Discover rare photographic glimpses of pioneering egoists such as Dora Marsden and Benjamin R. Tucker, and delve into the visionary project to produce a Braille edition of Max Stirner’s magnum opus for the indomitable Helen Keller. Unearth a plethora of fascinating artifacts pertaining to Malfew Seklew, and be riveted by the astonishing revelation of Ragnar Redbeard’s brief yet impactful foray as a Canadian Socialist Provocateur.

This sixth issue of Der Geist is sure to delight and offend, but most of all, serve as an essential philosophical reference work for centuries to come.

DER GEIST: The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945 | ISSUE 6 | Winter 2023
Paperback, 212 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1-944651-29-9, ISSN 2639-5339

Der Geist, (Trevor Blake, editor; Kevin I. Slaughter, co-editor) is an English-language journal for an international audience, publishing original scholarship on the philosophy of egoism. The journal is descriptive of the first century of egoism in print (from the 1845 publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner to the end of 1945), not prescriptive in advocacy of egoism.

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor  2

1. Max Stirner   7

Max Stirner’s Anarchist Gospel | A Dutch Review of Stirner’s Work | Anarchist Black Dragon | Max Stirner vs. Wahrheit-Sucher | “Celine Adele Marillier” | Pity and the Future | Max Stirner and the Grisette | Steven T. Byington’s Triple Score

2. Malfew Seklew  29

On “Bérnard’s Tour” | Minister Mocks Malfew  | Stern Critique of Christian Socialist  | Seklew Asks: Nietzsche to Blame?  | Social Aristocrat Socialist Secretary | A Freak Among Reformers  | No Guide for Anybody | Proletarians in Purgatory | No Justice for Malfew Seklew  | “We’re All More or Less Nutty” | Not Seeking Work  | Seklew Scolds Simpoleons, Supplies Sample Shilling Sericine Silk Set | No Detail Too Small!

3. Ragnar Redbeard   51

Redbeard in Canada | Desmond Selling George  | Give the New Hand a Show! | A.D. in the O.E.D.  | A Bogus Book | Australian Socialist Drinking Club | Redbeard’s Rough Stuff |“We Understand the Redbeard Philosophy” | Voima On Oikeus | Etc.

4. Dora Marsden  95

Dora Marsden for the Prosecution | The Freewomen of New York | Dora Marsden, unser aller Mutter  | Dora Marsden Ephemera | Rare Portraits

5. Benjamin DeCasseres   107

Emmeline Pankhurst | Pyrrhonism and Acatalepsy | Balzac | The Borrowed Mirror

6. Friedrich Nietzsche   117

Nietzsche and a Braille Stirner for Hellen Keller | “Will Nietzsche Come Into Vogue…” | The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche | Alexander Tille Reads Egoism

7. Enzo Martucci   135

A Sketch of Martucci | An Excerpt from The Red Sect | Martucci on Stirner

8. Free Spirits  159

Peter Lamborn Wilson Has Passed  | Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal | Vox Populi Vox Dei | Thompson at Rudolf Steiner Hall | Speakers’ Corner Anthology | Among the Anarchists | The True Comarade | Is This What You Call “Living?” | The Thirteenth Paragraph | Greeves Fisher, A Sketch | Dominance vs. Egoism | More Individualism | Individualism and Property | Why I am a Right-Wing Anarchist | Opening and Closing the Dil Pickle | Christmas a Joke! | “I” a poem  | “I GO” a poem| A Letter to the Editors of Freedom | Enrico Arrigoni Bibliography | Photo of Benjamin R. Tucker | About the Editors

The newest issue of Der Geist, the journal of historical Egoism, is here. Rare and unpublished works from the first century of egoism-the philosophy of Max Stirner.

from: Underworld Amusements or from Amazon.com: US | MX | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT

This issue of Der Geist includes rare reprints of egoist history. These include blow-by-blow accounts of Dora Marsden in her street-fighting phase, lost transcriptions of J. William Lloyd saved from the darkness by individualist feminist Wendy McElroy, the philosophical and physical wanderings of the laughing philosopher Malfew Seklew, and more. This issue of Der Geist also includes original inquiries into egoist history. These include a history of the Radical Book Shop of Chicago, and the heretofore undocumented bands of iron that link the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblys”) and Ragnar Redbeard’s book Might is Right.

Sections:

1. Dora Marsden
2. J. William Lloyd
3. Malfew Seklew
4. Laurance Labadie
5. Max Stirner
6. Free Spirits
7. Ragnar Redbeard

Lecture to the Ferrer Colony

by John William Lloyd

In reading this paper to you, members of the Ferrer Colony, I wish to say that I claim neither inspiration nor infallibility. I do not pretend to be an expert in anything. I am simply a friend and a comrade who has a few suggestions to make out of his own thought and experience. It is your part to criticize and reject the useless.

In coming to a colony you are aiming at a more ideal social life. Were it not so there would be no object in your forming a colony, for the advantages of complex civilization are better obtained in a city and the joys of a country life, per se, would be better obtained in a hermitage. But the first thing you all need to realize is that social life is more difficult in a colony of comrades than in a village of strangers, still more so than in a city. It requires more tact, more sympathy, more patience and good-will. The chief trouble in almost every colony of radicals is the dogmatic cock-sureness, the critic-ability and combativeness-plus of the members. Almost every member in such a chosen community has a vivid ideal of what life should be in such a place, all mapped and drawn to a scale in his mind, with every body’s behaviour and belief specified, and he confidently expects to see this at once put in operation on his arrival. But alas, his ideal coincides with that of no one else exactly, for each and every one of his neighbors has a different ideal, also demanding general faith and practice. The result is a clash of intense natures, a Donnybrook Fair of the saints, so to speak, each zealous enthusiast using his plan-of-salvation as a shillaleh to pound his neighbor with. What you must all remember, when you come to a place like this, is that you are all intense individualists and therefore fated to differ, that Harmony is vastly more important than your particular “ism”, and that whatever system, plan or method of life finally prevails in the colony will not be exactly what you have imagined, or exactly what anybody else has imagined, but a new and composite thing which the circumstances of the colony and the characters concerned have evolved and which under the friction of all these has proved most fitted to survive. Nothing else than this can be done.

The thing most needed in any colony is a lot of colonists who can live and work harmoniously together and you will find it the hardest thing of all to secure. In fact if your colony endures it will have to go thru a period of fermentation which will work off and out the unassimiable human units, leaving an effective working majority of those who are comrades in fact as well as in name. If you would assure this harmony you must all set your hearts upon it as your most vital social ideal, they keystone of your social arch without which it will surely fall.

But if Harmony is the keystone of your arch, Liberty and Sympathy are the foundation stones from which it springs. And these must be equal or it totters. A liberty which would do simply what it pleases is a Sampson which finally pulls down everything and on itself; and a sympathy which does not first grant freedom is worthless indeed. As you are mostly all libertarians I will not go into the theory of liberty, about which many of you know, no doubt, more than myself, but the necessary relation of sympathy to liberty is something which I have found too many libertarians unconscious of or indifferent to. It is all very well to affirm “I will do as I please and take the consequences”, if you are willing to take the consequences, but not if you are willing that one of the consequences shall be a successful colony group.

The first step in that liberty which is sympathetic and makes for harmony, as I see it, is that you are willing and glad that other people should be different from yourself in looks, dress, habits, beliefs and ideals, that variation is not only certain but within uninvasive and reasonable limits is exceedingly useful and the thing to be desired to make life interesting and picturesque.

I will quote from some writings of mine on this subject made years ago:

“There are two ways to get liberty. One is for the isolated individual to flee to the savage wilderness, and there, away from his fellows and untrammeled by them, attain such animal liberty as Nature permits. But this, be in noted, is only liberty from man’s fulfillment.

“The second way is for men to unite and by patiently, faithfully, lovingly cooperating, create for each other, and all, that real liberty which is power over Nature and fullness of self-expression — which is knowledge, which is mastery, which is character; which in the material realm is service, art, leisure and healthful joy.

“Liberty is power.

“And the greatest attainable human liberty will be when men stop struggling for power over each other and all unite for power over Nature?

“To drop men isolated — sink or swim — on little bits of land, is not to give them liberty, leisure, power, home or Nature. All the raw materials are there, but just out of reach. The necessity for constant drudgery of toil from dawn to bed makes all inaccessible?

“But the moment man helps his fellow, power arrives and liberty flowers and art bears fruit. Life on small pieces of land, in individual homes, is ideal, if all one’s neighbors are one’s helpers and one’s liberators, and if to liberate, love and assist is mutual job. Then combined brain and brawn can progressively lessen the hours of labor, while increasing the product, and power, leisure — real liberty — progressively arrive.”

Another quotation is this: “And I would suggest for land-holding groups that they hold land as a corporate body, but in individual allotments, with an understanding that on the withdrawal of any member the title should revert to the group. Otherwise when a member leaves he ight sell his holding to some outsider of absolutely uncongenial traits and so break up the quality of the group.”

When a group is formed of people who all know each other and live close together, one great danger is that they will so constantly enter each other’s homes and keep up such an intrusive intimacy that privacy will be impossible, and those who love retirement, meditation, quiet literary pursuits, and so on, will find the situation intolerable and at any cost must leave. And such people are usually of the very finest sort, the best material for harmonious cooperation. To lose them would be a grave loss. Yet there are always in every neighborhood, some who have no respect for their own society, but shun it as a vacuum, and rush continually to those about them for refuge from themselves. These become perilous bores unless carefully guarded against. It should be one of your unwritten if not written laws that a member may be as reserved as he likes, a hermit, a very Robinson Crusoe if he pleases, with no reproof from any one. But the mere theory will not be enough, for it is the peculiarity of the bore that he is obtuse and conceited and always imagines that he is the accepted one and his society thrice welcome. You must have some sign or signal, flag, color, emblem, what you will, that can be displayed on the door-post or gate-post and which will be understood as warning all away. And as soon as possible all your homes should be united by telephone so that any really necessary communication can be made without entering the home itself. I would emphasize this point, if you wish to have real liberty.

Many of you, I understand, are communists. Communism is one of the most beautiful of ideals, but in liberty it is only possible between loving friends. The only communism a libertarian can stand for is freedom communism and communism is only free when it is free to refuse. Therefore it must be based on individualism, on individual possession of property, for communism is sharing and if I possess nothing I can share nothing, and if I possess nothing I can refuse nothing. If your communism is forced it destroys your liberty, for liberty is power the means of power is property. Therefore your communism and individualism must be reconciled and both expressed in your colony life. Your communism must be your expression of your sense of solidarity and good will toward each other. Communism cannot be demanded as a right where there is to be liberty — it can only be a gift.

As many of you are city men, unused to country life and its methods, you should employ one or more of your members, if capable, if not then some outsider, to teach and show such of you as may need it the mysteries of gardening, fruit-growing, poultry-raising, also to maintain a model garden where you may learn by example. This may make all the difference between great losses and easy success.

Most men who are fitted for country life, who would make good gardeners and good home-makers are not good businessmen in the modern sense — they are not fitted for the struggles of the market, to buy and sell. You should then choose some trusted member with a talent for this and employ him as your business-agent, to buy for you economically and sell at a profit the things you produce.

The American pioneers did a good deal of practical communism under the name of “bees”. When a new man arrived in the community, all came together in a “bee” and rushed up a little home to shelter him, or cleared his land, or plowed it, or whatever might be necessary. You too might do much with the “bee”.

I would advise, too, that you mutually insured each other. What I mean is that in case of sickness you each contribute a few cents a week, whatever the agreed upon sum might be, to the support of the sick member. Or if fire destroys one of your little homes, that you each give $5, or whatever you may pledge yourselves for, toward the erection of a new dwelling. These things will bind you all together, make you all feel more secure and your comradeship real.

I take it for granted that most of you would prefer to escape the city altogether and form you abiding place here. To do this you should band your energies upon mutual employment. See if you cannot make your colony a little world in itself, self-supporting, self-sufficient. Andy by such cooperation and division of labor you can greatly increase your combined efficiency and comfort.

Thus why should not one of your members do all the baking and perhaps much of the cooking for the whole colony? Why not have a common dining-room where those who chose could get meals without doing their own cooking? Why not have a colony carpenter, a colony barber, a colony cobbler, etc. You should be able to employ a colony tailor and colony seamstress. Of course no one of these trades or employments might furnish a complete living, but combined with the garden it might make possible a residence permanent in the country, otherwise out of reach.

Many ways besides agriculture might be devised to sell colony products profitably to the outside world also. An arts-and-crafts shop for example. Or one woman instead of gardening might get some tents and furnish them and in summer take boarders from the city, doing their light housekeeping and cooking their meals. These are only hints and pointers.

Self-support and economic freedom should be your goal.

We all want liberty and we should want it. But we must take the universe as it is, for neither you nor I have made it, nor can change its laws. The wise man faces life as it is, and from that basis uses it to serve his purpose. And life as it is is an unstable balance of opposites; opposites that partly conflict, that is, and partly support each other, but are always there and insistent on being included. You can never successfully exclude all of any one and successfully include all of its opposite. It is a waste of time and strength to fight this natural law. In real life you can only have liberty in conjunction with a certain amount of authority and you practical problem, in each new set of circumstances that arises, will be to so reconcile the two that both may serve your benefit. We would fain abolish government because of its abuses, but in some form government insists on proportionate representation. Josiah Warren saw this and affirmed that in practical action the group must be an individual — which means that somebody’s brain must dominate the rest. Tucker saw it and based society on free-contract — but contract is valueless unless there is some power to enforce it on those who treat it as a scrap of paper. Kropotkin saw this and would regulate society by custom, but custom is government — too often the rule of the dead hand — and maybe a very arbitrary and obstructive form of government indeed. The same is true of the boycott. Abolish artificial government and we go back to the primitive struggle and rule of might as right. In some form, and necessarily, the arbitrary and the coercive always emerges. Any way you fix it or leave it alone, when it comes to cooperation or business, you will find yourselves helpless unless you have organization, accepted order and executive power. Apparently the experience of mankind has evolved nothing so far better for the working reconciliation of liberty and authority than the democratic vote with majority decision; the minority agreeing beforehand to acquiesce.

If you can secure the necessary degree of government thru internal discipline, self-government — self-restraint, loyalty and mutual agreement — well and good. If not it will have to be accomplished by some degree of external government.

For in your business you will not be able to function without some method of obtaining and enforcing decisions and in your school you will not have success unless you have an order and discipline — some method, with whatever checks and safeguards, of investing your teachers with sufficient authority to establish a working system out of a chaos of raw materials. Unless you evolve from or implant in your pupils a passionate love of social service and individual efficiency the liberty with which you endow them may be a personal and social curse and your education a failure.

The only true education is that which creates character. For character is the supreme essential of society. This is a truism, a platitude, if you will, but it is a fact we are all too prone to forget or underestimate. There is a certain plan of good intention and comprehending wisdom which some people attain which makes them always and everywhere good neighbors and good citizens. Get enough of such and you are safe. Without such a majority, nothing of theory or brilliant accomplishment can save you. Formulas, philosophies, laws or liberations are all wind and waste, deceptions and disappointments unless the men behind them are men of character.

And if you have the character you will do pretty well no matter what the form or shibboleth.

It is not what men profess, it is what they will and what they do.

There is in almost every human being an instinctive love of beauty tho he may be largely unconscious of it or contentious enough to deny it, or unable, by himself, to express it. But if not in his environment he will grow disgusted, pessimistic, heartsick. Order is one of these elements of beauty. Order is everywhere in Nature. All animals lead orderly lives. All “savages”, as we call them, have orderly societies and customs of life. Without order social life becomes intolerable and explodes to rearrange on new lines. Whatever its theories of liberty and spontaneity a society must evolve and maintain its own order or it falls into chaos.

The esthetic is extremely practical. We often regard work as alone practical, but we all work to attain the means of pleasure, and nothing affords us more pleasure than beauty. And the more orderly the work the more efficient. Work beautifully done, to achieve beautiful results, is always the most satisfactory.

But after the work is done, and we are tired and would rest, then disorder and ugliness discourage, dishearten, sicken. If the home to which we go after the day’s work is done is not orderly and restfully beautiful the next day’s work will be less efficient. Pioneers continually forget or ignore this and, in their concentration on the immediately practical, flout the beautiful until, in dull disgust with the hideousness of their own doings, they sell out and move on. Not until an element arrives which considers order and esthetics does an element which will stick arrive. It would pay any colony, then, that cares to succeed, to see it to that every building, however small or cheap, was made attractive to the eye, and that every bit of ground was laid out or cultivated in such a manner that the relation of it to all others in sight was pleasing, harmonious. For a hundred different people to settle, helter skelter on a tract of land, all in sight of each other, and proceed without plan, experience or regard to others, to run up every possible type of structure and tear up the earth generally, is very much in total effect on the nerves, as if a hundred would-be musicians seized a hundred instruments of any and every kind and proceeded, each for himself, to scrape, bang and blow, in the confident expectation of creating a symphony.

One of the most practical things any colony could do would be to elect a Committee of Esthetics to give advice to all on matters pertaining to beauty of form, color, line and relation. Make your colony beautiful and your colonists will love it as a home and be happy in it and with each other. Pay no attention to such things and observe the amazing percentage of homesickness, grumbling, quarreling, chronic kicking — the many and frequent secessions and the satire and contempt the whole movement will evoke.

It is simply a scientific fact that any tent, shack or hutch, however cheap or simple, can be made picturesque, and any bit of ground can be made not only productive but a pleasing part of the total landscape.

Available from Amazon.com or Underworld Amusements.

DER GEIST, The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945
VOLUME 2 NUMBER 1, ISSUE 2
WINTER 2018 (Published 25 October 2018)
Paperback, 188 pages, fifteen dollars
isbn 978-1-944651-11-4
issn 2639-5339

Contents of this issue:

Introduction by Trevor Blake
1. Benjamin DeCasseres
Detroit Jewish Chronicle | Hate Everlasting | How I Interviewed Bacchus | The Fatal Smile
2. Max Stirner
The Worker and the Government | James Walker – What is Good? What is Evil? | Good Reading to Sharpen Mental Teeth | William Flygare – Vanitas | Max Stirner Bibliography Addendum | L’Unique et sa propriété | The Unique Individual | Malcolm Green – I’ve Based My Affairs on Nothing
3. Anthony Ludovici
Kevin I. Slaughter – Anthony M. Ludovici’s Egoism | The Choice of a Mate
4. Dora Marsden
Trevor Blake – Dora Marsden’s England | Casandra and the War | Trevor Blake – To the Great Name | Egoist Advertisement in The Little Review | Anent the Decalogue | N.C. Chritcher – …the Power of Thought
5. Malfew Seklew
The Rejection of Christianity | Mr. F. Wilkesbarre, Coster | Trevor Blake – Surfessor of Egoism, Introduction | MS – Surfessor of Egoism | A New Way to Earn a Living | … from the Labor Annual | Perfumed Pigs | Stars in the Talking Marathon | Trevor Blake – Victor Grayson M.P. – Introduction | Victor Grayson M.P. / A Rhapsody
6. Henry and Georgia Replogle & Egoism (1890)
Egoism’s Purpose and Whyfore | Minus the Communism | The “Selfish” Bauble
7. J. Wm. Lloyd
Personally Acquainted | Anarchist Socialism
8. Dill Pickle Club
John Nichols Beffel – Up an Alley to a Wild Place | Patricia Bronte – Dill Pickle Club | Trevor Blake – Angels of the Dill Pickle Club| Andrea Proudfoot – The Optimist’s Ego
9. The Eagle and The Serpent (1898)
C. L. Swartz – A Volcano Has Burst Forth in England | Tak Kak – A Difference of Words Only | Volcano – A Dream of Beyond | Volcano – A Unanimous Conviction | Advertisement from the Labor Annual | Marginalia
10. Friedrich Nietzsche
William Gordak – Nietzsche | Nietzsche In T.P.’s Weekly
11. Free Spirits
Kevin I. Slaughter – The Sidney E. Parker Archives | Émile Armand – Three Poems | Herbert Roseman – Laurance Labadie and His Critics | The Altruist Corner | Kevin I. Slaughter – From the Library | Photo of George Schumm | Patreon Thanks | Errata | About the Editors

GEORGIA REPLOGLE,
Anarchist, Atheist, Materialist, Freelover and Beautiful Soul.
DIED, DENVER, COLORADO, OCT. 22, 1904.
DEDICATED to HENRY REPLOGLE.

The doors have opened, they have shut,
And thro’ their valves our friend has gone;
A gentle woman, brave and straight,
A friend to be depended on.
Lite is a mystery to all,
The strangest part of lite is death,
But deem you thon that all is done
Because the lungs no more have breath?
But she was wise and she was sweet,
And, whether death be death or no,
She lived a lite worth while and great,
And that is why we loved her so.

IN MEMORIAM.
Georgia E. Replogle passed into the unknown Oct. 22. Her life was a beautiful one, and despite the years of illness she nover lost her beautiful character, her superb charity and patience. LUCIFER readers are numerous who knew her well; they will feel the loss as much as can be.
Her funeral was a beautiful one: her dear friends said the things they thought, read her favorite selections, sang her songs.
Now that it’s over, that Our Georgia sleeps forever in the cemetery—under a beloved elm tree—where the mountains keep a vigil—we who remain have nothing left but the memory of her who lived so well, so beautifully. She cherished her friends —she loved nature, her life was a poem—to emulate her would be farcical—to remember her as she was is our boon.
Many who see this will say, “Dear Georgia,” and, after all is said and done, can any better tribute be offered?

B. F. BRUKK.

It is with a feeling of sadness for myself and for all who loved and needed “Our George,” and yet with joy for her release from ber long agony, that I give to our readers the news of the death of Georgia Replogle. the was one of my earliest and dearest friends; one who had a very great Influence on my life. She was one to whom, as a young girl, I could talk of my hopes, ambitions, as I could to no one else—one with whom I could “think aloud.” Many years have passed we parted, but it has seemed good to know that she lived and that I had her sympathy and her love. And now—well, she is released from her suffering, and I know that if conscious existence continues, her true, loving spirit is the same.
Her enthusiasm for her work was so great that she ignored her physical needs, working long and steadily, with insufficient care for herself. The result was that she has been an invalid for many years, though continuing to work as long as was possible to do so. Everything that could be done by her friends for her relief was done, but without avail—so now the end has come. A biographical sketch will probably appear in Our next issue.

L. H.

A Brief Sketch of the Life of J. William Lloyd

I was born on June 4th, 1857, at the tiny village of Westfield, New Jersey, (about 20 miles from New York City), of British, immigrant parents, who were almost unschooled, but not illiterate; my father a carpenter, my mother a seamstress.

A last and belated child in the family (the next eleven years older), I was brought up in a clearing in the woods, alone mostly, in the day time, with my mother, with only a few and occasional playmates. Went, in the winters, beginning at the age of seven, to two little, country, one-room, one-teacher schools, to be taught by “rote” the “four R.s”, tho I was always the school’s dunce in “‘rithmetic”. Left school at 14 to earn my living by hard work. Never so much as heard of High School, unknown at that time in those parts. My education has come from life and the reading of books and an innate flair for literary style.

Did farm work first, then was apprenticed to the carpenter’s trade but after one year carpentry collapsed in the “panic” of 1873. Took up gardening, but the second year a late drought destroyed my garden. When worked my way thru the Hygiee-Therapeutic College of drugless medication, at Florence, New Jersey, which system I later practiced in Kansas, Iowa, Tennessee and Florida. Lacking means, became next a pioneer on the Kansas frontier; first as a worker on a cattle-ranch, co-punching and prairie-breaking; later on my own homestead. With help of a friend, built myself a little stone cabin, and the girl I had become engaged to at the college, (Maria Elizabeth Emerson, a distant relative of Ralph Waldo) came out from Boston and married me in 1879. We were most happy together, but continuous drought from several years gave us very hard times. No work anywhere. Lived on whole-wheat bread, from borrowed wheat, and milk, with occasional prairie-chicken or rabbit. Only cash we had was $2.00 a month sent from my home. Local doctor, but almost no patients in that hardy and destitute population. Finally accepted invitation from head of Sanitarium at Vinton, Iowa, (who had heard of me from my articles in Medical Journals), to be assistant physician there and left Kansas, successful experience, but institution finally failed from accumulated debts. Followed another invitation to a Health Colony in the mountains of Tennessee. Again hard times. Built myself a beautiful little log cabin and cleared some land, worked in a saw-mill, had a few patients, drove a milk wagon, peddled home-made yeast. All would not suffice, work gave out, colony failed, and I sold out and moved to a similar colony in Florida, “Waldena”. Cleared a five-acre lot there, and built myself a two-story log-house, 40×16 splitting out all the shakes for the roof, and all the pickets for my garden, with a “frow”. Practiced medicine, but again folks were too healthy and too poor for any profit. Hoed in orange groves for neighbor and one winter cleared 15 acres of pine forest for him. But their colony failed too, work gave out, and I moved to Palatka and worked on a poultry farm. While there Yellow-fever struck Florida as a plague, the State was quarantined, and my beautiful married life ended by my wife dying from some mysterious internal disease, probably cancer of the liver. So, as soon as I could leave the State, I had to take my two little children (a boy born in Kansas and a girl in Tenn.), back to my parental home in N.J., to be cared for by my sister.

To find employment was imperative, and as my school of medicine was recognized there I became a nurse in New York City, specializing on the care of the insane, and also giving massage. My parents soon died, and with the help of my sister and my children, I tried to establish a little chicken-farm, on the old place, on the side.

When in Kansas I had written for the local newspaper and some Medical Journals, in Florida I had written for radical journals and reform papers, and always, ever since I was in college, I wrote poems, almost as a habit (still a habit in my eighties), but now, in New York, I began to bring out books and take literature more seriously, my first book, “Wind-Harp songs” appearing in 1896, and others gradually following: the most important, “Dawn-Thought” in 1908 and its sequel, “Life’ Beautiful Battle”, in 1910.

On March 7th, 1907, my Oriole, my lovely, beautiful daughter and dearest comrade, herself a fine poet and starting a printing-shop of her own, who had always seemed so healthy, died suddenly in Pennsylvania, from appendecitis and peritonitis. One of the great blows of my life. And my sister, Emily, so devoted to me, died in 1912. I had contracted a second marriage in 1901, but that had been unfortunate; we were incompatible, and after first separating were finally divorced. I would have been alone, but my son, who had become a dentist, and married, brought his wife to our home, and we all lived there till 1922. At my sister’s death I had inherited the old home.

In 1913, on sudden impulse, and accompanied at first by my bosom friend, Leonard D. Abbott, I started to make a knapsack trip over the British Islands. We went over much of Ireland together, had a period in England, and had just entered Scotland, when the sudden death of his father, forced Leonard to return, I went over most of England, making my headquarters with Dr. John Johnston and the Whitmanites of Bolton. Johnston had written a book on Whitman and was the physician of Edward Carpenter. I spent two days with Carpenter, incidentally meeting Henry S. Salt, the biographer of Thoreau. Also two weeks with William Atkinson, the dear old naturalist of Midhurst, in Sussex, studying the birds of England. A dear, affectionate old man, and what good times we had, tramping the commons and downs. Went into Surey. Went to Gilbert White’s “Selborne”. Went to Stonhenge and to Stratford-on-Avon. Visited William Platt, an English poet, went to Chichester and to Chester. Over Devonshire to Glovelly, over all the lake Country. To Winchester and Salisbury. To Milton’s Cottage and to Wordsworth’s Cottage, and to the old meeting house of William Penn. Hike over North Wales, and over Snowdown with knapsack on back. Over Isle of Man, and Isle of White, and Guernesye and Jersey in the Channel. Spent a day at St. Malo in Brittney. Slipped over to Switzerland and saw the Matterhorn. Visited Havelock Ellis is London and started a friendship lasting till death. Again in Scotland saw all the Burns country in Ayrshire., going out to Afton Water on one trip, seeing Burn’s Cottage and birthplace. And, standing on the Brig-‘O-Doon, felt the full thrill of the place and how he must have loved it. Went up the Caledonian Canal to Inverness, incidentally climbing Ben Movis, the highest mountain in the British Isles, and making snowballs there in August. Sailed, for a rip, out of Oban to see Fingal’s Cave, and Iona’s holy Isle, catching a glimpse, from the sea, of the Isle of Skye, with its dark and tragic peaks.

Returning to Glasgow from this trip, I took ship on the Allen Line for Canada, going up the St. Lawrence, stopping a short time at Quebec and spending several days at Montreal, with Horace Traubel at the hospitable home the Bains. Then came home by way of Boston, going out to Wellesly to see my friends, the Dentons.

Altogether I was gone about four months, at a total cost of about $400.00 and having one of the most delightful experiences of my whole life. And getting just ahead of the World War.

Back in 1903, (something I forgot to tell in its right place) I had gone out to the Pima Indians of Arizona, on the invitation of one tribe to get their wonderful old legends, living with them, as one of them, and building these stories into my “Am-Am-Tam Indian Nights” and some of the experience into “The Songs of the Desert”; on my return visiting the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and the Petrified Forest at Adama; La Veta and Denver, Colorado, Pike’s Peak and the Garden of the Gods.

But I had not seen enough of my beloved West and in 1915, I bought a special trip ticket to the California Fairs, on the way seeing Salt Lake City, Yellowstone Park, the Columbia river, Shasta, and going out, after the Fair, from San Francisco to Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove; then two weeks with Dutch friends near Santa Cruz, and some days with other friends at Santa Barbara, thence down to Los Angeles, friends there, and all the sights and cities of Southern California, including the San Diego Fair. On the home-stretch visiting a dear friend at Prescott, Arizona.

In 1922, my son who was going to California to live persuaded me to sell out and do the same. And this brought me finally to Freedom Hill. In 1925 I visited the Society Islands. And the rest of the story is in my “Like an Old Chinese Poet”, accurately told there.

My books are not popular and no publisher wants to risk them but they get extravagant praise from the greater minds, and brought me all my great friends. And in various way, at my own expense, or from the subsidies of devoted friends, some twenty have gotten into print, and I have unpublished manuscripts to make as many more, which may be published after my death — who knows? Dead is often a man’s best advertisement. And it can’t be long now, for I am nearing 83, and the lightning keeps hitting closer.

February 8th, 1940

I recently transcribed several essays of J. Wm Lloyd, a frequent contributor to Benjamin Tucker’s individualist anarchist periodical Liberty (1881) through most of its lifespan. Lloyd was the author of several works, mostly of poetry, that were heavily promoted by Liberty; they included The Anarchists’ March, The Dwellers in Vale Sunrise, and The Red Heart in a White World. To the extent there is a poet laureate of individualist anarchism, it is surely John William Lloyd. I consider this to be a companion piece to Lloyd’s classical essay on Anarchist Socialism. –Wendy McElroy, http://www.wendymcelroy.com

Anarchist-Mutualism

My old-time comrade and dear friend, C.L. Swartz, has sent me a copy of his new book, “What is Mutualism”, for review. I have unlimited respect for C.L. Swartz, his ripe scholarship and sincere idealism, and if I am compelled by an equal sincerity to differ with him, I hope our valued friendship will not be affected.

I make this review with pleasure, because it will incidentally afford me an opportunity to explain myself to my old comrades, who, I know, regard me as a sad renegade. In 1884, or thereabout, I became a disciple of the school of Proudhon and Tucker. Tho never very orthodox, I passed for a pretty straight Individualist-Anarchist for some 20 years. Tucker was a gentleman and a scholar, and his personal charm held me as well as intellectual and moral conviction. But at last my critical faculties were turned on the cult itself and I had to come out. I am no longer an Anarchist, but perhaps on many points I might fairly be called a Near-Anarchist still. I no longer label myself an Anarchist, or a Socialist (except in the large use of that term), but a Humanist, and the one principle I subscribe to is the greatest benefit to the greatest number. But I want all the personal liberty it is possible to have, for myself and others, so far as it is consistent with social benefit. I say all this because this new cult of Mutualism is simply the old cult of Tuckerism, of Individualist-Anarchism, under a new name and very wisely supplemented by the constructive principle of cooperation. As such it is far more attractive to me, as Co-operation is the most saving word in the language.

The Anarchists of half a century ago knew nothing of the psychology of modern business. With a new idea to put over, and in private life, courteous, cordial and refined, on paper they were a lot of swaggering, critical, swashbucklers, arrogant, browbeating and insulting, and all who differed were knaves or fools, and frankly so informed. The dictionary was reversed, and the astonished world was told that Anarchy was Order and Government was Invasion. Worse salesmanship for a new propaganda could hardly have been conceived. But conceit did not stop here, for men were also told that the Declaration of Independence must also be reversed. There were no “natural rights”, or any rights except those of might, unless created by contract between associates, and that children were the chattels of their parents, who (after all, as it was contradictorily discovered) had a natural right to do what they pleased with them as a labor product. It was a thousand pities, for those men really had some very valuable ideas that the world needed and which a sane and considerate propaganda might have enabled them to spread far. The tone of “What is Mutualism” is very different. It is courteous, persuasive, respectful and sweetly reasonable, and the old, antagonism-creating name has been wisely dropped, but under this gentle exterior one is saddened to see most of the old ideas reappear still.

As I see it: —

Liberty is to do as you please;
Law is that which limits liberty;
Government is that which applies law.

There is not now, and never has been, any complete liberty in our natural world or among men.

The universe is constructed of opposites, which always operate co-existently, at least to some extent; therefore liberty and authority always co-exist and operate together,

Anarchists plead only for equal-liberty, which is limited liberty, and therefore admit at the start that there is something in Nature and her necessities which limits liberty; therefore admit natural law and natural government — that there is a natural basis and origin for government. It is a dangerous admission for their cult. But they go further and claim that even equal-liberty has no rights against invasive might and its right must be created by an artificial contract between associates who pool their mights to defend it. They don’t stress the corollary, but if cornered admit it, that those outside the contract have no rights whatever and may be invaded without guilt by whosoever has the might. It is remindful of the morality of our Amerindians who are angels in tribal relations and fiends on the war-path to outsiders. They thus create a justification for invasion that the moral sense of the rest of men denies — and so still further cease to be the champions of liberty.

It is a tremendous strategic mistake that the Mutualists thus make to fly in the face of and array against them the moral intuitions of mankind. And quite unnecessary also. Even if they believe this, it is needless to mention it. Nobody suspects for a moment that Comrade Swartz and his immediate associates are seeking excuses for rape and murder on non-associates, or that they would treat their children any more like puppies or stove wood than other humans. Why then metaphysically outrage the moral code of those they are trying to persuade? What they are trying to put over is that good men, if they wish to have satisfactory liberty, must associate to realize and defend it. Why not emphasize that and chuck offensive hair-splitting out of the window? Why take a position that would theoretically permit one of their associates to prey as a burglar on non-associates, or a woman to sell her pretty little daughter into white slavery? And if it actually happened, if the man and the woman were loyal and inoffensive within the clan, and willing that the other members had equal liberty to burglarize and sell, how, without violating their principles, could they act to stop it? It was precisely at this point where Tucker, mad with his logic, asserted that the child was the labor-product of the mother, therefore absolutely her property and that the mother had the right to throw her baby into the fire, like an old newspaper, if she chose, that I broke with him first, and my Anarchism first began to crack. What insanity has moved modern Mutualists to re-assert these positions against which the heart of humanity and the intuitions of its moral conscience will always rebel? Especially as it is quite certain that none of those writing this book (for I am informed it is a mutualist creation) intend to make any practical application of such anti-social dogmas; nor has the practical application of the theory of the social-contract any need of such logic.

Nothing seems easier to demonstrate than natural rights. When Nature created us she endowed us all with an innate and indestructible conviction that we have: —

1. A right to live;
2. A right to promote and defend that life;
3. A right to do anything that really benefits us.

These are our natural rights, and everybody is convinced of them, spite of all doctrinaires. It is safe to say that Comrade Swartz is as convinced of his natural right to these rights as I am and would fight as hard to maintain them. And there are other natural rights with a wider social application. If advanced thinkers base their contentions on natural rights, and claim these for all human beings by the very fact of their humanity, they can go ahead with confidence and appeal with results to the human heart.

Those who would reason clearly on the question of rights should always make a distinction between rights and privileges. The so-called “right of might” is in the nature of a privilege. It is not a right, nor is it right unless it serves a right. Our rights always relate to benefits and connote satisfaction. That is right which benefits. In Nature might has no justification for action unless it secures benefit — therefore is subordinate to right. Might must serve right before it is justified and right must have the service of might before it can practically act, tho it existed just as certainly before. Swartz has a right to his Mutual Bank, tho he has no might to compel the government to withdraw its impediments. If might does not serve right, Nature condemns it in the final results — they are not beneficial. By endorsing the right of might Anarchists throw away their whole case, for they thereby endorse and justify all successful invasions, and particularly the invasions of government, which has the most might.

Instead of all rights being derived from might, all rights are derived from benefit and imply that, otherwise cannot qualify.

Government has its origin in Nature below man. Animal parents control their young, animal packs follow and obey a leader. We see the same among primitive men. Nature has instituted an instinct for government and its purpose has been benefit and preservation. The mother governs her child for the benefit of the family; and the tribe, the larger family, huddles for protection under the strength, courage and wisdom of the chief. The natural roots of government are in the mother and the chief, and in that self-government by which a man conserves his health and safety by controlling his dangerous appetites and impulses. Government of this kind is instinctively sought by human beings, and benefits of this sort are instinctively expected of government; and where benefits of this sort are derived from government, there need be no fear of rebellion. To “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty”, states the essentials pretty well.

Government of the invasive kind began when tribesmen adopted these very principles that Tucker and Swartz would have us accept — they felt an implied contract bound them together in loyalty within the tribe, but outside there was no right but might, no one outside the tract had any rights they were required to respect. The result was invasions, war, conquest of weaker tribes, property in loot, the ownership of stolen lands, the making of slaves. The chief made himself king over these conquered ones, subjects. By a separate contract with his strongest warriors he divided stolen lands among them, and made them feudal lords with serfs, and bound them to him and away from the loyalty to the weaker ones of the tribe. Special privileges in stolen property — that has been the quality of invasive government ever since. But the people have never forgotten that government purely for social benefit is perfectly possible, and the reason they do not forget it is because they still have mothers, and still at time, strong friends and champions arise to use their might to protect them.

Another instance where an implied contract was used for invasion was when men usurped all rights in the name of might, declared women had no rights, subjugated them, and instituted that form of marriage in which, in its pure form, the woman was forced to be monogamous, was purely her husband’s property, without human rights, and her children also property and also his.

Pure liberty — the untrammeled doing as one pleases — nowhere exists. Law and government, in some form or degree, open or concealed, always accompany liberty and modify it. When Anarchists ask only for equal-liberty they themselves acknowledge this and institute a degree of law and government by limiting liberty by equality, governing liberty by equality. Once you admit that, in practice, liberty must be limited, law and government are admitted, and it only becomes a question how much or hoe little liberty is best for the greatest benefit. If Mutualists bind themselves by a contract, the moment any one of them finds he has made a mistake and no longer agrees to the contract, he finds that the Contract has become a Government, and its several parts are laws, which is associates will enforce upon him. He can leave of course but if his home and investments are there that will not be so easy, and if obliged to go to another group, under another contract, he only changes governments, as an American who goes to Canada or Mexico. If a child has the misfortune to be born under one of these contract-mutualisms he finds he has no rights whatever, and is only property of his parent’s might. Not even equal-liberty for him until big enough to put his head into one of those contract nooses. If he chooses to live as a pure inoffensive individualist, outside of any contract, he will find that for his mutualist neighbors he has no rights whatever, unless they choose to endow him with some. If not, they are free to exercise their might upon him.

If a contract exactly expresses the will of a member it, of course, does not govern him. But it is a rigid form, for all that, and, sooner or later is bound to pinch somewhere, for he is growing and changing. When it pinches it governs, and if he enforces it on his dissenting desires he aids it to govern, but it governs none the less. If he does not enforce it on himself, but breaks it, and others enforce it on him, he is sure it governs. If enforced only by forfeiture of bonds, loss of privileges, etc., it governs still. A contract enforced limits liberty, tho not necessarily equal-liberty, and a contract not enforced, or not intended for enforcement, is weak, and weak precisely at points of greatest strain. And it is safe to say that, with any contract involving social life, there will be moments of emergency and crucial necessity when imperious wills will enforce the contract or violate it spite of any scruples about equal-liberty.

Perhaps the contract will be enforced only by the boycott. Mutualists would fain [sic] persuade us that there is no possible invasion of equal liberty in a boycott. Comrade Swartz, instinctively sensing a weak spot in his levees here, throws all his strength to its support. “It is”, he says, “the only weapon that cannot be used invasively?The reason for this is that the boycott is not an act; it is merely the refusal to act.” Yet please note that he admits it is a “weapon”, and implies that it can be “used”, and on page 163 admits that a boycotted person “may correctly allege that he has been coerced”, and lower down speaks of a boycott exerting a “pressure.” On page 165, we see it recommended as a “punishment for crime”, and a “drastic penalty”, “more painful to many than to be incarcerated in a prison”, etc. Now how can the use of a weapon, to exert a pressure, to coerce, to inflict a drastic penalty or punishment, worse than incarceration in a prison, be described as no act, “merely a declination to act”? It is absurd. The confusion of the Anarchist here comes from his failing to understand that, in the paradoxicality of the universe, there are acts-negative as well as acts-positive, and that the boycott is one of the acts-negative. A failure, or refusal to act in a positive manner may still be an act-negative. Thus if a baby, at my feet, falls into a ditch, and I, quite able to retrieve it, allow it to drown, I am just as guilty of its murder as if I pushed it under; if I see a spark starting to ignite a house, and I, quite able, indifferently permit it to burn on, I am morally guilty of arson. When I boycott or ostracize a person to coerce him to do something which he is unwilling to do I am acting, and my act is an act of government.

For this is precisely what government is — in the relations of human beings, it is the action of one mind to control another mind to coerce it to perform an act, or cease to act, where it is reluctant or unwilling to comply — that is government, and is so understood by all mankind — or, more briefly — government is the imposition of a stronger will upon a weaker will that is here unwilling. It is always a limitation of liberty, even if intended to maintain whatever liberty may be possible.

Anarchists will find, whenever they try to apply their theories, that they cannot maintain an orderly, comfortable home, or run an orderly, harmonious school, or conduct an orderly public meeting, (Tucker averred that it was necessary that the moderator should be an autocrat), or run a safe railroad train, or sail a safe ship, without government. There must be discipline for order and efficiency — self-applied, or externally applied, and almost invariably the latter, for the self-applied is very unreliable in practice. Swartz praises the superior efficiency of private business concerns over government action in the same lines. He fails to note that the reason is that the discipline and government of the business enterprises is far more instant and severe than that of ordinary political government. In the army and navy, where government is still more strict and severe, efficiency is supreme. Efficiency is apt to be in inverse proportion to liberty. But of course government is a blind force and must be directed by intelligence; a fool must not be an engineer.

I cite all this merely to prove that Anarchism is a natural impossibility. Government is ubiquitous and pops up everywhere. There is no such thing as complete liberty, and equal-liberty, tho a beautiful moral standard, as an ideal, is, in real life invaded all the time, by stern natural necessity. There is no such thing as an “individual sovereign”, a “single, separate person” — he does not exist. Centrally there is a certain nucleus of individuality, yes, and very precious to us, but on all borders and contacts one merges with forces, things and persons, depends on them, and becomes all tangled up, coercing and being coerced, governing and being governed, in all sorts of conscious or unconscious, secret or overt way, by acts-negative or acts-positive. Society is not a mere word, but a living reality. As soon as any group forms there begins to develop a collective, composite spirit, or mind, invisible, but very real, that more or less telepathically unites and includes it — all its members. All contribute life to it — all are influenced, modified by it. This is Society — the composite spirit of the group — and it exercises an invisible, but very real government. The visible leaders must mainly express it or they do not last long. There is always a majority rule, tho a powerful individual mind may captivate the majority, at least for a time. Anarchists cannot escape the action of this government; moreover they will participate in it.

I first really faced the fallacy of Anarchism when I faced the problem of Conservation. When Anarchists forgot the assertion of the single right of might, they were full of rights to assert, and one was that the individual sovereign had an indisputable right to go to wild Nature for anything he could use and, provided he left the field open for others, no one had a right to prevent him. I agreed, till suddenly I realized that this meant that an Italian could live on slaughtered son birds, a market pot-hunter could kill all the year round, fish could be seined out of all waters, the lumber-hog could seep away the forests, and, as long as these men left equal-liberty for others to commit equal havoc, there was absolutely nothing in Anarchist principles that could consistently be applied to stop them. They were occupying and using, and not invading equal-liberty — and to stop them was “government”, that is, “invasion”. I dropt Anarchism right then and there. I began to see emerging the rights of society — of a wise collectivity, envisaging the rights o all and of posterity. Some social benefits required even the sacrifice of equal-liberty.

In presenting their propaganda, Anarchists seem to fight shy of putting out any definite program, or telling in unmistakable terms how their principles would work out in practice. Usually they prefer to only deliver fascinating generalities. One of these fascinating generalities is that of usufruct, which, they claim, would give a perfect title to land. But when you look into it, this doctrine of occupation and use is as full of potential trouble as any tropical jungle. Will occupancy alone give a full title to ownership, or will use alone do so, or must it be both occupancy and use. And what constitutes either occupancy or use? If I set my house in the middle of a quarter-section do I occupy all that land, or do I occupy only what my house actually covers? If I run a footpath over a farm and walk over it frequently, does that constitute use? If I fence in 10,000 acres of rich land, capable of feeding 40,000 people under intensive cultivation, and merely pasture 10,000 head of cattle on the tract, is that occupancy and use and must the other 39,999 leave me in possession? What constitutes failure to occupy? How long may I be absent, and under what circumstances, and still retain occupancy. And so on and so on, and so on? What has the right to decide such questions anyway, or to enforce decisions when made, especially when “the natural right of might” looms in the background? Is it not instantly clear that any and all decisions must be more or less arbitrary. And all occupancy and use of land is to a certain extent a monopoly and excludes some one from the equal right to occupy and use it — is, to a degree, a violation of equal freedom. I see endless possibilities of disputes, quarrels, litigation, fights, feuds, arising out of this utterly loose and indeterminate way of deciding land titles. Far better in every way, in my judgment, is to plan of the Single Taxer — all the people own the land in common and the government administers it; you pay your rent to a clearly defined piece of land, and so long as you pay, you occupy — when you stop payment, you have vacated your title. It is all as clear as dollars and cents, and settled instantly on business-like principles. And makes it far more difficult to hold valuable and socially-needed lands for selfish pleasure or inferior use. Under usufruct a stubborn occupant, holding a strategic position, refusing to sell out, could block a road, even a railroad, and cause expense and trouble, or exact his own price, or exact a toll. Nothing of that [is] possible under government ownership.

Much more could be said, but I have not been asked to write a volume. And there is much in the book to praise. The criticism of Bolshevism is penetrative and deserved. I am not a financier but The Mutual Bank appeals to me as an excellent institution. For many years I have been convinced that the finances of the country should represent and be based upon the exchangable wealth of the country, not based on gold. The explanation of what The Mutual Bank is, and would do, seems to me to be more clearly given in this book than in anything else I have read. Some such method is painfully needed to deliver from the robbery of interest and insure general prosperity. [NOTE inserted in hand by Lloyd: Now (1934) I believe, with Bellamy, that the remedy is to abolish all banks and money.] The tone of the book is excellent, its literary merit of the highest. There is a complete absence of violent accusation and insult toward opponents, or those criticised. Its working methods, as recommended — education, passive resistance, to repeal obnoxious laws where possible and ignore where impossible — all these are admirable. But repeal would require voting — do Mutualists use the vote? Are they wise enough to be opportunists and to use the enemy’s weapons where available? The original Anarchists would die first.

For myself I am satisfied that education and evolution are all we can look to for effective help — the evolution of character. When the general character of society reaches a high enough development, only men of character can represent it in government or serve it in business, and the nature of all institutions will reflect that character, opportunities for the unscrupulous to use the might of force or cunning to domineer and exploit here will always be, under any system, rule or contract, and nothing but the refusal of the tempted to utilize these opportunities can save the day. And no matter how bad the social system, the good man will at once proceed to reform it into one of real social service. Even a dictator is harmless is his character is high enough, and the loudest professor of Anarchism will be a tyrant and a parasite if his character is low enough.

I quite agree with this book in its denunciation of monopoly and special business privilege. Government should never be permitted to create these. I am for free trade and free competition. Private parties should always be free to compete with the government in rendering public service — a competition between government and private companies should act as a corrective of the usual faults of each. I favor the abolition of patents and copyrights, still I think it would be to the public interest to offer inducements to investors. I would suggest a plan something like this: Suppose a board of experts nominated by the manufacturers of the county, to pass on the merits of inventions. Any inventor who chooses may submit his invention to these. If they approve, they appraise the labor cost of his invention, and of his model, and reimburse him for this. They also describe and illustrate his invention in one issue of a periodical they print, which goes to all manufacturers. Any and all are now free to make and sell the invention, but all who do so must pay the inventor a small royalty for his lifetime, or for the time they continue so to do. By this plan the inventor would get at least something for his invention, at least get back his expenses. But it would be the property of the people, and could not be bought up and shelved. All would have access to it on equal terms, and the more who were benefited, the more the inventor would get. And the more good, free inventions, the more the whole world gains.

I fully agree that juries should try he law as well s the evidence. In other words, all laws relating to crime should be flexible, and applied or modified according to the peculiar circumstances of each case. Only thus can justice be done. But to select ignorant and unwilling men, haphazard, for jurors, is a most clumsy and dangerous method. Jurymen should be professionals, men of selected character, especially educated in human psychology and the problems of impartial equity; in the employ of the whole people at a fixed salary, and always on the job, trying all cases as they came. Lawyers, too, should be only in the employ of the people, at fixed salaries; not mercenaries, fighting like soldiers of fortune for the highest bidder. The chief business of lawyers should be to settle quarrels, reconcile disputants, dissipate litigation and reform criminals. Also to constantly simplify, clarify and lessen law and save legal expense to the community. For a lawyer to aid a known criminal to escape conviction should be regarded as a worse crime than that of his client, because treasonable to his profession and not against an individual but the whole people.

I am convinced that private associations for defence against crime would swiftly lead to worse abuses than those we now suffer from in that line. Like mercenary lawyers, the temptation would always be to fight for their customers, right or wrong. And to get into conflicts between themselves that might easily embroil the whole community or lead to civil wars. Besides, there is nothing in true Anarchist principles that requires anyone to employ a defence-association. An individual sovereign has a right, according to his principles, to make his own laws about his own affairs, and avenge his own wrongs in his own way. Under Anarchism we could not fail to go back to the old ways of blood-vengeance and the vendetta, to lynch law and standing feuds.

The government we are under today has grown out of the composite spirit of the people and represents it. It is as good as the people deserve, speaking generally, however hard on advanced individuals. It will improve as the spirit of the people improves, and it can only improve that way. Bloody revolutions only deceptively change surfaces. Witness that in modern Russia the continuing spirit of czarist days comes out in despotisms, bureaucracy, massacres, executions without trial, espionage, censorship, corruption, inefficiency. Only those improvements have been made that the spirit of the people was ready for and would peacably have gradually effected anyway.

The greatest reform needed in government is flexibility and a recognition and promotion of growth. If governments were wise they would emasculate and “denature” rebellions by allowing safety-valves and vent-holes for radicals. They would encourage and solicit criticism and assist those who offered better ways to demonstrate their methods in practice, thus submitting them to the acid test. If a new theory could demonstrate actual improvement, then the referendum. No revolutions on that road, but steady evolution.

The trouble with Radicals is that they are practically all doctrinaires. They denounce compromise, not recognizing that compromise is the road of progress. In real life all principles must, at times, recognize and employ their opposites. There is everything in the universe and a time, place and use for each thing. Take the principle of Equal-Freedom and the case of the motorist. The motorist is not a criminal, nor intends to be — simply a busy man, rushing to his important destination, asking only liberty to do so at his own risk, and willing to give the same liberty to everyone, in cars or on foot. But at the crossing of the ways, there stands the traffic-officer, with his white gloves, imperiously stopping and starting him at his will. It is a clear invasion of equal-liberty and he would defy it if he dared, but there is Law behind the officer, and bullets behind the law. Yet there is public benefit in the traffic-officer and the people will never let him go, principle or no principle.

I have been sorry to criticize this book. Its spirit is fine — the spirit of individualist-anarchism usually is fine and co-operation is all to the good. I am for co-operation to the limit and for individual liberty as far as practicable. I agree with Jefferson that the least government that will do the work is the best and would reduce law to a minimum — but social action without some government and some law is naturally impossible and will always be found so. And liberty is the legal-tender of life and a piece of it is the price we pay for every motion and benefit.

June 17, 1927

This is a transcription of original source material from John William Lloyd. Lloyd was a frequent contributor to Benjamin Tucker’s individual anarchist periodical Liberty (1881) through most of its lifespan.

The following essay “Anarchist Socialism” by Lloyd is undated but it seems to be have been written in the 1920s or ’30s. The piece is unedited (by me) except for the deletion of passages with material that would confuse the reader: for example, the mention of Lloyd’s obscure acquaintances. The punctuation and grammar is sometimes antiquated and remains so due to my reluctance to edit the work of someone deceased.

Despite the word “Socialism” in its title, the essay should be of interest to libertarians. First, it includes a retrospective of Lloyd’s own experiences with the 19th century Anarchist movement, including memories of Tucker and commentary on luminaries such as Josiah Warren. Second, Lloyd was the author of several works, mostly of poetry, that were heavily promoted by Liberty; they included The Anarchists’ March, The Dwellers in Vale Sunrise, and The Red Heart in a White World. To the extent there is a poet laureate of individualist anarchism, it is surely John William Lloyd.

Third, the term “socialism” as used by the 19th century individualist radicals differed in meaning as dramatically as the word “liberal” today differs from its 18th century usage. As used by Lloyd and his contemporaries, socialism per se — as opposed to State Socialism — did not negate private property or the primacy of the individual but referred more to voluntary, co-operative ventures through which a just society could be achieved. Thus, many of the voluntary communities of early libertarianism could be viewed through either a socialist or individualist lens. To the extent that individualist anarchists who sometimes used the label “socialist” had a point of overlap with collectivist-socialists, it is: they agreed with the labor theory of value. Since individualist anarchists also insisted on the primacy of contract, however, their position devolved to the statement: interest and rent are invalid practices, nevertheless everyone has the right to make a foolish contract, and no third party has the right to interfere. –Wendy McElroy, http://www.wendymcelroy.com

Anarchist Socialism

By J.Wm [John William] Lloyd

As many of you, my comrades, may know me only as a Socialist, and may doubt my qualifications to explain Anarchism, I will say that for some 20 years or more I was a professed and active Anarchist, a constant contributor to Anarchist periodicals, and the personal friend and correspondent of many of the Anarchist leaders of the time. In 1884, when I first publicly announced myself a philosophical Anarchist, Liberty was the leading Anarchist paper in the United States and certainly the ablest one in the world and I became a steady contributor to its columns and the close friend of its editor and owner, Benj. R. Tucker. Mr. Tucker now lives in Europe, but his wife was one of the most intimate friends of my family and his only child is named Oriole, after my daughter. At one time I was the literary editor of Liberty. At another I myself edited an Anarchist periodical, The Free Comrade, which was suspended for while, and then revived for a short time by Leonard Abbott and myself, as an advocate of the juncture of the Anarchist and Socialist forces. I also wrote and published an Anarchist booklet, “The Red Heard in a White World”, and became the leader of an Anarchist group, which was known as “The Comradeship of Free Socialists”, and at one time had quite a membership, scattered all over the world. My books, “The Natural Man” and “Vale Sunrise”, were Anarchistic. During these years, tho I avoided the platform, I was almost constantly engaged in debate, defending and explaining the philosophy of Anarchism thru the press. I even wrote an “Anarchist’s March”, which was set to music. I mention all this simply to show you that when I speak of Anarchism, I am somewhat prepared to explain it and do it justice.

First, then, what is Anarchism? It is logical human liberty. It is the ideal of human life without a master. Tucker defined it as “Equal Liberty”. Another definition is, “Do as you please at your own expense”; another, “Mind your own business and let your neighbor’s alone”. The name was first used and applied by Pierre J. Proudhon, the French philosopher, who derived it from the Greek an, privitive, and archos, ruler, meaning life without a ruler or government. On this basis the Anarchist founds a whole system of ethics and politics. He identifies crime and government as the same in logical essence, for both are impositions of one man’s will on another without his consent. All Anarchists say that liberty and Anarchism are synonyms.

It was a common charge a few years ago, and probably still is, that Anarchism is an imported foreign product and un-American. On the contrary, Anarchism originated in the United States before the rest of the world had it, and is a logical consequence of fundamental American principles; also many prominent Americans have been Anarchists.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was so nearly an Anarchist that he uttered the famous aphorism, “The best government is that which governs the least.” The Declaration is so nearly an Anarchist document that there is probably not an Anarchist in the world, except the few Nietzscheans, who would reject its fundamental logic. For example: That all men are equal in rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness; That governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; That whenever any government becomes destructive to the above rights, it is the right and duty of those who have formed it, the people, to take whatever measures may be necessary to secure their own safety and happiness, even to its complete abolition. In other words, the logic of the Declaration is that the individual is sovereign and supreme where he has his true rights, and the government only his tool, which he has made and has a right, therefore, to unmake at his pleasure.

“Individual Sovereignty” was one of the fundamental American watchwords and the whole of Anarchism is logically included in it. So too, all Anarchism is logically contained in the doctrine that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. No Anarchist has any logical objection to a government to which all its members consent; only he carries the logic one step further and says that if the individual withdraws his consent, in that moment the just power of the government over him ceases. So too, all Anarchism is logically contained in the statement that the right of every man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in his own inoffensive way, is rightfully inalienable. Therefore the American principles are profoundly Anarchistic and the logic of Anarchism is absolutely American.

But the matter was not left simply to logic and doctrinaire deductions. Josiah Warren, direct descendant of that famous General Warren who fell at Bunker Hill, was the real founder of Anarchism and the first Anarchist author. In his work “True Civilization”, published, I believe in the thirties [1830s], he took the American principle of Individual Sovereignty and worked it out to its logical ultimates, making the first clear and definite presentation of Anarchist principles the world had ever seen. He also established the first Anarchist group at his colony of “Modern Times” on Long Island. However he did not use the word “Anarchism”, which had not then been adopted. At that time many prominent Americans accepted these ideas, either wholly or in part. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the most shining example. His writings are full of Anarchist statements of great force, much quoted by Anarchists to this day. His friend, Henry David Thoreau, was a scarcely less illustrious and more militant Anarchist. He went to jail rather than pay a poll-tax to a government that supported slavery. When Emerson heard of it and came to pay his tax to get him out, he said to Thoreau, in his cell, “What Henry, you here!” and Thoreau sarcastically replied, with his quaint Yankee humor, “What, Waldo, and you not here!”, implying that to be consistent Emerson would have done the same. And a New England woman, who knew him, told me two summers ago, that his townspeople actually never afterwards asked him to pay a tax. Most of the New England Transcendentalists were more or less Anarchist and so were all Abolitionists, some of whom were radically so, particularly William Lloyd Garrison and Stephen Pearl Andrews. It is noteworthy that the Civil War was more of less avowedly fought over two Anarchist principles, wrested from their context. Thus the North, so far as intentionally Abolitionist, was fighting for the restoration of individuality to the black man, and the South was fighting for the Anarchist principle of Free Secession from an undesired Union.

Warren’s most brilliant and influential disciple was Benj. R. Tucker, a man of old New England stock. He was at one time city editor of the Boston Globe. As a translator of French books, he translated some of the most important of Proudhon’s works and adopted Proudhon’s name, Anarchism, for the philosophy. Proudhon had developed his Anarchism separately, with no knowledge of Warren but probably derived it from the logic of the French Revolutionary slogan of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”, which perhaps the French had largely derived from the principles of the American Revolution with its Declaration of Independence. At any rate its logic was identical. But somewhere near this time, also independently, a Russian form of Anarchism was originated by Bakounine.

Now developed the first split in the Anarchist movement, which since then has broken up fundamentally into many sects and schools. Warren and Proudhon were intensely individualistic, and Proudhon and Tucker especially detested and fought communism, while the Russians made communism their main principle. Bakounine, Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman, all Russians, have been the great leaders of Communistic-Anarchism, which now has largely outgrown the Individualistic-Anarchistic division in numbers and political importance.

Another split grew up over the question of violence. The Individualist-Anarchists have always stood for an intellectual propaganda and for passive resistance, reserving violence only as a weapon of last and desperate resort.

The Russians have largely advocated, encouraged and winked at terrorism as a means of revolution — “propaganda by deed” they called it. A small group of Americans and foreigners combined, in Chicago, at one time and adopted the Russian communistic and terroristic principles, leading to the calamitous “Haymarket Riot”, and the hanging of several of their leaders. Among these was Samuel Parsons, also an American of Revolutionary ancestry. On the other hand, among the Russians, Tolstoy developed an entirely new variant of Anarchism — a Christian and non-resistant form, but still communistic. He declared all violence, even in self-defense, a violation of liberty; even to defend liberty, it was a violation of liberty.

Now another split came among the individualists. These had largely adopted the philosophy of Egoism of the German, Max Stirner, who declared all human life was moved simply by self-interest. Still the Americans did not think this conflicted with their principle of equal liberty, which they declared an enlightened egoism would make every man maintain for his own benefit. But Stirner’s most brilliant disciple was the German, Nietzsche, who declared that the law of Nature was that might was right, and that the true Anarchist was the individual who cared consciously only for himself and exploited the world to feed his own individuality – who pleased himself and had no law or limit but his own powers. Thru his brilliant and paradoxical genius, Nietzsche exerted a tremendously active influence in the German universities and over the dominating spirits of the world. Theodore Roosevelt is commonly considered among his disciples. So is the German Kaiser and the whole military caste of Germany, and the initiation of the present war is often laid to his door. Napoleon and John Pierpont Morgan could have called themselves Nietzschean Anarchists; or any other utterly unscrupulous exploiter and tyrant might have taken the name.

There was also a small American school whose watchword was “Do as you please and take the consequences!”, which they said contained all of Anarchism.

So now Anarchism, today, is curiously broken up into utterly opposing and contradictory schools. This arises from their failure to agree on a definition of liberty. Anarchism, they all say, is liberty, but what liberty is and how best to secure it are the points on which they divide. The Americans and French say that the liberty of the individual is only logically secured by equal liberty of each to be sovereign only over his own. The Russians say that equal liberty can only be secured by the equal sharing of communism – the individualists retorting that communism swallows up the individual and digests him into the community. Tolstoy says if you adopt altruism as your method and let your brother do what he pleases without resistance, he will let you do what you please and so equal liberty and harmony will come by the law of Christ. Neitzsche says he is Anti-Christ, ridicules and denounces Christianity, altruism, Socialism, equality, communism and social rights, as all equally the inventions of the weak to cheat the strong, declares there is no logical liberty but that of the individual to assert himself thru that struggle for existence and survival of the fittest which is Nature’s law, and everything but the law of might will fail.

I, in my writings, did not agree with any of these exactly, but endeavored to effect a reconciliation – a working combination of individualism and communism – the individual to possess and be master of his own personal belongings, but communistic in the larger and social relations.

Again the Anarchists split on the question of property in land. The Individualists held that the only valid title to anything was a labor-title, and as nobody’s labor had made the land, therefore it belonged to nobody, but would become the property of whoever occupied and used it just so long as he occupied and used it and no longer. The Communists held that everything belonged to all men equally, the land included. My own proposition was that each man should have a small piece of land, not larger than he could personally occupy and cultivate or use, and a communal right, with all others, in all land not thus individually occupied and used. The Single-Taxers, who, by the way, are largely Anarchistic in theory, agreed with the communists and offered the Single Tax as the best way of equalizing land values and opportunities.

Despite its differences, Anarchism has had a profound and far-reaching influence on human thought. For personal liberty appeals to every brave and original mind. It is to be noted that Anarchists, just as strongly as Marxians, claim to be scientific. Nay, they claim to be more scientific, because they say they would cut away all artificial supports and privileges and leave man absolutely to the natural laws on which alone science bases itself. All government, they say, are artificial and interfere with Nature. It must be remembered that in their younger days Proudhon and Karl Marx were friends and agreed up to a certain point, where Marx declared the remedy to be to put all social functions under the government, and Proudhon affirmed that government itself, with its privileges and monopolies and invasions of liberty, was the enemy. In those days both called themselves socialists and Marx called himself a Communist, as witness his famous “Manifesto”. Indeed Anarchists still claim to be socialists, a name which the Social-Democrats have no right, they say, to monopolize. All men are socialists, they claim, who are working for the world as it should be, against those who are contented or are contending for the world as it is. They call themselves, sometimes, Free-Socialists, as opposed to what they call State-Socialists – that is, those who would create socialism thru political action.

Now for a little personal history. Our secretary [of a local radical organization], Comrade Zeitelhack will remember that when I offered to join the Westfield Branch, I wrote him I was an Anarchist but as there was no Anarchist Group of Single-Tax party here, and as I believed in radicals working together, I wanted to help the Socialists. He met me on the street and told me he did not think there was much difference in the ultimate aims of Anarchism and Socialism and that he would be glad to have me join, and it was on these terms that I was admitted. I had no thought of becoming a real Socialist, but I studied the thought and the literature and in time came to feel that the Socialists had the best of the argument. Anarchist theories were fine and fascinating, but, as most Anarchists rejected voting, majority rule and even suspicioned organization, they were powerless against the growing evils of capitalism. They refused the ballot because they said the bullet was behind it, but as most of them justified the bullet, at least as a last resort, why not use the ballot? I came to see that government was a tool without which, in some form, cooperative action was impossible. Voting and majority rule were natural necessities of collective functioning, and men could act in no other way if they acted together, and I now saw why, in the twenty years I had been with them, the Anarchists had accomplished nothing except to modify the thought of some of the higher minds. I came to think too that there might be times and places where the rights or necessities of the collectivity might be greater than those of the individual. So I ceased to be an orthodox Anarchist. Nevertheless I have never lost my thirst for personal liberty, only I believe now, that if the Social-Democracy can win, it will give to all men greater practical equal-liberty and security than the vague faiths and method, or no-methods of the Anarchists could achieve.

But I believe that Anarchism and Socialism are both needed in human society – that they represent two strong trends in human psychology – the trend toward liberty and individual variation, and the trend toward cooperation, sympathy and solidarity, and that therefore they should work together. Socialism greatly needs Anarchism as a critic and to keep it from sacrificing the individual and his originality to the domination of the mass. And I have tried, tho I confess with no appreciable success, to effect a compromise, which would permit the essential Anarchist principles of Individual Secession and Autonomy of the Group to be guaranteed under Socialism, claiming that if this were done in the Socialistic Constitution and Platforms, the Anarchists would have no logical ground for keeping out of the Party, which would thus gain a multitude of votes – without sacrificing its own principles. Simply an alliance to win, with division of territory and autonomy of method after the conquest of government and the capitalist defeat.