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The idea was applied to government in a treatise entitled the Social Contract . The "social-contract" theory was not new, but Rousseau made it famous. He taught that government, law, and social conventions were the outcome of an agreement or contract by which at the misty dawn of history all members of the state had voluntarily bound themselves.

It is the same old tale of the "social-contract" theory to which our Anarchists one and all invariably recur after manifold scientific toil and trouble. In fact this primitive paradise described by Kropotkin is just as much a figment of his imagination as the Anarchist paradise of the future. He speaks of early travellers.

Carried into practice, Voluntarism would be as like Anarchism as two peas. None the less we must not undervalue the theoretical progress shown in the distinction quoted above. Herbert approaches within a hair's-breadth of the standpoint of Sociology, and what separates him from it is not so much the logical accentuation of the social-contract theory as the indirect assumption of it.

As for the social-contract aspect of marriage, I want no better housekeeper than Antoinette; and my dining-table having no guests does not need a lady to grace its foot; I have no a priori craving to add to the population. "If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone," says Schopenhauer, "would the human race continue to exist?

There is no doubt that such a mutual arrangement was made in the troublous feudal period of mediæval European history, just as the original thirteen American colonies gave up some of their individual powers to make possible a real American state, but the social-contract theory is no longer accepted as a satisfactory explanation of the origin of government.