THE STATE on a legal basis, to lead the brain astray in accustoming it to servitude, will lend itself marvellously to new functions; that it will become the means of making a new life germinate, that it will seat liberty and equality on an economic basis, awaken society, and march to the conquest of a better future! What an absurd miscomprehension of history! To give free scope to Socialism, it is necessary to reconstruct society, based to-day on the narrow individualism of the shopkeeper, from top to bottom. It is not only, as they said sometimes in a vague metaphysical way, a question of returning to the worker "the integral product of his work," but a question of re-modelling in their entiFety all relations among men, from those existing to-day between every individual and his churchwarden or his station master, to those existing between trades, hamlets, cities and regions. In every street, in every hamlet, in every group of men assembled about a factory or along a railroad, we must awaken the creative, constructive, organising spirit, in order to reconstruct the whole of life in the factory, on the railroad, in the village, in the stores, in taking supplies, in production, in distribution. All relations between individuals and between human agglomerations must begin to be remodelled as soon as we begin to reform any part of the present commercial or administrative organisation. And they expect this immense work, demanding the full and free exercise of popular genius, to be carried out within the frame-work of the State, within the pyramidal scale of organisation that constitutes the essence of each State! They want the State, whose very reason for existence lies in the crushing of the individual, in the destruction of all free grouping and free creation, in the hatred of initiative and in the triumph of one idea (which must necessarily be that of the mediocrity), to become the lever of this immense transformation! They want to govern a newborn society by decrees and electoral majorities! What childishness! Throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition. Again, on the eve of the great Social Revolution these two traditions stand face to face. Between these two currents, always alive, always struggliag in humanity-the current of the people and the current of the minorities which thirst for political and religious domination-our choice is made. We again take up the current which led men in the twelfth century to organise themselves on the basis of free understanding, of free initiative of the individual, of free federation. We leave others to cling to the Roman, Canonic, and Imperial tradition, 43 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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