nce
of each small territorial unit becomes a pressing need; mutual agreement
replaces law in order to regulate individual interests in view of a
common object--very often disregarding the frontiers of the present
States.

All that was once looked on as a function of the Government is to-day
called in question. Things are arranged more easily and more
satisfactorily without the intervention of the State. And in studying
the progress made in this direction, we are led to conclude that the
tendency of the human race is to reduce Government interference to zero;
in fact, to abolish the State, the personification of injustice,
oppression, and monopoly.

We can already catch glimpses of a world in which the bonds which bind
the individual are no longer laws, but social habits--the result of the
need felt by each one of us to seek the support, the co-operation, the
sympathy of his neighbours.

Assuredly the idea of a society without a State will give rise to at
least as many objections as the political economy of a society without
private capital. We have all been brought up from our childhood to
regard the State as a sort of Providence; all our education, the Roman
history we learned at school, the Byzantine code which we studied later
under the name of Roman law, and the various sciences taught at the
universities, accustom us to believe in Government and in the virtues of
the State providential.

To maintain this superstition whole systems of philosophy have been
elaborated and taught; all politics are based on this principle; and
each politician, whatever his colours, comes forward and says to the
people, "Give my party the power; we can and we will free you from the
miseries which press so heavily upon you."

From the cradle to the grave all our actions are guided by this
principle. Open any book on sociology or jurisprudence, and you will
find there the Government, its organization, its acts, filling so large
a place that we come to believe that there is nothing outside the
Government and the world of statesmen.

The Press teaches us the same in every conceivable way. Whole columns
are devoted to parliamentary debates and to political intrigues; while
the vast everyday life of a nation appears only in the columns given to
economic subjects, or in the pages devoted to reports of police and law
cases. And when you read the newspapers, your hardly think of the
incalculable number of beings--all humanity, so to say--