! Now you cannot move! How beautiful, how orderly, how secure!
And this, and this is socialism! And it was to accomplish this that
France opened the sluices that have deluged the earth with blood!
What! we have broken the bonds of iron to bind ourselves in tape! We
have discrowned Napoleon to crown ... to crown...."

He looked across at Allison, and suddenly pulled himself up. Then,
attempting the tone of exposition, "There is only one way out of it,"
he resumed, "the extension of free co-operation in every department of
activity, including those which at present are regulated by the State.
You will say that this is impracticable; but why? Already, in all that
you most care about, that is the method you actually adopt. The
activities of men that are freest in the society in which we live are
those of art and science and amusement. And all these are, I will not
say regulated by, but expressed in, voluntary organizations, clubs,
academies, societies, what you will. The Royal Society and the British
Association are types of the right way of organizing; and it is a way
that should and must be applied throughout the whole structure. Every
trade and business should be conducted by a society voluntarily formed
of all those who choose to engage in it, electing and removing their
own officials, determining their own policy, and co-operating by free
arrangement with other similar bodies. A complex interweaving of such
associations, with order everywhere, compulsion nowhere, is the form of
society to which I look forward, and which I see already growing up
within the hard skin of the older organisms. Rules there will be but
not laws, rules gladly obeyed because they will have been freely
adopted, and because there will be no compulsion upon anyone to remain
within the brotherhood that approves and maintains them. Anarchy is
not the absence of order, it is absence of force; it is the free
outflowing of the spirit into the forms in which it delights; and in
such forms alone, as they grow and change, can it find an expression
which is not also a bondage. You will say this is chimerical. But
look at history! Consider the great achievements of the Middle Age!
Were they not the result of just such a movement as I describe? It was
men voluntarily associating in communes and grouping themselves in
guilds that built the towers and churches and adorned them with the
glories of art that dazzles us still in Italy and France.