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Title: I Am an Anarkist Author: Elbert Hubbard Date: November, 1899 Language: en Topics: anti-militarist, Arts and Crafts, introductory Source: Retrieved on 23 March 2011 from http://libertarian-labyrinth.org/archive/I_Am_an_Anarkist Notes: From The Philistine
I Am an Anarkist.
All good men are Anarkists.
All cultured, kindly men all gentle men; all just men are Anarkists.
Jesus was an Anarkist.
A Monarkist is one who believes a monark should govern. A Plutokrat
believes in the rule of the rich. A Demokrat holds that the majority
should dictate. An Aristokrat thinks only the wise should decide; while
an Anarkist does not believe in government at all.
Richard Croker is a Monarkist; Mark Hanna a Plutokrat; Cleveland a
Demokrat; Cabot Lodge an Aristokrat; William Penn, Henry D. Thoreau,
Bronson Alcott and Walt Whitman were Anarkists.
An Anarkist is one who minds his own business. An Anarkist does not
believe in sending warships across wide oceans to kill brown men, & lay
waste rice fields, and burn the homes of people who are fighting for
liberty. An Anarkist does not drive women with babes at their breasts
and other women with babes unborn, children and old men into the jungle
to be devoured by beasts or fever or fear, or die of hunger, homeless,
unhouseled and undone.
Destruction, violence, ravages, murder, are perpetrated by statute law.
Without law there would be no infernal machines, no war ships, no
dynamite guns, no flat nosed bullets, no pointed cartridges, no
bayonets, no policemen’s billies, no night sticks, no come-alongs, no
hand-cuffs, no straight jackets, no dark cells, no gallows, no prison
walls to conceal the infamies therein inflicted. Without law no little
souls fresh from God would be branded “illegitimate”, indelibly, as soon
as they reach Earth. Without law there would be less liars, no lawyers,
fewer hypocrites, and no Devil’s Island.
“The Cry of the Little Peoples goes up to God in vain,
For the world is given over to the cruel sons of Cain;
The hand that would bless us is weak, the hand that would break us is
strong,
And the power of pity is nought but the power of a song.
The dreams that our fathers dreamed to-day are laughter and dust,
And nothing at all in the world is left for a man to trust.
Let us hope no more, nor dream, nor profesy, nor pray,
For the iron world no less will crash on its iron way;
And nothing is left but to watch, with a helpless pitying eye,
The kind old aims for the world, and the kind old fashions die.”
I do not go quite so far as that — I’m a pessimistic-optimist, Dearie, —
I believe that brutality tends to defeat itself. Prize fighters die
young, gourmands get the gout, hate hurts worse the man who nurses it, &
all selfishness robs the mind of its divine insight, and cheats the soul
that would know. Mind alone is eternal! He, watching over Israel,
slumbers not nor sleeps. My faith is great: out of the transient
darkness of the present the shadows will flee away, and Day will yet
dawn.
I am an Anarkist.
No man who believes in force & violence is an Anarkist. The true
Anarkist decries all influences save those of love and reason. Ideas are
his only arms.
Being an Anarkist I am also a Socialist. Socialism is the antithesis of
Anarky. One is the North Pole of Truth, the other the South. The
Socialist believes in working for the good of all, while Anarky is pure
Individualism. I believe in every man working for the good of self; and
in working for the good of self, he works for the good of all. To think,
to see, to feel, to know; to deal justly; to bear all patiently; to act
quietly; to speak cheerfully; to moderate one’s voice — these things
will bring you the highest good. They will bring you the love of the
best, and the esteem of that Sacred Few, whose good opinion alone is
worth cultivating. And further than this, it is the best way you can
serve Society — live your life. The wise way to benefit humanity is to
attend to your own affairs, and thus give other people an opportunity to
look after theirs.
If there is any better way to teach virtue than by practicing it, I do
not know it.
Would you make men better — set them an example.
The Millenium will never come until governments cease from governing,
and the meddle is at rest. Politicans are men who volunteer the task of
governing us, for a consideration. The political boss is intent on
living off your labor. A man may seek an office in order to do away with
the rascal who now occupies it, but for the most part office seekers are
rank rogues. Shakespeare uses the word politician five times, and each
time it is synonymous with knave. That is to say, a politician is one
who sacrifices truth and honor for policy. The highest motive of his
life is expediency-policy. In King Lear it is the “scurvy politician,”
who thru tattered clothes beholds small vices, while robes and furred
gowns, for him, covers all.
Europe is divided up between eight great governments, and in time of
peace over three million men are taken from the ranks of industry and
are under arms, not to protect the people but to protect one government
from another. Mankind is governed by the worst — the strongest example
of this is to be seen in American municipalities, but it is true of
every government.
We are governed by rogues who hold their grip upon us by & thru statute
law. Were it not for law the people could protect themselves against
these thieves, but now we are powerless and are robbed legally.
One mild form of coercion these rogues resort to is to call us
unpatriotic when we speak the truth about them. Not long ago they would
have cut off our heads. The world moves.
Governments cannot be done away with instantaneously, but progress will
come, as it has in the past by lessening the number of laws. We want
less governing, and the Ideal Government will arrive when there is no
government at all. So long as governments set the example of killing
their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.
So long as men are clubbed, robbed, imprisoned, disgraced, hanged by the
governing class, just so long will the idea of violence and brutality be
born in the souls of men.
Governments imprison men, and then hound them when they are released.
Hate springs eternal in the human breast.
And hate will never die so long as men are taken from useful production
on the specious plea of patriotism, and bayonets gleam in God’s pure
sunshine. And the worst part about making a soldier of a man is, not
that the soldier kills brown men or black men or white men, but it is
that the soldier loses his own soul.
I am an Anarkist.
I do not believe in bolts or bars or brutality. I make my appeal to the
Divinity in men, and they, in some mysterious way, feeling this, do not
fail me.
I send valuable books, without question, on a postal card request, to
every part of the Earth where the mail can carry them, and my confidence
is never abused. The Roycroft Shop is never lockt, employees and
visitors come and go at pleasure, and nothing is molested. My library is
for anyone who cares to use it.
Out in the great world women occasionally walk off the dock in the
darkness, and then struggle for life in the deep waters. Society jigs
and ambles by, with a coil of rope, but before throwing it, demands of
the drowning one a certificate of karacter from her Pastor, or a letter
of recommendation from her Sunday School Superintendent, or a
testimonial from a School Principal. Not being able to produce the
document the struggler is left to go down to her death in the darkness.
A so-called “bad woman” is usually one whose soul is being rent in an
awful travail of prayer to God that she may get back upon solid footing
and lead an honest life. Believing this, the Roycroft principle is to
never ask for such a preposterous thing as a letter of recommendation
from anyone. We have a hundred helpers, and while it must not be
imagined by any means that we operate a reform school or a charitable
institution, I wish to say that I distinctly and positively refuse to
discriminate between “good” and “bad” people. I will not condemn, nor
for an instant imagine that it is my duty to resolve myself into a
section of the Day of Judgment.
I fix my thought on the good that is in every soul and make my appeal to
that. And the plan is a wise one, judged by results. It secures you
loyal helpers, worthy friends, gets the work done, aids digestion &
tends to sleep o’ nights. And I say to you, that if you have never known
the love, loyalty & integrity of a proscribed person, you have never
known what love, loyalty and integrity are.
I do not believe in governing by force, or threat, or any other form of
coercion. I would not arouse is the heart of any of God’s creatures a
thought of fear, or discord, or hate, or revenge. I will influence men,
if I can, but it shall be only by aiding them to think for themselves;
and so mayhap, they, of their own accord will choose the better part —
the ways that lead to life and light.
— Fra Elbertus.