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Dora Marsden vs. Benjamin Tucker and Steven Byington

Benjamin Tucker and Steven Byington, the publisher and translator, respectively, of the english verison of Max Stirner's "The Ego and His Own", spent some time contributing articles and letters to the editor to The New Freewoman and The Egoist. Tucker came out of his retirement from publishing "Liberty" to contribute to The New Freewoman. He had called The Freewoman "the most important publication in existence". His contributions came to an abrupt end, when he and Byington sparred with Marsden over anarchism and egoism.

The contributions of Tucker and Byington to The New Freewoman and The Egoist, including their letters to the editor, are included in the files below:

The Debate between Marsden, Tucker and Byington

It is complete through the ending of The New Freewoman. The articles by Byington and Tucker in the Egoist have yet to be included, though Marsden's articles are here.

Sid Parker's commentary on the exchange.

Short Comments by Tucker

ANARCHISM AND PROPERTYAn explicit and unequivocal expression of support for private property by Tucker.

"On the Interference With the Environment", by Steven Byington

Published serially in The New Freewoman and The Egoist. A full elaboration of Byington's views on a class of sticky issues for libertarians and anarchists.

I - THE PRESUPPOSITIONS I START FROM
II - THE CLASSES OF INTERFERENCE.
III - CERTAIN CONFLICTS OF INTERSTS.
IV - THOROUGHFARES; AND PISCICULTURE.
V - MAINLY ON OFFENSES TO THE EYE.
VI - THE QUESTION OF OBSCENITY.
VI - CONTINUED - end of series

"If we men have more reason than women, they have much more instinct than we. The only thing that has been taught them is to wear properly the fig-leaf that they received from their first ancestor. All that is said and repeated to them during their first eighteen or nineteen years comes down to this: ` My daughter, have an eye to your fig-leaf; your fig-leaf sets well, your fig-leaf sets badly. ' "

BENJ. R. TUCKER.

§ § §

DOES GOD EVER THINK TWICE?

To the Editor of THE NEW FREEWOMAN.

MADAM,

Drumont, the Anti-Semite, lamenting the decline of the French army, declares, in his journal, La Libre Parole, that France should have assumed the offensive between 1876 and 1896, when her army was at its best, and taken back Alsace, Lorraine, and the war indemnity. " When a country, " he says, " has made enormous sacrifices to re-establish its army, when this army is ready, and when the country knows what it wants, it passes at once to brutal action, and God does the rest in favour of the right. " But in 1870 had not Germany made great sacrifices to perfect her military power? Was not her army ready? Did not Bismarck know precisely what he wanted, and pass at once to the brutal action? And did not God render His verdict " in favour of the right"? Does Drumont, then, expect Omniscience to plead guilty of error, and reverse its judgment in the light of " a sober second thought " ?

BENJ. R. TUCKER.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, July 1st, 1913

SOME OPINIONS

THE FREEWOMAN.

_______

FRANCIS GRIERSON. —I predict for you brilliant success in the near future. No new movement will succeed that gives quarter to the blind forces of the material. The psychic, being superior, will over-ride the material, and that is what is occurring in certain parts of the world notably in America.

H. G. WELLS. —I rejoice beyond measure in the revival of THE FREEWOMAN. Its policy even at its worst was a wholesome weekly-irritant, and its columns were more illuminating and entertaining than anything since Mr. Frank Harris's " Saturday Review. "

EDWARD CARPENTER. —THE FREEWOMAN did so well during its short career under your editorship, it was so broad-minded and courageous, that its cessation has been a real loss to the cause of free and rational discussion of human problems.

HAVELOCK ELLIS. —I admire so much the energy and courage of THE FREEWOMAN that I am really sorry I cannot identify myself more closely with its spirit and outlook. No doubt a newspaper requires both funds and publicity. The first is usually difficult to obtain, but I scarcely think you can complain on the second head. Considering the inevitable difficulties, the limited appeal of so revolutionary a journal, and the closure of the usual method of procuring publicity, it is wonderful how widely the paper is known.

REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN, Author of "Daughters of Ishmael. "—THE FREEWOMAN was a torch in the night. I am glad indeed that that torch is to be rekindled, and I shall always be at your command to do whatever I cad to help to guard the flame.

BENJ. R. TUCKER, Thirty years Editor of New York " Liberty. "—I consider your paper the most important publication in existence.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS. —I am delighted to learn that THE FREEWOMAN is not dead, but merely in a fainting condition from lack of necessary nourishment. May she soon be her dashing self again.

MRS. G. BERNARD SHAW. —I am really glad to hear that there is a chance of restarting THE FREEWOMAN, for though there has been much I have not agreed with, I think it is a valuable medium of self-expression for a clever set of young men and women.

CHARLES LAPWORTH, Editor of the " Daily Herald. "—It was while Mrs Lapworth and I were leading the lives of tramps in Italy that we were first introduced to THE FREEWOMAN, and we fell in love with its fine upstanding, vigorous attitude towards " Life Problems. " 1 hope it will go on.

EDNA KENTON (Hon. Secretary, THE NEW FREEWOMAN Committee, New York). —I cannot tell you how unreservedly I admire your courage and your standpoint. Until the advent of THE FREEWOMAN I had not had the same feeling of breathless wonder at the voicing of heretofore unprinted things since reading "The Ego and Its Own. "

CHARLES T. HALLINAN (Associate Editor, " Chicago Evening Post "). —I am delighted that THE FREEWOMAN is again to take the field. There is work for it to do here as well as in England. I believe that a large and intelligent minority in the suffrage movement in this country is ready for the discussion of something else besides votes. It may take them some time to get used to the libertarian emphasis of THE FREEWOMAN, but they will be able at once to recover through its columns a perspective of the woman's movement which, through no fault of its own, is suffering at present from an excess of politicians and a shortage of general ideas.

FLOYD DELL on THE FREEWOMAN in "Studies in Modern Feminism. "—She provokes thought. And she welcomes it. She wants everybody to think—not to think necessarily, nor the right thought always, but that which they can and must. She is a propagandist, it is true. But she does not create a silence and call it conversion. She stimulates her readers to cast out the devils that inhabit their souls—fear, prejudice She helps them to build up their lives on a basis of will—the exercise, not the suppression, of will. She indurates them to the world. She liberates them to life.

C. F. HUNT (Chicago). —Every progressive individual I know will hear from me in regard to making the future of your paper secure. LUCIAN CARY (Chicago). —THE FREEWOMAN is one of those forces which are proving all the old generalizations about women untrue.

MRS. HUMPHREY WARD on THE FREEWOMAN in "The Times. "—A newspaper has recently appeared amongst us which. is written by women of high education who, generally speaking, sign their names to what they write. The paper shows in some respects conspicuous ability, and is, I believe, eagerly read.... The doctrine of the economic independence of women which is everywhere part and parcel of the Suffrage movement leads, in the case of this ably-written paper, to strange results.... Arguments against the immoral permanence of marriage, complete freedom of union under the guidance of passion between men and women, and other speculations and contentions with regard to the relations of the sexes.... These matters and the handling of them shed a flood of light on certain aspects of the "Woman Movement. "... It seems to me, and to others, what they (i. e., Suffragists) have no right to do is to ignore this dark and dangerous side of the " Woman Movement. "

EARL PERCY on THE FREEWOMAN in the "Morning Post. "—With regard to the Church League, the welcome (to THE FREEWOMAN) would appear to be equally cordial, if less official. In the issues of THE FRFEWOMAN for July 11th and July 18th, appear letters from the Rev. ——, a member of the League. In the first case the letter is placed close to one entitled " The Children of the State, " advocating open immorality, which hardly seems a suitable situation for a clergyman's letter. In his second letter, however, he says: "It is refreshing ... to meet somebody who has the courage to champion, " &c. This refers to the Editor, whose courage in that particular issue took the form of an article entitled "The immorality of the Marriage Contract. " So that on one page a clergyman writes on "The Idea of God, " and on another the marriage state is described as immoral. Presumably "The Idea of God" is, in his opinion, quite consistent with this view of marriage. If the Church League is not in sympathy with the doctrines of THE FREEWOMAN, why does one of its members, an eminent divine of the Church of England, correspond with it?

MORNING POST Editorial on THE FREEWOMAN. "—The battle, then (i. e., the women's), is against society, and naturally there is a tendency to alliance with the Socialist Party, who have also a quarrel with out established institutions. A Socialist feminist organ, the THE FREEWOMAN, preaches the new doctrine with a great deal of vigour and frankness.

THE FORUM (New York, October, 1912). —THE FREEWOMAN came with the incredible heresy that the woman movement was nothing if not an effort on the part of the [women to lift themselves for ever out of the " servant " class and to place themselves definitely and finally among the " masters, " using their faculties, like all masters, for the upbuilding and development of their own personalities and the advancement of their own personal aims

CURRENT OPINION (New York, January, 1913). —The feminist movement has evolved its superwoman; or rather, the superwoman is the ultimate expression of that new philosophy of feminism preached by the daring " humanist " review, the London FREEWOMAN.

THE AMERICAN REVIEW OF REVIEWS (FRANCES BJORKMAN, quoted in December, 1912). —The writer of THE FREEWOMAN editorials has shot into the literary and philosophical firmament as a star of the first magnitude. Although practically unknown before the advent of THE FREEWOMAN last November, she speaks always! with the quietly authoritative air of the writer who has arrived. Her style has beauty as well as force and clarity. Merely as an essayist she makes us wonder why we have never heard of her before.

THE CHICAGO EVENING POST (October, 1912). —Year by year THE FREEWOMAN, if unhampered, will precipitate for the English and the American woman's movements some new and lasting conceptions of the vital problems which confront us.

Some of these expressions of opinion were written to the Editor under the impression that the old paper would be revived. For reasons unnecessary to enlarge upon, that plan has been abandoned in favour of the present plan of commencing an entirely new and separate publication.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, July 15th, 1913

Paris Notes.

I read in " L'Homme Libre " that in the home of the painter Lauth, who married George Sand's granddaughter, it is forbidden to speak the name of Alfred de Musset. Visitors are warned in advance by the familiars of the house. Sometimes, however, the hazards of conversation lead someone to mention the poet of " Les Nuits, " whereupon an icy silence marks the offender's blunder. This reminds one of Vizetelly's apology for Zola's illegitimate children. What a pity that our heroes and our ancestors are not always precisely as good as ourselves—not a whit better ! A cat may look at a king, but may it expect royalty to be feline?

§ § §

Mademoiselle Renée Mignot, having been classed as a feminist by Monsieur Victor Méric, in Les Hommes du Jour, apropos of something that she had written in La Cravache, of Reims, sends Monsieur Méric an answer, from which the following is an extract: —

"I know not what you mean with your 'free women. ' Why this plural? I am a free woman who troubles herself very little about her companions. I am a 'lone Amazon. ' In the last analysis I am nothing at all; my opinion is to have no opinions. I doubt everything, am certain about nothing. I criticise everything. I analyse ideas. I gather impressions without ever feeling the need of coming to a conclusion. To conclude is to be pretentious and vain.

" I entertain no illusions as to men, or as to myself, or as to love, and yet among men I count some good comrades. I take love for what it is worth—a physical passion, almost a physiological necessity which I am not free to escape.

" I write solely for my own pleasure. I do not utter ideas with a view to inducing others to share them; the clash of ideas alone interests me.

" As for the usefulness and charm of life, of which you see evidence in love, the family, and beauty, permit me to dispute them. Your affirmations have value only for one individual, whose name is V. Méric. Why generalise from one's own phenomenon? For my part, I deny both the charm and the usefulness of life.... I do not believe in happiness, because I do not believe in justice. I do not believe in the perfectability of people or of things. I call in question the benefits of the arts and sciences.

" Although my nihilism is of a rather jovous nature, I would willingly say with Leopardi: ' All that is is evil. Existence is an evil, an abomination, a monstrosity !' Yet I do not commit suicide; whoso commits suicide desires life.

" Confess that I am not simply a charming lady, but also a mad woman ! But reassure yourself, I am not in the least deranged, not in the least ugly.

" Would you believe me if I told you that I am twenty-five years old, that I am not dyspeptic, and that I am a water-drinker?"

§ § §

The following is an extract from Remy de Gourment in La France: " It seems that the Tribunal of the Seine (it is composed of numerous chambers and sections) is working with an incomparable ardour. It judges everything that comes before it with a celerity that leaves one overwhelmed with astonishment. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand cases do not frighten it. In spite of everything it is fourteen thousand cases in arrears. All these are about to be cleared away. And the work is beginning. Ah ! how far we are from the oak of) Saint Louis ! Shall I say that I have not read the reports of these precipitate labours without a certain fear? These judges really know their trade too well. Their skill is a little disturbing. One of my friends has just had occasion to be present at a session of the court, and he confesses that he went out a little frightened, so thickly rained the days, the

months, the years of prison on the heads of the poor devils. Nobody understood what was going on. least of all the unfortunates whose debatable acts seemed to call for a certain discussion. But the judge, and especially the hurried judge, the judge who clears away heaps of fourteen thousand cases with a shovel, sees only categories where we see individual offences. Ten robberies seem to us ten very different affairs, the attitude of the robber varying no less than that of the victim, but to the judge there is only one affair, only one offence, and it is the offender that becomes an abstraction. Is the judge right? Are we obsessed by our naivete? A deed is a deed. Very well, but there are individuals who lend their special quality to the deed. Oh ! if we were to enter into all these matters of psychology, there would be no end. And we must end, since there is always a re-beginning. Next case!

§ § §

Unless the Free Woman is uninterested in the Free Man, your readers will enjoy a translation that I have made of a passage from one of Clemenceau's leaders in his new daily, L'Homme Libre, the birth of which in Paris was almost coincident with the re\i\al of your Femme Libre in England. Sympathizing with his friend, the Abbé Lemire, the Catholic Republican whom a recent papal decree has prevented from renewing his candidacy for the Chamber of Deputies, the freethinker Clemenceau says:

" We both are victims, I tell you. You, because, aspiring to liberty, you can find it only in yourself, outside the support, on which you had counted, of a faith freely accepted, freely practised, which ends in imposing a constraint upon you. I, because, wishing to liberate in my turn, and clashing with the formidable opposition of a past of violence, I see myself condemned to impose constraint, not on those who must face history under the weight of deviations disastrous to humanity, but on unfortunates who have received the sad inheritance and are bound to suffer, whether they repudiate it or choose to enwrap themselves alive in the winding-sheet of the things that have been.

Do you wish an example borrowed from my own recollections? When Minister of the Interior, it fell to my lot to secularize the hospital service of the Hôtel-Dieu. So I sent for the mother superior of the congregation concerned. There came to my office a venerable and wrinkled old woman, with mild and timid eyes, in which was summed the anguish of an accident long foreseen. I welcomed her respectfully, and tried to explain to her, not only what the law required, but how we had been driven, in the very interest of the liberty of belief, to see to it that abusive acts of propagandism, of which I myself had often been a witness, should no longer occur in hospitals maintained by taxpayers of different faiths.

" That I might not wound, I carefully weighed my words. How could I have succeeded? I saw the poor, sorrowful face contract without a word, and big tears, following the lines of the deep wrinkles, fell on the sad and discouraged hands. Much moved by this silent breakdown, I gently made excuses for being the cause of it. ' We both are victims, ' said I, ' of a situation that far antedates us. You expiate faults that are not yours personally, and I, who seem to you an agent of cruel constraint, establish in the end a situation of liberty for all. ' She did not move or speak, but her tears continued to flow.

" They flowed till the moment of her departure, marked only by a trembling gesture of politeness. And, although I was very certain of having acted in the interest of liberty—remembering as I did so many instances of religious pressure on the sick and dying—I remained obsessed by the spectacle of sorrow which an act of liberation had imposed upon me. No good without an accompanying ill, such, we must believe, is our misfortune. I know, moreover, other cases of secularization whose history lends itself less to the suggestions of philosophy.

" So the only thing that astonishes me in your

letter is that it makes you sad to quit Paris and the Chambers to which you have become acclimated by twenty years of work. Are you then so young? When one is near to quitting the movement of men for a still longer time, the determination of our destinies calls for a superior detachment. Between ourselves, I am persuaded that politics has no joys save for those whom I would advise to let politics alone. You are not of those, and that is why, my priest, you are forbidden to remain in politics.

" Chance and malchance ! Who knows if they do not render you a service in separating you from those sad battles in which there is often less heroism than sound, before you begin to feel the need of peace for your approaching end? You will go back to your parish, you will live there as a good priest, under the reprimands of an old servant who, I am told, knows how to make herself obeyed, happy with your hens, your leeks, your roses—symbols of the extreme needs of humanity. You will have neighbours (one realises that only in a village), the good and the bad. I recommend to you the latter, who are of an excellent school for the sound conduct of life.

" And then you will ascend your pulpit and say things that your parishioners will not understand. That is of no importance, because they will come to you in search, not of a doctrine the comprehension of which surpasses their degree of culture, but simply of a voice of sympathy, a resonance of fraternal compassion, in earthly trials. They will find it, because your are good and goodness bestows all things. In short, this biblical flock will derive consolation from the gestures of their shepherd, which will place them, as they think, under the august protection of the Unknown.

" Of necessity you will be hated, because, being a republican, you will not sack the secular school, and because the prevailing liberalism, in the village as in the city, has no comprehension of love without a corresponding hatred. Perhaps your windows will be broken, perhaps an assault will be made upon your friendships; that is no great matter, for those who can be separated from you will not be worth your regrets.

" And then, as soon as you are dead and no longer a source of embarrassment to anyone, all will begin to speak well of you and even to think well of you. You will see what a fine funeral they will give you. It annoys me to know that I shall not be there, for I shall have long since quitted this world. It annoys me still more to think that I shall not meet you in the other world, for I could entertain such a hope only on an hypothesis that would be rather uncom fortable for you. "

Léon Daudet, in his Royalist journal, L'Action Française, declares that Clemenceau (known as " The Tiger ") sheds crocodile tears over the mother superior. At least he sheds them well. An artist always.

BENJAMIN R. TUCKER.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, August 1st, 1913

Paris Notes.

SCHOOL PRIZES AND PROBLEMS.

(Translated from the French of JEAN JACQUES' BROUSSON in " Gil Blas. ")

HAPPY Barbamuche (Hector, Victor, Nestor, Népomucène, Vinceslas), I have learned through the newspapers of your academic triumphs. At the distribution" of prizes in your grammar-school you have been named fifteen times. Prize for conduct, for geography, for cosmography, for dancing, for football, for Greek version, for horsemanship, for violin playing, for history, for Latin verses, for Spanish, for fencing, for algebra, for line drawing, — you have had them all. Yes, fifteen times, with gymnastic stride and to the strains of a discordant and patriotic orchestra, you have mounted the steps of the platform hung in blood-red Andrinople. Fifteen times the mayor of the town has encircled your pimpled and close-cropped brow with a crown of crimped-paper daisies. Fifteen times he has kissed, without passion or disgust, your downy purple cheeks. Fifteen times you have redescended the trembling boards of glory, your arms breaking under the burden of your trophies. Every mother in the audience regretted that she had not carried you in her womb. Every father was jealous of your progenitor.

On your way home, O Barbamuche, in the procession of your parents, of your sisters, of your nieces, of your serving-maids, proud caravan staggering under the heap of heavy octavos bound in red and gilt, you met the little Crabouillat. He is the dunce of the class.

You eyed him with just disdain. He had obtained not the tiniest booklet, not even a leaf of laurel wherewith to season a stew.

In shame, like a malefactor, his father thumped him along to hasten his flight from the gaze of a contemptuous public. Resembling the lamentable Niobe, his mother, weeping like a gutter-spout, followed at fifteen paces, hiding the immensity of her affliction behind an inadequate handkerchief.

At sight of you both, Monsieur Jourdain, Monsieur Dimanche, Monsieur Josse, Madame La Ressource, standing in the doorways of their shops, lifted the veil of the future:

"Ah ! this Barbamuche ! What ability ! He will go far. Surely he will be a notary some day, or a cabinet minister, or a member of the municipal council. Just as you see him, he will have his street and his statue in our city. "

As for the distressing Crabouillat, they unanimously declared him unfit for anything, unsuited to any office in the republic. In advance they consigned him to privation, the night shelter, the hospital, and the paupers' grave.

Well, young and interesting Barbamuche, it will be just the contrary. The dunce will become His Excellency and have his statue. And the finest street in the city will be called Crabouillat Street.

For mark this, O Barbamuche, if there is an essential and fundamental truth in this lower world where all is uncertainty and illusion, it is that only the former dunces come to anything.

Having learned nothing at school, they have nothing to forget. Their brains are fresh, and not encrusted with that academic deposit of which you are so vain. They have so far done nothing. Good ! they are not tired. Their ardor is unimpaired.

And then, is it true that they have done nothing? It is very difficult to do nothing. While you were stuffing your thumbs in your ears to rehearse your everlasting lesson, your schoolfellow T, armed with a jagged penknife, was lovingly carving his name in his desk: I predict that he will become a famous engraver on wood.

U, who dissected maybugs behind his raised desk-cover, may end in the skin of a great entomologist. And entomologists, you know, are very much in fashion, because they prove God by the instincts of cockroaches.

And who shall prevent V, who converted the finest pages of Bossuet and Boileau into superb three-masters and elegant caravels, from becoming an admiral and sending his own battleships to the bottom, quite like any other?

As for the ingenious W, who poured the dregs of his glass on litmus paper to make it redden like a young virgin, the subtle W who made the ink boil in the inkstands by sprinkling it with powdered chalk, he will follow in Pasteur's footsteps, and become famous by the sacrifice of a hundred thousand innocent guinea-pigs. And why should not X, who drew caricatures of the teacher on the margins of his Virgil, be elected some day a member of the Institute?

Y, who bartered rusty pens, without points, for agate marbles, doubtless will become a Rothschild. Z, who yawned under the penalties imposed upon him and scanned on his dirty fingers verses to Noémie, his cousin, will be a poet. He will fling himself into the water with only six sous in his pocket. At least his name will float upon the lips of men.

While you, O Barbamuche (Hector, Victor, Nestor, Népomucène, Vinceslas), fifteen times named, will be at most a functionray, a paper-scratcher, a budget-eater.

You will wear out your shiny half- es on ministerial paper. Broken to discipline ana routine on the benches of your school, you will be fit for nothing but to turn a mill, like the blindfolded ass.

Not with field daisies or victorious laurels should your sheepish persistence have been crowned, but with a prophetic leather ring-cushion.

§ § §

" A vessel has 3 masts. The mizzenmast measures 20 metres, the mainmast 25, and the foremast 1975. Its tonnage is 4, 000. It has provisions on board for 98 days. There are 127 passengers. Find the age of the captain. " Such, or nearly such, is the problem that a pedant propounded to the sagacity of a graduating class. This somewhat outworn pleasantry has excited the vengeful fervor of our journalistic confrères. But there is nothing new about it. Pedants have always been banterers, delighting in setting snares.

Our master, Anatole France, loves to tell how old father Hase, a soaring Hellenist, took him down at his examinations.

This famous philologist questioned him in geography, as is the custom. Had he been a geographer, he would have questioned him in philology.

" My child, " said he, " you have been highly recommended to me. Well, let us see. Do not be troubled. Do not answer hastily. The Seine empties into the Channel, doesn't it?"

" Yes, Monsieur. "

" Very good ! Very good ! The Loire empties into the Atlantic, doesn't it?"

" Yes, Monsieur, " said the youth, with growing confidence.

" Perfect ! Perfect ! The Gironde also empties into the Atlantic, doesn't it?"

" Yes, Monsieur "; and this time the acquiescence was accompanied by a beatific smile.

" Marvellous! And the Rhone empties into Lake Michigan, doesn't it?"

" Yes, Monsieur, " answered the candidate, enthusiastically, fascinated by the hypocritical benevolence of his executioner.

" Ah ! Truly? The Rhone empties into Lake Michigan? You are an ass, my child, a downright

ass, asinus. I give you a zero, a pointed zero. Off with you !"

In your opinion, which of the two had the longer ears, old father Hase or the young Thibaut, who since has become Anatole France?

§ § §

HISTORY IN ANTICIPATION.

(Translated from the French of Clement Vautil in "Le Matin. ")

Mademoiselle Dupont is engaged to be married. She is delightful, and Monsieur Durand, her intended, is a charming fellow, a little delicate in health, it is true, but never complaining. Moreover, marriage will do him good. Nothing like the conjugal soup-kettle to restore one's vigour.

One day the young woman's father takes Monsieur Durand into a corner, and says to him:

" All is broken off. "

" Why?"

" You did not tell me that your name is on the official list of the tuberculous !"

" True, but I am getting better. And, as I have friends in high office, I hope that my name will soon be taken off the list. "

"No matter; I cannot allow my daughter to marry a consumptive. "

The marriage is abandoned. Commonplace consequence of the compulsory declaration of tuberculosis !

Some time later Mademoiselle Dupont is engaged again. This time Monsieur Chose is the choice of her heart. Monsieur Chose also seems to be suffering a little, but Papa Dupont attaches no importance to this; he has assured himself that his future son-in-law does not figure on the famous list drawn up by the advice of the Academy of Medicine.

The marriage is celebrated joyously. Who still remembers the poor evicted consumptive?

Now, a year later, the young woman is delivered of a still-born child. Moreover, characteristic symptoms had already enlightened the family physician. Monsieur Chose is obliged to confess:

"It is true, I am syphilitic. But, after all, that is my right. I figure on no list of prohibitions. And I have married with the guarantee of the government !"

§ § §

A French deputy who lately addressed the Chamber for four hours on a matter of law rushed into the library not long ago and said to the librarian:

" You have no idea of the tricks that my memory plays me. Perhaps you can tell me—for I have forgotten—on what date the law of supply and demand was enacted. "

I cannot vouch for the foregoing. L'Intransigeant is responsible for it. Se non è véro, ben trovato.

§ § §

A Columbia University professor, while refusing to approve the tactics of the suffragettes, complimented them on the fibre shown in their willingness to commit crime and take the consequences. Someone answered that the compliment was undeserved, since the suffragettes, in resisting forcible feeding, decline to take the consequences. Doubtless the professor would have been happier in his phrase had he directed his eulogy to the willingness to risk the consequences. But his critic's position is groundless, A rebel against the State is contemptible if he complains of the consequences of his rebellion, but certainly he is entitled to avoid them if he can, and, in doing so, he shows, not lack of fibre, but possession of wit. To say that a rebel is bound in honour

to take the consequences is to declare the victim the tyrant's debtor, and is superstition pure and simple.

§ § §

ANARCHY'S NEW ALLIES.

THE movement in favour of exacting health certificates from both parties to a marriage is gaining ground rapidly in the United States. Legislatures are enacting laws in this direction, and religious bodies are ordering their clergymen to refrain from solemnizing marriages without the physician's sanction. Whereat there is much rejoicing, it being forgotten apparently that husbands and wives may, and frequently do, contract disease after marriage, and communicate it to offspring. The logic of this movement requires periodical examination of all husbands and wives by authorized doctors, and compulsory divorce in case of the discovery of disease. The prostitute who is pestered in this way may live to see the wife similarly treated. Let us have equality before the law for all licensees of the State. But do these hygienic moralists realize that they are aiding the Anarchists, though not by Anarchistic methods, to lessen the number of marriages, increase the number of free unions and illegitimate children, and reduce the birth-rate? Now that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., is helping Brieux to put " Damaged Goods " on the stage, what will Rockefeller do if Brieux asks him to alternate "Damaged Goods" with "Maternity"? The one play discourages marriage, the other encourages abortion, and the result of either is fewer slaves for Rockefeller. And what will happen when this form of the eugenics craze shall strike France, already in a panic over the dwindling of her population? Will Piety and Patriotism, in league to contrive ways and means for the more rapid production of human targets for invisible artillery belching shrapnel, be able to resist the demand of Purity that henceforth no invalid shall be permitted to engage in target manufacture? There is trouble ahead for the three Ps, whatever road they take. The gods have made them mad, and their consequent destruction is imminent.

BENJ. R. TUCKER.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, August 15th, 1913

The Latest Freaks in Taxation.

INSANE as the State is, no one has ever dreamed that it would contemplate the levying of a special tax on people so unfortunate as to be afflicted with disease. Yet this is what it is on the point of doing. In THE NEW FREEWOMAN of August 1st I called attention to the growing tendency of State legislatures in the United States to require certificates of health from both parties to a marriage. Now comes the congress of the United States with a proposition for a general income tax, graduated for all incomes in excess of $4000, and, in the case of celibates, for all incomes in excess of $3000. That is to say, the celibate is to be taxed on an extra thousand dollars. But, if ill, he is forbidden to marry. Therefore those whom the State forces to remain celibates are to be taxed virtually because they are diseased. You are damned if you do, and you are damned if you don't. France, more logical thus far than the United States, will damn you only if you don't. No doubt the double damnation will come in due time, but for the present France will fall afoul of you only if you fail to marry. But this damnation, though single, is far the more serious. Under the income tax proposed in France the benedict who enjoys an income of 10, 000 francs will pay a tax of only 25 francs a year, while the bachelor enjoying the same income will pay 1025 francs a year. Besides paying the same tax that the benedict pays, the bachelor must pay, in addition, every year, twenty per cent of his entire income in excess of 5000 francs. This proposal is being assailed vigorously by such writers as Urbain Gohier, Victor Margueritte, Paul Brûlât, and Remy de Gourmont; and a special way in which it will work injustice is pointed out by Paul Desachy, who says in " Gil Blas ":

" The project is dominated by a veritable spirit of reaction. It is a manifestation against free union, against those who think that marriage, as it now exists, is an immoral contract because love does not figure in it, because it is a guarantee only for the rich, because it has been instituted solely for the maintenance of property and the consolidation of castes, and because it is not adapted to a society where each participates in the social capital and in the social task. Those who profess these theories, on which Stendhal has written vigorous pages, are becoming more numerous every day; and still more numerous those who, under the influence of the movement for woman's emancipation, are practising them and founding families, by the simple assent of two free wills, without the aid of scarf or chasuble. Well, Mr. Lawgiver, do you intend to tax heavily, doubly, the life of these beings who, regardless of social conventions, love and procreate?"

Remy de Gourmont attacks the proposal from various points of view, but his conclusive objection is that " a tax of this sort is an assault upon liberty. " But, my dear Monsieur de Gourmont, what tax is not?

BENJ. R. TUCKER.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, September 1st, 1913

Lego et Penso.

A PREJUDICE THAT MUST COUNT.

IN THE NEW FREEWOMAN of August 1st Mr. Edward Carpenter expresses the opinion that pretty positively at the present day the men of Uranian temperament are especially in favour of women in their struggle for liberty and hold them in high respect, and he offers numerous citations indicating that a similar attitude towards women prevailed among the Spartans in the days of the Uranian love. I have made no study of Uranian men, least of all historically; but perhaps I shall not De impertinent in suggesting, as far as the present is concerned, that both homosexualists and heterosexualists (let us use plain language, the term Uranian being caviare to the general) may be divided broadly into three classes, the gross, the ordinary, and the refined, and that the attitude towards women is more apt to be determined by the degree of refinement than by the direction which the sexual passion chances to take. The great majority of high-minded men, whatever their sexual lives, respect women and wish them to be free. If the direction of the sexual passion has any influence at all in this regard, I incline to the view that the women stand higher in the minds of heterosexualists. There is an undeniable tendency in many homosexualists to look upon woman as an inferior. They sometimes honor certain exceptional women, just as Anti-Semites sometimes honor certain individual Jews; but in either case, as a rule, prejudice must first be overcome. It is hardly to be presumed, then, that the men who entertain this. instinctive aversion to women are absolutely uninfluenced by it when summoned by women to support their demand for independence.

§ § §

OUR RIGHTS.

" Foemina " (Madame Bulteau) is writing for " Le Figaro" a series of articles under the general title, " In the Peace of the Evening, " one of which is so nearly in line with the teachings of THE NEW FREEWOMAN that I translate it in full:

" The anxiety that torments collectivities, and also the nervous discontent, the swift disgusts, the brief duration of sentiments, and a thousand other unpleasant things from which individuals suffer perhaps more than they used to, —do not all these arise from the growing concern and firm certainty felt by each and all in the matter of their rights?

"Yet what a queer delusion! It happens, no doubt, that one has the power to dispose as he pleases of beings, of objects, of this or that force. Objects, beings, force, are yours ! Possession gives you the means of destroying or preserving them. Yes. But the means is not the right ! And if you need to eat and be happy, where was concluded the mystic contract thanks to which food and happiness are due to you? You do not know; but you feel clearly your right to satisfy your instincts. Why should you have it? One finds no other reply than that of stub-born children who have exhausted their arguments: because !

" When certain men, after having declared themselves kings or caused themselves to be so declared, had the inspiration to persuade their subjects that the right to reign emanates directly from God, they showed great wisdom. One does not see how they could have gotten out of the difficulty in any other manner. For it is only by going back to the marvellous obscurity of the divine will that the idea of any right whatever finds a basis.

*' In truth, long before he occupied himself with monarchs, the Lord, placing his creature in Paradise, gave him all the delights, or almost all. But, in expelling him, he gave him to understand—as was

strikingly shown by the sequel—that nothing more would be drawn from the void for his sole pleasure and definite possession, that every object conquered by his effort, and which he should find good reasons for considering his own, might be taken from him by the effort of another, who also would have his reasons, and that, in short, fire, bread, and love would by no means be destined, set aside, for each, prior to his birth.

" With their first steps out of Eden the susceptible Adam and the visionary Eve lost all their rights. " Yet their successors must have kept some memory of the dazzling garden where the primitive law caused fruits to ripen at the hour of hunger, imposed obedience on animals, and prepared for each desire a satisfaction amid the sublime liberty of the world in flower. Only a persistent recollection of Paradise can explain the mad notion of a right to what one has, to what one wishes, even to what one needs.

" This notion has taken many forms and has never ceased to work upon the mind. Thanks to it, and for the perpetuation of those artificial establishments, societies, has been justified the domination of the stronger—pleasantly qualified as the ' better '—over the weaker and the worse. And with it has been drawn up the catalogue of the virtues and the vices: the former recognizable by the fact that they give freer play to the rights of the neighbour, the latter by the fact that they restrain him, deny him, or annihilate him. Crimes and faults: robbery and murder, which assail the fancied right of each to live and keep his goods; and debauchery, because it compromises the right to endure which the race attributes to itself; and falsehood, which, depriving relations and exchanges of security, tends to ruin all rights together; and disorder, because it invades, gently or abruptly, a multitude of our recognised rights to the money that it screws out of us, the time that it squanders, the peace that, by its very neigh-bourhood, it destroys.

" As for the virtues, their rôle is plainly to be seen. The greatest, naturally, are those that appeal to the greatest number, such as heroism or charity, that touching safeguard of the right to wealth, which by generous sacrifices, an exquisite goodness, prevents poverty for a moment from perceiving that it too has its rights.

"Then come the little virtues: submission favourable to the right of tyranny; patience, that permits the right to ill temper to display itself at leisure, economy, so helpful to the prodigalities of heirs; and, for reasons of the same type, fidelity, frankness, industry.

" It is a curious and useful experiment to impose upon one's self for a day the obligation not to say or think, in respect to any matter whatever: ` I have the right. ' One is surprised to remark at the end that, a propos of some contradiction, some disappointment, some lack of respect, some servant at fault, some letter delayed, some remark reported, the irresistible formula has risen ten or twenty times, or more. We mingle it with everything, and with it we spoil everything.

" If parents were to strike it from their vocabulary, they would be less certain of having received their authority from heaven, and would no longer believe themselves infallible. Knowing that their little ones are not theirs and do not exist for their sakes, they would bring them up more wisely. And they, the children, if they would refrain from making the absurd formula the basis of their judgments, would realize the value of the endless tenderness, the marvellous devotion, to which they are not at all entitled, as it pleases them to imagine. Brothers, cousins, and aunts would not feel authorized to disparage each other more pitilessly than they disparage any stranger. A more delicate modesty would temper the struggles for money. Families would not be, as they so often are, groups of antipathies, where ill-

will is met, and where, amid paltry and cruel conflicts, it seems legitimate to liberate one's faults, one's worst manias, and al that is lowest in the mind. We should respect each other more if we were to forget the rights of blood and of alliances.

" And benefactors would know no bitterness but for their ' right to gratitude. ' The most illusory of all ! Does one pretend to be loved, admired, for the good that one does? Then one does not deserve it ! And those magnificent hearts that are generous and devoted because a sublime egoism obliges them to enjoy themselves only in others, —well, such would desire no gratitude. It is they who owe it when they are permitted to serve and to console, so vast is the joy that they feel therein. Rare hearts, expert in the art of living, they find no rights.

" As soon as one is certain of having rights over them, objects, situations and people begin to lose their interest. For all vital force tends to conquest. One is called only by that which does not yet belong to one, or that which one is afraid of losing. But one may lose anything ! No one has said to you: ' This joy, created for yourself alone, has been conceded to you by an indestructible compact in such a way that no one can deprive you of it. '

" You have tried to win some one's love. You have it; you are at your ease. Imprudence! Tranquil on your security, you no longer restrain yourself, uncovering your egoism, your weaknesses. Some one has loved in you a personage who adorned his soul as his body, and who, improved by the anxiety of uncertain love, grew more beautiful. You reveal in yourself another personage. Will you continue to be loved? Do not hope too much from your rights !

" And do not count on them in friendship either. Perhaps you would neglect the daily offer" of yourself which is necessary to this sentiment, so strong and so precarious, so resisting and so vulnerable ! The lapse of time, the long confidence, the firmness of the received affection, —all these things, remember, simply lay upon you duties. And if you, of the two, love the more, it is a happiness for which you can expect no thanks. Have a poor man's prudence, though your heart be full. And keep a close watch on your feelings after doing a service to a friend.

" Take care ! Overcome the temptation to believe that, because of this, he will be the more attached. On the morrow of the day when it has been useful, friendship runs a terrible risk. It is an ordeal that tries the strongest. If the disastrous idea is in him, the generous friend will lose somewhat of that fear of displeasing without which no sentiment endures. He will judge from a higher standpoint, and the cherished being will seem diminished. And, if the latter perceives that, as a reward for this devotion, it is considered that he must belong more than before, you feel his recoil, the instinctive defence that he puts up? How allow an obligation to be laid upon one's heart? The friendship has entered upon its death-agony; the image of the right has intervened.

"Detestable image! It destroys the militant ardour, the taste for perfection, and the proud humility in the artist too sure that he deserves the success that is his. He takes his ease with his art, and no fear of doing less well causes him a holy anguish. It is this image too that detaches from precious objects, deprives chance of its amusement, corrodes all the feelings, and prevents people from maintaining with respect to each other that buruing curiosity which alone gives happiness. It turns aside from effort also. It is really a detestable image !

" Everyone remembers certain simple emotions, yet as intense as happiness, called forth by a sunset, or music that, thanks to the assent of mind and nerves, has procured one of those perfect movements in which a long-felt weariness slips from the shoulders like a cloak. And again, on a journey, the mysterious street or a distant song, an odor of bark

borne on the breeze, a sudden ray piercing the shades, suddenly deliver to you the soul of a region. And also, those joys without a morrow: the swift look that penetrates and caresses your dear secret; an anonymous sympathy that decks the twilight of a gloomy day. If all these delicate treasures have such value, it is because we do not believe ourselves entitled to them. Precious offerings of chance! We are free to seize them, attentive, eager, full of the fine appetite for conquest; alive, in short.

" None of these things are due to us, —not the sky on fire, not the melody, not the perfumes, not the love that has come, nothing ! Say to yourself every morning, joyfully—and anxiously: Why am I free, beautiful, glorious, rich, contented And why am I loved, instead of another? At once you will feel a wonderful taste for life. Things will no longer wither in your hands. For a long time, perhaps indefinitely, everything will wear an aspect of novelty. You will find a pleasure, mingled with the exquisite acid of astonishment, in remarking your glory, in enjoying your beauty, in spending your money. Underlying your pains you will not meet so often the intolerable sensation of injustice. And you will no longer lose your treasures of tenderness by the wayside. For you will be afraid of losing them.

" If, sure of our rights, we do not keep a firm grasp on our possessions, they quickly change to ashes, or escape. We must continually renew our deserts, achieve afresh our conquests. We must, or else we shall not be slow to see what our rights are worth. "

§ § §

POSSIBILITIES OF THE FUTURE.

When my friend Swartz shall have organised the industry of the sex-working women, presumably advertisements of the industry will be in order, and the daily papers will teem with bargain-counter announcements, offering remainders and shop-worn goods at reduced prices. Being a believer in liberty, I cannot say nay. Most people having the idea that every Anarchist is bound to prove that Anarchy and the millennium are one and the same thing, it will be no new thing for me to answer such objectors that even liberty has its unpleasant side. But meanwhile the illogical human race, which rarely grants one liberty without curtailing another, probably will have agreed to the proposal of. E. C. Walker of New York, also my friend and one-time libertarian, that the boycott shall be rigorously suppressed by law, and then it will be illegal to refrain from reading any journal whatsover, even the Bulletin of the International Intelligence Institute, which Mr. Swartz conducts, and which perhaps will then be filled with the delectable advertisements in question. With this cheerful prospect before us, I feel some comfort in the reflections that we may still have the liberty to take to the woods. By the way, in view of the the increasing vogue of male prostitution, does Mr. Swartz intend to organize the sex-workingmen as well?

BENJ. R. TUCKER.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, September 1st, 1913

" HUMANITY AN ORGANISM. "

To the Editor of THE NEW FREEWOMAN.

MADAM,

To say that " Humanity " is a myth is perhaps to speak truth, but to say that there is no such thing as a social organism is not true.

There is no such organism as " Humanity, " made up of individual human beings as cells made up of groups of human beings as organs; but there is a social organism, made up of cells which are the doings of men, in their living relations with one another—made up of organs which are the organized social functioinings involved in these relations.

This organism is no more an " abstraction " to the cells and organs which compose it than is any other organism to its organs and cells. In this social organism the social life of the individual human being makes a cell, the co-ordinated, organised association of individual lives in certain specialized kinds of social living, make the functoning organs; and to these functionary organs, and finally to the whole social organism, the doing, the living, of every man is invincible bondage.

The tyranny of this social order, is the tyranny of nature. The tyranny of nature must be submitted to, or overcome.

We overcome nature, not by annihilating her to our thought, not by destroying her, but by conquering her—taming her, harnessing her to the chariot of our aims and purposes. And it is this that we must do with human nature, as manifested in the social organism, if we will to live.

No individual can do this alone—even for himself. Only the co-ordinated organized doing of a race, evolving to greater and higher complexity of organization can do this, —as the evolution of all life plainly shows.

Now in any organism, the cell is, in the very nature of things, at the mercy of the organ, which is in turn at the mercy of the whole organism. Hence, as I said before, the social life of the individual human being is in invincible bondage to the social order; and there is nothing that he as an individual can do to free his life from such bondage.

But social human nature can be conquered, tamed, harnessed to the chariot of aims and purposes just as certainly as can be any other manifestation of nature. This is being done, partially, sporadically, but growingly and continually, every clay. It can be fully done however, only by complete raceal organization to this purpose.

And now we come to the question of the individual to himself, " What does it avail me, oh my soul, to be free, to be just, to be loving?" And we fancy that the answer of the wise soul to itself must be this: " It will avail me nothing, except it lead me to cast in my lot with all those who are organized to conquer,

to tame, to harness to the chariot of the will to be free and just and loving, —human nature as manifested in the social organism, —for this is the whole of the history of evolution. "

Philadelphia.

ALICE GROFF.

[It does not seem to us that our correspondent has proved her contention that societies (or humanity, whatever that is) can rightly be regarded as "organisms. " She has not attempted to show the existence of any kind of integrating principle tending to bind individuals into an indivisable whole, such as is characteristic of the internal life of an " organism. " The trend of "evolution " in any sense in which we are able to understand the term is towards the accentuation of the individual. Inasmuch as a person is recognised as a person, that is, notable and superior among his contemporaries, he individualises himself out from the rest of the pack. He is distinct as an individual just because he embodies, and feels he embodies, differences and distinctions. Because there are many individuals, they find themselves in company, i. e., societies, which are nothing more than a very loose nexus of relationships, dependent upon the will and whim of the individuals. To give to this loose arrangement of individuals, the title of " organism " is to our thinking a totally unjustifiable use of a quite useful term. " Mechanical mixture " was the term which we suggested in the days of THE FREEWOMAN, and this we think quite fairly describes the loose set of relationships presented by society. —ED. ]

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, September 15th, 1913

ON INTERFERENCE WITH THE ENVIRONMENT.

By STEVEN T. BYINGTON.

I. —THE PRESUPPOSITIONS I START FROM.

I WANT to start a discussion which may be of some length, especially if I get replies from those who disagree with me, as I hope I may, and I think it will pay if first I lay down, like Euclid, a few of the axioms and postulates with which I begin.

I observe that men universally hold that certain types of action are to be approved and certain others are to be disapproved. They differ as to what actions should be put in either class: Herodotus noted this in the case of the nation where it was a disgrace to eat one's father, and the other nation where it was a disgrace not to eat one's father. They differ as to what names should be used for the classes: most people say right and wrong or good and bad, but some object most strenuously to these terms and prefer to say high and low, noble and base, fine and sordid, and I know not what. But everybody has some name for some sorts of actions that he thinks well of, and another name for those of which he thinks ill. The question whether it is well to speak of "right" or "wrong" is a very dry dispute about words; but the question whether a given action belongs in the black class or in the white class is a question of intense interest wherever there is a difference of opinion about it. Look at any book that has been written to prove that there is no such thing as moral good or evil, and see with what a relish the author will stigmatise the moralist's attitude by the names of such vices as he recognises to be vices, such as

cowardice or laziness. Well, I will try to avoid using terms that are objected to—I am entirely willing, in order to gel neutral terminology, to revive the Stoic's names of proegmena and apoproegmena, and to use these names in a way directly opposite to the Stoic use—but I want leave to talk approvingly of some actions and disapprovingly of others, as everyone else does; and if I carelessly let a bit of moralistic language slip in, I hope those who believe that there is no crime will allow that I have committed none.

Similarly, I observe a general consensus that society will be best ordered by letting a man feel secure that certain things shall not be done against him. Once more we have the dispute over names, some objecting strongly to the words " right" and "ought" because of the moralistic associations of these words. But, though they do not offer such a flood of substitute names as in the other case, I do not see that they are any less disposed to claim for themselves or their clients some of the things commonly called rights, and to use strong objurga-tory language in expressing their disagreement with those who will not acknowledge some of these claims. I am interested in some such claims myself; if in discussing them I ever say that a man " ought " to have a "right" to something, I shall not intend those words to prejudice the case in my favour, and I shall not think well of one who tries to make those words prejudice the case against me.

I believe in debate, not because I ordinarily expect either debater to convince his adversary, but because

bystanders are occasionally convinced, and more especially because one's understanding of his own ideas and of his opponent's ideas is mightily clarified by seeing what explanations of those ideas have to be given in meeting the objections of the unapprecia-tive. I love clear-cut ideas, and would get myself a complete set of them in two weeks if I could.

For this reason I like best to talk about things concrete and definable. I would rather publish two paragraphs in favour of making coins octagonal, so that they should not annoy us by rolling, than two pages on the grandeur of the individual as the true inspiration of vital art. I am afraid that my fondness for formulas may get me into trouble in a paper which appears to have declared war on formulas; but I have for some time had too much peace to suit me. So far as I see, the most effective fight against worn-out formulas has always been made by those who were ready to offer counter-formulas at once, such as Jesus Christ. Arnold Toynbee said " Languor can only be conquered by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be kindled by two things: an ideal which takes the imagination by storm, and a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice. " The words ought to be printed in italics in all text-books of rhetoric and psychology, with the title " Toynbee's Law. " Observe, it is not denied that a striking presentation of the ideal without the definite intelligible plan may win a vast deal of applause, particularly from that part of the population that objects to hard thinking; but in the morning there is nothing left of that applause except a reputation for eloquence. The action which ought to follow (was not this what Demosthenes meant by naming action as the first, second, and third consideration for an orator?) does not come. This is the reason why there can be such a flood of supposedly effective speaking and writing, with great audiences of idlers, and so little done in consequence of it.

The reason why definite plans of social reform are so often ridiculous is not that the demagogue with a plan is at all a shallower thinker than the demagogue without a plan, but that the man who makes a definite proposal makes it possible to prove the wisdom or folly of his ideas. For this reason the man who seeks applause, and who does not care to have this applause take the form of practical discipleship, does well to avoid definiteness; but the man who seeks for truth, and who wants to be corrected if he is making a fool of himself, does well to put his propositions in definite shape for convenience of proof or disproof.

As a fundamental principle of social order, I believe in letting every man have the constructing of his own life, with voluntary co-operation but without compulsory co-operation. We commonly call this liberty, and formulate our demand as Herbert Spencer's law of equal freedom. It strikes me that there is a bit of a fallacy here. Just as some of our friends, in their rage for simplification, reduce all human motives to the one impulse towards pleasure, not only setting aside all moral motives but setting aside the fact that the impulse away from pain is not an impulse toward pleasure—that nature gives them different functions, assigning the pain motive to things that our safety requires us to do at once, and the pleasure motive to things about which we may take our time—that the effort to escape pain as far as possible is not practically compatible with the effort to secure as much pleasure as possible—that the two are so disparate that you cannot add the pleasures and the negative of the pains together into a total which we should try to raise to a maximum, any more than you can add together a girl's beauty and her intelligence and select as bride the girl who has the largest total-—just so the same fondness for simplification leads us to say that a man infringes my liberty when he slaps me on my right cheek, and that our objection to this action is based on our

loyalty to liberty. He does indeed infringe my liberty in so far as he compels me to pay attention to a matter not of my choosing; but that is no more than is done by any man who accosts me by my name. Jesus' well-known advice to turn the other cheek is meant simply as a way of insisting on the maximum of liberty: I am presumed to be concerning myself with something that is more to me than a slap on my cheek, and I am not to let myself be so far enslaved by the aggressor as to be jostled out of my self-determined line of thought and action into a line determined by him. Which is very sensible in the case of a single slap; and it is mere reasonableness, not sophistry, to note that Jesus says nothing about a series of slaps wherefrom there results more interruption to one's work in the continuance of the outrage than in stopping to knock the impudence out of the fellow. Yet, whatever course of action may be recommended to the sufferer from his personal standpoint, I hardly expect anyone to contradict the proposition that as between man and man the merits of a slap in the face are identical with those of a violation of liberty. That is, a man equally insists on having the control of his own personal life whether liberty is involved or not. In a sense this is fundamental to what I am starting to say: in another sense, nothing depends on it; if a man insists on classifying the slap as an invasion of liberty, all I need ask of him is that he will impartially gi\e the idea of liberty the same breadth of application in considering the points that follow.

Call it liberty or not, one corollary follows from this principle: we must not let the acknowledgment of any right, claim, or whatever you may call it, be determined by counting noses. Otherwise I am not aware that a way has been found to prevent my life from being altogether dependent on my neighbours' preference. One may, to be sure, divide liberty into water-tight compartments, and allow freedom of religious creed without allowing freedom of international trade; but in regard to each individual point the alternative still holds—either I must be free to attempt to cure diseases without satisfying the majority that I am on the right track, or the freedom of attempting to cure diseases does not exist except for those who agree with the majority.

I hold that when one person injures another by aggressive disregard of these principles, the injured party may justifiably use a reasonable amount of violence in repelling the aggression. The word " justifiably " need not, for the purposes of my argument, mean more than than that you can get a workable social equilibrium by counting on this as a thing that he is likely to do and is to be permitted to do, while you cannot get a workable equilibrium by undertaking consistently to negate such use of violence. What amount of violence is reasonable, is a question fortunately irrelevant to my present purpose.

I have frequently called people's attention to some of the revolutionary conclusions which follow from these premises; and sometimes the people have replied by challenging me to produce a list of the applications of my principles to all the most fundamentally important things which men may do to each other. I thought I saw how such a list could be made useful, and a while ago I tried to compile it Much of my work went swimmingly, for it was nothing but writing down propositions already familiar. But I found also a number of points in which I could not conceive of a practical social order getting satisfactory results from what I had accepted as the orthodox views of my school of thought. After worrying a while over this state of things, I found that my points of special trouble seemed to be related to each other. And at length I concluded that we—I and my allies—had been failing to apprehend the application of our principle to a very important part of life.

The thesis to which I was thus led is this:

If one person injures another by making the material environment unfit for that other's use, the injury should be regarded as on the same level with a direct assault on another's person or on the products of his labour. I say " material environment, " meaning such things as the air, the water, the hosts of birds and beetles and bacteria; not the social environment.

I do not claim the honours of a first discoverer. Herbert Spencer made this a chapter in the new edition of " Social Statics. " But, as the insertion of that chapter seemed to be part of the process of cutting the radicalism out of " Social Statics, " he got very little hearing from radicals; and I never appreciated the value of the idea until I re-discovered it for myself.

It will be apparent why I expect contradiction. In assenting to the use of violence for the repression of this kind of injuries, I am in danger of upholding the enforcement of a whole series of laws on which we friends of liberty have always looked with the greatest contempt: game laws, public health regulations, Berlin police restrictions of piano-playing, and the like. However, if have regard for consistency I shall not uphold indiscriminately so inconsistent a mess as these laws now are; and if I have no regard for consistency, logic cannot drive me to uphold anything whatever; so I advise my angry friends to wait a fortnight or two and see what particular applications I make of my principle, before they decide at which part of my body to aim their shots.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, September 15th, 1913

Lego et Penso.

OUR RIGHTS.

(The following paragraphs from Madame Bulteau's article with Mr. Benj. R. Tucker's comments thereon were omitted from Mr. Tucker's contribution in our last issue. By an oversight Mr. Tucker's statement that Madame Bulteau's article was given in full was allowed to stand. The paragraphs appearing below which were omitted on account of pressure on our space should be read to< follow par. vi., page 115, in the previous issue. —ED. )

" And why has adultery in woman been held so long for a grave offence? Because of its possible consequences? Evidently. Morals, like everything-else, have been constructed by men, and the capital importance which they have given to feminine adultery is the necessary consequence of the imperative need of being sure of their paternity. Perhaps this need has some profound physiological cause which science will one day determine. Perhaps too it was born at the same time as the notion of possessing goods, the right to which is so sure that it continues to be exercised even after death. In short, there is probably a relation of causa and effect between the power to bequeath one's weapons, the scalps of one's enemies, or one's American railway shares, and the stamp of reprobation which so far has been placed upon erring wives. And who knows if the new and even greater indulgence that is being shown to these weak ladies does not announce, a little prematurely, the feelings and the judgments of a day when the laws will no longer permit the leaving of one's fortune to one's children?

" However that may be, it is difficult to give the face of a crime to adultery in man, since he runs no risk of introducing into the home a little thief to steal the inheritance. The taste for equality will have to be developed still further in women, and they will have to use their revolvers on a considerable number of faithless husbands, before persuading them—and persuading themselves !—that the treason of the male is as serious as their own. For the right to constancy occupies even in delicate souls, a smaller place than the right to money.

" Then come the little virtues: submission favourable to the right of tyranny; patience, that permits the right to ill temper to display itself at leisure, economy, so helpful to the prodigalities of heirs; and, for reasons of the same type, fidelity, frankness, industry.

" They have done well, since men must live together, to so draw the line between good and evil that each individual might learn to respect the rights of others. They would do still better to convince each other that only the others have rights, —each none at all. Ah ! if we could efface the images of that Eden, the road to which decidedly is lost ! If we could renounce the belief that men and circumstances owe us something or other, that happiness is necessarily in reserve for us somewhere, that to have held a thing in our hands is a warrant for its eternal possession !

...........

Mr. Tucker's comments on Madame Bulteau's entire article are as follows: —

The only criticism that I feel inclined to pass on this fine article is that " Fœmina, " while denying

rights (for the most part triumphantly) seems also to counsel against self-assertion, and that, in saying that "only the others have rights, " she not simply assails her main contention, but utters an absurdity, since all of us are others to some one, and therefore all have rights. The essence of the matter is that none of us have rights, and that what we call our rights are either pure fictions or else permissions from the mighty. And, this once established, we have cleared the field for consideration of the further question: What permissions shall we find it advantageous to grant to ourselves and to each other when we, the free, —that is, the mentally enfranchised— shall have become the mighty? To me it is obvious that the answer must satisfy at least two conditions: first, that the permissions shall be mutual, since no one wishes to participate in a one-sided contract; second, that they shall guarantee the greatest possible amount of liberty to each participant, since the desire to extend and assure our freedom is the chief motive of the contract. These permissions we may perhaps call our rights, in the absence of a better name; yet it will be necessary always to remember that the individual is prior to the contract, and may recede from it, after which recession he will be under free, beautiful, glorious, rich, contented ! And why no obligation to respect anybody, nor will anybody be under obligation to respect him. But, while the contract lasts, it must ever be a healthy thing for the participants to insist upon their privileges, Foemina " to the contrary notwithstanding; for to do otherwise would be to cultivate that "little virtue, " submission, which she describes as " favourable to the right of tyranny. "

BENJ. R. TUCKER.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, October 1st, 1913

On Interference with the Environment

II. —THE CLASSES OF INTERFERENCE.

MY thesis is that if one interferes with another's opportunity to utilize the resources of the world the injury is of the same class as an assault on the person or property.

My reason for wanting to classify actions at all is the need of co-operation. I want to make what I can of my own life. For this it is essential that I should not run blindly into antagonism to my neighbours and exhaust my time and strength in such antagonism. So far as I can come to a friendly agreement with them by which I shall know which acts of mine they will resist and which they will not, it is an essential economy of strength that I should form such an agreement—which involves a classification of acts. So far as I wish to insist on doing any things which several of my neighbours wish to insist on resisting, it is still more essential that I should reinforce my strength by co-operation to such an extent as will enable me to beat my enemies. But for such co-operation a classification of acts is in the highest degree essential: if any set of men proposed to stand by me whatever I did, I should expect them to take their pay by more or less enslaving me to their league. To list the acts that I am willing to back and that I ask to be backed in, and see what sort of agreement I can make with those whose list is nearly the same as mine, seems more practicable.

One of the greatest advantages of the defenders of the existing order over its upsetters is that the defenders have a workable agreement as to what they will defend. I desire to be one of the upsetters; but I do not see that I shall upset anything unless I can get the co-operation of enough others to constitute an upsetting force. And this won't work unless we can set down in black and white what we will co-operate in: if we depend merely on all being inspired by the same spirit of liberty, we shall find m the middle of our first undertaking that each of us is knocking out the wedges that his neighbour is driving in. i am attempting, therefore, to supply the indispensable prerequisite of any revolutionary movement by defining the objects to be attained. Of course experience will be the best teacher: but, as natural scientists know, in order to be taught by experience you need an antecedent theory on which you can inscribe experience's corrections—somewhat as Francis Bacon says that a council will make more progress by starting with a written proposal even it they are destined ultimately to reject every point of that proposal. Besides, m those matters for which co-operation is necessary we shall never get so far as to have any experience if we do not first have enough of an agreed programme to carry us through the preliminary stages.

It is an ordinary experience of humanity—and the most learned need not be so snobbish as to claim exemption—that a definition in abstract or general terms fails to convey so clear an impression as the citation of specific examples. Also, I am as much interested in seeing what particular things my principle will carry me to as in defining the principle itself. For both reasons I ask attention to a sample case and a bill of particulars.

New York City begins to complain of Albany and Troy for sending sewage down the Hudson. New York is right. John Doe of New York, if he wants to bathe in the river that runs under his windows, or to sit by its side and smell fresh air, or to wash his floor with a bucket of its water, has a just claim to find that water free from artificial depravation. The fact that Richard Roe of Poughkeepsie has long-been dumping his slops in that water does not affect the fact that every fresh dumping of those slops is a fresh assault on John Doe—no more than the antiquity of the Russian government establishes the

rightfulness of the traditional methods of that government. The justice of Doe's claim is not dependent on the fact that there are a great many of his neighbours making the same claim, or that they are organised into a municipality, or that they hope to get a statute enacted in their favour. The importance of his claim is indeed greatly affected by the fact that the land where he lives is so crowded with neighbours as to leave hardly any place except the water for the satisfaction of that part of his personality which demands open-air life and nature; but even if he had at his back the primeval woods of Manhattan, or the farms of old New Amsterdam, the condition of his water-front would still be no negligible matter to him.

So in any other case where natural resource is, in the absence of artificial restriction, free to all, any person who desires to use it is injured by anyone who bars him from its use, or impairs the resource or annexes an inconvenience to its use. By saying " free to all " I intend to side-step the land question: in an unappropriated country a garden-plot or mill-site is not free to all in the plural, but to anyone; it cannot be utilised by one and remain open to others at the same time. The land question calls for separate consideration. Since in many cases a man's convenience is greatly served by disregarding this principle, and in some cases the gain in convenience will amount to more than the injury it would seem desirable that the penalty should consist in a payment of actual damages to the injured; then a man would have the option of stopping his nuisance or paying for it. I think, however, that the men who say " The little damage this may do to anybody is of no importance compared to its usefulness in our business " would in most cases suddenly decide to stop the nuisance if they were presented with such a bill of damages as could be practically brought in if even half the aggrieved were associated to take joint action in the matter.

The main particulars under this head, I think, would be pure air; pure water; right of way over such lines of travel as are indicated either by custom or by special intrinsic convenience; along such rights of way, light (the cutting off of natural light can in general be made up by artificial light, providing it is thoroughly done), the absence of such artificial glares as demonstrably cripple the eyesight either momentarily or permanently, and under some circumstances unscreened freedom of view; freedom from the artificial breeding of pernicious or annoying animal or vegetable life, such as flies, mosquitoes, hens that run in a neighbour's garden, weeds, disease germs. If it is shown that by keeping an unscreened manure-heap Roe breeds flies that are an annoyance to Doe, the question whether the flies carry disease is not relevant to the fact that here is invasion; it is only relevant to the size of the damages that may be claimed. The size of Doe's damages would be found by seeing how much of a nuisance the flies were to him (if it is agreed that they really are disease-carriers, then the fact of thus threatening him with disease is an injury whether actual disease results or not) and how large a part of his flies Roe contributed. If Doe, having first cleaned up his own premises, chose to claim damages from all fly-breeders in the neighbourhood at once, then the burden of apportioning the particular shares of his damage to the individual breeders ought to fall on the breeders and not on him; how far it could in practice be made to fall on them, I am not sure. If it is shown that the known prevalence of tetanus germs in the earth of some special localities, such as Brooklyn, is a result of the burial of persons who died of that disease, then it is an injury to everybody in the neighbourhood to bury a victim of tetanus anywhere without either cremating or embalming.

Another and a less clear application of this principle is to those acts which offend one of the physical senses. As to these, offences to touch and taste may be set aside because, so far as they can

attach to the use of a natural opportunity open to all, they will follow the analogy of smell, sight, and hearing. The public generally regards a bad smell as a sign of unwholesomeness in air for breathing; this judgment is so commonly correct that it is neither practicable nor desirable to get the public in general to look at it otherwise; besides, the creation of a bad smell about (for instance) a highway, even if the smell is concededly harmless to health, bars everybody from using that highway except under penalty of a physical pain; the passer cannot escape this penalty by turning his nose another way as he passes. For these reasons an offence to smell should be treated on the same principles as a poisoning of the air, though of course the two injuries are not equal in seriousness. The last reason given under smell applies almost equally to objectionable sounds, except that the pain is commonly psychical rather than physical; and a nuisance of sound is apt to affect matters more important (according to current standards of importance; I do not know what other standards we can use) than mere comfort; so let hearing be treated like smell. There remains sight. I would say (setting aside actual dazzling as something else than a mere offence) that an offence to the sight should not be regarded as an assault on a man's right to a chance to enjoy the world. For, in the first place, an offence to the sense of sight is never (unless in the case of obscenity; of this later) an injury to anything but mere comfort; in the second place, it is more thoroughly impossible to define offence to the sense of sight than to define offences to any other sense; in the third place, the person who is offended by any sight has very often the option of shutting his eyes or looking elsewhere; in the fourth place, a requirement that one should not offend a neighbour's eyes would shackle a man's life quite intolerably if he had to look out for all the tastes that there are.

Doubtless much of the above is not yet clear of the inconvenience of generalised language. Also, at many points in the list obvious difficulties suggest themselves. Hence in my next I will step further into details.

STEVEN T. BYINGTON.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, October 1st, 1913

Lego et Penso.

PROUDHON AND ROYALISM.

FOR some years past there has been developing in France a new reactionary force, which may be described as the party of neo-royalism. Though its aim is to undermine the republic by ruse and overthrow it by force, restore the Orleanist dynasty, and place Monseigneur le Duc d'Orléans on the throne, it is distinguished from the older royalism by the fact that its leaders, many of whom formerly belonged to the most advanced political factions, are atheists in private yet stout upholders of the Church of Rome, and will look to their king to institute, under the guidance of the pope, a régime of decentralization that shall guarantee numerous individual liberties now more and more endangered by democracy and socialism. It is growing in importance, and has a daily organ, " L'Action Française, " edited by Léon Daudet, and numbering among its contributors the pilosopher of the party, Charles Maurras, a young man of high culture and ability. It has converted at least one Academician, Jules Lemaître, who on all possible occasions shout A las la République! and Vive le Roi! in company with its fighting force, Les Camelots du Roi, whose members promptly voice a hot resentment whenever contemptuous opponents, in printing the name of this army of conspirators, spell Roi with a y, and thus offer insult to their modernism. One of the methods of propagandism practised by these agitators is the attempt to enroll among their apostles all the great dead who, if living, would look with scorn upon their ways and works. Every great writer who has criticised democracy and who, being in his grave, cannot enter protest, is listed as a royalist, a nationalist, and an anti-Dreyfusard. Chief among these helpless victims is the foremost of all Anarchists, to whom these impudent young rascals constantly refer as notre grand Proudhon. Indeed, they have formed a Cercle Proudhon, which publishes a bi-monthly review under the title, Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon. On the whole, I am glad of this, because it advertises Proudhon, leads people to read his works, and thereby, in the end, will render all misinterpretation futile, especially in France, which, of all the great nations (England alone excepted), least understands and appreciates Proudhon, and where, on January 19, 1915, his works will fall into the public domain and consequently will appear in cheap editions. (It is interesting to note, by the way, how this miserable copyright business retards progress by burying the most important progressive writings for more than half a century. ) Of course democracy is an easy mark for this new party, and it finds its chief delight in pounding the philosopher of democracy, Rousseau. Now, nobody ever pounded Rousseau as effectively as Proudhon did, and in that fact the Cercle Proudhon finds its excuse. But it is not to be inferred that, because Proudhon destroyed Rousseau's theory of the social contract, he did not believe in the advisability of a social contract, or would uphold a monarch in exacting an oath of allegiance. On the contrary, after demonstrating the falsity of Rousseau's claim that existing society is founded on contract, he proceeded to find fault with existing society for the very reason that it is not so founded, and endeavoured to substitute for existing society, or to develop out of it, or to dissolve it in, a society

having voluntary contract for its base. All this, however, is carefully concealed by the Cercle Proudhon. It freely quotes and prints Proudhon's attacks on Rousseau, but utterly ignores the affirmative statements of its stolen hero. To expose this fraud I present here an extract from Proudhon's most representative work, Idée Générale de la Révolution au Dix-neuvième Siècle.

" Reason, assisted by Experience, discloses to man the laws of Nature and Society; then it says to him:

" These laws are those of necessity itself. No man has made them; no man imposes them upon you. They have been gradually discovered, and I exist only to bear testimony to them.

" If you observe them, you will be just and good.

" If you violate them, you will be unjust and wicked.

" I offer you no other motive.

" Already, among your fellows, several have recognised that justice is better, for each and for all, than iniquity; and they have agreed with each other to mutually keep faith and right—that is, to respect the rules of transaction which the nature of things indicates to them as alone capable of assuring them, in the largest measure, well-being, security, peace.

" Do you wish to adhere to their compact, to form a part of their society?

" Do you promise to respect the honour, the liberty, and the goods of your brothers?

" Do you promise never to appropriate, either by violence, or by fraud, or by usury, or by speculation, the product or the possession of another? "Do you promise never to lie and deceive, either in justice, or in business, or in any of your transactions?

" You are free to accept or to refuse.

" If you refuse, you become a part of the society of savages. Outside of the communion of the human race, you become an object of suspicion. Nothing protects you. At the slightest insult, the first comer may lift his hand against you without incurring any other accusation than that of cruelty needlessly practised upon a brute.

" On the contrary, if you swear to the compact, you become a part of the society of free men. All your brothers enter into an engagement with you, promise you fidelity, friendship, aid, service, exchange. In case of infraction, on their part or on yours, through negligence, passion, or malice, you are responsible to each other for the damage as well as the scandal and the insecurity of which you have been the cause: this responsibility may extend, according to the gravity of the perjury or the repetitions of the offence, even to excommunication and to death.

" The law is clear, the sanction still more so. Three articles, which make but one—that is the whole social contract. Instead of making oath to God and his prince, the citizen swears upon his conscience, before his brothers, and before Humanity. Between these two oaths there is the same difference as between slavery and liberty, faith and science, courts and justice, usury and labour, government and economy, non-existence and being, God and man. "

Leaving out the words "good, " "wicked, " " brute, " and " Humanity, " which are mere surplusage here, this extract, I think, would have been acceptable even to Max Stirner as a charter for his " Union of the Free, " -an appreciation of the importance of which is necessary to a complete appreciation of Stirner's political philosophy. If Miss Marsden knows of any idea originating in America, or developed there, of greater moment or larger dimensions than that presented in this page from France, she will do me a very great service in pointing it out. (In any case, it amply serves to demolish the audacious claim of the neo-royalists. If, in face of it, it should be decided that Proudhon is their property, we might well say, without doing violence to current terminology as Proudhon did when he said it: La propriété, c'est le vol. With it in hand, the

Anarchists answer to Charles Maurras and all his followers: No, the author of Idée Générale de la 'Révolution au Dix-neuvième Siècle is not your great Proudhon; he is OURS.

§ § §

THE POLICEMAN AND THE PIPER.

Following the example of his Master, my Christian and Anarchist friend Byington comes into the columns of THE NEW FREEWOMAN (I hail his advent with enthusiasm), not to bring peace, but a sword. Of late he has had too much peace to suit him, and he is looking forward with relief to a resumption of hostilities. Doubtless he expects me to get into the fray, and I shall not disappoint him. He and I are not only old friends and co-workers, but old adversaries as well. We have had more than one battle, stubborn and long-drawn-out, and our last ended, much to my surprise, in his acknowledgment of defeat, thereby showing that sometimes not alone the bystanders are convinced. Should I be less fortunate in our new encounter, I hope to profit by his frank example in my acceptance of discomfiture. At the worst I can always comfort myself with an old saying of mine, which has won me some prestige, that " in all intellectual controversy he is the real victor who gains the most light. " In thus promptly joining issue, I do not forget Mr. Byington's advice to his " angry friends " to await his later articles before returning fire. It is a warning that I need not heed, since I refuse to be counted in that category. My humour is not ruffled; and so I begin by asking Mr. Byington, since he would have the Union of the Free suppress all assaults upon the material environment— that is, protect the air against the tobacco-smoker, the street against the organ-grinder, the tree against the woodman, the river against the manufacturer, and the young lobster against the fisherman—how he expects to secure for these ends that voluntary co-operation to which alone—and very properly—he consents to look in seeking association for defence. In estimating the practicability of such association, I have been accustomed to view strength as dependent upon simplicity. The more we multiply the duties of the policeman, the less efficient will he be; and not only that: the more difficult also shall we find it to achieve that virtual unanimity as to his usefulness which is requisite to the voluntary subscription of his salary. Unless we limit the sphere of defence to the suppression of those invasions that are perfectly simple and plain, we shall enter upon an endless quarrel between conflicting interests and passions that must end in paralyzing secessions. With the presentation of this difficulty I suspend my argument. It will be time enough to look upon the matter in its other aspects when Mr. Byington shall have satisfied me that the tobacco-smoker will voluntarily pay the expense of his own suppression. I ask not who will pay the piper, but will the piper pay?

BENJ. R. TUCKER.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, October 15th, 1913

On Interference with the Environment

III. —CERTAIN CONFLICTS OF INTERSTS.

I HAVE stated my belief that in order to get a workable and tolerably satisfactory social order we must recognize every man's claim to enjoy in unimpaired form those resources which the material world naturally offers him, and that where one is not allowed such enjoyment it is reasonable that one should make the interférer pay. To complete my statement I ought to add that it is equally necessary to recognize every man's claim to the liberty of removing such unfriendly manifestations of nature as he may meet with—destroying pestilent living things, removing obstructions in pathways, protecting his house and crops against floods, and, probably, clearing away such accumulations of inflammable matter as make the ground ready for the rapid spread of a forest fire.

This opens an immediate prospect of conflict with my first statement. The most obvious conflict, perhaps, is in the matter of living things. Of course nobody but a Buddhist or a Hindu would object if by some inconceivable invention we could make a sudden end of all insects that suck human blood; but the British poultry-raiser wants liberty to exterminate the foxes from England as the wolves were exterminated, while the sportsman insists on preserving the breed of foxes as a resource for sport; the American forester feels the need of preventing beavers from multiplying lest they injure his forest, while the fur-trader and the admirer of nature's wonderful works would like to see a beaver-dam on every stream; above all, the general preservation of bird life is urgently necessary for the prosperity of agriculture, while most birds, especially of the most numerous species, are injurious to the agriculture of one or another individual. Nobody doubts that the bobolink is a blessing to the farmers of his summer home in New England, even leaving out of account his aesthetic value for a combination of strikingly beautiful plumage and supremely beautiful song; nobody doubts that he is a curse to the rice-fields of South Carolina at a season when he has neither fine feathers nor song. The South Carolina man's liberty to protect his rice-fields is exercised to the serious detriment of New England.

Yet I do not see but that South Carolina must have this liberty. If New England wants to preserve the bobolinks, New England must find a way to make South Carolina willing not to shoot them. Since it is rather Utopian to expect that the population of South Carolina will in a body refrain from shooting out of motives of courtesy and neighbourliness, New England must devise some plan by which New England's interest shall be South Carolina's interests.

It is unlucky that in this matter the most urgent problem is the most difficult. The far less important question of the preservation of quadrupedal wild life is much easier: let the man who wants to preserve deer have deer on his own estate—how he gets that estate, and on what terms he holds it, are questions aside from my present purpose—and let him put around his estate such fences as he is impelled to erect by the knowledge that if the deer trespass on his neighbour's farm the neighbour may shoot them or claim payment for the damage they have caused or both. Of course the field is easily open for thirty sportsmen to buy adjoining farms and treat all their homes as a single deer-preserve, or to pay a neighbour a hundred dollars a year for acting as a member of the preserving association if the neighbour does not on his own account care to; and I do not see why such an association should not even be allowed to put gates across public roads unless the deer's horns become a serious danger to the lives of people traversing those roads. As to beasts too small to be easily

fenced in, they will usually keep up at least a moderate number where part of the population are friendly to them. Only, while the friend of squirrels certainly cannot be required to kill off the squirrels from his place, if he interferes with his neighbours killing them off he ought in reason to pay for such damage to the neighbours' corn as this interference may cause. So he will if he interferes with his neighbours breaking up their breeding-places, even though by breaking them up the neighbour would have made himself responsible for much damage to the works of the man who helped the squirrels. This last point becomes one of great importance in the case of mosquitoes. The only practical way to make war on mosquitoes is to destroy or poison all their breeding-places over a considerable area of country: to do so may be a hardship to the individual whose special line of agriculture or enjoyment of nature is interfered with, but if on that account he bars people from doing it there is no reason why he should not be made to pay a reasonable valuation of the damage caused to other individuals by the mosquitoes that would have been destroyed but for his protection. And this will surely bankrupt him.

Of course, where human life is threatened—where the stag or boar of the game-preserve is of murderous temper and is not kept under restraint, or where the mosquitoes are habitual carriers of a deadly disease— anyone who can suppress the threatening beast may be expected to do so, and to reject any offered pecuniary substitute as insufficient. At least, if anyone chooses to do so it will be hard to make out that his action is unreasonable.

Now how if instead of mosquitoes we have microbes, and if their breeding-place is in the human person? A is dangerous to those whom he meets because he has in his person the germs of a disease (call it scarlet fever) which may pass to these others. B undisputably has in his person a natural breeding-place for the germs of another disease (call it small-pox); if the germs get into his person and breed there, they may infect C; C believes that the chance of the germ's breeding in B's person can be greatly lessened by giving B a certain treatment; but B is unwilling to undergo this treatment, because it is distasteful to him, perhaps also because he fears bad incidental consequences from it, and perhaps also because he does not believe in its efficacy. C wants to defend himself against the germs that A and B might bring; A and B reply that if they are not to have control of their own persons, in the narrowest sense of the term, they do not see where liberty is to begin.

We can doubtless agree that the reckless disposal of the germs after they are separated from the body may be an aggression, the act of one who scatters tuberculosis germs on a sidewalk does not differ essentially, it would seem, from the act of one who drops arsenic into a spring from which drinking-water may be drawn, if the two are equally conscious of the probable consequences. Then I think it might be agreed that it is aggression for one to walk on a public street while he is involuntarily throwing off germs which will float in the air till they infect another, or while it is certain that flies which light on his skin will pick up germs suitable to infect the next person on whom the fly lights. But I do not think it is an aggression for one to run a risk of becoming a breeding-place of germs. The interference with my health if my neighbour goes unvaccinated is in any case highly problematical; the interference with his person if I vaccinate him against his will is not problematical at all. We shall never get aggression minimized by using force in resistance to the threat that a threat may sometime be made. It may be added that nothing is more desirable than the accumulation of unquestionable evidence on every aspect of the vaccination question, and that compulsory vaccination interferes with this by giving many people a motive to conceal the fact of non-vaccination and thus vitiate the statistics. And, while I am willing to agree that the statistics are already adequate to

prove the efficiency of vaccination substantially as claimed by its friends, and that the allegation of bad incidental results from vaccination has not yet been sufficiently sustained, I think on the other hand that this matter of the incidental results of vaccination deserves more study than it has yet received. Also, while there are some people whom no evidence could convince, it is easily supposable that a larger percentage of the public would be convinced of the merits of vaccination if the evidence, which I am acknowledging to be adequate, were more obviously free from suspicion. For such reasons I wish it might become possible to collect statistics on vaccination free from the distorting influence of compulsory vaccination laws.

The application to venereal disease seems clear enough. If one who knows that he bears the contagion exposes another person to it without warning that other person, it is an assault. Likewise, if the bearer of the contagion has reason to suspect its presence and wilfully neglects to obtain assurance. But this is no sufficient ground for precautionary interference with those who have no reason to suspect themselves.

Another obvious conflict between the claim to retain natural resources and the claim to do away with natural disadvantages is in the case of land and water routes of travel. One wants a navigable channel from east to west, another wants a road from north to south uninterrupted by water. It will doubtless be undisputed, as it has been undisputed, that the maker of the new route should provide the necessary bridge for keeping open the old.

STEVEN T. BYINGTON.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, October 15th, 1913

SYNDICALIST PROSTITUTION.

MADAM,

There is certainly no objection to the formation of a trade-union of " sex-working women. " It is understood that the majority of them are a frightfully under-paid lot; and if their union should reduce their employers' profits, it is understood that the present largeness of these profits is the cause of great and uncompensated evil If they should form a union and go into the usual routine of striking for higher wages and shorter hours, doing everything they could think of to block their employers' business utterly while the strike was on, and all the time taking great pains to keep down the number of apprentices entering their trade, they could count on the approval of a great many persons for whose sympathy the other trade-unions sigh in vain. But I doubt if they have the stuff in them to do it.

One good result of the present fashion for discussing the prostitution question is that it makes known to the public some of the facts that specialist students have been gathering. And one of the things that we appear to have learned is that prostitution (taking the word in its generally accepted sense) is, in a society of the Europeo-American sort and in many others, the natural ultimate resource of the woman who is too feebleminded to hold any other job, without being quite feebleminded enough to be put in an asylum: that if we ever succeed in abolishing or greatly decreasing prostitution we shall find a notable addition to the Problem of the Unemployable. It is not denied that there are a good many prostitutes who are not of this type, but it would seem that these others are the round pegs that have unfortunately got into square holes, and that the really typical prostitute is the woman who never had stamina enough to take care of herself in any other way.

If this is so, if most of the profession are such weaklings to begin with, and if to this we super-add the enervating influence of the life itself, I think that their trade-union would easily fall a prey to its enemies in every conflict. To make an efficient trade-unionist it takes the ability to keep up a long, hard fight; and a trade cannot be unionized if too many of those who work at it lack this qualify.

I am very sorry, for there are few conceivable things that would please a larger part of the community than to have the prostitutes form a union and better themselves by regular union methods; but I think Mr. Swartz's plan will not be found workable. The alternative will still be—either something is done for them by others, or nothing is done for them. Most regrettable.

STEVEN T. BYINGTON.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, November 1st, 1913

On the Interference with the Environment

IV. — THOROUGHFARES; AND PISCICULTURE.

The mere demand to use a route may involve a conflict of claims, apart from the question of barring one route by opening another; but there seems to be nothing puzzling about most of the conflicts so arising. Where two people are using the same right of way, each must facilitate the other's passage as much as possible; fortunately men are already as familiar with caring for their neighbours' rights in this respect as in any. In the comparatively rare case where two railroads require to go through a pass too narrow for two tracks, any railroad man can arrange for both to use the road if once he is assured that his own line cannot monopolize it.

A tide-mill is a form of industry which cannot be carried on anywhere without putting a dam in the way of navigation; there must be some truth in the counter-claim that the tide-mill also helps navigation by slackening the current, but I do not know how much; on a stream that carried almost exclusively export cargoes however this might even be an additional evil. The tide-mill problem can be better solved when the rising price of coal has led to the building of more tide-mills than are now legally permitted. In the absence of the experience to be thus gained, we can at least say that the builder of a tide-mill must provide his dam with all necessary weirs and locks and operate these gratuitously, putting himself to an expense which I suppose might become prohibitive on a river carrying a great deal of commerce—on such a river as the Thames I take it that his dam would be nothing but locks, all going at once. Also, that the dam must be high enough up the stream to allow all possible use of the mouth as a harbour— there could rarely be a motive for putting it lower anyhow. Under these conditions it seems to me, till I have such information as few men are to-day competent to give, that the building of tide-mills should be a free industry. The higher coal goes, the more we shall want all sources of power; and a single lock on a river is no such great obstruction to commerce at best.

Another question of thoroughfares is that of roadways artificially built for general free use. We profess to be speaking of natural opportunities, but in practice we shall hardly find it possible to separate this problem altogether from that of opportunities artificially created with the intent that they be open to the public in a fashion more or less analogous to that of natural opportunities. Of such things the most obvious example is a paved public road.

Of such artificial opportunities that is true whatever is true of private property in general, so far as the special conditions of the case do not require specific exceptions. The reason for having such an institution as private property at all is that I sometimes work with the intention of producing a particular result, that the satisfaction of my work is spoiled if somebody steps in and starts his own work on the same thing in such a way as to prevent my work from producing its result, and hence that if the boys insist on stealing my melons I shall positively get a hive of the most irascible bees I can hear of and set it in my melon-patch. Also, of course, that I can raise more melons for myself than I could trust these boys to raise for me if we were supposed to be all working selflessly for each other; but I am not sure that this last, which is the motive oftenest spoken of, is in fact the strongest. Now the men who paved a road for the public to ride on wanted their work to come out in a certain way; and if somebody interferes with its coming out in that way, they will have the same motive for complaint that I have when my melons are stolen. If the creators of such a public

utility have not got in the public's way, there is no reason why they should not, if they choose, keep the same absolute control as in the case of their other property. If they choose to build a free public library and refuse to let red-haired people use it, well and good: the red-haired suffer no wrong, for they would have had no library there if these fools had not built it. But if they refuse to let a red-haired man walk on the road they pave, they cut him off from a walk which he could have taken with some satisfaction if the ground had been uncared-for, and he has a grievance. On the other hand, if they have built a good road for horses and it will be torn to pieces by motors, they have a grievance against any motor that runs on their road unless the motorist will do an amount of repairing that corresponds to his damage.

Our friends the game laws come up again under this head. The American lobster is considered such a dainty that it is in danger of extermination. Here step in a number of men who go into the business of raising infant lobsters and stocking the coast with them to keep up the breed. (It happens just now to be the United States government; but it might, and at some better future day it will, be a piscicultural association which gets its money honestly. ) Their work is not thought to have a hopeful prospect unless the young lobsters are allowed to grow to the age at which they reproduce their kind. The fishermen are grateful for all new stock, but are not disposed to show their gratitude by sparing the lives of the half-grown lobsters, especially as their customers like these best of all.

As a general thing, if one man finds a form of wild life most useful in life and another finds it most useful in death, I do not see how the first man is to inhibit the second man's ravages except by merely permitting his preferences to override the other man's; if we are to plan a human society with the least possible overriding, the birds and blossoms will have to suffer till there is found some other method of protecting them than a direct prohibition of destruction. But when the life is no longer wild in the sense of being the spontaneous growth of the non-human world, but is the universally-welcome product of human industry directed to the manufacture of such wild life, then the industrious producers have the same grievance against one who cuts off the fruit of their work, exactly the same, as if they had not intended that this fruit should at its maturity be for the free gathering of everybody.

We have not quite yet, probably, come to the point where the lobsters of the New England coast can as a mass be considered to be the product of the pisciculturists' labours; there are a considerable percentage of aboriginal wild ones left. But we are approaching that point; and when we get to it, it will doubtless not be beyond the power of science to demonstrate the fact. When it is demonstrated, I think the pisciculturists can claim to be merely defending their own labours if they enforce any restrictions on lobster-catching that may be necessary to the preservation of the breed in its desired numbers. If there were two piscicultural associations both working in the same field, but not agreeing on the amount of restriction to be enforced, it would be the business of the more rigorous restricters to prove that the stock was dependent on their cultural activities and would go to the dogs if no more young were put in than their rivals furnished. If any persons who want short-lobster fishing to continue will show that they are providing sufficiently for the upkeep of lobsterdom, then nobody else can reasonably claim to stop this fishing on the ground of the work he is doing in the same cause.

If (as will hardly happen in the case of pisciculture, but might easily happen in the case of thé roadway if there were freedom of competition) there are two claimants for the privilege of maintaining the public convenience, and both cannot

maintain it at once, I do not see but that the one which was first in the field must have the preference. I am not fully satisfied to leave the game-law question in this shape. The trailing arbutus, New England's most admired spring flower, is in danger of being exterminated by its popularity, and nobody has yet discovered a way to propagate or cultivate it. But I do not see how to provide protection for the arbutus without giving up the rule of acting as if one man's wishes were as good as a dozen's; and when I see the present consequences of not insisting on that rule, I think leaving the arbutus to its fate is the lesser evil. Perhaps we can persuade the public to regard the purchase of arbutus bouquets as unpopular.

STEVEN T. BYINGTON.

THE NEW FREEWOMAN, November 15th, 1913

On Interference with the Environment.

V. —MAINLY ON OFFENSES TO THE EYE.

UNDER the head of pure water, it appears to me that bathing in a river or lake, if it is not receiving such special care as belongs to a water-supply reservoir, cannot be reckoned as a pollution, because an open river cannot be supposed to be in such a state of purity as bathing would impair. One does, indeed, hear of the pollution of the Ganges water by the bathing at Benares; but, until I see the testimony of a competent specialist observer, I am inclined to doubt whether—even if the running of sewage into the river had first been stopped—the abolition of this bathing would make the Ganges below Benares a perceptibly better river to live by. Of course what I said earlier about the isolation of persons carrying known disease-germs applies to the bathing of such persons.

As to offenses to the sense of hearing, we must not regard as invasive any noises which, by their use as public warnings, are practically necessary for the protection of life and property.

Of the points that I had i