IX GOVERNMENT \. \ :, 



person be in a minority of one, is as brutal a 

 usurper as ever exercised monarchical tyranny; 

 and, whether a man shall so much as recognise 

 the right of another to the freedom which he him- 

 self exercises, is to be left to his private judgment. 

 As all property is robbery, so is all government 

 from without, tyranny. 



In this country, where the influence of the 

 pedantry of the Absolute is so much trammelled 

 by common sense and more or less experience of 

 the difference between the nature of things and a 

 priori assumptions, Individualism has, usually, 

 stopped short of the conclusions of Stirner and of 

 Bakounine, beyond which, so far as I can see, the 

 a priori method can hardly carry its most hardened 

 practitioner. Nevertheless, the "party of In- 

 dividual Liberty," of which Mr. Auberon Herbert 

 is the spokesman, must, I think, be classified as 

 Anarchist ; l though the definition of their concep- 

 tion of the relations of the individual to govern- 

 ment looks, at first sight, as if it meant no more 

 than limited Individualism. 



Each man and woman are to be free to direct their faculties 

 and their energies according to their own sense of what is right 



1 Let me remind the reader that I use "anarchy" in its 

 philosophical sense. Heaven forbid that I should be supposed to 

 suggest that Mr. Herbert and his friends have the remotest 

 connection with those too " absolute " political philosophers who 

 desire to add the force of dynamite to that of persuasion. It 

 would be as reasonable to connect Monarchists with murder, on 

 the strength of the proceedings of a Philip the Second, or a 

 Lewis the Fourteenth. 



