Life already shows in which direction the change
will be made. Not in increasing the powers of the State, but
in resorting to free organization and free federation in all those
branches which are now considered as attributes of the State.''
Kropotkin, ``Anarchist Communism,'' pp. 28-29.
Attractive as this view is, I cannot resist the
conclusion that it results from impatience and
represents the attempt to find a short-cut toward the
ideal which all humane people desire.
Let us begin with the question of private crime.[50]
Anarchists maintain that the criminal is manufactured
by bad social conditions and would disappear
in such a world as they aim at creating.[51] No doubt
there is a great measure of truth in this view. There
would be little motive to robbery, for example, in an
Anarchist world, unless it were organized on a large
scale by a body of men bent on upsetting the Anarchist
regime. It may also be conceded that impulses
toward criminal violence could be very largely eliminated
by a better education. But all such contentions,
it seems to me, have their limitations. To take
an extreme case, we cannot suppose that there would
be no lunatics in an Anarchist community, and some
of these lunatics would, no doubt, be homicidal.
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