utility and waste, are represented by the system of coercion and punishment accepted in our days. And such an examination will surely prove that in this matter we have developed our ingenuity less (sometimes atrophied it), and proceeded with far greater hurry and slovenliness than with any of the other products of civilisation. Try and imagine

where building, agriculture, manufacture, any of the most common crafts would be had it been carried on throughout the centuries as we still carry on the moralisation of mankind; if stone, brick, soil, manure, raw material, let alone the physical and chemical laws, had been treated in the rough-and-ready manner in which we treat human thought and impulse. But the fact is that we have required food, clothing, and shelter so bitterly hitherto, that all our best intelligence and energy have gone to diminish wastefulness in their production; and no time has remained, no power of discrimination, for making the best of intellectual and moral qualities. Indeed, we have dealt, and we deal only, with the bad moral qualities of mankind; those that can be seen in spare five minutes and with a rushlight; nay, those which are stumbled over in the dark and kicked into corners. We may hope for improvement almost in proportion as we recognise that destruction is the expression not of responsibility towards heaven on the part of the malefactor, but of incapacity and hurry on the part of those whom the malefactor damages. For here even as in the question of duties and ideals, what we are suffering from is lack of discrimination, paucity of methods, insufficiency of formulas; and what we want is not less law, but more law; law which will suit the particular case which is a reality and has results, not merely the general run, which is an abstraction and takes care of itself.

Out of these various doubts about standards of conduct and social arrangements there arises gradually a central core of doubt, to which the others can be logically reduced; the doubt, namely, whether the individuality is not cramped, enfeebled, rendered unfit for life, by obedience to any kind of abstraction, to anything save its own individual tendencies. Oddly enough, the psychological theory had in this matter preceded the thoroughgoing practical application; and the essential principles of subsequent anarchical views were expressed by the earliest and least read of anarchist writers, Max Stirner (Kaspar Schmidt), who died so long ago as 1856.

Max Stirner builds up his system-for his hatred of system is expressed in elaborately systematic form-upon the notion that the Geist, the intellect which forms conceptions, is a colossal cheat for ever robbing the individual of its due, and marring life by imaginary obstacles; a wicked sort of archimago, whose phantasmagoria, duty, ideal, vocation, aim, law, formula, can be described only by the untranslatable German word Spuk, a decidedly undignified haunting by bogies. Against this kingdom of delusion the human individual-der Einzige-has been, since the beginning of time, slowly and painfully fighting his way; never attaining to any kind of freedom, but merely exchanging one form of slavery for another, slavery to the religious delusion for slavery to the metaphysic delusion, slavery to divine right for slavery to civic liberty; slavery to dogma,

commandment, heaven and hell, for slavery to sentiment, humanity, progress-all equally mere words, conceits, figments, by which the wretched individual has allowed himself to be coerced and martyrised; the wretched individual who alone is a reality. This is the darkest, if not the deepest, pit of anarchical thought; and through its mazes Stirner drags us round and round for as long a time as Kant requires for his Categories, or the author of the Imitation for the love of God-both of which, by the way, are good examples of Spuk. But even as Dante clambered out of hell by continuing the way he had come down, so we also can emerge from Stirner's negations by pursuing the arguments which had led into them. And, having got to the individual as the only and original reality, we can work our way back to those subsidiary and contingent realities, the individual's duties, ideals, and institutions.

There is nothing real, says Stirner, but the various conditions of the individual; the rest is delusion, Spuk. But if only the ego is real, how can anything else interfere with it? If such abstractions and figments as God, state, family, morality, or whatever the name of the particular bogey, can cramp, cabin, maim our individuality; then, since our individuality alone has reality, these various delusions must be a part of our individuality. Free yourselves, says Stirner, from your own ideas. But our ideas, whether spontaneously generated in ourselves or assimilated from others, must, in order to have real powers such as we attribute to them, be a part of ourself: and if we sacrifice any other part of ourself to those ideas, it is a proof that they, and not the sacrificed part, must be, at that particular conjunction of circumstances, the dominant part of our ego. Stirner's psychology admits love for individuals as a determinant of action; and similarly regard for the reciprocity of self-interest. But is not love for mankind, however vague the mankind, and regard for principle, however abstract the principle, quite as much a real active power of our nature? If Stirner is made uncomfortable, as he says, by the frown on the face of his beloved, and "kisses the frown away" to rid himself of his discomfort; why, so are other egosless numerous, but not less real-made uncomfortable by the look of pain in men and women whom they do not care for, nay, by the mere knowledge that men and women, nay, animals, whom they have never seen, are suffering, or are likely to suffer: and, in certain egosrarest, but most efficaciously real-there will arise an impulse—yes, something so irresistibly real as a constitutional impulse-to sacrifice everything for the sake of diminishing that unseen, that possible suffering present suffering in hospitals, in factories, in slums, in prisons, or future suffering in hell.

And similarly there are egos which are made as wretched by the neglect of some civic or religious duty as Stirner could possibly be by