_orbis et urbis_ after the _coup
d'etat_; and not to take a lower standard than the father of
Anarchism, we exclaim also, "Justice must be done to all, even to
Proudhon."

The most usual reproach which is cast against Proudhon is that he is
contradictory and confused. This reproof is generally made by people
who know no more about Proudhon than the paradox "Property is Theft,"
and from this one expression call him confused and contradictory.

Proudhon saw very clearly the end before his eyes, strove to attain it
unfalteringly and steadily, and amid all the variety of the
developments in which he preached his ideas to the world for a quarter
of a century, never betrayed one iota of its contents. The
contradiction from which his work suffered lay deeper. It lay in the
form of his thought, and partly in the period to which he belonged.
Placed on the boundary line between two epochs of social science and
of social forms, one of which is marked by dogma and the other by
induction, he had not the strength to break completely with one or
give himself up completely to the other. His whole life and thought
was a constant fight against dogma in every form. He fought against
social Utopianism as against religious dogmatism, and fought against
the dogmatism of property as against political authority; he sought to
transform Socialism upon severely scientific and realistic lines, and
to free it from all the fetters of dogmatic religion; and yet, just as
Rousseau did, he placed at the head of his system a dogma: "Man is
born free"; and at the conclusion of it the teleological phrase of a
moral order of society--two propositions which can never be proved by
experience, but rather contradict all experience.

In the same way this internal contradiction is shown in the principal
work of his last period, the _Justice dans le Revolution et dans
l'Eglise_, in which Proudhon endeavours to show these two separate
worlds in their marked difference one from another without suspecting
that he himself fluctuated between both.

After he, as a logical idealist, had denied all external force and all
authority, and nevertheless as a realist had supported society as the
unalterable condition of human life and civilisation, he seeks at the
same time to save anarchy and society by a new bond between
individuals who have been set free and find this in some internal
necessity and internal authority, in a principle which acts upon the
will like a forc