Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/267

himself an anarchist, and yet has a violent desire to govern. He seems bold, but he is timid; his boldness consists in mere words, and his ideas are timorous. He is thought dogmatic, but he is skeptical; his skepticism is in substance, and his dogmatism in form. He solemnly announces that he is about to proclaim new and strange truths, but he simply echoes old and exploded errors. His apothegm, property is theft, has charmed the French by its air of originality and ingenuity; but it may be well to remind them that on this side of the Pyrenees this saying is very ancient. From the days of Viriato up to the present time, every highwayman who threatens the life of the traveler if he does not give up to him his purse, is said to commit a theft, and, like a thief, he takes what he can get. Mr. Proudhon has only stolen his apothegm from the Spanish banditti, as they steal the purse of the traveler. In the same way that he professes to be original when he is in fact a plagiarist, so he calls himself the prophet of the future, when he is only the apostle of the past. His principal artifice consists in expressing the idea that he affirms with the word which contradicts it. For example, every one calls despotism, despotism. Mr. Proudhon calls it anarchy; and when he has given the thing affirmed its contradictory name, with this name he combats its friends, and with the thing itself its adversaries. By his communist sentiments, which are at the bottom of his system, he terrifies capitalists, and by the word anarchy he frightens and puts to flight his friends the communists; then he looks around him to observe the effect produced, and seeing the first utterly dismayed, and the second silenced, he ridicules them all. Another artful device which he makes use of is to adopt a portion of each