is too
trivial to justify the application of exceptional measures and the
suspension of the principle of tolerance to all opinions. The
Anarchists are not, after all, so very original; they are a modernised
version of the Chiliasts of more than a thousand years ago, and differ
from them only as the mental conception of the present differs from
that of Irenaeus. For he sought to justify his dreams by an appeal to
religion, while the Anarchists appeal to modern science. That is all.
But if we blame for its intolerance, and stigmatise as belonging to
the "dark ages," the age that persecuted the Chiliasts with fire and
sword, we certainly ought not to show a still greater intolerance to
the Chiliasts of our own day.

But it may be said that this fantasy, this Anarchist theory, is far
more dangerous than all the other errors that have preceded it; it
wishes to abolish property, reduce the family to Hetairism, and so
forth. We hope we have shown clearly in the preceding pages that, at
bottom, all Anarchist theories, even Kropotkin's, are very harmless,
and would merely result in leaving everything as before, merely
changing the present compulsory system into a voluntary one. A large
group of Anarchists, indeed the most extreme, are pure Individualists,
even maintaining individual property; how this could be maintained
without some legal guarantee is a question for themselves; but it is
evident that the Anarchist theory would alter the existing state of
things much less than the social-democratic theory; for the latter
demands the cessation of Individualist economy, and would punish any
opposition to its views as a crime, just as we punish theft to-day. It
is the same with marriage. Anarchists of all parties merely wish the
family to be changed into the "family group"; but that means that
everything could practically remain unchanged; only the legal
guarantees and privileges associated with marriage must be abolished.
We will neither discuss the morality, or lack of it, nor the
practicability or impracticability of this idea; but in this the
Anarchists go no further than what Fichte, or that moderate liberal,
Wilhelm von Humboldt, or even F. A. Schlegel, the poet of Lucinde,
have demanded as regards natural marriage; and Schlegel certainly is
somewhat of the national-Christian-Socialism type. In any case, here,
too, Socialism with its more drastic measures is more formidable, for
even if it would respect the sexual group--whi