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Title: Anarchism in Literature
Author: Voltairine de Cleyre
Language: en
Topics: literature
Source: Original text from http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=5275, 2021.

Voltairine de Cleyre

Anarchism in Literature

In the long sweep of seventeen hundred years which witnessed the

engulfment of a moribund Roman civilization, together with its borrowed

Greek ideals, under the red tide of a passionate barbarism that leaped

to embrace the idea of Triumph over Death, and spat upon the Grecian

Joys of Life with the superb contempt of the Norse savage, there was,

for Europe and America, but one great animating Word in Art and

Literature—Christianity. It boots not here to inquire how close or how

remote the Christian ideal as it developed was in comparison with the

teachings of the Nazarene. Distorted, blackened, almost effaced, it was

yet some faint echo from the hillsides of Olivet, some indistinct vision

of the Cross, some dull perception of the white glory of renunciation,

that shaped the dreams of the evolving barbarian, and molded all his

work, whether of stone or clay, upon canvas or parchment. Wherever we

turn we find a general fixup or caste, an immovable solidity of orders

built upon orders, an unquestioning subordination of the individual,

ruling every effort of genius. Ascetic shadow upon all; nowhere does a

sun-ray of self-expression creep, save as through water, thin and

perturbed. The theologic pessimism which appealed to the fighting man as

a proper extension of his own superstition—perhaps hardly that, for

Heaven was but a change of name for Valhalla,—fell heavily upon the man

of dreams, whose creations must come forth, lifeless, after the uniform

model, who must bless and ban not as he saw before his eyes but as the

one eternal purpose demanded.

At last the barbarian is civilized; he has accomplished his own

refinement—and his own rottenness. Still he preaches (and practices)

contempt of death—when others do the dying! Still he preaches submission

to the will of God—but that others may submit to him! Still he proclaims

the Cross—but that others may bear it. Where Rome was in the glut of her

vanity and her blood-drunkenness—limbs wound in cloth of gold

suppurating with crime, head boastfully nodding as Jove and feet rocking

upon slipping slime—there stand the Empires and Republics of those whose

forefathers slew Rome.

And now for these three hundred years the Men of Dreams have been

watching the Christian Ideal go bankrupt. One by one as they have dared,

and each according to his mood, they have spoken their minds; some have

reasoned, and some have laughed, and some have appealed, logician,

satirist, and exhorter all feeling in their several ways that humanity

stood in need of a new moral ideal. Consciously or unconsciously, within

the pale of the Church or without, this has been “the spirit moving upon

the face of the waters” within them, and at last the creation is come

forth, the dream that is to touch the heart-strings of the World anew,

and make it sing a stronger song than any it has sung of old. Mark you,

it must be stronger, wider, deeper, or it cannot be at all. It must sing

all that has been sung, and something more. Its mission is not to deny

the past but to reaffirm it and explain it, all of it; and to-day too,

and to-morrow too.

And this Ideal, the only one that has power to stir the moral pulses of

the world, the only Word that can quicken “Dead Souls” who wait this

moral resurrection, the only Word which can animate the dreamer, poet,

sculptor, painter, musician, artist of chisel or pen, with power to

fashion forth his dream, is Anarchism. For Anarchism means fullness of

being. It means the return of Greek radiance of life, Greek love of

beauty, without Greek indifference to the common man; it means Christian

earnestness and Christian Communism, without Christian fanaticism and

Christian gloom and tyranny. It means this because it means perfect

freedom, material and spiritual freedom.

The light of Greek idealism failed because with all its love of life and

the infinite diversity of beauty, and all the glory of its free

intellect, it never conceived of material freedom; to it the Helot was

as eternal as the Gods. Therefore the Gods passed away, and their

eternity was as a little wave of time.

The Christian ideal has failed because with all its sublime Communism,

its doctrine of universal equality, it was bound up with a spiritual

tyranny seeking to mold into one pattern the thoughts of all humanity,

stamping all men with the stamp of submission, throwing upon all the

dark umber of life lived for the purpose of death, and fruitful of all

other tyrannies.

Anarchism will succeed because its message of freedom comes down the

rising wind of social revolt first of all to the common man, the

material slave, and bids him know that he, too, should have an

independent will, and the free exercise thereof; that no philosophy, and

no achievement, and no civilization is worth considering or achieving,

if it does not mean that he shall be free to labor at what he likes and

when he likes, and freely share all that free men choose to produce;

that he, the drudge of all the ages, is the cornerstone of the building

without whose sure and safe position no structure can nor should endure.

And likewise it comes to him who sits in fear of himself, and says:

“Fear no more, neither what is without or within. Search fully and

freely your Self; hearken to all the voices that rise from that abyss

from which you have been commanded to shrink. Learn for yourself what

these things are. Belike what they have told you is good, is bad; and

this cast mold of goodness, a vile prison-house. Learn to decide your

own measure of restraint. Value for yourself the merits of selfishness

and unselfishness; and strike you the balance between these two: for if

the first be all accredited you make slaves of others, and if the

second, your own abasement raises tyrants over you; and none can decide

the matter for you so well as you for yourself; for even if you err you

learn by it, while if he errs the blame is his, and if he advises well

the credit is his, and you are nothing. Be yourself; and by

self-expression learn self-restraint. The wisdom of the ages lies in the

reassertion of all past positivisms, and the denial of all negations,

that is, all that has been claimed by the individual for himself is

good, but every denial of the freedom of another is bad; whereby it will

be seen that many things supposed to be claimed for oneself involve the

freedom of others and must be surrendered because they do not come

within the sovereign limit, while many things supposed to be evil, since

they in nowise infringe upon the liberty of others are wholly good,

bringing to dwarfed bodies and narrow souls the vigor and full growth of

healthy exercise, and giving a rich glow to life that had else paled out

like a lamp in a grave-vault.”

To the sybarite it says, Learn to do your own share of hard work; you

will gain by it; to the “Man with the Hoe,” Think for yourself and

boldly take your time for it. The division of labor which makes of one

man a Brain and of another a Hand is evil. Away with it.

This is the ethical gospel of Anarchism to which these three hundred

years of intellectual ferment have been leading. He who will trace the

course of literature for three hundred years will find innumerable bits

of drift here and there, indicative of the moral and intellectual

revolt. Protestantism itself, in asserting the supremacy of the

individual conscience, fired the long train of thought which inevitably

leads to the explosion of all forms of authority. The great political

writers of the eighteenth century, in asserting the right of

self-government, carried the line of advance one step further. America

had her Jefferson declaring:

“Societies exist under three forms: 1. Without government as among the

Indians. 2. Under governments wherein every one has a just influence. 3.

Under governments of force. It is a problem not clear in my mind that

the first condition is not the best.”

She had, or she and England together had, her Paine, more mildly

asserting:

“Governments are, at best, a necessary evil.”

And England had also Godwin, who, though still milder in manner and

consequently less effective during the troublous period in which he

lived, was nevertheless more deeply radical than either, presaging that

application of the political ideal to economic concerns so distinctive

of modern Anarchism.

“My neighbor,” says he, “has just as much right to put an end to my

existence with dagger or poison as to deny me that pecuniary assistance

without which I must starve.”

Nor did he stop here: he carried the logic of individual sovereignty

into the chiefest of social institutions, and declared that the sex

relation was a matter concerning the individuals sharing it only. Thus

he says:

“The institution of marriage is a system of fraud.... Marriage is law

and the worst of all laws.... Marriage is an affair of property and the

worst of all properties. So long as two human beings are forbidden by

positive institution to follow the dictates of their own mind prejudice

is alive and vigorous.... The abolition of marriage will be attended

with no evils. We are apt to consider it to ourselves as the harbinger

of brutal lust and depravity; but it really happens in this, as in other

cases, that the positive laws which are made to restrain our vices,

irritate and multiply them.”

The grave and judicial style of “Political Justice” prevented its

attaining the great popularity of “The Rights of Man,” but the indirect

influence of its author bloomed in the rich profusion of Shelleyan

fancy, and in all that coterie of young litterateurs who gathered about

Godwin as their revered teacher.

Nor was the principle of no-government without its vindication from one

who moved actively in official centers, and whose name has been

alternately quoted by conservatives and radicals, now with veneration,

now with execration. In his essay “On Government,” Edmund Burke, the

great political weathercock, aligned himself with the germinating

movement towards Anarchism when he exclaimed: “They talk of the abuse of

government; the thing, the thing itself is the abuse!” This aphoristic

utterance will go down in history on its own merits, as the sayings of

great men often do, stripped of its accompanying explanations. Men have

already forgotten to inquire how and why he said it; the words stand,

and will continue a living message, long after the thousands of sheets

of rhetoric which won him the epithet of “the Dinner-bell of the House”

have been relegated to the dust of museums.

In later days an essayist whose brilliancy of style and capacity for

getting on all sides of a question connect him with Burke in some manner

as his spiritual offspring, has furnished the Anarchists with one of

their most frequent quotations. In his essay on “John Milton,” Macaulay

declares, “The only cure for the evils of newly acquired liberty is—more

liberty.” That he nevertheless possessed a strong vein of conservatism,

sat in parliament, and took part in legal measures, simply proves that

he had his tether and could not go the length of his own logic; that is

no reason others should not. The Anarchists accept this fundamental

declaration and proceed to its consequence.

But the world-thought was making way, not only in England, where,

indeed, constitutional phlegmatism, though stirred beyond its wont by

the events of the close of the last century, acted frigidly upon it, but

throughout Europe. In France, Rabelais drew the idyllic picture of the

Abbey of Thelemes, a community of persons agreeing to practice complete

individual freedom among themselves.

Rousseau, however erroneous his basis for the “Social Contract,” moved

all he touched with his belief that humanity was innately good, and

capable of so manifesting itself in the absence of restrictions.

Furthermore, his “Confessions” appears the most famous fore-runner of

the tendency now shaping itself in Literature—that of the free

expression of a whole man—not in his stage-character only, but in his

dressing-room, not in his decent, scrubbed and polished moral clothes

alone, but in his vileness and his meanness and his folly, too, these

being indisputable factors in his moral life, and no solution but a

false one to be obtained by hiding them and playing they are not there.

This truth, acknowledged in America, in our own times, by two powerful

writers of very different cast, is being approached by all the manifold

paths of the soul’s travel. “I have in me the capacity for every crime,”

says Emerson the transcendentalist. And Whitman, the stanch proclaimer

of blood and sinew, and the gospel of the holiness of the body, makes

himself one with drunken revelers and the creatures of debauchery as

well as with the anchorite and the Christ-soul, that fullness of being

may be declared. In the genesis of these declarations we shall find the

“Confessions.”

It is not the “Social Contract” alone that is open to the criticism of

having reasoned from false premises; all the early political writers we

have named were equally mistaken, all suffering from a like

insufficiency of facts. Partly this was the result of the habit of

thought fostered by the Church for seventeen hundred years,—which habit

was to accept by faith a sweeping generalization and fit all future

discoveries of fact into it; but partly also it is in the nature of all

idealism to offer itself, however vaguely in the mist of mind-struggle,

and allow time to correct and sharpen the detail. Probably initial steps

will always be taken with blunders, while those who are not imaginative

enough to perceive the half-shapen figure will nevertheless accept it

later and set it upon a firm foundation.

This has been the task of the modern historian, who, no less than the

political writer, consciously or unconsciously, is swayed by the

Anarchistic ideal and bends his services towards it. It is understood

that when we speak of history we do not allude to the unspeakable trash

contained in public school text-books (which in general resemble a

cellar junk-shop of chronologies, epaulets, bad drawings, and silly

tales, and are a striking instance of the corrupting influence of State

management of education, by which the mediocre, nay the absolutely

empty, is made to survive), history which is undertaken with the purpose

of discovering the real course of the development of human society.

Among such efforts, the broken but splendid fragment of his stupendous

project, is Buckle’s “History of Civilization,”—a work in which the

author breaks away utterly from the old method of history writing, viz.

that of recording court intrigues, the doings of individuals in power as

a matter of personal interest, the processions of military pageant, to

inquire into the real lives and conditions of the people, to trace their

great upheavals, and in what consisted their progress. Gervinus in

Germany, who, within only recent years, drew upon himself a prosecution

for treason, took a like method, and declared that progress consists in

a steady decline of centralized power and the development of local

autonomy and the free federation.

Supplementing the work of the historian proper, there has arisen a new

class of literature, itself the creation of the spirit of free inquiry,

since, up till that had asserted itself, such writings were impossible;

it embraces a wide range of studies into the conditions and psychology

of prehistoric Man, of which Sir John Lubbock’s works will serve as the

type. From these, dark as the subject yet is, we are learning the true

sources of all authority, and the agencies which are rendering it

obsolete; moreover, a curious cycle of development reveals itself;

namely, that starting from the point of no authority unconsciously

accepted, Man, in the several manifestations of his activity, evolves

through stages of belief in many authorities to one authority, and

finally to no authority again, but this time conscious and reasoned.

Crowning the work of historian and prehistorian, comes the labor of the

sociologist. Herbert Spencer, with infinite patience for detail and

marvelous power of classification and generalization, takes up the facts

of the others, and deduces from them the great Law of Equal Freedom: “A

man should have the freedom to do whatsoever he wills, provided that in

the doing thereof he infringes not the equal freedom of every other

man.” The early edition of “Social Statics” is a logical, scientific,

and bold statement of the great fundamental freedoms which Anarchists

demand.

From the rather taxing study of authors like these, it is a relief to

turn to those intermediate writers who dwell between them and the pure

fictionists, whose writings are occupied with the facts of life as

related to the affections and aspirations of humanity, among whom,

“representative men,” we immediately select Emerson, Thoreau, Edward

Carpenter. Now, indeed, we cease to reason upon the past evolution of

liberty, and begin to feel it; begin to reach out after what it shall

mean. None who are familiar with the thought of Emerson can fail to

recognize that it is spiritual Anarchism; from the serene heights of

self-possession, the Ego looks out upon its possibilities, unawed by

aught without. And he who has dwelt in dream by Walden, charmed by that

pure life he has not himself led but wished that, like Thoreau, he might

lead, has felt that call of the Anarchistic Ideal which pleads with men

to renounce the worthless luxuries which enthralled them and those who

work for them, that the buried soul which is doomed to mummy cloths by

the rush and jangle of the chase for wealth, may answer the still small

voice of the Resurrection, there, in the silence, the solitude, the

simplicity of the free life.

A similar note is sounded in Carpenter’s “Civilization: Its Cause and

Cure,” a work which is likely to make the “Civilizer” see himself in a

very different light than that in which he usually beholds himself. And

again the same vibration shudders through “The City of Dreadful Night,”

the masterpiece of an obscure genius who was at once essayist and poet

of too high and rare a quality to catch the ear stunned by strident

commonplaces, but loved by all who seek the violets of the soul, one

Thomson, known to literature as “B. V.” Similarly obscure, and similarly

sympathetic is the “English Peasant,” by Richard Heath, a collection of

essays so redolent of abounding love, so overflowing with understanding

for characters utterly contradictory, painted so tenderly and yet so

strongly, that none can read them without realizing that here is a man,

who, whatever he believes he believes, in reality desires freedom of

expression for the whole human spirit, which implies for every separate

unit of it.

Something of the Emersonian striving after individual attainment plus

the passionate sympathy of Heath is found in a remarkable book, which is

too good to have obtained a popular hearing, entitled “The Story of My

Heart.” No more daring utterance was ever given voice than this: “I pray

to find the Highest Soul,—greater than deity, better than God.” In the

concluding pages of the tenth chapter of this wonderful little book

occur the following lines:

“That any human being should dare to apply to another the epithet of

‘pauper’ is to me the greatest, the vilest, the most unpardonable crime

that could be committed. Each human being, by mere birth, has a

birthright in this earth and all its productions; and if they do not

receive it, then it is they who are injured; and it is not the

‘pauper’—oh! inexpressibly wicked world!—it is the well-to-do who are

the criminals. It matters not in the least if the poor be improvident,

drunken, or evil in any way. Food and drink, roof and clothes, are the

inalienable right of every child born into the light. If the world does

not provide it freely—not as a grudging gift, but as a right, as the son

of the house sits down to breakfast,—then is the world mad. But the

world is not mad, only in ignorance.”

In catholic sympathy like this, in heart-hunger after a wider

righteousness, a higher idea than God, does the Anarchistic ideal come

to those who have lived through old phases of religious and social

beliefs and “found them wanting.” It is the Shelleyan outburst:

“More life and fuller life we want.”

He was the Prometheus of the movement, he, the wild bird of song, who

flew down into the heart of storm and night, singing unutterably sweet

the song of the free man and woman as he passed. Poor Shelley! Happy

Shelley! He died not knowing the triumph of his genius; but also he died

while the white glow within was yet shining higher, higher! In the light

of it, he smiled above the world; had he lived, he might have died

alive, as Swinburne and as Tennyson whose old days belie their early

strength. Yet men will remember

“Slowly comes a hungry people as a lion drawing nigher. Glares at one

who nods and winks beside a slowly dying fire.”

and

“Let the great World swing forever down the ringing grooves of Change.”

and

“Glory to Man in the highest for Man is the Master of Things”

and

“While three men hold together, The kingdoms are less by three”

until the end “of kingdoms and of kings,” though their authors “take

refuge in the kingdom” and quaver palsied hymns to royalty with their

cracked voices and broken lutes. For this is the glory of the living

ideal, that all that is in accord with it lives, whether the mouthpiece

through which it spoke would recall it or not. The manifold voice which

is one speaks out through all the tongues of genius in its greatest

moments, whether it be a Heine writing, in supreme contempt,

“For the Law has got long arms, Priests and Parsons have long tongues

And the People have long ears,”

a Nekrassoff cursing the railroad built of men, a Hugo painting the

battle of the individual man “with Nature, with the Law, with Society,”

a Lowell crying:

“Law is holy aye, but what law? Is there nothing more divine Than the

patched up broils of Congress,—venal, full of meat and wine? Is there,

say you, nothing higher—naught, God save us, that transcends Laws of

cotton texture wove by vulgar men for vulgar ends? Law is holy: but not

your law, ye who keep the tablets whole While ye dash the Law in pieces,

shatter it in life and soul.”

and again,

“One faith against a whole world’s unbelief, One soul against the flesh

of all mankind.”

Nor do the master dramatists lag behind the lyric writers; they, too,

feel the intense pressure within, which is, quoting the deathword of a

man of far other stamp, “germinal.” Ibsen’s drama, intensely real,

common, accepting none of the received rules as to the conventional

plot, but having to do with serious questions of the lives of the plain

people, holds ever before us the supreme duty of truth to one’s inner

being in defiance of Custom and Law; it is so in Nora, who renounces all

notions of family duty to “find herself”; it is so in Dr. Stockman, who

maintains the rectitude of his own soul against the authorities and

against the mob; it should have been so in Mrs. Alving, who learns too

late that her yielding to social custom has brought a fore-ruined life

into the world besides wrecking her own; the Master Builder, John

Gabriel Borkman, all his characters are created to vindicate the

separate soul supreme within its sphere; those that are miserable and in

evil condition are so because they have not lived true to themselves but

in obedience to some social hypocrisy. Gerhart Hauptmann likewise feels

the new pulsation: he has no hero, no heroine, no intrigue; his picture

is the image of the headless and tailless body of struggle,—the struggle

of the common man. It begins in the middle, it ends in nothing—as yet.

To end in defeat would be to premise surrender—a surrender humanity does

not intend; to triumph would be to anticipate the future, and paint life

other than it is. Hence it ends where it began, in murmurs. Thus his

“Weavers.” Octave Mirbeau, likewise, offers his criticism on a world of

sheep in “The Bad Shepherds,” and Sara Bernhardt plays it. In England

and America we have another phase of the rebel drama—the drama of the

bad woman, as a distinct figure in social creation with a right to be

herself. Have we not the “Second Mrs. Tanqueray” who comes to grief

through an endeavor to conform to a moral standard that does not fit?

And have we not Zaza, who is worth a thousand of her respectable lover

and his respectable wife? And does not all the audience go home in love

with her? And begin to quest the libraries for literary justifications

of their preference?

And these are not hard to find, for it is in the novel particularly, the

novel which is the special creation of the last century, that the new

ideal is freest. In a recent essay in reply to Walter Besant, Henry

James pleads most Anarchistically for his freedom in the novel. All such

pleas will always come as justifications, for as to the freedom it is

already won, and all the formalists from Besant to the end of days will

never tempt the litterateurs into chains again. But the essay is well

worth reading as a specimen of right reasoning on art. As in other modes

of literary expression this tendency in the novel dates back; and it is

strange enough that out of the mouth of a toady like Walter Scott should

have spoken the free, devil-may-care, outlaw spirit (read notably

“Quentin Durward”), which is, perhaps, the first phase of self-assertion

that has the initial strength to declare itself against the tyranny of

Custom; this is why it happens that the fore-runners of social change

are often shocking in their rudeness and contempt of manners, and, in

fact, more or less uncomfortable persons to have to do with. But they

have their irresistible charm all the same, and Scott, who was a true

genius despite his toadyism, felt it and responded to it, by always

making us love his outlaws best no matter how gently he dealt with

kings. Another phase of the free man appears in George Borrow’s

rollicking, full-blooded, out-of-door gypsies who do not take the

trouble to despise law, but simply ignore it, live unconscious of it

altogether. George Meredith, in another vein, develops the strong soul

over-riding social barriers. Our own Hawthorne in his preface to the

“Scarlet Letter,” and still more in the “Marble Faun,” depicts the

vacuity of a life sucking a parasitic existence through government

organization, and asserts over and over that the only strength is in him

or her—and it is noteworthy that the strongest is in “her”—who

resolutely chooses and treads an unbeaten path.

From far away Africa, there speaks again the note of soul rebellion in

the exquisite “Dreams” of Olive Schreiner, wherethrough “The Hunter

walks alone.” Grant Allen, too, in numerous works, especially “The Woman

Who Did,” voices the demand for self-hood. Morris gives us his idyllic

“News from Nowhere.” Zola, the fertile creator of dungheaps crowned with

lilies, whose pages reek with the stench of bodies, laboring,

debauching, rotting, until the words of Christ cry loud in the ears of

him who would put the vision away, “Whited sepulchers, full of dead

men’s bones and all uncleanliness”—Zola was more than an unconscious

Anarchist, he is a conscious one, did so proclaim himself. And close

beside him, Maxim Gorki, Spokesman of the Tramp, Visionary of the

Despised, who whatever his personal political views may be, and

notwithstanding the condemnations he has visited upon the Anarchist, is

still an Anarchistic voice in literature. And over against these,

austere, simple, but oh! so loving, the critic who shows the world its

faults but does not condemn, the man who first took the way of

renunciation and then preached it, the Christian whom the Church casts

out, the Anarchist whom the worst government in the world dares not

slay, the author of “Resurrection” and “The Slavery of Our Times.”

They come together, from the side of passionate hate and limitless

love—the volcano and the sea—they come together in one demand, freedom

from this wicked and debasing tyranny called Government, which makes

indescribable brutes of all who feel its touch, but worse still of all

who touch it.

As for contemporaneous light literature, there are magazine articles and

papers innumerable displaying here and there the grasp of the idea. Have

we not the Philistine and its witty editor, boldly proclaiming in

Anarchistic spelling, “I am an Anarkist?” By the way, he may now expect

a visitation of the Criminal Anarchy law. And a few years since, Julian

Hawthorne, writing in the Denver Post, inquired, “Did you ever notice

that all the interesting people you meet are Anarchists?” Reason why:

there is no other living dream to him who has character enough to be

interesting. It is the uninteresting, the dull, the ready-made minds who

go on accepting “Dead limbs of gibbeted gods,” as they accept their

dinner and their bed, which someone else prepares. Let two names,

standing for strangely opposing appeals yet standing upon common ground,

close this sketch—two strong flashes of the prismatic fires which blent

together in the white ray of our Ideal. The first, Nietzsche, he who

proclaims “the Overman,” the receiver of the mantle of Max Stirner, the

scintillant rhetorician, the pride of Young Germany, who would have the

individual acknowledge nothing, neither science, nor logic, nor any

other creation of his thought, as having authority over him, its

creator. The last, Whitman, the great sympathetic, all-inclusive Quaker,

whose love knew no limits, who said to Society’s most utterly despised

outcast,

“Not until the sun excludes you, will I exclude you,”

and who, whether he be called poet, philosopher, or peasant was

supremely Anarchist, and in a moment of weariness with human slavery,

cried:

“I think I could turn and live with animals, they seem so placid and

self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not

sweat and whine about their conditions, They do not lie awake in the

dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their

duty to God; Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania

of owning things; Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived

thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole

earth.”