"Anarchy," Tucker insisted, "means a slow growth of the principles of liberty
and justice; the gradual dropping of the 'thou shalts' and the 'thou shalt
nots' of laws and consitutions as men slowly learn that it is better to be
governed by reasonable and intelligent conviction from within than by 
compulsion from without..." And the first step in this procedure, he held,
is to disabuse oneself of the idea that government, even when that government
takes the form of parliamentary democracy functioning after the principle of
majority rule and minority rights, is capable of assuring the individual 
freedom or of brining about a condition of harmonious relations among people.
If mankind is ever to realize justice in its actual social relations, the
notion that the individual citizen has a moral obligation to the State must
be completely abandoned.  We anarchists, Tucker proclaimed, "look upon all
obligations, not as moral, but as social, and even then not really as 
obligations except as these have been consciously and voluntarily assumed."  
And this means nothing less than that the State, which is to say formal
government itself, must be discarded as an instrument of social control.


William O. Reichert; "Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty", 
anthology by Michael Coughlin Press. Pages 170-171.




