egard this as their right,--there slavery exists in its
broadest measure.

And money is the same thing as slavery. Its object and its consequences
are the same. Its object is--that one may rid one's self of the first
born of all laws, as a profoundly thoughtful writer from the ranks of the
people has expressed it; from the natural law of life, as we have called
it; from the law of personal labor for the satisfaction of our own wants.
And the results of money are the same as the results of slavery, for the
proprietor; the creation, the invention of new and ever new and never-
ending demands, which can never be satisfied; the enervation of poverty,
vice, and for the slaves, the persecution of man and their degradation to
the level of the beasts.

Money is a new and terrible form of slavery, and equally demoralizing
with the ancient form of slavery for both slave and slave-owner; only
much worse, because it frees the slave and the slave-owner from their
personal, humane relations.]

CHAPTER XVIII.

I am always surprised by the oft-repeated words: "Yes, this is so in
theory, but how is it in practice?" Just as though theory were fine
words, requisite for conversation, but not for the purpose of having all
practice, that is, all activity, indispensably founded on them. There
must be a fearful number of stupid theories current in the world, that
such an extraordinary idea should have become prevalent. Theory is what
a man thinks on a subject, but its practice is what he does. How can a
man think it necessary to do so and so, and then do the contrary? If the
theory of baking bread is, that it must first be mixed, and then set to
rise, no one except a lunatic, knowing this theory, would do the reverse.
But it has become the fashion with us to say, that "this is so in theory,
but how about the practice?"

In the matter which interests me now, that has been confirmed which I
have always thought,--that practice infallibly flows from theory, and not
that it justifies it, but it cannot possibly be otherwise, for if I have
understood the thing of which I have been thinking, then I cannot carry
out this thing otherwise than as I have understood it.

I wanted to help the unfortunate only because I had money, and I shared
the general belief that money was the representative of labor, or, on the
whole, something legal and good. But, having begun to give away this
money, I saw, when I gave the bills which I had accumul