who grow up and
die, who know sorrow, who work and consume, think and create outside the
few encumbering personages who have been so magnified that humanity is
hidden by their shadows, enlarged by our ignorance.

And yet as soon as we pass from printed matter to life itself, as soon
as we throw a glance at society, we are struck by the infinitesimal part
played by the Government. Balzac already has remarked how millions of
peasants spend the whole of their lives without knowing anything about
the State, save the heavy taxes they are compelled to pay. Every day
millions of transactions are made without Government intervention, and
the greatest of them--those of commerce and of the Exchange--are carried
on in such a way that the Government could not be appealed to if one of
the contracting parties had the intention of not fulfilling his
agreement. Should you speak to a man who understands commerce, he will
tell you that the everyday business transacted by merchants would be
absolutely impossible were it not based on mutual confidence. The habit
of keeping his word, the desire not to lose his credit, amply suffice to
maintain this relative honesty. The man who does not feel the slightest
remorse when poisoning his customers with noxious drugs covered with
pompous labels, thinks he is in honour bound to keep his engagements.
But if this relative morality has developed under present conditions,
when enrichment is the only incentive and the only aim, can we doubt its
rapid progress when appropriation of the fruits of others' labour will
no longer be the basis of society?

Another striking fact, which especially characterizes our generation,
speaks still more in favour of our ideas. It is the continual extension
of the field of enterprise due to private initiative, and the prodigious
development of free organizations of all kinds. We shall discuss this
more at length in the chapter devoted to _Free Agreement_. Suffice it to
mention that the facts are so numerous and so customary that they are
the essence of the second half of the nineteenth century, even though
political and socialist writers ignore them, always preferring to talk
to us about the functions of the Government.

These organizations, free and infinitely varied, are so natural an
outcome of our civilization; they expand so rapidly and federate with
so much ease; they are so necessary a result of the continual growth of
the needs of civilized man; and lastly, they