CIVIL GOVERNMENT
After the evolution of society through brute force and the first
stages of militarism, comes civil government. In its forms and methods
civil government differs from military government, but in its essence,
its real purpose and effect, it is the same. Civil government, like
military government, rests on violence and force. As society reaches the
industrial stage, it is easier and costs less waste of energy for the
ruling class to maintain its supremacy through the intricate forms and
mazes of civil government, than through the direct means of soldiers and
guns.
Civil governments, like military governments, are instituted and
controlled by the ruling class. Their purpose is to keep the earth and
its resources in the hands of those who directly and indirectly have
taken it for themselves. This can only be done by the establishment and
maintenance of certain rules and regulations concerning the disposition
of property and the fate of men. A vast army of officials, governors,
legislators, tax-gatherers, judges, sheriffs, policemen, and the like are
maintained by the governing class to enforce these rules and regulations
and keep the exploited in their place. The decrees of courts and the
various orders of civil government are enforced by violence, differing
only in kind from the general’s commands. The decrees of courts, whether
rightful or wrongful, must be obeyed, and the penalty of disobedience is
the forcible taking of property, the kidnapping and imprisoning of men,
and if need be, the taking of human life. If it shall ever occur that
the civil authorities have not sufficient force to compel obedience, the
whole power of the army and navy may at once be made subservient to the
civil power.
The vast army which is charged with enforcing and maintaining civil
law is drawn largely from the ruling class and those who contribute as
their willing tools. This class must be supported and maintained in
greater luxury than that enjoyed by the ordinary man, and the support
entails ceaseless and burdensome exactions from the producing class.
These exactions are a portion of the price that the worker pays for the
privilege of being ruled. It is true that a portion of the money forcibly
taken through the machinery of government is used for those coöperative
commercial purposes that are incident to a complex social life, but it
has never yet been shown that an autocratic power like a political state
is needed to provide the common resources incident to social life.
Practically the whole army of officials, with its wastefulness, its
extravagance and its endless peculation, is supported and kept in worse
than idleness for the purpose of ruling men through violence and force.
Even in so-called democracies the civil law, with its ponderous and
costly machinery, serves the same purpose as in monarchical states. It is
easy to understand that when the decrees of a ruler are absolute it can
matter little whether these decrees are issued to an army and carried out
by force of the bayonet and gun, or whether they are crystallized into
law and carried out by the orders of courts to be enforced by consigning
troublesome and rebellious subjects to the prison or the block. In either
event the will of the sovereign is law, and the law is made for the
benefit of the ruler, not the ruled.
In democracies, the form is somewhat changed, but the results are not
unlike. Every democracy begins with a great mass of regulations inherited
from the autocratic powers that have gone before. These laws and customs
are originally the same decrees that have gone forth from the absolute
rulers of the earth, and every change in forms and institutions is based
upon the old notions of property and rights that were made to serve the
ruler and enslave the world.
Then, too, authority has the same effect on human nature whether in an
absolute monarchy or a democracy, and the tendency of authority is ever
to enlarge its bounds and to encroach upon the natural rights of those
who have no power to protect themselves. The possession of authority
and arbitrary power ever tends to tyranny, and when autocratic orders
may be enforced by violence, liberty and life depend upon sufferance
alone. A close community of interest naturally springs up between those
circumstanced alike. The man who possesses one sort of power, as, for
instance, political privilege, is very friendly to the class who possess
another sort, as, for instance, wealth, and this community of interest
naturally and invariably arrays all the privileged classes against the
weak. The laws and regulations of a democracy tend no more to equality
than those of a monarchy. Under a democratic government inequality
of possession, of opportunity, of power, is quite as great as under
absolute monarchies. Given the right to use force of man over man and
the strongest force will succeed. You may forbid it in one direction,
it will but find a new method to accomplish the same result, like the
pent-up torrent that will find its outlet, in however circuitous a route
it is obliged to move. The legislators who make laws come either from
the ruling class or draw their honors, rewards, and emoluments from this
class; and the statutes of the most democratic state are not unlike the
dictates of the absolute monarch, and the decrees of both alike may
be enforced by all the power and violence of the state. But laws do
not execute themselves, and every official appointed or self-chosen to
enforce the law either comes from or naturally gravitates toward the
ruling class. Here again power grows by what it feeds on. Order is more
important than liberty, and at all costs order must be enforced upon the
many. The few have little need for law. Whatever is, is theirs, and may
they not use their own to suit themselves? The business of the courts and
officials is to enforce order upon the great mass who must depend upon
the few for the means of life. To enforce order upon them means that they
may only live in certain ways.
* * * * *
But admitting the orthodox view of government to be correct, then how
stands the case? The great majority of mankind still believe in the
utility of the state. They not only believe that society could not
exist without the state, but likewise that this political institution
exists and is maintained for the public good; that all its functions and
activities in some mysterious way have been conferred upon it by the
weaker class of society, and that it is administered to save this class
from the ravages of the vicious and the strong. Of course, there are many
humane officials, men who use their power to promote the public good,
as they see and understand the public good. These, in common with the
community, look upon the endless provisions of our penal code as being
the magical power that keeps the state from dissolution and preserves
the lives and property of men from the vicious and the bad. The idea of
punishment, of violence, of force, is so interwoven with all our concepts
of justice and social life that but few can conceive a society without
force, without jails, without scaffolds, without the penal judgments of
men. The thought never suggests itself to the common mind that nature,
unaided by man’s laws, can evolve social order, or that a community
might live in measurable peace and security moved only by those natural
instincts which form the basis and render possible communal life. To be
sure, the world is full of evidence that order and security do not depend
on legal inventions. From the wild horses on the plains, the flocks
of birds, the swarming bees, the human society and association in new
countries amongst unexploited people, suggestions of order and symmetry
regulated by natural instincts and common social needs are ample to show
the possibility at least of order or a considerable measure of justice
without penal law. It is only when the arrogance and the avarice of
rulers and chiefs make it necessary to exploit men that these rulers must
lay down laws and regulations to control the actions of their fellows.
And the more fixed the caste, the better settled the community; the more
complete the private appropriation of land, and the longer the penal
code, the greater the number of victims that are caught within its snares.
Turning from the examples everywhere present of the naturalness of order
and system to what we observe of the daily acts of men, the thought
that right conduct has little relation to penal laws is still further
confirmed. In the myriad acts of men it is only rarely that one is
done directly because of law. To turn to the right when you meet your
neighbor on the street; to imperil your happiness and even your life
to help in dire need; to protect the helpless; to defend the weak; to
tell the truth; in fact, to obey all that natural morality or right
conduct requires, is the first instinct of man, and ever prevails, not
only regardless of human law but in spite of human law, and this, too,
for the best and most abiding reason that can influence the life of man.
Nature provides that certain conduct makes for life, and in the sweep of
time, those who conform to this conduct live and their offspring populate
the earth when they are gone; those who violate the laws of communal
life will die or leave no descendants or weak offspring to be the last
survivors of their line. The unschooled child and the uncivilized race
alike tell the truth; they obey the laws of nature and the laws of life.
It is only after the exploiter appears with his rules for enslaving man
that he must needs build jails in which to pen those who defy or ignore
their power.