The great man and the great woman should say to the world: ‘Think of me what you choose. It is indifferent to me. You are not my master; and I shall never accept you as a judge.’ This should be the attitude of all royalty, whether that of the king, the hero, or the genius.
THE STATE AS AN IMMORAL
FACTOR
The tendency of the last years of the nineteenth century is toward increase in the powers of the state and decrease in the powers of the individual citizen. Whether the government of a country be at this moment nominally free, or whether it be avowedly despotic, whether it be an empire, a republic, a constitutional monarchy, or a self-governing and neutralised principality, the actual government is a substitution of state machinery for individual choice and individual liberty. In Servia, in Bulgaria, in France, in Germany, in England, in America, in Australia, anywhere you will, the outward forms of government differ widely, but beneath all there is the same interference of the state with personal volition, the same obligation for the individual to accept the dictum of the state in lieu of his own judgment. The only difference is that such a pretension is natural and excusable in an autocracy; in a constitutional or republican state it is an anomaly, even an absurdity. But whether it be considered admirable or accursed, the fact is conspicuous that every year adds to the pretensions and powers of the state, and every year diminishes the personal freedom of the man.
To whatever the fact be traceable, it is there, and it is probably due to the increase of a purely doctrinaire education, which with itself increases the number of persons who look upon humanity as a drill-sergeant looks upon battalions of conscripts; the battalions must learn to move mechanically in masses, and no single unit of them must be allowed to murmur or to fall out of the ranks. That this conscript, or that, may be in torture all the while matters nothing whatever to the drill-sergeant. That what would have been an excellent citizen makes a rebellious or inefficient conscript is not his business either; he only requires a battalion which moves with mechanical precision. The state is but a drill-sergeant on a large scale, with a whole nationality marched out on the parade-ground.
Whatever were in other respects the evils attendant on other ages than this, those ages were favourable to the development of individuality, and therefore of genius. The present age is opposed to such development; and the more the state manipulates the man, the more completely will individuality and originality be destroyed. The state requires a tax-paying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colourless, spiritless, moving unanimously and humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight, high road between two walls. That is the ideal of every bureaucracy; and what is the state except a crystallised bureaucracy? It is the habit of those who uphold the despotism of government to speak as though it were some impersonal entity, some unerring guide, some half-divine thing like the pillar of fire which the Israelites imagined conducted them in their exodus. In actual fact, the state is only the executive; representing the momentary decisions of a majority which is not even at all times a genuine majority, but is, in frequent cases, a fabricated and fictitious preponderance, artificially and arbitrarily produced. There can be nothing noble, sacred, or unerring in such a majority; it is fallible and fallacious; it may be in the right, it may be in the wrong; it may light by accident on wisdom, or it may plunge by panic into folly. There is nothing in its origin or its construction which can render it imposing in the sight of an intelligent and high-spirited man. But the mass of men are not intelligent and not high-spirited, and so the incubus which lies on them through it they support, as the camel his burden, sweating beneath it at every pore. The state is the empty cap of Gessler, to which all but Tell consent to bow.
It has been made a reproach to the centuries preceding this one that in them privilege occupied the place of law; but, though privilege was capricious and often unjust, it was always elastic, sometimes benignant; law—civil law, such as the state frames and enforces—is never elastic and is never benignant. It is an engine which rolls on its own iron lines, and crushes what it finds opposed to it, without any regard to the excellence of what it may destroy.
The nation, like the child, becomes either brutalised by over-drilling, or emasculated by having all its actions and opinions continually prescribed for it. It is to be doubted whether any precautions or any system could compass what the state in many countries is now endeavouring to do, by regulation and prohibition, to prevent the spread of infectious maladies. But it is certain that the nervous terrors inspired by state laws and by-laws beget a malady of the mind more injurious than the bodily ills which so absorb the state. Whether Pasteur’s inoculation for rabies be a curse or a boon to mankind, there can be no question that the exaggerated ideas which it creates, the fictitious importance which it lends to what was previously a most rare malady, the nightmare horrors it invokes, and the lies which its propagandists, to justify its pretences, find themselves compelled to invent, produce a dementia and hysteria in the public mind which is a disease far more widespread and dangerous than mere canine rabies (unassisted by science and government) could ever have become.
The dissemination of cowardice is a greater evil than would be the increase of any physical ill whatever. To direct the minds of men in nervous terror to their own bodies is to make of them a trembling and shivering pack of prostrate poltroons. The microbe may be the cause of disease; but the nervous terrors generated in the microbe’s name are worse evils than any bacillus. It is the physiologist’s trade to increase these terrors; he lives by them, and by them alone has his being, but when the state takes his crotchets and quackeries in earnest and forces them upon the public as law, the effect is physically and mentally disastrous. The cholera as a disease is bad enough, but worse than itself by far are the brutal egotism, the palsied terror, the convulsive agonies, with which it is met, and which the state in all countries does so much to increase. Fear alone kills five-tenths of its victims, and during its latest visitation in the streets of Naples people would spring up from their seats, shriek that they had cholera, and fall dead in convulsions, caused by sheer panic; whilst in many country places the villagers fired on railway trains which they imagined might carry the dreaded malady amongst them. This kind of panic cannot be entirely controlled by any state, but it might be mitigated by judicious moderation, instead of being, as it is, intensified and hounded on by the press, the physiologists, and the governments all over the known world.
The state has already passed its cold, hard, iron-plated arms between the parent and the offspring, and is daily dragging and forcing them asunder. The old moral law may say ‘Honour your father and mother,’ etc., etc., but the state says, on the contrary: ‘Leave your mother ill and untended whilst you attend to your own education; and summon your father to be fined and imprisoned if he dare lay a hand on you when you disgrace and deride him.’ The other day a working man in London was sentenced to a fortnight’s imprisonment with hard labour, because, being justly angry with his little girl for disobeying his orders and staying out night after night in the streets, he struck her twice with a leathern strap, and she was ‘slightly bruised.’ The man asked pertinently what was the world coming to if a parent might not correct his child as he thought fit. What can be the relations of this father and daughter when he leaves the prison to which she sent him? What authority can he have in her sight? What obedience will he be able to exact from her? The bruises from the strap would soon pass away, but the rupture, by the sentence of the tribunal, of parental and filial ties can never be healed. The moral injury done to the girl by this interference of the state is irreparable, ineffaceable. The state has practically told her that disobedience is no offence, and has allowed her to be the accuser and jailer of one who, by another canon of law, is said to be set in authority over her both by God and man.
The moral and the civil law alike decree and enforce the inviolability of property; anything which is the property of another, be it but of the value of a copper coin, cannot be taken by you without your becoming liable to punishment as a thief. This, by the general consent of mankind, has been esteemed correct, just and necessary. But the state breaks this law, derides it, rides rough-shod over it, when for its own purposes it requires the property of a private person; it calls the process by various names—condemnation, expropriation, annexation, etc.; but it is a seizure, a violent seizure, and a essentially seizure against the owner’s will. If a man enter your kitchen-garden and take a few onions or a few potatoes, you can hold, prosecute and imprison him; the state takes the whole garden, and turns you out of it, and turns it into anything else which for the moment seems to the state excellent or advantageous, and against the impersonal robber you can do naught. The state considers it compensation enough to pay an arbitrary value; but not only are there many possessions, notably in land, for the loss of which no equivalent could reconcile us, but the state herein sets up a principle which is never accorded in law. If the man who steals the onions offers to pay their value, he is not allowed to do so, nor is the owner of the onions allowed to accept such compensation; it is called ‘compounding a felony.’ The state alone may commit this felony with impunity, and pay what it chooses after committing it.