alterable
natural inequality of its members, only intensifies them by legalising
all kinds of new inequalities, and if it regards its institutions, and
especially the law, as instruments for the unalterable conservation of
all present forms of society with all their imperfections and
injustices. If right is done, and right is uttered arbitrarily, in a
partisan and protectionist method; if equality before the law is
disregarded by those who are called to defend the law; if belief in
the reliability of the indispensable institutions of authority is
lightly shaken by these very institutions themselves, then it is no
wonder if men despair of the capability of the State to practice or to
maintain right; and if the masses, always ready to generalise, deny
right, law, State, and authority together. We have already pointed out
repeatedly that Anarchism cannot be explained by pauperism alone.
Pauperism justifies Socialism; but this movement against authority,
which certainly does not bear in all cases the name of Anarchism, but
which is to-day more widely spread than is often imagined, can only be
explained by a confused mass of injustice and wrongdoing, of which the
_bourgeois_ State is daily and hourly guilty towards the weak.

The average man does not much mind his rich fellow-man riding in his
carriage while he himself cannot even pay his tram fare; but that he
should be abandoned by society to every chance official of justice, as
a prey that has no rights, while justice often falters anxiously
before those who are shielded by coats of arms and titles,--that makes
his blood boil, and causes him to seek the origin of this injustice in
the institution itself instead of in the way it works. How many
Anarchists have become so merely because they were treated as common
criminals when they happened to have the misfortune to be suspected of
Anarchism? How many became Anarchists because they were outlawed by
society on account of free and liberal views?

Anarchism may be defined etiologically as disbelief in the suitability
of constituted society. With such views there would be only one way in
which we could cut the ground from under the Anarchists' feet. Society
must anxiously watch that no one should have reason to doubt its
intention of letting justice have free sway, but must raise up the
despairing, and by all means in its power lead them back to their lost
faith in society. A movement like Anarchism cannot be conquered by
fo