Moribund Society and Anarchy by Jean Grave

We have demonstrated -- at least we hope so -- the right of every individual, without exception, to evolve without constraint; the right of everyone to satisfy his needs fully; and hence the illegitimacy of authority, property, and all the institutions which the exploiting class has established to defend those privileges which can only be secured by the spoliation of the masses. It remains for us to examine the means for overturning this state of things which we attack, for founding the society which we demand in the future, and to prove the legitimacy of these means; for many persons who admit our criticisms of the existing social condition, who applaud our vision of a harmonious world, fly into transports at the idea of employing violence. In their opinion it would be better to proceed step by step through persuasion, seeking gradually to ameliorate existing conditions. "Everything in nature," they tell us, "is transformed by evolution; why, then, not proceed in the same way in sociology instead of wishing for sudden ruptures? While seeking to transform society by force, you risk wrecking everything without producing any good; above all you risk getting crushed yourself; bringing about a reaction not less violent than the attack and thus causing a setback to progress for several centuries. " This reasoning which is addressed to us by honest men, who discuss solely with a desire for enlightenment, rests upon a semblance of truth and merits being considered.

It is true that everything in nature is transformed by a slow process of evolution, by an uninterrupted sequence of progress acquired little by little, imperceptible if followed throughout its course, bursting upon the eye only when we pass suddenly from one period to another. It is thus that life progressed upon our globe, it is thus that man emerged from animality; and therefore it is that man in the nineteenth century no longer resembles man in the age of stone. But one thing only is ignored, viz., that in order that this evolution should go on without shocks it must meet no obstacles in its way; if it does, and the acquired impulse is stronger than the obstacles, it breaks them; if not, it is abortive. Every time that a shock occurs between progress and some existing thing there is a revolution, whether it be the swallowing up of a continent or the disappearance of a molecule in an organism -- the size of the thing does not matter. Nowadays it is admitted that great geologic revolutions, far from having been provoked by frightful convulsions and sudden changes proceeding from violent propulsions in the interior of our globe, are but the product of slow causes and imperceptible changes which have continued their effects through thousands of centuries. We know, likewise, that these same causes which have brought the earth to that condition in which we behold it are continuing their operation in our own days and preparing a new transformation. Everywhere the rains gnaw into the mountains, filter through them, and disintegrate the hardest granite. Nothing reveals the slow work of disintegration which is going on, or betrays it to the eye of the tourist. Generations pass away without any appreciable modification being noticed. But some fine day the mountain crumbles, dragging down forests and villages, filling up the beds of rivers, altering their courses, sowing ruin and desolation in the cataclysm. Yet the excitement once over, life soon resumes its course, issuing stronger and more intense than ever from every pore of this wreckage of materials. The evolution took place very slowly, but there came a moment when it could no longer continue without imperiling the existing order of things; it continued its course, and the mountain, undermined, crumbled, overwhelming everything upon its surface.