ace of abode is not
known.

[1] See his life in Stepniak, _u. s._, pp. 90-101.

[2] He was living in Kent in 1897.--TRANS.

Kropotkin's Anarchism rests upon the most scientific and humane
foundations, and yet assumes the most unscientific and brutal forms.
To him the Anarchist theory appears to be nothing but a necessary
adaptation of social science to that modern tendency in all other
sciences which, leaving on one side abstract and collective
generality, turn to the individual, as, _e. g._, the cellular theory,
the study of molecular forces, and so on. Just as all great
discoveries of modern science have proceeded by rejecting the
unfruitful deductive method and beginning to build up from below, so
also, Kropotkin maintains, society must be built up afresh by
realising all power, all reality, all purpose in individuals, and can
only arise again new-born synthetically, from the free grouping of
these individuals. With unconscious self-irony, Kropotkin remarks that
he would like to call this system the "synthetic," if Herbert Spencer
had not already applied that name "to another system." Anyone who
would conclude from this that the learned prince would build up
scientifically a well-founded system, as his earlier predecessors
tried to do, would be mistaken. With a few exceptions, Kropotkin has
only published short works, though certainly numerous, in which he
uses epithets rather than arguments, and those in an intentionally
trivial tone; indeed he sometimes mocks at the "wise and learned
theorists," and regards one deed as worth more than a thousand
books.[3] The same internal contrast is seen in him in another
direction. He is apparently a philanthropist of the purest water,
wishing to see the foundation of an universal brotherhood of humanity,
based upon what he regards as the innate feeling of solidarity in man;
we seem to see in this Proudhon's "justice," Comte's "love," in short,
the moral order of the world, however materialist Kropotkin may be in
action, and however much he may deny all moral element therein. But
how does he mean to bring about this moral order? By any means that is
suitable, even by the sanguinary "propaganda of action," and finally
by the re-establishment of the actual conditions of the primeval
ape-man, or tribal life on the level of the inhabitants of Tierra del
Fuego.

[3] The chief work of Kropotkin is _La Conquete du Pain_,
Paris, 1892. (The chapter on agriculture wa