KROPOTKIN State in order to conquer the right of constituting themselves into commercial societies, a right which the State only conceded when it discovered in it an easy method of creating monopolies to the advantage of its creatures and to re-fill its treasury; and the struggles for the right to write or speak differently from what the State orders through its academies, universities or churches; and the struggles for the right to teach, be it only reading; and the struggles even to obtain the right of amusing oneself in common; not to mention those wars which would still have to be fought for the right to chooseone's judge or one's law (which before the growth of the State was of daily occurrence), or the struggles that separate us from the day when they will burn the book of infamous punishments, invented by the spirit of the inquisition and of the despotic empires of the East and known under the name of penal code ! Then look at taxation, an institution of purely State origin, a formidable weapon which the State uses in Europe as well as in young societies in the United States to keep the masses under its heel, to favour friends, to ruin the greater number to the advantage of those who govern, and to uphold the old divisions and castes. Then take war, without which States can neither constitute tliemselves nor stand-war that becomes fatal, inevitable, as soon as we admit that a certain region (because it is a State) can have interests opposed to those of its neighbours. Think of past wars and of those we are threatened with before the conquered races will q_eallowed to breathe freely, of wars for commercial markets, of wars to create colonial empires. In France we know only too well what servitude each_war, whether victorious or not, brings in its train. What is worse than all that I have-enumerated, is that the education we all receive from the State, at school and later on in our life, has so vitiated our brains that the idea of liberty itself goes astray and is travestied into servitude. It is sad to see those who believe themselves to be revolutionists, vowing their depest hatred to Anarchists-because the Anarchist conception of liberty surpasses their own narrow and mean conception culled from State teaching. The spirit of voluntary servitude has always been artfully nourished in young brains, and is so still, in order to perpetuate the slavery of the subject to the State. Libertarian philosophy is suffocated by pseudo-Roman and Catholic State philosophy. History is vitiated from the first page, where it lies about the Merovingian and Carlovingian dynasties, to its last page, on which it glorifies Jacobinism and ignores the people and their work in the creation of institutions. Natural sciences are perverted to the beqefit of the dual idol Church and State. The psychology of the individual, and still more that of society, is falsified to 40 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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