viduals; "free" men in the
Anarchist sense will never let themselves be made equal and never have
done so.

But Kropotkin thinks otherwise. He goes back to those dear, good, and
too happy savages of Rousseau, and tells us[7] that primitive peoples,
so long as they submit to no authority but live in Anarchy, lead a
most enviably happy life. "Apart from the occurrences of natural
forces, such as sudden changes of weather, earthquakes, frost, etc.,
and apart from war and accidents, primitive races lead a rich and full
life out of their own resources, following their own wishes, at the
cost of the minimum of labour. Read the descriptions left by the great
voyagers of early centuries, read certain modern records of travel,
and you will see that where society has not yet sunk under the yoke of
priests and warriors, plenty prevails among savages. Like gregarious
birds they spend the morning in common labour; in the evening they
rest in common and enjoy themselves. They have none of the troubles of
life known to the proletariat in the great centres of industry of our
time. Misery only overtakes them when they fall under the yoke of some
form of authority."

[7] _Les Temps Nouveaux_, p. 21.

Here we have the golden age existing before any form of society, just
as previously we heard the description of a golden age after the fall
of forms of society, and that the misery of this "cursed civilisation"
can only be removed by doing away with such a society and returning
again to the same primitive condition. It is the same old tale of the
"social-contract" theory to which our Anarchists one and all
invariably recur after manifold scientific toil and trouble. In fact
this primitive paradise described by Kropotkin is just as much a
figment of his imagination as the Anarchist paradise of the future. He
speaks of early travellers. Now, as regards the ethnographic
observations of old travellers, they are a very doubtful source of
information. Formerly it was frequently declared off-hand that this or
that people had no idea of religion or lived in Anarchy. The reason
was that travellers completely underrated primitive forms in
comparison with their own preconceived religious or political ideas
and regarded them as naught. Exact observations have shown that a
complete lack of all religious conceptions is as rare in primitive
races as complete lack of all social organisation or form of
authority. Kropotkin unfortunately does not ment