The State Is Nothing But An Instrument

But The Most Horrible Spot .... Lies....immediately South West Of Oxford Road And Is Known As Little Ireland. The Race That Lives In These Ruinous Cottages, Behind Broken Windows, Mended With Oilskin, Sprung Doors, And Rotten Door-posts, Or In Dark, Wet Cellars, In Measureless Filth And Stench....must Surely Have Reached The Lowest Stage Of Humanity.

Labour Is The Source Of All Wealth, The Political Economists Assert. And It Really Is The Source -- Next To Nature, Which Supplies It With The Material That It Converts Into Wealth. But It Is Even Infinitely More Than This. It Is The Prime Basic Condition For All Human Existence, And This To Such An Extent That, In A Sense, We Have To Say That Labour Created Man Himself.

The Anarchists Put The Thing Upside Down. They Declare That The Proletarian Revolution Must Begin By Doing Away With The Political Organization Of The State. But To Destroy It At Such A Moment Would Be To Destroy The Only Organism By Means Of Which The Victorious Proletariat Can Assert Its Newly-conquered Power, Hold Down Its Capitalist Adversaries, And Carry Out That Economic Revolution Of Society Without Which The Whole Victory Must End In A New Defeat And A Mass Slaughter Of The Workers Similar To Those After The Paris Commune.

By The Same Right Under Which France Took Flanders, Lorraine And Alsace, And Will Sooner Or Later Take Belgium — By That Same Right Germany Takes Over Schleswig; It Is The Right Of Civilisation As Against Barbarism, Of Progress As Against Stability.

Bare-faced Covetousness Was The Moving Spirit Of Civilization From Its First Dawn To The Present Day; Wealth, And Again Wealth, And For The Third Time Wealth; Wealth, Not Of Society, But Of The Puny Individual, Was Its Only And Final Aim.