THE STATE justify the triple alliance of soldier, priest and executioner. Even morality, which for centuries has preached obedience to the Church or to some so-called divine book, emancipates itself to-day only to preach servility to the State. "You have no direct moral obligations towards your neighbour, not even a sentiment of solidarity; all your obligations 'are to the State," we are taught by this new religion of the old Roman and Ca:sarian divinity. Neighbours, comrades, companionsforget them! You must know them only through the intermediary of an organ of your State. And all of you must practise the virtue of being equally its slaves. This glorification of State and discipline, for which Church and University, press and political parties work, is so well preached that even revolutionists dare not confront this fetish. The modern radical is a centralizer, a State partisan, a Jacobin to the core, and the Socialist walks in his footsteps. Like the Florentines at the end of the fifteenth century, who could only invoke the dictatorship of the State, to save them from the patricians, the Socialists know only how to invoke the same gods, the same dictatorship and the same State, to save us from the abominations of an economic system created by that very State! X. If you look still deeper into all the facts which I have touched upon, if you see the State as it was in history and as it is in essence to-day, and if you consider moreover that a social institution cannot serve all aims indiscriminately, because, like every other organ, it is developed for a certain purpose, and not for all purposes, you will understand why,we desire the abolition of the State. We see in it an institution developed in the history of human societies to hinder union among men, to obstruct the development of local initiative, to crush existing liberties and prevent their restoration. And we know that an institution, which has a past dating back some thousands of years cannot lend itself to a function opposed to that for which it was developed in the course of history. To this argument, unassailable to anyone who has reflected on history, what replies do we receive? We are answered by an almost childish argument: "The State is there, it exists, it represents a ready-made powerful organisation. Why destroy it instead of making use of it? Admittedly it works for ill, but that is due to its being in the hands of exploiters. In the hands of the people, why should it not be utilised for a better end and for the good of men?" Always the same dream, the dream of Schiller's Marquis of Posa trying to make autocracy an instrument of enfranchisement, the dream of the gentle priest Peter in Zola's Rome, wishing to make the Church a lever of Socialism I -41 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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