The American writer Elbert Hubbard was best know for an essay entitled “A Message to Garcia,” which recounts the daring exploits of an American soldier as he carries a message from President William McKinley to General Calixto García just before the Spanish-American War. For a time, “to carry a message to Garcia” was  a common phrase meaning to take initiative in carrying out a difficult task.  (Richard Nixon uses it during one of his taped conversations with Henry Kissinger and John Ehrlichman.)

Hubbard also founded Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts community in East Aurora, New York. Based around the Roycroft Press,  which he had started with his first wife, Bertha Crawford Hubbard, the community included a bindery, a furniture shop, and studios producing modeled leather and hammered copper goods.

“A Message to Garcia” was reprinted in Hubbard’s 1901 collection A Message to Garcia and Thirteen Other Things—along with the following essay:

THE BETTER PART

I am an Anarchist.

All good men are Anarchists. All cultured and kindly men, all gentle men, all just men are Anarchists.

Jesus was an Anarchist.

A Monarchist is one who believes a monarch should govern. A Plutocrat believes in the rule of the rich. A Democrat holds that the majority should dictate. An Aristocrat thinks only the wise should decide; while an Anarchist does not believe in government at all.

Richard Croker is a Monarchist; Mark Hanna is a Plutocrat; Cleveland a Democrat; Cabot Lodge an Aristocrat; William Penn, Henry D. Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and Walt Whitman were Anarchists. An Anarchist is one who minds his own business. An Anarchist does not believe in sending war ships across wide oceans to kill brown men, and lay waste rice fields, and burn the homes of people who are fighting for liberty. An Anarchist does not drive women with babes at the breast and other women with babes unborn, children and old men into the jungle to be devoured by beasts or fever or fear, or die of hunger, homeless, unhoused and undone.

Destruction, violence, ravages and murder are perpetrated by statute law. Without law there would be no infernal machines, no war ships, no dynamite guns, no flat-nosed bullets, no pointed cartridges, no bayonets, no policemen’s billies, no night sticks, no come-alongs, no handcuffs, no straight jackets, no dark cells, no gallows, no prison walls to conceal the infamies therein inflicted. Without law no little souls fresh from God would be branded “illegitimate” indelibly as soon as they reach Earth. Without law there would be less liars, no lawyers, fewer hypocrites and no Devil’s Island.

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