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Title: Jesus Was An Anarchist
Author: Elbert Hubbard
Date: 1910
Language: en
Topics: christianity, pacifism,
Source: https://archive.org/details/JesusWasAnAnarchist
Notes: Jesus Was An Anarchist (1939) by Elbert Hubbard. Published by the Roycrofters as an essay called “The Better Part” in “A Message to Garcia and Thirteen Other Things” (1901). “Jesus Was An Anarchist” booklet published in 1910 by Labadie books.

Elbert Hubbard

Jesus Was An Anarchist

I AM AN ANARCHIST.

All good men are Anarchists.

All cultured, kindly men; all gentlemen; all just men are Anarchists.

Jesus was an Anarchist.

A monarchist is one who believes a monarch should govern. A Plutocrat

believes in the rule of the rich. A Democrat holds that the majority

should dictate. An Aristocrat thinks only the wise should decide; while

an Anarchist does not believe in government at all.

Richard Croker is a Monarchist; Mark Hanna a Plutocrat; Cleveland a

Democrat; Cabot Lodge an Aristocrat; William Penn, Henry D.Thoreau,

Bronson Alcoa and Walt Whitman were Anarchists.

An Anarchist is one who minds his own business. An Anarchist does not

believe in sending warships across wide oceans to kill brown men, and

lay waste rice fields, and burn the homes of people fighting for

liberty. An Anarchist 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,

unhoused and undone.

Destruction, violence, ravages, murder, are perpetuated 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 policeman’s billies, no nightsticks, no come-alongs, no

handcuffs, no strait-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,

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,

and all selfishness robs the mind of its divine in sight, 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 Anarchist.

No man who believes in force and violence is an Anarchist. The true

Anarchist decries all influences save those of love and reason. Ideas

are his only arms.

Being an Anarchist I am also a Socialist. Socialism is the antithesis of

Anarchy. One is the North Pole of Truth, the other the South. The

Socialist believes in working for the good of all, while Anarchy 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 o f all. To

think, to see, to feel, to know; to deal justly; to bear all patiently;

to ad 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 wi se 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 Millennium will never come until governments cease from governing,

and the meddler is at rest. Politicians are men who volunteer the task

of governing us, for a consideration. The political boss is intent on

living off your labour. 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 divded 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 and 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.

Government 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 their’s. 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 Anarchist.

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 locked,

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 character 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 Judgement.

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 and

tends to sleep o’nights. And I say to you, that if you have never known

the love, loyalty and integrity o f 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 in the heart of any of God’s creatures a

thought of fear, or discord, or hate or revenge. I will influen ce men,

if I can, but it shall be only by aiding them to think for themselves;

and so mayhap, they, of their own accord choose the better part—the ways

that lead to life and light.