And now I must ask the excited reader not to lose his head on one side
or the other, but to draw a sane moral from these grim absurdities. It
is not good sense to propose that laws against crime should apply to
principals only and not to accessories whose consent, counsel, or
silence may secure impunity to the principal. If you institute
punishment as part of the law, you must punish people for refusing to
punish. If you have a police, part of its duty must be to compel
everybody to assist the police. No doubt if your laws are unjust, and
your policemen agents of oppression, the result will be an unbearable
violation of the private consciences of citizens. But that cannot be
helped: the remedy is, not to license everybody to thwart the law if
they please, but to make laws that will command the public assent, and
not to deal cruelly and stupidly with lawbreakers. Everybody
disapproves of burglars; but the modern burglar, when caught and
overpowered by a householder usually appeals, and often, let us hope,
with success, to his captor not to deliver him over to the useless
horrors of penal servitude. In other cases the lawbreaker escapes
because those who could give him up do not consider his breech of the
law a guilty action. Sometimes, even, private tribunals are formed in
opposition to the official tribunals; and these private tribunals
employ assassins as executioners, as was done, for example, by Mahomet
before he had established his power officially, and by the Ribbon
lodges of Ireland in their long struggle with the landlords. Under such
circumstances, the assassin goes free although everybody in the
district knows who he is and what he has done. They do not betray him,
partly because they justify him exactly as the regular Government
justifies its official executioner, and partly because they would
themselves be assassinated if they betrayed him: another method learnt
from the official government. Given a tribunal, employing a slayer who
has no personal quarrel with the slain; and there is clearly no moral
difference between official and unofficial killing.
In short, all men are anarchists with regard to laws which are against
their consciences, either in the preamble or in the penalty. In London
our worst anarchists are the magistrates, because many of them are so
old and ignorant that when they are called upon to administer any law
that is based on ideas or knowledge less than half a century old, they
disagree with it, and being mere ordinary homebred private Englishmen
without any respect for law in the abstract, naively set the example of
violating it. In this instance the man lags behind the law; but when
the law lags behind the man, he becomes equally an anarchist. When some
huge change in social conditions, such as the industrial revolution of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, throws our legal and
industrial institutions out of date, Anarchism becomes almost a
religion. The whole force of the most energetic geniuses of the time in
philosophy, economics, and art, concentrates itself on demonstrations
and reminders that morality and law are only conventions, fallible and
continually obsolescing. Tragedies in which the heroes are bandits, and
comedies in which law-abiding and conventionally moral folk are
compelled to satirize themselves by outraging the conscience of the
spectators every time they do their duty, appear simultaneously with
economic treatises entitled "What is Property? Theft!" and with
histories of "The Conflict between Religion and Science."
Now this is not a healthy state of things. The advantages of living in
society are proportionate, not to the freedom of the individual from a
code, but to the complexity and subtlety of the code he is prepared not
only to accept but to uphold as a matter of such vital importance that
a lawbreaker at large is hardly to be tolerated on any plea. Such an
attitude becomes impossible when the only men who can make themselves
heard and remembered throughout the world spend all their energy in
raising our gorge against current law, current morality, current
respect ability, and legal property. The ordinary man, uneducated in
social theory even when he is schooled in Latin verse, cannot be set
against all the laws of his country and yet persuaded to regard law in
the abstract as vitally necessary to society. Once he is brought to
repudiate the laws and institutions he knows, he will repudiate the
very conception of law and the very groundwork of institutions,
ridiculing human rights, extolling brainless methods as "historical,"
and tolerating nothing except pure empiricism in conduct, with dynamite
as the basis of politics and vivisection as the basis of science. That
is hideous; but what is to be done? Here am I, for instance, by class a
respectable man, by common sense a hater of waste and disorder, by
intellectual constitution legally minded to the verge of pedantry, and
by temperament apprehensive and economically disposed to the limit of
old-maidishness; yet I am, and have always been, and shall now always
be, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make law impossible; our
liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our
morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by
inexperienced or malexperienced dupes, our power wielded by cowards and
weaklings, and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the
existing order for good reasons; but that does not make my attacks any
less encouraging or helpful to people who are its enemies for bad
reasons. The existing order may shriek that if I tell the truth about
it, some foolish person may drive it to become still worse by trying to
assassinate it. I cannot help that, even if I could see what worse it
could do than it is already doing. And the disadvantage of that worst
even from its own point of view is that society, with all its prisons
and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in
the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in
the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating
explosives which every Russian student can make, and every Russian
grenadier has learnt to handle in Manchuria, lies in the fact that
brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their
skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough
to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their
consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, simply not to
outrage their consciences.
Do not be afraid that they will not make allowances. All men make very
large allowances indeed before they stake their own lives in a war to
the death with society. Nobody demands or expects the millennium. But
there are two things that must be set right, or we shall perish, like
Rome, of soul atrophy disguised as empire. The first is, that the daily
ceremony of dividing the wealth of the country among its inhabitants
shall be so conducted that no crumb shall go to any able-bodied adults
who are not producing by their personal exertions not only a full
equivalent for what they take, but a surplus sufficient to provide for
their superannuation and pay back the debt due for their nurture.
The second is that the deliberate infliction of malicious injuries
which now goes on under the name of punishment be abandoned; so that
the thief, the ruffian, the gambler, and the beggar, may without
inhumanity be handed over to the law, and made to understand that a
State which is too humane to punish will also be too thrifty to waste
the life of honest men in watching or restraining dishonest ones. That
is why we do not imprison dogs. We even take our chance of their first
bite. But if a dog delights to bark and bite, it goes to the lethal
chamber. That seems to me sensible. To allow the dog to expiate his
bite by a period of torment, and then let him loose in a much more
savage condition (for the chain makes a dog savage) to bite again and
expiate again, having meanwhile spent a great deal of human life and
happiness in the task of chaining and feeding and tormenting him, seems
to me idiotic and superstitious. Yet that is what we do to men who bark
and bite and steal. It would be far more sensible to put up with their
vices, as we put up with their illnesses, until they give more trouble
than they are worth, at which point we should, with many apologies and
expressions of sympathy, and some generosity in complying with their
last wishes, then, place them in the lethal chamber and get rid of
them. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to expiate their
misdeeds by a manufactured penalty, to subscribe to a charity, or to
compensate the victims. If there is to be no punishment there can be no
forgiveness. We shall never have real moral responsibility until
everyone knows that his deeds are irrevocable, and that his life
depends on his usefulness. Hitherto, alas! humanity has never dared
face these hard facts. We frantically scatter conscience money and
invent systems of conscience banking, with expiatory penalties,
atonements, redemptions, salvations, hospital subscription lists and
what not, to enable us to contract-out of the moral code. Not content
with the old scapegoat and sacrificial lamb, we deify human saviors,
and pray to miraculous virgin intercessors. We attribute mercy to the
inexorable; soothe our consciences after committing murder by throwing
ourselves on the bosom of divine love; and shrink even from our own
gallows because we are forced to admit that it, at least, is
irrevocable--as if one hour of imprisonment were not as irrevocable as
any execution!
If a man cannot look evil in the face without illusion, he will never
know what it really is, or combat it effectually. The few men who have
been able (relatively) to do this have been called cynics, and have
sometimes had an abnormal share of evil in themselves, corresponding to
the abnormal strength of their minds; but they have never done mischief
unless they intended to do it. That is why great scoundrels have been
beneficent rulers whilst amiable and privately harmless monarchs have
ruined their countries by trusting to the hocus-pocus of innocence and
guilt, reward and punishment, virtuous indignation and pardon, instead
of standing up to the facts without either malice or mercy. Major
Barbara stands up to Bill Walker in that way, with the result that the
ruffian who cannot get hated, has to hate himself. To relieve this
agony be tries to get punished; but the Salvationist whom he tries to
provoke is as merciless as Barbara, and only prays for him. Then he
tries to pay, but can get nobody to take his money. His doom is the
doom of Cain, who, failing to find either a savior, a policeman, or an
almoner to help him to pretend that his brother's blood no longer cried
from the ground, had to live and die a murderer. Cain took care not to
commit another murder, unlike our railway shareholders (I am one) who
kill and maim shunters by hundreds to save the cost of automatic
couplings, and make atonement by annual subscriptions to deserving
charities. Had Cain been allowed to pay off his score, he might
possibly have killed Adam and Eve for the mere sake of a second
luxurious reconciliation with God afterwards. Bodger, you may depend on
it, will go on to the end of his life poisoning people with bad whisky,
because he can always depend on the Salvation Army or the Church of
England to negotiate a redemption for him in consideration of a
trifling percentage of his profits. There is a third condition too,
which must be fulfilled before the great teachers of the world will
cease to scoff at its religions. Creeds must become intellectually
honest. At present there is not a single credible established religion
in the world. That is perhaps the most stupendous fact in the whole
world-situation. This play of mine, Major Barbara, is, I hope, both
true and inspired; but whoever says that it all happened, and that
faith in it and understanding of it consist in believing that it is a
record of an actual occurrence, is, to speak according to Scripture, a
fool and a liar, and is hereby solemnly denounced and cursed as such by
me, the author, to all posterity.
London, June 1906.