ical. The difference between all these conceptions of property
according to the principles of individualist or Communist Anarchism,
and the relations of property as they exist to-day, merely reduces
itself to this, that with us the State affords the guarantee of
property, while Anarchy, at most, places the guarantee of it in free
association or agreement, proceeding from a "group" or a "union of
egotists." Here we come face to face with the purely formal question
of whether right is derived from convention or compulsion; but as
regards individual property as such no alteration is thereby made.

But Kropotkin's "economics of the heap" (_la mise au tas, la prise au
tas_) has another fault besides this matter of logic. Its talented
inventor proceeds from two assumptions, which characterise him as a
Utopian of the first water; on the one hand the old and incorrect
assumption of the inexhaustible productivity of the earth, and on the
other the assumption of the innate solidarity of mankind.

Kropotkin maintains that production now already outweighs consumption,
and that the former is growing with unsuspected rapidity together with
scientific insight into the methods of production and with freedom of
production. A piece of land which to-day is cultivated by ten persons,
and feeds one hundred, would with rational cultivation feed one
thousand people, and with the general employment of machinery would
only require five persons to cultivate it. In fact, diminution of
labour, with increase of production under rational cultivation, is
perhaps the quintessence of Kropotkin's argument. Men will then
quickly leave the less productive countries to settle in the most
suitable and most productive districts, and from these they will
extract with proportionately little labour a never-ending superfluity,
so that the economic arrangement proposed by Kropotkin will become
not only possible, but there will even be too much to distribute. Here
again we have the Land of Idleness in the disguise of science, the
millennium of the revolution. Let us listen to the description of this
return to Paradise in Kropotkin's own words:

"The workers will [after the Revolution] go away from the city and
return to the country. With the help of machinery which will enable
the weakest among us to support it, they will introduce the revolution
into the methods of cultivation, as they had previously with the ideas
and conditions, of those who were before but s