Views and Opinions

by Ouida

The state only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties which require liberal treatment and spacious expansion inevitably dry up and perish. Take a homely instance. A poor, hard-working family found a little stray dog; they took it in, sheltered, fed it, and attached themselves to it; it was in one of the streets of London; the police after a time summoned them for keeping a dog without a licence; the woman, who was a widow, pleaded that she had taken it out of pity, that they had tried to lose it, but that it always came back to them; she was ordered to pay the amount of the dog-tax and two guineas’ costs; i.e., the state said to her: ‘Charity is the costliest of indulgences; you are poor; you have no right to be humane.’ The lesson given by the state was the vilest and meanest which could be given. This woman’s children, growing up, will remember that she was ruined for being kind; they will harden their hearts, in accordance with the lesson; if they become brutal to animals and men, it is the state which will have made them so.

All the state’s edicts in all countries inculcate similar egotism; generosity is in its sight a lawless and unlawful thing: it is so busied in urging the use of disinfectants and ordering the destruction of buildings and of beasts, the exile of families and the closing of drains, that it never sees the logical issue of its injunctions, which is to leave the sick man alone and flee from his infected vicinity: it is so intent on insisting on the value of state education that it never perceives that it is enjoining on the child to advance itself at any cost and leave its procreators to starve in their hovel. The virtues of self-sacrifice, of disinterested affection, of humanity, of self-effacement, are nothing to it; by its own form of organism it is debarred from even admiring them; they come in its way; they obstruct it; it destroys them.

Mr Ruskin, in one of the papers of his Fors Clavigera, speaks of an acacia tree, young and beautiful, green as acacias only are green in Venice, where no dust ever is; it grew beside the water steps of the Academy of the Arts and was a morning and evening joy to him. One day he found a man belonging to the municipality cutting it down root and branch. ‘Why do you murder that tree?’ he asked. The man replied, ‘Per far pulizia’ (to clean the place). The acacia and the municipality of Venice are an allegory of the human soul and its controller, the state. The acacia was a thing of grace and verdure, a sunrise and sunset pleasure to a great soul; it had fragrance in its white blossoms and shade in its fair branches; it fitly accompanied the steps which lead to the feasts of Carpaccio and the pageants of Gian Bellini. But in the sight of the Venetian municipality it was irregular and unclean. So are all the graces and greenness of the human soul to the state, which merely requires a community tax-paying, decree-obeying, uniform, passionless, enduring as the ass, meek as the lamb, with neither will nor wishes; a featureless humanity practising the goose-step in eternal routine and obedience.

When the man has become a passive creature, with no will of his own, taking the military yoke unquestioningly, assigning his property, educating his family, holding his tenures, ordering his daily life, in strict accord with the regulations of the state, he will have his spirit and his individuality annihilated, and he will, in compensation to himself, be brutal to all those over whom he has power. The cowed conscript of Prussia becomes the hectoring bully of Alsace.[^[O]]

‘Libera chiesà in libero stato’ is the favourite stock phrase of Italian politicians; but it is an untruth—nay, an impossibility—not only in Italy, but in the whole world. The church cannot be liberal because liberality stultifies itself; the state cannot be liberal because its whole existence is bound up with dominion. In all the political schemes which exist now, working themselves out in actuality, or proposed as a panacea to the world, there is no true liberality; there is only a choice between despotism and anarchy. In religious institutions it is the same; they are all egotisms in disguise. Socialism wants what it calls equality; but its idea of equality is to cut down all tall trees that the brushwood may not feel itself overtopped. Plutocracy, like its almost extinct predecessor, aristocracy, wishes, on the other hand, to keep all the brushwood low, so that it may grow above it at its own pace and liking. Which is the better of the two?

Civil liberty is the first quality of a truly free life; and in the present age the tendency of the state is everywhere to admit this in theory, but to deny it in practice. To be able to go through the comedy of the voting-urn is considered privilege enough to atone for the loss of civil and moral freedom in all other things. If it be true that a nation has the government which it deserves to have, then the merits of all the nations are small indeed. With some the state assumes the guise of a police officer, and in others of a cuirassier, and in others of an attorney; but in all it is a despot issuing its petty laws with the pomp of Jove; thrusting its truncheon, or its sword, or its quill into the heart of domestic life, and breaking the backbone of the man who has spirit enough to resist it. The views of the state are like those of the Venetian municipality concerning the acacia. Its one aim is a methodical, monotonous, mathematically[mathematically]-measured regularity: it admits of no expansion; it tolerates no exceptions; of beauty it has no consciousness; of any range beyond that covered by its own vision it is ignorant. It may work on a large scale—even on an enormous scale—but it cannot work on a great one. Greatness can be the offspring alone of volition and of genius: it is everywhere the continual effort of the state to coerce the one and to suffocate the other.

The fatal general conception of the state as an abstract entity, free from all mortal blemish, and incapable of error, is the most disastrous misconception into which the mind of man could possibly have fallen. If the human race would only understand, and take the trouble to realise, that government by the state can be nothing better than government by a multitude of clerks, it would cease to be enamoured of this misconception. Government, absolute and unelastic, by a million of Bumbles, the elevation to supreme and most meddlesome power of a Bureaucracy employing an army of spies and informers in its service; this is all that the rule of the state can ever be, or can ever mean, for mankind. It is impossible that it should ever be otherwise.

Were there some neighbouring planet, populated by demi-gods or some angels, from whom the earth could obtain a superior race to undertake its rule, the domination of this superior race might be beneficial, though it is questionable whether it would, even then, be agreeable. Socialism calls itself liberty, but it is the negation of liberty, since it would permit the state, i.e., the bureaucracy, to enter into and ordain every item of private or of public life. The only sect which has any conception of liberty is that which is called Individualism, and it is singular and lamentable how few followers Individualism obtains. It is due, perhaps, to the fact that so few human beings possess any individuality.

The mass of men are willing to be dominated, have no initiative, no ambition, no moral courage; it is easier to them to join a herd and be driven on with it; it saves them thought and responsibility. Were Individualism general, there would be no standing armies, there would be no affiliation to secret societies, there would be no formation of the public mind by the pressure of a public press, there would be no acceptance of the dicta of priests and physicians, there would be no political councils, there would be no ministers of education. But Individualism is extremely rare, whether as a quality or a doctrine. Where it does exist, as in Tolstoï or Auberon Herbert, it is regarded by the mass of men as abnormal, as something approaching a disease. Yet it will be the resistance of Individualism which will alone save the world (if it be saved indeed) from the approaching slavery of that tyranny of mediocrity which is called the authority of the state. For government by the state merely means government by multitudes of hired, blatant, pompous official servants, such as we are now blessed with; but with the powers of those official servants indefinitely extended until the tentacles of the state should stretch out like that of the octopus and draw into its maw all human life.

No one who studies the signs of the times can fail to be struck by the growing tendency to invoke the aid of what is called the state in all matters; and those who would be alarmed and disgusted at the despotism of a single ruler, are disposed meekly to accept the despotism of the impalpable, impersonal and most dangerous legislator. No one who has observed the action of a bureaucracy can, without dread, see its omnipotence desired; for the fact cannot be too often repeated, that the omnipotence of the state is the omnipotence of its minions in a multitude of greater or smaller offices throughout the country cursed by them. Through whom can the espionage which is necessary to secure the working of permissive bills, of total abstinence laws, of muzzling regulations, of medical and hygienic interference, be exercised, and the vast machinery of fines and dues which accompany these be manipulated, except by hordes of officials gaining their livelihood by torturing the public?