Things seem to be freest in Nature when no artificial arrangement is interposed to prevent their association in the manner most conducive to their growth and most in harmony with the conditions of their being. If this be so, it will apply to man and to society. Man is the cosmos in miniature. Society has been his greatest curse in one respect. It has coaxed him into selling his individuality, and burying it in collectivity. As soon as a man is prompted to follow some wholesale law of growth, his neighbor stands ready with the warning: "But you must not forget that you are a member of society; you do not own yourself; society owns you." This is the most fatal heresy that ever seduced the race.
Source: What is Freedom? and When Am I Free? (1886)
[link] #764The Anarchist does not want to destroy all existing institutions with a crash and then inaugurate the substituting process on their ruins. He simply asks to be let alone in substituting false systems now, so that they may gradually fall to pieces by their own dead weight. He asks the humble privilege of being allowed to set up a free bank in peaceable competition with the government subsidized class bank on the opposite corner. He asks the privilege of establishing a private post office in fair competition with the governmentally established one. He asks to be let alone in establishing his title to the soil by free occupation, cultivation, and use rather than by a title hampered by vested rights which were designed to keep the masses landless ... He asks not to be taxed upon what has been robbed from him under a machine in which he has practically no voice and no choice. In short, the Anarchist asks for free land, free money, free trade, free love, and the right to free competition with the existing order at his own cost and on his own responsibility, - liberty.
Source: Anarchism, True and False (1884)
[link] #807About Henry Appleton
Henry Appleton was a 19th-century American individualist anarchist. He was an editorial assistant to Benjamin Tucker and a significant contributor to Liberty during which he gained a reputation as an exceptional writer. Appleton was a graduate of Brown University and resided in Providence, Rhode Island. He is remembered as "the most forceful critic of anarchist communism in the early 1880s".
Appleton believed that anarchism was the philosophical basis of a method in sociology and should be considered as such. Anarchism as according to Appleton was neither theory nor institute but the logical outcome of the Progressive movement. Appleton also believed that the state and the church was intertwined and that the church, in particular, was essential for upholding the state.
Appleton was a staunch critic of anarcho-communism believing it to be just communism, masquerading as anarchism and viewed those aligned with anarcho-communism to be at war with liberty. Writing under the pseudonym 'X,' he would attack the communist anarchist leader Johann Most, decrying him to be a "State Socialist", posed a question to him of how someone who is of a peaceful stance would be treated if they were to disagree with his economic ideas and claimed that he and his followers wished to destroy all existing institutions and then build their own utopia. Appleton believed if he did not comply with Most's ideas all he had created would be "declared the property of the Commune."
