Eltzbacher's repetitiousness has no opportunity to become prominent here, and the man is not at all dull in choosing and translating his quotations. On the contrary, his fondness for apt illustrations is a great help toward making the compilation constantly readable, as well as toward making the reader's impressions of the Anarchistic teachings vivid and definite.

I do not mean to say that this book can take the place of a consultation of the original sources. For instance, the Bakunin chapter follows next after the Stirner chapter; but the exquisite contrariness of almost every word of Bakunin to Stirner's teaching can be appreciated only by those who have read Stirner's book—Eltzbacher's quotations are on a different aspect of Stirner's teaching from that which applies against Bakunin. (Stirner and Bakunin, it will be noted, are the only Anarchist leaders against whom Eltzbacher permits himself a disrespectful word before he has presented their doctrines.) It is to be hoped that many who read this book will go on to examine the sources themselves. Meanwhile, here is an excellent introduction, and the chronological arrangement makes it easy to watch the historical development and see whether the later schools of Anarchism assail the State more effectively than the earlier.

I have not reserved any expressions of praise for the small part of the book which comes after the compiled chapters, because it calls for none. All Eltzbacher's weak points come out in this concluding summary; the best that can be said for it is that it deserves careful attention, and that the author continues to be oftener right than wrong. But now that he has gathered all his knowledge he wants it to amount to omniscience, and most imprudently shuts his eyes to the places where there is nothing under his feet. He charges men with error for not using in his sense a term whose definition he has not undertaken to determine. He accepts all too unquestioningly such statements as fit most conveniently into his scheme of method. His most glaring offence in this direction is his classification of the Anarchist-Communist doctrines as mere prediction and not the expression of a will or demand or approval or disapproval of anything, simply because the fashionableness of evolutionism and of fatalism has led the leaders of that school to prefer to state their doctrine in terms of prediction. Eltzbacher has forgotten to compare his judgment with the actions of the men he judges; solvitur ambulando; if Kropotkin's proposition were merely predictive and not pragmatic, it would have less trouble with the police than it has. Again, he does one of the most indiscreet things that are possible to a votary of strict method when he asserts repeatedly that he has listed not merely all that is to be found but all that could possibly exist under a certain category. For instance, he declares that every possible affirmative doctrine of property must be either private property, or common property in the wherewithal for production and private property in the wherewithal for consumption, or common property. Why should not a scheme of common property in the things that are wanted by all men and private property in the things that are wanted only by some men have as high a rank in the classification as has Eltzbacher's second class? A look at the quotations from Kropotkin will show that I have not drawn much on my own ingenuity in conceiving such a scheme as supposable. He claims to have listed all the standpoints from which Anarchism has been or can be propounded or judged, yet he has omitted legitimism, the doctrine that a political authority which is to claim our respect and obedience must appear to have originated by a legitimate foundation and not by usurpation. The great part that legitimism has played in history is notorious; and it lends itself very readily to the Anarchist's purpose, since some governments are so well known to have originated in usurpation and others are so easily suspected of it. Nay, legitimism is in fact a potent factor in shaping the most up-to-date Anarchism of our time; for it is largely concerned in Lysander Spooner's doctrine of juries, of which some slight account is given in Eltzbacher's quotations from Tucker. And he claims to have recited all the important arguments that sustain Anarchism: where has he mentioned the argument from the evil that the State does in interfering with social and economic experimentation? or the argument from the fact that reforms in the State are necessarily in a democracy, and ordinarily in a monarchy, very slow in coming to pass, and when they do come to pass they necessarily come with all-disturbing suddenness? or the argument from the evil of separating people by the boundary lines which the State involves? or the fact that war would be almost inconceivable if the States were replaced by voluntary and non-monopolistic organizations, since such organizations could have no "jurisdiction" or control of territory to fight for, and war for any other cause has long been unknown among civilized nations? By these and other such unwarranted claims of absolute completeness, and by the conclusions based on these pasteboard premises, Eltzbacher makes it necessary to read his final chapters with all possible independence of judgment.

It remains for me to say something of my own work on this book. I have consulted the originals of some of the works cited—such as circumstances have permitted—and given the quotations not by translation from Eltzbacher's German but direct from the originals. The particulars are as follows:

Of Godwin's "Political Justice" I used an American reprint of the second British edition. This second edition is greatly revised and altered from the first, which Eltzbacher used. Godwin calls our attention to this, and especially informs us that the first edition did not in some important respects represent the views which he held at the time of its publication, since the earlier pages were printed before the later were written, and during the writing of the book he changed his mind about some of the principles he had asserted in the earlier chapters. In the second edition, he says, the views presented in the first part of the book have been made consistent with those in the last part, and all parts have been thoroughly revised. It will astonish nobody, therefore, that I found it now and then impossible to identify in my copy the passages translated by Eltzbacher from the first edition. In particular, I got the impression that what Eltzbacher quotes about promises, from the first part of the book, is one of those sections which Godwin says he retracts and no longer believed in even at the time he wrote the later chapters of the first edition. If so, a bit of the foundation for Eltzbacher's ultimate classification disappears. Besides giving the pages of the first edition as in Eltzbacher, I have added in brackets the page numbers of the copy I used, wherever I could identify them. Throughout the book brackets distinguish footnotes added by me from Eltzbacher's own, and in a few places I have used them in the text to indicate Eltzbacher's deviations from the wording of his original, of which matter I will speak again in a moment.

The passages from Proudhon's works I translated from the original French as given in the collected edition of his "Œuvres complètes." In this edition some of the works differ only in pagination from the editions which Eltzbacher used, while others have been extensively revised. I know of no changes of essential doctrine.

Since in Stirner's case German is the original language, I have accepted as my original the quotations given by Eltzbacher. It is probable that they are occasionally condensed; but a fairly faithful memory, and the fact that it is less than a year since I was reading the proofs of my