ance for all, including even the
occasional lazy individual. Besides, it is well to consider that
laziness results either from special privileges, or physical and
mental abnormalities. Our present insane system of production
fosters both, and the most astounding phenomenon is that people
should want to work at all now. Anarchism aims to strip labor of its
deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to
make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real
harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both
recreation and hope.

To achieve such an arrangement of life, government, with its unjust,
arbitrary, repressive measures, must be done away with. At best it
has but imposed one single mode of life upon all, without regard to
individual and social variations and needs. In destroying government
and statutory laws, Anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and
independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by
authority. Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only
in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in
him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social
bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundation of a
normal social life.

But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it
endure under Anarchism?

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy
name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson
to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak
authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan,
the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of
human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every
soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in
captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits,
their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from
their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow
space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its
potentialities?

Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose,
alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all
its wonderful possibilities.

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind
from the dominion of religion;