Views and Opinions

by Ouida

Under the incessant meddling of government and its offspring, bureaucracy, the man becomes poor of spirit and helpless. He is like a child who, never being permitted to have its own way, has no knowledge of taking care of itself or of avoiding accidents. As, here and there, a child is of a rare and strong enough stuff to break his leading-strings, and grows, when recaptured, dogged and sullen, so are there men who resist the dogma and dictation of the state, and when coerced and chastised become rebels to its rules. The petty tyrannies of the state gall and fret them at every step; and the citizen who is law-abiding, so far as the greater moral code is concerned, is stung and whipped into continual contumacy by the impertinent interference of the civil code with his daily life.

Why should a man fill up a census-return, declare his income to a tax-gatherer, muzzle his dog, send his children to schools he disapproves, ask permission of the state to marry, or do perpetually what he dislikes or condemns, because the state wishes him to do these things? When a man is a criminal, the state has a right to lay hands on him; but whilst he is innocent of all crime his opinions and his objections should be respected. There may be many reasons—harmless or excellent reasons—why publicity about his life is offensive or injurious to him; what right has the state to pry into his privacy and force him to write its details in staring letters for all who run to read? The state only teaches him to lie.

‘You ask me things that I have no right to tell you,’ replied Jeanne d’Arc to her judges. So may the innocent man, tormented by the state, reply to the state, which has no business with his private life until he has made it forfeit by a crime.

The moment that the states leaves the broad lines of public affairs to meddle with the private interests and actions of its people, it is compelled to enlist in its service spies and informers. Without these it cannot make up its long lists of transgressions; it cannot know whom to summon and what to prosecute.

That duplicity which is in the Italian character so universally ingrained there that the noblest natures are tainted by it—a duplicity which makes entire confidence impossible, and secrecy an instinct strong as life—can be philosophically traced to the influences which the constant dread of the detectives and spies employed under their various governments for so many centuries has left upon their national temperament. Dissimulation, so long made necessary, has become part and parcel of the essence of their being. Such secretiveness is the inevitable product of domestic espionage and trivial interference from the state, as the imposition of a gate-tax makes the peasantry who pass the gate ingenious in concealment and in subterfuge.

The requisitions and regulations of the state dress themselves vainly in the pomp of law; they set themselves up side by side with moral law; but they are not moral law, and cannot possess its impressiveness. Even a thief will acknowledge that ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is a just and solemn commandment: but that to carry across a frontier, without declaring it, a roll of tobacco (which you honestly bought, and which is strictly your own) is also a heinous crime, both common-sense and conscience refuse to admit The Irish peasant could never be brought to see why the private illicit whisky-still was illicit, and as such was condemned and destroyed, and the convictions which followed its destruction were amongst the bitterest causes of Irish disaffection. A man caught in the act of taking his neighbour’s goods knows that his punishment is deserved; but a man punished for using or enjoying his own is filled with chafing rage against the injustice of his lot. Between a moral law, and a fiscal or municipal or communal imposition or decree, there is as much difference as there is between a living body and a galvanised corpse. When in a great war a nation is urged by high appeal to sacrifice its last ounce of gold, its last shred of treasure, to save the country, the response is willingly made from patriotism; but when the revenue officer and the tax-gatherer demand, threaten, fine and seize, the contributor can only feel the irritating impoverishment of such a process, and yields his purse reluctantly. Electoral rights are considered to give him a compensating share in the control of public expenditure; but this is mere fiction: he may disapprove in every item the expenditure of the state; he cannot alter it.

Tolstoï has constantly affirmed that there is no necessity for any government anywhere: it is not a government, but all governments, on which he wages war. He considers that all are alike corrupt, tyrannical and opposed to a fine and free ideal of life. It is certain that they are not ‘the control of the fittest’ in any actual sense, for the whole aspect of public life tends every year more and more to alienate from it those whose capacity and character are higher than those of their fellows: it becomes more and more a routine, an engrenage, a trade.

From a military, as from a financial, point of view this result is of advantage to the government, whether it be imperial or republican; but it is hostile to the character of a nation, morally and æsthetically. In its best aspect, the state is like a parent who seeks to play Providence to his offspring, to foresee and ward off all accident and all evil, and to provide for all possible contingencies, bad and good. As the parent inevitably fails in doing this, so the state fails, and must fail, in such a task.

Strikes, with their concomitant evils, are only another form of tyranny; but they have this good in them—that they are opposed to the tyranny of the state, and tend to lessen it by the unpleasant shock which they give to its self-conceit and self-complacency. Trades-unions turn to their own purposes the lesson which the state has taught them—i.e., a brutal sacrifice of individual will and welfare to a despotic majority.

There is more or less truth and justification in all revolutions because they are protests against bureaucracy. When they are successful, they abjure their own origin and become in their turn the bureaucratic tyranny, sometimes modified, sometimes exaggerated, but always tending towards reproduction of that which they destroyed. And the bureaucratic influence is always immoral and unwholesome, were it only in the impatience which it excites in all courageous men and the apathy to which it reduces all those who are without courage. Its manifold and emasculating commands are to all real strength as the cords in which Gulliver was bound by the pygmies.