his grave situation is by extending still greater privileges
to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further
enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of
government--laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures,
prisons,--is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most
antagonistic elements in society.

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to
diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the
greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing
in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital
punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with
crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the
horrible scourge of its own creation.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution
of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to
misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people
are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they
loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the
statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime. What does
society, as it exists today, know of the process of despair, the
poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass
on its way to crime and degradation. Who that knows this terrible
process can fail to see the truth in these words of Peter Kropotkin:

"Those who will hold the balance between the benefits thus attributed
to law and punishment and the degrading effect of the latter on
humanity; those who will estimate the torrent of depravity poured
abroad in human society by the informer, favored by the Judge even,
and paid for in clinking cash by governments, under the pretext of
aiding to unmask crime; those who will go within prison walls and
there see what human beings become when deprived of liberty, when
subjected to the care of brutal keepers, to coarse, cruel words, to a
thousand stinging, piercing humiliations, will agree with us that the
entire apparatus of prison and punishment is an abomination which
ought to be brought to an end."

The deterrent influence of law on the lazy man is too absurd to merit
consideration. If society were only relieved of the waste and
expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the
paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social
tables would contain an abund