s to Darwin and Buechner are, in the
language of Darwinism, the society of to-day, and any other form of
society based upon the principle of the State implies a softening of
the struggle for existence by artificial selection; but Anarchy would
be natural selection, and thus would be a step lower in development.
The return to primitive stages, which have long since been passed
through, would be the external form in which this fact would appear;
thus, for example, the conditions described by Grave in "the sexual
group" would mean a return to the times and conditions which, in all
races of a primitive type living in total or partial Anarchy, have led
to the dreadful custom of murdering children and old people. But this
would mean a return to artificial selection in its most primitive and
sanguinary form. Anarchists want us to undergo once again all the
errors, terrors, and madness associated with the results won by human
culture; and that there will not be even a respectable minority
prepared to do. But they wish to do it in order to introduce
"happiness for all" (_le bonheur de l'humanite_), to change the
"struggle for existence" into a general "struggle with nature," as all
Anarchists from Proudhon to Grave have dreamed; and in this lies the
incomprehensible and ineffable contradiction.

* * * * *

More original than Reclus and Grave, if only after the fashion of the
eclectic who can quicken the various ancient and modern elements of
thought into a new spirit, is Daniel Saurin, who, in his work on
_Order through Anarchy_ (_L' Ordre par l'Anarchie_, Paris, 1893),
tries to find a philosophic foundation for Anarchism. For Saurin,
humanity is something substantial and real, not that _tohuwabohn_ from
which even Reclus cannot rescue Kropotkin's "economics of the heap."
According to Saurin the normal man combines two elements: a constant
something that is permanent throughout the centuries, and, surpassing
space and time, comes back again in all nations and persons; and a
variable. The first is "man," the latter the individual. The human
average (_le minimum humain_) appears in the bodily, moral, and mental
equality of men; the individual is determined by the relation of these
constants to an environment (_milieu_). Above the individual stands
Man, and Man includes all individuals in himself. The laws of each
individual are thus the laws of humanity; the law of society resides
in ourselves; to