c individuals, or
madmen, tilling the soil, making shoes, and so on, instead of smoking
cigarettes, playing whist, and roaming about everywhere to relieve their
tedium, during the space of the ten leisure hours a day which every
intellectual worker enjoys? This will be the outcome: that these madmen
will show in action, that that imaginary property for which men suffer,
and for which they torment themselves and others, is not necessary for
happiness; that it is oppressive, and that it is mere superstition; that
property, true property, consists only in one's own head and hands; and
that, in order to actually exploit this real property with profit and
pleasure, it is necessary to reject the false conception of property
outside one's own body, upon which we expend the best efforts of our
lives. The outcome us, that these men will show, that only when a man
ceases to believe in imaginary property, only when he brings into play
his real property, his capacities, his body, so that they will yield him
fruit a hundred-fold, and happiness of which we have no idea,--only then
will he be so strong, useful, and good a man, that, wherever you may
fling him, he will always land on his feet; that he will everywhere and
always be a brother to everybody; that he will be intelligible to
everybody, and necessary, and good. And men looking on one, on ten such
madmen, will understand what they must all do in order to loose that
terrible knot in which the superstition regarding property has entangled
them, in order to free themselves from the unfortunate position in which
they are all now groaning with one voice, not knowing whence to find an
issue from it.

But what can one man do amid a throng which does not agree with him?
There is no argument which could more clearly demonstrate the terror of
those who make use of it than this. The _burlaki_ {260} drag their bark
against the current. There cannot be found a _burlak_ so stupid that he
will refuse to pull away at his towing-rope because he alone is not able
to drag the bark against the current. He who, in addition to his rights
to an animal life, to eat and sleep, recognizes any sort of human
obligation, knows very well in what that human obligation lies, just as
the boatman knows it when the tow-rope is attached to him. The boatman
knows very well that all he has to do is to pull at the rope, and proceed
in the given direction. He will seek what he is to do, and how he is to
do i