Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Let those factories and workshops be erected, not for making profits by selling shoddy or useless and noxious things to enslaved Africans, but to satisfy the unsatisfied needs of millions of Europeans.

You will admire the amount of sound knowledge which your children will acquire by your side, the rapid growth of their intelligence, and the facility with which they will grasp the laws of Nature, animate and inanimate.

If you make yourselves the soil, and partly the temperature and the moisture which each crop requires, you will see that to grow the yearly food of a family, under rational conditions of culture, requires so little labour that it might…

For thousands of years in succession to grow one’s food was the burden, almost the curse, of mankind.

But human genius, stimulated by our modern Renaissance, has already indicated new paths to follow.

When we look back on ages past, and see there the same sufferings, we may say that perhaps then they were unavoidable on account of the ignorance which prevailed.

What floods of useless sufferings deluge every so-called civilised land in the world!

From the age of thirteen we compel the girl--a child yet--to work as a “woman” at the weaving-loom, or to stew in the poisoned, over-heated air of a cotton-dressing factory, or, perhaps, to be poisoned in the death chambers of a…

We all know that the child ought, at least, to be familiarised with the forces of Nature which some day he will have to utilise; that he ought to be prepared to keep pace in his life with the steady progress of science and technics; that…

One month of work every year would be quite sufficient to provide the worker with a healthy dwelling.

Is not bread and dripping the staple food of more than one-half of English children?

But the researches of Engel (at Berlin) and his many followers tell us that the workman’s family has to spend one full half of its yearly earnings--that is, to give six months of labour, and often more--to provide its food.

In industrially developed countries, a couple of months’ work, or even much less than that, would be sufficient to produce for a family a rich and varied vegetable and animal food.

And now, in the presence of all these conquests--what is the reality of things?

It has been won by the obscure tillers of the soil, from whose hands greedy States, landlords and middlemen snatch the fruit of their labour even before it is ripe; by obscure teachers who only too often fall crushed under the weight of…

It is an acquisition of the times we live in--an acquisition which has been won despite the innumerable obstacles always thrown in the way of every initiative mind.

Far from being inferior to the “specialised” young persons manufactured by our universities, the complete human being, trained to use his brain and his hands, excels them, on the contrary, in all respects, especially as an initiator and an…

Or, are they not mere wasteful survivals from a past that was plunged into darkness, ignorance and oppression, and never took into consideration the economical and social value of the human being?

Readers who have had the patience to follow the facts accumulated in this book, especially those who have given them a thoughtful attention, will probably feel convinced of the immense powers over the productive forces of Nature that man…

It would freely take its flight towards the highest regions of progress compatible with human nature.

It would not know the duality of conscience which permeates our life and stifles every noble effort.

And such a community would not know misery amidst wealth.

Free pursuit in new branches of art and knowledge, free creation, and free development thus might be fully guaranteed.

The so-called “division of labour” has grown under a system which condemned the masses to toil all the day long, and all the life long, at the same wearisome kind of labour.

How much more medicine would trust to hygiene, and how much less to prescriptions, if the young doctors were the nurses of the sick and the nurses received the education of the doctors of our time!