SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM 165 



the City. In England an attempt has been 

 made to give this defunct phrase a new lease 

 of life by the "Free Labor Association" an 

 organization which had this in common with 

 our "Citizen's Alliance" that it sought to en- 

 courage the dear good workingman to keep 

 out of the "tyrannical" labor unions. 



"Freedom of contract" or, as it is sometimes 

 called "Voluntary Co-operation" never ex- 

 isted in capitalist society and has never been 

 anything but a grim joke or a plain lie. Where 

 is the freedom or voluntaryism of the worker 

 who must work for what he can get or starve 

 like a dog in the street? 



The effects of "free Competition" in Eng- 

 land in the early days of capitalism, where it 

 was most free^ were such that none but a 

 fiend would wish them recalled. The "might 

 have been" halo with which present day in- 

 dividualists seek to surround this principle, is 

 a midsummer night's dream that never had 

 any existence in the world of reality and can 

 never be realized, except in the phantasmo- 

 goria of their own ideological imaginations. 



Individualism in all its forms has become 

 an anachronism. The deified ego of Max Stir- 

 ner, which imagines itself sitting enthroned 

 on the pinnacle of the universe, directing the 

 motions of the planet Jupiter by crooking its 



