our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honor false
in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good
reasons; but that does not make my attacks any less encouraging
or helpful to people who are its enemies for bad reasons. The
existing order may shriek that if I tell the truth about it, some
foolish person may drive it to become still worse by trying to
assassinate it. I cannot help that, even if I could see what
worse it could do than it is already doing. And the disadvantage
of that worst even from its own point of view is that society,
with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and
starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is
prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our
natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which
every Russian student can make, and every Russian grenadier has
learnt to handle in Manchuria, lies in the fact that brave and
resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins
for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough
to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until
their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is,
simply not to outrage their consciences.

Do not be afraid that they will not make allowances. All men make
very large allowances indeed before they stake their own lives in
a war to the death with society. Nobody demands or expects the
millennium. But there are two things that must be set right, or
we shall perish, like Rome, of soul atrophy disguised as empire.
The first is, that the daily ceremony of dividing the wealth of
the country among its inhabitants shall be so conducted that no
crumb shall go to any able-bodied adults who are not producing by
their personal exertions not only a full equivalent for what they