[Unedited]
“For always in thine eyes, O Liberty!
Shines that high light whereby the world is saved;
And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee.”
John Hay.
On Picket Duty.
The London County Council has prohibited the playing of dance music on Sundays by bands in the public parks. The London County Council is composed of men and women a majority of whom are either outright State Socialists or on the way to become such. Their success at the last election was hailed as a Socialistic victory. In this prohibition of the playing of dance music we get an indication of the hollowness of the pretence that personal liberty will be safeguarded under Socialism.
It is well known that for years Whitelaw Reid has been fighting the typographical union. Three or four days before his nomination for the vice-presidency he made the “Tribune” composing-room a union office. In this barefaced bid for votes Whitelaw Reid shows clearly that he thinks the workingmen are such fools as to be willing, in return for this concession, to swing their hats for a man who has been their life-long enemy. I am sorry to have to admit that Mr. Reid’s estimate of the workingman is not far from correct. We shall probably see the very men who have been denouncing Reid as a conspirator with “scabs” hail his latest move as a great victory for labor. It is indeed another victory — of the Barondess sort; a victory destined, if the victor carries his point, to fasten the shackles on labor more firmly than ever.
The editor of the “Sanitary Era,” in an article reprinted in another column, expresses very forcibly ideas regarding the stupidity of existing postal arrangements, which the editor of Liberty has long entertained. The “second-class mail matter” scheme, as now administered, is neither more nor less than a device for smoothing the path of old and well-established periodicals and obstructing the path of new and struggling periodicals. But even the editor of the “Sanitary Era” does not see the entire evil. He thinks it very wrong for the Government to discriminate against new journals in favor of old, but sees no impropriety in its discrimination against advertising journals in favor of those that are literary. It is not the business of the mail-carrier to foster literature, but to carry the mails. Where there is no difference in the cost of carrying, there should be no difference in the rate of carrying. Now, it costs no more to carry an advertising journal than to carry a literary journal of the same size and weight, and to force the owner of one to partially pay the postage bill of the owner of the other (the result really accomplished by a discrimination in rates) is both paternal and unjust. Geo. P. Rowell & Co., in “Printers’ Ink,” are striking nearer the mark in demanding that all printed matter shall be carried at one uniform rate. The true and radical remedy, however, is to abolish the monopoly of the postal service. Competition in mail-carrying will insure the performance of the service on business principles. But as long as the monopoly lasts, the abuses which monopoly engenders will prove ineradicable.
The Secret of a Successful Life.
[H. L. Koopman in University Cynic.]
“We should not indulge ourselves in the habit of thinking that the course which involves the greatest sacrifice to ourselves is necessarily the right one. Remember that we can have no duties to others paramount to those we owe to ourselves. Self-preservation is not only an instinct of nature, but it is the dictate of principle, and we ought, even out of regard to others, to husband our physical resources in such a manner as to enable us, not only to do much, but to hold out long. It is only great occasions and urgent necessity which render self-sacrifice obligatory, or even lawful, and the good to be accomplished must be both great and certain to justify us in doing for others that which will be attended with permanent evil to ourselves.”
These words were written by George P. Marsh when he was 38 years old, some years before the beginning of his public career. They have especial pertinence as addressed to a young friend, for in youth the heart leads the head, and the young are peculiarly susceptible to the claims of altruism. As the years ripen, however, one of their earliest fruits is the conviction that the cases are few in which self-sacrifice is anything more than a mere sacrifice of self, without real benefit to those for whom the sacrifice is made. All testimony agrees that Mr. Marsh made the principle here stated the rule of his life. Had he adopted a less self-respecting and self-conserving principle, and yielded to the calls that from below and above pour in upon everyone with their entreaties or demands for the sacrifice of self, it is certain that Mr. Marsh would never have been heard of outside his native State; while all the strength and inspiration that have come to thousands from his personality and his writings would have been squandered and lost.
Let us apply the principle to a simple case of everyday experience. When nature has fitted a young man for a business career, shall he, because his conscience has been stirred by descriptions of the unsaved condition of the heathen, and by his own apparently guilty unwillingness to go forth as a missionary, shall he accordingly decide that a refusal to do so would be an unpardonable sin, or even a sin at all? It is perfectly safe to say that any man who ought to become a missionary will never feel an unwillingness to do so. Do poets and painters and musicians have to be whipped up by a rebuking conscience before they will devote themselves to their art? Is it not rather the truth that they follow their calling in spite of every obstacle? One vocation is just as sacred as another; and the test of a man’s “call” is not a feeling of duty, but an overmastering inclination. Not self-sacrifice, but self-realization is the end of life. One man can “find himself” amid the privations of a missionary’s labors; another, as a civil engineer, just as truly develops his nature to the fullest; while, were they to exchange places, each would lament a life unsatisfied and wasted. It may be questioned whether a person can do good to others while he is doing only evil to himself; it is certainly questionable whether those can receive good who willingly accept such sacrifice.
The Churchyard.
This is his grave, not green as yet;
It has not been watered with tears, you see;
It is well for her that she can forget
In a few short years; and alas! for me.
Scarred, marred, by a life’s regret.
Her life seems fair, perhaps is so;
But I do not envy her happy lot.
For the heart must be wrong that cannot show
For the helpless dead some sorrowful spot
Torn deep by the bird of woe.
I nurse my grief; you call that weak;
But, life as it is, and death as it is,
I would bare my breast to the vulture’s beak;
Byes of the dying are pleading for this.
Now that the tongue cannot speak.
Rizpah was wrong to set such store
By the body of him she loved, you say.
For the soul had passed to a hither shore.
And all that was left was the earthly clay
You have not loved, I am sure.
Body and soul, well, all he knew
Came to his soul through that body of his.
And you cheat yourself with a dream untrue.
If you think that Reason can part like this
What wrapt in each other grew.
Body and soul, his soul was near
And stirred my soul, when his body I saw.
Till the dual self had become so dear
That my heart awoke, and I loved the law
Which linked them together here.
Body and soul, his body’s gone
So I miss his soul, that is all I know.
And the things that he loved to look upon
Have a power to pain, which perhaps will grow
To grief that is past a groan.
Yes, it is weak, but weak I wist
Are all who love, and who do not forget.
Ere the grave is green, the face they have kissed.
You strong, who feel sure that they live, may let
Your dead know they are not missed.
Miriam Daniell.
The Spinner.
Eluding words, eluding all things, yea.
Eluding love and hate, the Spirit stands,
And out of dust and darkness with strong hands
Weaves for herself a garment like the day.
Holding the threads of all results to lay
Across the loom of life in bars of gold.
Uncontaminated, passionless, and cold.
Ever she works and dreams not of decay;
But, when arrayed in consciousness complete,
Resting from toil, she sees with strange sad eyes
A bridegroom hasting toward her on swift feet
Resistless with the will to make her wise.
Death is his name, and he unravels light
Once more the naked soul is lost in night.
Miriam Daniell.
“In abolishing rent and interest, the last vestiges of old-time slavery, the Revolution abolishes at one stroke the sword of the executioner, the seal of the magistrate, the club of the policeman, the gunge of the exciseman, the erasing-knife of the department clerk, all those insignia of Politics, which young Liberty grinds beneath her heel.” — Proudhon.
The appearance in the editorial column of articles over other signatures than the editor’s initial indicates that the editor approves their central purpose and general tenor, though he does not hold himself responsible for every phrase or word. But the appearance in other parts of the paper of articles by the same or other writers by no means indicates that he disapproves them in any respect, such disposition of them being governed largely by motives of convenience.
Anarchy’s New Ally.
Natural science and technical skill, which have revolutionized so many things, may yet revolutionize political economy, and in a way little dreamed of. It has long been known that the water of the ocean contains gold and silver. The percentage of these metals, however, is so very small that at first thought it hardly seems worth noticing. And as a matter of fact little notice has been taken of it, but principally for the reason that the extraction of the metals by any advantageous method has been deemed an impossibility. Now comes the fairy Electricity, whose wand has already achieved so many wonders, and promises us a new miracle, which, though possibly less strange in itself than some others, will be more far-reaching in its results than all the telegraphs and telephones and railways imaginable. She proposes, by stretching long series of iron plates across channels and through various parts of the seas and ocean and running an electric current through them, to precipitate the gold and silver from the water upon these plates. It is estimated that one-half of one horse power is all that is needed for the purpose, and that it will consequently be possible to get gold in this way at a cost equal to but one per cent, of its present value.
But where does the revolution in political economy come in? some one may ask. Does the connection seem remote to you, my thoughtless friend? Then think a bit and listen. Every ton of sea water contains half a grain of gold and a grain and a half of silver. Has that an insignificant sound? If so, let us appeal to mathematics. We shall find that, at the rate of half a grain of gold and a grain and a half of silver to each ton of sea water, the entire seas and oceans of the world (I take the figures from a scientific journal) contain 21,595 billion tons of gold and 64,785 billion tons of silver. As good fish in the sea as ever were caught? I should say so, and much better. Why, this means, to speak at a venture, that there is several billion times as much gold in the water as has been extracted from the land up to date. Now, if this gold can be taken from the water, as is claimed, at the rate of a dollar’s worth for a cent, soon it will be scarcely worth its weight in good rag paper. The much defamed “rag baby” will be a very aristocratic personage beside it. In that case what will become of “the metal appointed by God in his goodness to serve as the currency of the world”? Would it be possible to more thoroughly revolutionize political economy than by dethroning gold? And could gold be more effectually dethroned than by reducing its value to insignificance? Its monetary privilege would disappear instantly and of necessity, and the era of free money would dawn, with all the tremendous blessings, physical, mental, and moral, that must follow in its wake. As Proudhon well says: “The demonetization of gold, the last idol of the Absolute, will be the greatest act of the revolution of the future.”
All hail, then, Electricity! On with your magnificent work! Lend a hand, you believers in dynamite; we offer you a better saviour. This good fairy is carrying on a “propaganda by deed” that discounts all your Ravachols. Success to her! May she force gold, the last bulwark of Archism, to become, through offering itself for sacrifice on the altar of Liberty, the greatest of Anarchists, the final emancipator of the race!
Money, said Adam Smith, in one of those flashes of his intellectual genius which have so illuminated man’s economic path, money is “a wagon-way through the air.” If Electricity shall make of this wagon-way a railway, it will be the most signal, the most useful of her exploits. T.
Report of the Secretary of the Society for the Mitigation of the Acerbity of Impecuniosity, for the year ending May 31. 1892.
During the past year it has been the effort of the Society to extend its usefulness into hitherto untried fields.
Going beyond the sale of old clothes at low, but not unremunerative, prices, the Society has undertaken to educate to some extent the tastes of our less fortunate brothers and sisters.
Two principles the Society has laid down for its guidance: — the first, that nothing, however trifling, is to be given gratis. Free gifts are demoralizing to the recipient, and have but one result, the destruction of individual energy, enterprise, and independence, and the erection of a class of habitual paupers. The second principle is that it is the taste of the common people that is to be educated.
Even upon a small income, — and that of our dear, but unfortunate, friends ranges down to as low as three dollars a day; often indeed lower, — but, even upon a pittance, a person of cultivated tastes can subsist in luxury, where the ordinary uneducated taste would starve.
In three directions the Society has tried to educate the tastes of the masses:
1. Clothing.
2. Food and Drink.
3. Personal Habits.
As to clothing, little is to be said, as that has been the especial field of the Society’s work hitherto. Old clothes, contributed by the generous hands of friends, are sold at very small prices, in accordance with principle No. 1. The mere acquaintance with clothing of fine material and careful make will, we are confident, educate our poor brothers to save their small means until they can purchase better clothes in the first instance: a business suit at $60, it is well known, is more economical than two at half the price.
The experience with fine shoes too, ever» though half-worn, will no doubt induce our friends to forsake the coarse and degrading: “brogans” which they now seem to prefer.
In the matter of drink, we have tried to-introduce the elegant and inexpensive drink, so popular among the French, eau sucrée. It is composed of a glass of water with one or more lumps of sugar, flavored with a drop or two of orange-flower essence. The Society sells orange-flower essence at 15 cents a bottle, which is 5 cents less than the market price. A profit of 1½ cents per bottle still remains. The Society has sold during the past year two (2) dozen such bottles.
The Society has on its books the names of several habitual drinkers of eau sucrée who are out of work. The attention of manufacturers and others is called to these good people, as their abstinence from the usual alcoholic drinks enables them to work for from 20 to 25 per cent, cheaper than others.
In the matter of food, the Society has procured a portable kitchen with a charcoal fire, which is carried about by some poor beneficiaries of the Society, who are, we trust temporarily, out of a job. These persons carry the apparatus to the room of some tenement house where the demonstration is to be held, and young ladies from the cooking school attached to the Church of the Poor Carpenter show to others, in a spirit of Christian endeavor, what they themselves have just learned. Such demonstrations cannot but be of benefit to the poor in educating their taste, and at the same time they give an opportunity to the young ladies of our church to complete their skill by actual practice. The dishes are sold for the benefit of the Society at the store of the Woman’s Work Sale Association. The chief difficulty in the way has been the total lack of spices, olive oil, citron, Worcestershire sauce, truffles, and such things, which, though trifling in themselves, are essential to delicate cookery, but which are usually lacking in the dwellings of the poor. Another difficulty is that, after the dishes are completed, those for whose instructions they have been made, and who are invariably permitted to taste them, seem to find difficulty in perceiving any superiority in their favor over that of the coarse stews to which they are accustomed. This extraordinary lack of discriminatory power in the gustatory organs has been investigated by a noble and excellent physician, who has long been one of our stanchest upholders. In his opinion, it is due to the foul air in the lodgings of the poor, and he has found a compound which will entirely restore the normal powers of taste. His remedy is sold at $1.00 a bottle, or 6 for $5.00.
As to personal habits, effort has been made to popularize the use of tooth brushes. Keenly aware of the smallness of means which prevents our friends from purchasing tooth brushes, we have arranged to rent them at a rental of one cent per use. After each use the brushes are thoroughly cleaned and disinfected with bichloride of mercury. At present the Society is the owner of twenty-five tooth brushes which are used by one hundred and fifteen of the poor. During the coming year the Society proposes to rent manicure sets upon the same plan.
Summary.
| Old clothes distributed, 716 pieces | $325. |
| Meals prepared — 54 | 42. |
| Orange flower water, — bottles 24 | .36 |
| Tooth brushes loaned, — 115 persons 200 times | 330. |
| Total | $697.36 |
Treasurer’s Report.
| Receipts from sales, etc. | $697.36 |
| Donations from various sources | 2,115.72 |
| $2,813.08 | |
| Secretary’s salary | $1500. |
| Treasurer’s “ | 1500. |
| Office and other expenses | 800. |
| Total | $3800. |
Deficit, $1,986.02.
A. Skinner, Treasurer.
We trust that the dear Lord will inspire some faithful heart to come forward to make up this small deficit. In such emergencies under His will, such relief has not been lacking in the past, and we trust that it will not be lacking now. Let each Christian think for a moment whether it is not his part to contribute a trifle to aid an association which aims at winning for all who contribute to it, in the great day, the sweet words from His Divine lips: “Come, ye blessed, for I was ill and in prison and ye came unto me, nude and ye clothed me.”
U. B. Blode,
Secretary.
Pour copie conforme,
John Beverley Robinson.
A Specimen of State Socialism.
[Sanitary Era.]
By the courtesy of the Post-Office Department we have received the United States Postal Guide for April, containing, with much other information, copies of the bills now before Congress relating to improvements and modifications of the postal system. One of these is so monstrously retrograde and injurious to some of the most vital public interests that we are surprised to see it still under consideration, especially after the general roasting it has received from the press of the country.
Of course, our reference is to the provision to restrict the sample copies of any publication, mailable at pound rate, to one-half the number mailed at the same time to regular subscribers.
The “Sanitary Era” is one among hundreds of scientific, professional, religious, or philanthropic publications which can in no event expect to make money, and are issued through the self-denial of individuals or associations deeply concerned for some form of public good, and hoping only to gather from the widely scattered individuals in sympathy with their special object — rarely averaging two or three in a town (earnest sanitarians, for instance) — sufficient patronage to pay their expenses, and perhaps afford, or perhaps not, a meagre salary to a hard-working and enthusiastic editor. No one will question but that these pioneers of the higher progress in every respect constitute a public interest of no secondary importance, deserving all the encouragement which Government can legitimately afford.
What does this bill propose to do with all this invaluable class of publications? To answer this question, suppose they average one thousand cash subscribers, — a very large estimate for the facts. Being mostly monthlies, they will be permitted to cast upon the waters 6,000 sample copies in a year. With the best possible selection of classes supposed to include those in sympathy with the objects of the publication, these 6,000 samples may catch five or six subscribers; by no means more. Excluding periodicals, editors, and publishers that are already famous and popular, one subscriber to a thousand samples will be acknowledged by every experienced publisher to be more than an average yield. In short, the select few in every considerable community who could be interested in any specialty of a high order must be sifted out of the whole population of the United States by a universal “sampling” to the better elements of society by the hundred thousand. The cost of printing these samples, and transporting them at one dollar a hundredweight, is the utmost that can be paid, by any and every means at the command of the promoters.
The answer to the question, then, is this: Under the proposed law, the average publication, of this important class, would be permitted to get its second thousand of subscribers, and begin to pay its current expenses from its proceeds, in about one hundred and seventy-five years.
And what of future ventures of this noble order That chapter can be written now, in four monosyllables: — I here can be none. The start allowed with one hundred paying subscribers will be hard enough to meet; but what will be the use of distributing six hundred samples a year? The result would be nil.
It would be much less harmful to the higher interest of periodical literature to exclude all samples from the second-claps rate. This would at least impose no unequal disability on the younger and physically weaker publications; whereas the allowance of samples to one-half the paying list, while doing these publications absolutely no good, would still enable the publications with very large circulation (rarely very valuable ones) to deluge the mails with free samples, and maintain an ever-narrowing monopoly in the control of public intelligence.
What is the object of it all? The title of the bill says “to prevent advertising sheets being mailed at second-class rates.” Taking it for what it means, instead of what it says (as we must do at other points, if we are to make any meaning in particular out of the singular mass of obscurities and contradictions which the writer of this bill has produced), the object is to prevent a merchant, for instance, mailing his own private periodical for mere advertising purposes, on the footing of a public journal. And the Government, forsooth, is reduced to the necessity of killing hundreds of valuable public journals, in order to eliminate a few palpable shams! If the Post-Office Department cannot find out whether a publication is or is not shaped to the public interest in the main, what can it do? If it can do that, what need it do more, with regard to this matter?
The evil and the danger at which the blow is aimed are both vastly exaggerated, and at worst can be better dealt with in other ways. Any publication will speak for itself, by its own public merits, professed purposes, and adaptation to those purposes; and if it fails so to clearly justify its existence, while yielding a suspicion of a private axe to grind, let its true owners be found, and warned that they must put a very marked public value into their work before it can be entered as second-class matter. Very few advertising houses ever did or ever will go to the expense of producing a valuable public journal; and when they do so, — as a few have done, — it is because their business itself enables them to understand and perform the work better than any one else could do the same, and they are thus rendering the public the most valuable service, of that special kind, that the public can in any way acquire. But the narrow, technical, purblind officialism petrified in the standing personnel of the Post-Office can see in work like this only something to be savagely arrested by discriminating exclusion from a common public privilege. A Congress of men more broadly versed in affairs and judgments ought, surely, to prove superior to views of this small-bore type.
There are other silly things in this bill; but we have already dwelt too long upon it. One of them, however, barely needs mentioning; it is proposed to exclude entirely from the second-class any publication that includes its sample copies, whether more or less, in its professed circulation! That must be kept secret — at least from advertisers. Talk of paternal government! Any parent possessed of such senseless, meddlesome, and tyrannical notions of government as these ought to be placed under the supervision of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Walt Whitman.
[Ferdinand Freiligrath in Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, May 10, 1868.]
Walt Whitman! Who is Walt Whitman?
The answer is: a poet! A new American poet! His admirers say: the first, the only poet whom America has yet produced. The only specifically American poet. No traveler in the beaten paths of the European muse, no; fresh from the prairie and the settlements, fresh from the sea-coast and the great rivers, fresh from the crowded throngs of the wharves and the cities, fresh from the battlefields of the South, the scent of the sail that produced him in hair and beard and dress; unlike anyone who has yet appeared, standing firm and self-reliant on his own American feet, announcing great things grandly, if often strangely. And further still the admirers: Walt Whitman is to them the only poet in whom time, teeming, toiling, troubled time, has found its expression; the poet par excellence; the poet.
Thus, on the one side, the admirers, among whom we meet even an Emerson; on the other, of course, the fault-finders, the traducers. Beside the unmeasured praise, the enthusiastic appreciation, bitter, biting scorn, malicious defamation.
Of course that does not disturb the poet. He accepts praise as something due him, and repays scorn with scorn. He believes in himself; his self-assertion is boundless. He is the one man (says his English publisher, W. M. Rossetti) who entertains and professes respecting himself the grave conviction that he is the actual and prospective founder of a new poetic literature, and a great one, — a literature proportioned to the material vastness and the unmeasured destinies of America; he believes that the Columbus of the Continent or the Washington of the States was not more truly than himself in the future a founder and upbuilder of this America. Surely a sublime conviction, and expressed more than once in magnificent words, — none more so than the lines beginning
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble.
That sounds proud. Is the man justified in speaking so? Let us approach him! Let us look into his life and work! Let us open his book!
Are these verses? The lines are cut up like verses, indeed, but they are no verses. No metre, no rhyme, no strophes. Rhythmical prose, prose poetry. At first sight rough, unwieldy, formless; but nevertheless not wanting in euphony for the finer ear. The language plain, harsh, downright, calling all things by their true name, unterrified, sometimes obscure. The tone rhapsodic, prophetic, often uneven, mingling the sublime with the commonplace to the last degree. Notwithstanding all differences, he occasionally recalls our Hamann, or Carlyle’s oracular wisdom, or the “Paroles d’un Croyant.” In all we see the Bible, — its language, not its faith.
And what does the poet offer us in this form? First, himself, his ego, Walt Whitman. But this ego is a part of America, a part of the earth, a part of mankind, a part of the all. As such he feels himself, and, connecting the greatest with the minutest, always starting from America and always returning to America (the future belongs only to a free people!), he unrolls before us a grand world-panorama. Through this individual. Walt Whitman, and his Americanism, we should say, runs a cosmic streak, as is characteristic of contemplative spirits who, in the presence of infinity, have passed lonely days by the shores of the ocean, lonely nights under the starry heavens of the prairie. He finds himself in all and all in himself. He, the one man, Walt Whitman, is mankind and the world. And the world and mankind are to him one great poem. What he sees and hears, what he touches, whatever comes in contact with him, the Lowest, the least, the commonplace, — all is to him symbol and sign of the higher, of something spiritual. Or rather: matter and spirit, the real and the ideal, are to him one and the same. So he stands by virtue of his own nature; so he passes on singing; so, a proud, free man, and only a man, he opens up universal social and political perspectives.
A strange phenomenon! We confess that it affects us, disquiets us, and does not let go of us. But at the same time we feel that our judgment concerning it is not final, that we are still under the spell of the first impression. In the meantime we, probably the first in Germany, must at least provisionally take notice of the existence and work of this new force. It deserves that our poets and thinkers look more closely upon this strange new comrade who threatens to overthrow our entire ars poctica, all our æsthetic theories and canons. Indeed, after listening to the rustle of these serious leaves, after familiarizing ourselves with the full-toned sounds of these rhapsodic sentences which rush in upon us like the waves of the ocean in uninterrupted series, our conventional verse-making, our forcing thought into traditional forms, our playing with jingle and rhyme, our scanning, our sonnetizing, and building of strophes and stanzas, appears almost childish. Have we indeed reached the point where life in poetry too imperatively demands new forms of expression? Has the age so much and such important things to say that the old vessels no longer suffice for the new contents? Are we in the presence of a poetry of the future, just as we have for years been told that we are in the presence of a music of the future? And is Walt Whitman more than Richard Wagner?
Now.
There is no after life for blighted roses.
No place to finish interrupted songs.
No heaven where a gracious god reposes.
No one or here or there to right our wrongs.
Ah! then, seize swift your sword, shout battle-cry.
And, if they lay you low and if you die.
Why, I will still wage war with savage spear.
Nor spend one idle moment by your bier.
Miriam Daniell.
The Herd.
Now once more, with roar and rattle.
We again behold the battle,
’Twixt the long-eared, thick-skulled cattle.
And to determine — what?
Whether Democrats shall steal
All their rags and their last meal
(Meanwhile the patriots ’plaud with zeal),
Or Republicans shall skin
Them of their all, except their sin
(To tumble they will ne’er begin).
Aren’t they a lovely lot?
Charles E. Nichols.
Boston, Mass., June 8, 1892.
Don’t keep Liberty to yourself, share it with others!
Liberty’s Library
Leonard E. Read: Accent On The Right: To Frederic Bastiat (1801–1850), who sought for truth rather than outcome and never witnessed the fruits his labor bore. Obedience to conscience was his first rule; we witness the results.
Leonard E. Read: Anything That’s Peaceful: Many favor peace but not many favor the things that make for peace. — Thomas à Kempis
Leonard E. Read: Awake for Freedom’s Sake: Finally, share with others. Forget about “reforming” them! The more we share, the more we learn. This is in the interest of self and freedom!
Leonard E. Read: Castles in the Air: If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; there is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. — Henry David Thoreau
Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State: Political philosophy is dominated by a myth, the myth of the necessity of the state. The state is considered necessary for the provision of many things, but primarily for peace and security. In this provocative book, Gerard Casey argues that social order can be spontaneously generated, that such spontaneous order is the norm in human society and that deviations from the ordered norms can be dealt with without recourse to the coercive power of the state.
Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers: Murray Rothbard: Murray Rothbard (1926–1995) was an economist, historian, philosopher, and legal theoretician. His work was unified by a passionate and resolute commitment to a libertarianism that may be characterized as ‘anarcho-capitalism’ and which implied a belief that even the legal system may be provided privately without the need for a coercive collective authority. Hence, anarcho-capitalists envisage a society where the traditional role of government is wholly subsumed by private, profit-making enterprises and all social relationships are ultimately founded upon consent.
