The pernicious influence of society upon the morals of the individual being discovered, it is easy to suppress the bad instincts and develop the good. Your society based on antagonism of interests having produced the struggle between individuals, procreates the malevolent beast called “civilized man.” Conceive, then, an organization based, on the contrary, upon the strictest solidarity. Make it so that private interests shall no longer be opposed to each other, nor contrary to public interests. Make it so that personal well-being shall flow from the general well-being, or produce it. Make it so that, in order to live and to enjoy, people need not fear the competition of their fellows. Make it so that by associating their energies and aspirations they may find their expectations realized thereby. Make it so that this association shall not be turned to the detriment of neighboring groups.
You are afraid of the lazy! Make work attractive. Instead of riveting it upon a small minority of society to whom it becomes a torture, do away with all your State machinery, your useless offices, and organize your society in such a way that each shall be led, by mere force of circumstances and not by any authority whatever, to cooperate in social production. Make work useful, necessary, and so that it may be a hygienic exercise instead of a torture. From the present organization you reap a harvest of wars, crimes, thefts, fraud, and misery. This is the result of private property and authority; it is the influence of environment making itself felt. If you would have a society in which reign confidence, solidarity, and well-being for all, base it upon liberty, reciprocity, and equality.
XI
“The Country”
Religion, property, authority, the family, having slowly evolved from human aspirations, became gradually defined; but as they became precise in conception, as their purposes grew clear, they became the nucleus of an evolution which, as it developed, led them to concentrate more within themselves, and gradually transformed them into well-defined castes, each having its attributes and privileges. Of these the military caste was not the last to form, develop, and become preponderant everywhere. For wherever it was compelled to cede the foremost rank to the sacerdotal caste, it yielded merely an honorary precedence. Was it not at bottom the military caste which could, by its cooperation, ensure stability of power in the hands of those who held that power? Did it not furnish the nominal or real chiefs in whom was summed up the omnipotence of caste?
In all this conflict of interests the idea of “the country” held very little place. Group fought against group, tribe against tribe, and, in historic times, city against city; whole peoples, even, sought to enslave other peoples; nations, indeed, commenced to be distinguished; but the notion of a “fatherland” was still very vague and uncertain. We must come down to modern times before we see the idea of “the country” formulated, exact, and setting its authority above that of kings, priests, or warriors, who are no more than servants of this new metaphysical entity, “the country,” priests of the new religion. In France it was in 1789 that the idea of the country, together with that of the law, revealed itself in all its potency. It was an idea congenial to the bourgeoisie to substitute the authority of the nation for that of divine right, to present it to the workers as a synthesis of all rights, and to lead them to defend the new order of things by affording them the belief that they were struggling for the defense of their own rights. (For it is well to observe that the idea of the country, the nation, as it is called, summed up the whole of the people, their rights and institutions, rather than the soil itself. It was only little by little, and under the influence of ulterior causes, that the idea of the country shrunk and shriveled to the narrow sense taught today, of love of the soil without concern for those who live upon it or the institutions in operation among them.) But whatever the prevalent idea of the country, the bourgeoisie found it too much to their interest to cultivate that idea not to seek to develop it in men’s minds and make a religion of it, in the shelter of which they could preserve their sturdily contested authority. At all events the defense of the soil was but too good a pretext for maintaining the army necessary to the support of their privileges, and the “collective interest” an invincible argument for compelling the workers to contribute to the defense of said privileges. Happily the spirit of criticism grows and spreads day by day, and man no longer content with words wants to know their meaning. If he does not grasp it at the first attempt, his memory is capable of storing up the facts, deducing consequences and drawing a logical conclusion from them.
What, in reality, does the word “country” represent, beyond the natural affection one has for his family and his neighbors, and the attachment engendered by the habit of living upon one’s native soil? Nothing, less than nothing, to the major portion of those who go off to get their heads broken in wars of whose causes they are ignorant and whose cost they alone pay, as workers and combatants! Successful or disastrous, these wars cannot alter their situation in the
