itions, bad habits, inherited diseases and weaknesses,
germs and poisons, filths and envies. We are not dealing with
magnificent creatures such as one sees in ideal paintings and splendid
sculpture, so beautiful they may face the world naked and unashamed;
we are dealing with hot-eared, ill-kempt people, who are liable to
indigestion, baldness, corpulence and fluctuating tempers; who wear
top-hats and bowler hats or hats kept on by hat-pins (and so with all
the other necessary clothing); who are pitiful and weak and vain and
touchy almost beyond measure, and very naughty and intemperate; who
have, alas! to be bound over to be in any degree faithful and just to
one another. To strip such people suddenly of law and restraint would
be as dreadful and ugly as stripping the clothes from their poor
bodies....

That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe--well, I,
at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day
bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race
begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I
have said it, "who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a
footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars," but
the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism
is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously
we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust
laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a
system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and
action. Socialism is the school-room of true and noble Anarchism,
wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.

There is a graceful and all too little known fable by Mr. Max
Beerbohm, _The Happy Hypocrite_, which gives, I think, not only the
relation of Socialism to philosophic Anarchism, but of all discipline
to all idealism. It is the story of a beautiful mask that was worn by
a man in love, until he tired even of that much of deceit and, a
little desperately, threw it aside--to find his own face beneath
changed to the likeness of the self he had desired. So would we veil
the greed, the suspicion of the self-seeking scramble of to-day under
institutions and laws that will cry "duty and service" in the ears and
eyes of all mankind, keep down the evil so long and so effectually
that at last law will be habit, and greed and self-seeking cease for
ever, from being the