s free understanding or
_entente_, in which government never intervenes; what, for example,
in isolated cases two railway companies do in making a free
arrangement about fares and time-tables, is to be the universal form
of society.

In this society the feeling of solidarity alone, which Kropotkin
assumes as a sort of _a priori_ axiom of society, will determine men's
actions: "Each must retain the right of acting as he thinks best, and
the right of society to punish any one for a social action in any way
must be denied...." "We are not afraid of doing without judges and
their verdicts," says he, in _La Morale Anarchiste_. "With Guyon we
renounce each and every approval of morality or any duties to
morality. We do not shrink from saying: Do what pleases you! Act as
you think fit! for we are convinced that the great majority of
mankind, in proportion to their enlightenment and to the completeness
with which they throw off their present fetters, will always act in a
manner beneficial to society--just as we are certain that some day or
other a child will walk upon its two feet and not on all fours,
because it is born of parents that belong to the genus _homo_." But
the comparison is incorrect. There are, as a matter of fact,
degenerate children of human kind who, deprived of all understanding,
creep on all fours quite unconcernedly. Equally insufficient is
another proof adduced by Kropotkin, who is a great friend of animals,
from the animal world. Looking around among animals, he finds in them
also an innate feeling of sympathy with their own species, expressed
in mutual assistance in time of need or danger. By this he wishes to
prove that men likewise would act in the same way to their fellow-men
merely from the feeling of solidarity, and without laws or government.
Elsewhere certainly, in a later work, he has to confess that there are
among men an enormous number of individuals who do not understand that
the welfare of the individual is identical with that of the race. But
supposing that man were exactly like the animals, then--speaking in
Kropotkin's manner--he would stand no higher in morality than they.
But then do we really find that, in the animal world, the number of
cases in which they act from a feeling of solidarity is greater than
those in which they simply make use of brute force or blind want of
forethought, and have animals the sense to do away with organised
solidarity, the State, in order to replace it by