“Anarchy, in the eyes of some, is robbery, assassination, bombs, a return to savagery; anarchists are only house-breakers, loafers, who would divide all wealth in order to be able to amuse themselves with doing nothing.
“In the eyes of others, anarchy is a sort of Utopia, of golden-age dream which they readily grant to be very beautiful, but a dream good at best to illustrate books of ethics or fantastic social schemes with. The most kindly disposed regard anarchy as a vague aspiration which they do not hesitate to recognise as desirable for humanity to attain, but as so completely inaccessible that there is no reason for making any decided effort to realise it, and consider the anarchist as a species of lunatic whom it is prudent to avoid, a pitiful _illuminé_ who strays from the practicable paths to lose himself in the vagueness of Utopia.
“They are very few who know that anarchy is a theory resting on rational bases, that anarchists are men who, having collated the complaints of those who suffer from the actual social order, and having saturated themselves with human aspirations, have undertaken a critique of the institutions which control us, analysing them, weighing their worth, and estimating what they are capable of producing, and who, from the sum total of their observations, deduce logical natural laws for the organisation of a better society.
“Of course, the anarchists do not pretend to have invented the critique of the social order. Others had done that before them. As soon as power began to exist, there were malcontents who made no bones of railing at its acts; and, if we possessed the legends which men handed down from generation to generation before writing was known, we should probably find therein satires against the chiefs. It is quite possible to criticise the existing order of things without being an anarchist, and there are those who have done this in a successful fashion which the anarchists will never surpass.
“But what anarchists believe they have done more than the other critics, more than the existing socialistic schools or the socialistic schools which preceded them, is to have gotten their bearings in the midst of the confused mass of errors which spring from the complexity of social relations, to have remounted to the causes of misery, of exploitation, and finally to have laid bare the political error which made men place hope in good governments, good governors, good legislation, good dispensers of justice, as efficacious remedies for the ills from which humanity suffers.