It can be called an evil only in the sense that needful and not especially healthful labor can be called a curse. Government is invasion, and the State is the embodiment of invasion in an individual, or band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area. The Anarchists are opposed to all government, and especially to the State as the worst governor and chief invader. I may add, in conclusion, that very probably the disposition of the Individualist to give greater prominence than does the Anarchist to the necessity of organization for protection is due to the fact that he seems to see less clearly than the Anarchist that the necessity for defence against individual invaders is largely and perhaps, in the end, wholly due to the oppressions of the invasive State, and that when the State falls, criminals will begin to disappear. Whatever else Anarchism may mean, it means that State coercion of peaceable citizens, into co-operation in restraining the activity of Bill Sikes, is to be condemned and ought to be abolished.
Anarchism implies the right of an individual to stand aside and see a man murdered or a woman raped.
It implies the right of the would-be passive accomplice of aggression to escape all coercion. Qua Anarchist, he is within his right in withholding such co-operation, in leaving others to bear the burden of resistance to aggression, or in leaving the aggressor to triumph unchecked. Individualism, on the other hand, would not only restrain the active invader up to the point necessary to restore freedom to others, but would also coerce the man who would otherwise be a passive witness of, or conniver at, aggression into co-operation against his more active colleague. The foregoing paragraph occurs in any ably-written article by Mr. J. H. Levy in the Personal Rights Journal . The writer's evident intention was to put Anarchism in an unfavorable light by stating its principles, or one of them, in a very offensive way.