o be blind to the inevitable
bankruptcy of our business of production. Nor is this the only crime
of the latter. Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer
into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than
his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the
products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of
originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is
making.

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that
help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to
live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig
coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no
talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous
things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,--too weak to live,
too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this
deadening method of centralized production as the proudest
achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are
to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete
than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that
centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of
health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in
a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal
is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the
individual. Oscar Wilde defines a perfect personality as "one who
develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in
danger." A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of
society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions
of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table,
the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the
painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist,--the
result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work
as a creative force. That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic
arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive
associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best
means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism,
however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of
individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in
harmony with