. True, such attempts
are rare, but they indicate in which direction evolution is going.

They show the road of liberty. In future, when a man will have something
useful to say--a word that goes beyond the thoughts of his century, he
will not have to look for an editor who might advance the necessary
capital. He will look for collaborators among those who know the
printing trade, and who approve the idea of his new work. Together they
will publish the new book or journal.

Literature and journalism will cease to be a means of money-making and
living at the cost of others. But is there any one who knows literature
and journalism from within, and who does not ardently desire that
literature should at last be able to free itself from those who formerly
protected it, and who now exploit it, and from the multitude, which,
with rare exceptions, pays for it in proportion to its mediocrity, or to
the ease with which it adapts itself to the bad taste oL the greater
number?

Letters and science will only take their proper place in the work of
human development when, freed from all mercenary bondage, they will be
exclusively cultivated by those who love them, and for those who love
them.

IV

Literature, science, and art must be cultivated by free men. Only on
this condition will they succeed in emancipating themselves from the
yoke of the State, of Capital, and of the bourgeois mediocrity which
stifles them.

What means has the scientist of to-day to make researches that interest
him? Should he ask help of the State, which can only be given to one
candidate in a hundred, and which only he may obtain who promises
ostensibly to keep to the beaten track? Let us remember how the Academy
of Sciences of France repudiated Darwin, how the Academy of St.
Petersburg treated Mendeleeff with contempt, and how the Royal Society
of London refused to publish Joule's paper, in which he determined the
mechanical equivalent of heat, finding it "unscientific."[7]

It was why all great researches, all discoveries revolutionizing
science, have been made outside academies and universities, either by
men rich enough to remain independent, like Darwin and Lyell, or by men
who undermined their health by working in poverty, and often in great
straits, losing endless time for want of a laboratory, and unable to
procure the instruments or books necessary to continue their researches,
but persevering against hope, and often dying before they had r