The state continually tampers with and tramples on private property, taking for itself what and where and how it pleases; the example given to the public is profoundly immoral. The plea put forth in excuse for its action by the state is that of public benefit; the interests of the public cannot, it avers, be sacrificed to private interest or ownership or rights of any sort. But herein it sets up a dangerous precedent. The man who steals the potatoes might argue in his own justification that it is better in the interest of the public that one person should lose a few potatoes than that another person should starve for want of them, and so, either in prison or in poorhouse, become chargeable to the nation. If private rights and the sacredness of property can be set at naught by the state for its own purposes, they cannot be logically held to be sacred in its courts of law for any individual. The state claims immunity for theft on the score of convenience, so then may the individual.
If the civil law be in conflict with and contradiction of religious law, as has been shown elsewhere,[[N]] it is none the less in perpetual opposition to moral law and to all the finer and more generous instincts of the human soul. It preaches egotism as the first duty of man, and studiously inculcates cowardice as the highest wisdom. In its strenuous endeavour to cure physical ills it does not heed what infamies it may sow broadcast in the spiritual fields of the mind and heart. It treats altruism as criminal when altruism means indifference to the contagion of any infectious malady. The precautions enjoined in any such malady, stripped bare of their pretences, really mean the naked selfishness of the sauve qui peut. The pole-axe used on the herd which has been in contact with another herd infected by pleuro-pneumonia or anthrax would be used on the human herd suffering from typhoid, or small-pox, or yellow fever, or diphtheria, if the state had the courage to follow out its own teachings to their logical conclusions. Who shall say that it will not be so used some day in the future, when increase of population shall have made mere numbers of trifling account, and the terrors excited by physiologists of ungovernable force?
We have gained little by the emancipation of human society from the tyranny of the churches if in its stead we substitute the tyranny of the state. One may as well be burned at the stake as compelled to submit to the prophylactic of Pasteur or the serum of Roux. When once we admit that the law should compel vaccination from small-pox, there is no logical reason for refusing to admit that the law shall enforce any infusion or inoculation which its chemical and medical advisers may suggest to it, or even any surgical interference with Nature.
On the first of May, 1890, a French surgeon, M. Lannelongue, had a little imbecile child in his hospital; he fancied that he should like to try trepanning on the child as a cure for imbecility. In the words of the report,—
‘Il taillait la suture sagittale et parallèlement avec elle une longue et étroite incision cranienne depuis la suture frontale à la suture occipitale; il en resulta pour la partie osseusse une perte de substance longue de 9 centimetres et large de 6 millimetres, et il en resulta pour le cerveau un véritable débridement.’
If this child live, and be no longer imbecile, the parents of all idiots will presumably be compelled by law to submit their children to this operation of trepanning and excision. Such a law would be the only logical issue of existing hygienic laws.
In the battlefield the state requires from its sons the most unflinching fortitude; but in civil life it allows them, even bids them, to be unblushing poltroons.
An officer, being sent out by the English War Office this year to fill a distinguished post in Hong Kong, was ordered to be vaccinated before going to it; and the vaccination was made a condition of the appointment. In this instance a man thirty years old was thought worthy of confidence and employment by the state, but such a fool or babe in his own affairs that he could not be trusted to look after his own health. You cannot make a human character fearful and nervous, and then call upon it for the highest qualities of resolve, of capacity, and of courage. You cannot coerce and torment a man, and then expect from him intrepidity, presence of mind and ready invention in perilous moments.
A few years ago nobody thought it a matter of the slightest consequence to be bitten by a healthy dog; as a veterinary surgeon has justly said, a scratch from a rusty nail or the jagged tin of a sardine-box is much more truly dangerous than a dog’s tooth. Yet in the last five years the physiologists and the state, which in all countries protects them, have succeeded in so inoculating the public mind with senseless terrors that even the accidental touch of a puppy’s lips or the kindly lick of his tongue throws thousands of people into an insanity of fear. Dr Bell has justly said: ‘Pasteur does not cure rabies; he creates it.’ In like manner the state does not cure either folly or fear: it creates both.
The state is the enemy of all volition in the individual: hence it is the enemy of all manliness, of all force, of all independence, and of all originality. The exigencies of the state, from its monstrous taxation to its irritating by-laws, are in continual antagonism with all those who have character uncowed and vision unobscured. Under the terrorising generic term of the law, the state cunningly, and for its own purposes, confounds its own petty regulations and fiscal exactions with the genuine solemnity of moral and criminal laws. The latter any man who is not a criminal will feel bound to respect; the former no man who has an opinion and courage of his own will care to observe. Trumpery police and municipal regulations are merged by the ingenuity of the state into a nominal identity with genuine law; and for all its purposes, whether of social tyranny or of fiscal extortion, the union is to the state as useful as it is fictitious. The state has everywhere discovered that it is lucrative and imposing to worry and fleece the honest citizen; and everywhere it shapes its civil code, therefore, mercilessly and cunningly towards this end.