"If even with the help of authority we have a hard struggle against the anti-Christian elements ever ready to overpower us, and destroy all the progress made by civilization, how then could public opinion prove an efficient substitute for the use of force, and avail for our protection? To rely upon public opinion alone would be as foolhardy as to let loose all the wild beasts of a menagerie, because they seem inoffensive when in their cages and held in awe by red-hot irons.
"Those men entrusted with authority, or born to rule over others by the divine will of God, have no right to imperil all the results of civilization, simply to make an experiment, and learn whether public opinion can or cannot be substituted for the safeguard of authority."
Alphonse Karr, a French writer, forgotten to-day, once said, in trying to prove the impossibility of abolishing the death penalty: "Que Messieurs les assassins commencent par nous donner l'exemple." And I have often heard this witticism quoted by persons who really believed they were using a convincing and intellectual argument against the suppression of the penalty of death. Nevertheless, there could be no better argument against the violence of government.
"Let the assassins begin by showing us an example," say the defenders of government authority. The assassins say the same, but with more justice. They say: "Let those who have set themselves up as teachers and guides show us an example by the suppression of legal assassination, and we will imitate it." And this they say, not by way of a jest, but in all seriousness, for such is in reality the situation.
"We cannot cease to use violence while we are surrounded by those who commit violence."
There is no more insuperable barrier at the present time to the progress of humanity, and to the establishment of a system that shall be in harmony with its present conception of life, than this erroneous argument.
Those holding positions of authority are fully convinced that men are to be influenced and controlled by force alone, and therefore to preserve the existing system they do not hesitate to employ it. And yet this very system is supported, not by violence, but by public opinion, the action of which is compromised by violence. The action of violence actually weakens and destroys that which it wishes to support.
At best, violence, if not employed as a vehicle for the ambition of those in high places, condemns in the inflexible form a law which public opinion has most probably long ago repudiated and condemned; but there is this difference, that while public opinion rejects and condemns all acts that are opposed to the moral law, the law supported by force repudiates and condemns only a certain limited number of acts, seeming thus to justify all acts of a like order which have not been included in its formula.
From the time of Moses public opinion has regarded covetousness, lust, and cruelty as crimes, and condemned them as such. It condemns and repudiates every form that covetousness may assume, not only the acquisition of another man's property by violence, fraud, or cunning, but the cruel abuse of wealth as well. It condemns all kinds of lust, let it be impudicity with a mistress, a slave, a divorced wife, or with one's wife; it condemns all cruelty,—blows, bad usage, murder,—all cruelty, not only toward human beings, but toward animals. Whereas, the law, based upon violence, attacks only certain forms of covetousness, such as theft and fraud, and certain forms of lust and cruelty, such as conjugal infidelity, assault, and murder; and thus it seems to condone those manifestations of covetousness, lust, and cruelty which do not fall within its narrow limits.
But violence not only demoralizes public opinion, it excites in the minds of men a pernicious conviction that they move onward, not through the impulsion of a spiritual power, which would help them to comprehend and realize the truth by bringing them nearer to that moral force which is the source of every progressive movement of mankind,—but, by means of violence,—by the very factor that not only impedes our progress toward truth, but withdraws us from it. This is a fatal error, inasmuch as it inspires in man a contempt for the fundamental principle of his life,—spiritual activity,—and leads him to transfer all his strength and energy to the practice of external violence.