The Social Monster

By Johann Most

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In the monarchical countries of Europe people ,are still very enthusiastic for what they call the state of the people -- the republic-- and dream of the establishment of such an it institution as a means to solve the social difficulties which press upon them. .

That enthusiasm must be spent, that illusion must burst before time- comes s far a really effective anarchist agitation, and such an opportunity will hardly present itself until a practical experiment with the dream has been made.

In France the laboring man had a taste of what the state of the people can and will do for him, already in 1848, but the taste was not sweet. In 1871 he proved to have made some progress. He tried to establish the independent commune in opposition to the state. But the attempt failed and the plan is insufficient.

After that time the "republican" government has taken good care to extinguish every spark of faith in the idea of a state of the people from, his breast. Still, France is not through with the experiment.

In America, on the contrary, the state in which everything is done "by the people and for the people," has existed since more than a century; and who does not see that the true historical significance of this huge experiment is the terrible warning, it gives all future statesmen?

To the government-cars are harnessed corruption, egotism, intrigue, that mean submissiveness which is the piteous inheritance of suppression through generations, and nothing else. All noble hearts, all intellectual heads have long ago turned away from the whole government-machinery with [unreadable] disgust, and the poll they hate as the plague.

Now, does anybody suppose that such men are not, somehow or other, perhaps unconsciously, tolerably well prepared for the ideas of anarchism?

They are! Their faith in the goodness and power and wisdom and justice of the state they have given up long ago as a frivolous superstition, and now they have only left a choice between that pessimism which gives up humanity in despair and --- anarchism.

That is the true reason for the terrible hatred which the conservative or reactionary party here bears to the anarchists, and which, in Chicago, led them to commit one of the meanest political crimes on record.

It is observations of this kind, which: have dictated us our method of agitation, and our adversaries among our brethren had better examine the former before they condemn the latter-- as un-American.

Probably the result would be, that they immediately join us in our battle against the church, the state and the bourse, that “holy trinity," which must