ions he knows, he will repudiate the
very conception of law and the very groundwork of institutions,
ridiculing human rights, extolling brainless methods as "historical,"
and tolerating nothing except pure empiricism in conduct, with dynamite
as the basis of politics and vivisection as the basis of science. That
is hideous; but what is to be done? Here am I, for instance, by class a
respectable man, by common sense a hater of waste and disorder, by
intellectual constitution legally minded to the verge of pedantry, and
by temperament apprehensive and economically disposed to the limit of
old-maidishness; yet I am, and have always been, and shall now always
be, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make law impossible; our
liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our
morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by
inexperienced or malexperienced dupes, our power wielded by cowards and
weaklings, and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the
existing order for good reasons; but that does not make my attacks any
less encouraging or helpful to people who are its enemies for bad
reasons. The existing order may shriek that if I tell the truth about
it, some foolish person may drive it to become still worse by trying to
assassinate it. I cannot help that, even if I could see what worse it
could do than it is already doing. And the disadvantage of that worst
even from its own point of view is that society, with all its prisons
and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in
the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in
the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating
explosives which every Russian student can make, and every Russian
grenadier has learnt to handle in Manchuria, lies in the fact that
brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their
skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough
to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their
consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, simply not to
outrage their consciences.

Do not be afraid that they will not make allowances. All men make very
large allowances indeed before they stake their own lives in a war to
the death with society. Nobody demands or expects the millennium. But
there are two things that must be set right, or we shall perish, like
Rome, of soul atrophy disguise