II.

Everything foretells the doom of authority. The killing of kings is

no new industry; it is as ancient as the race. Always and everywhere

persons in high place have been the assassin's prey. We have ourselves

lost three Presidents by murder, and will doubtless lose many another

before the book of American history is closed. If anything is new in

this activity of the regicide it is found in the choice of victims. The

contemporary "avenger" slays, not the merely great, but the good and

the inoffensive--an American President who had struck the chains from

millions of slaves; a Russian Czar who against the will and work of his

own powerful nobles had freed their serfs; a French President from whom

the French people had received nothing but good; a powerless Austrian

Empress, whose weight of sorrows touched the world to tears; a blameless

Italian King beloved of his people; such is a part of the recent record

of the regicide whose every entry is a tale of infamy unrelieved by one

circumstance of justice, decency or good intention.

And the great Brazilian liberator died in exile.

This recent uniformity of malevolence in the choice of victims is not

without significance. It points unmistakably to two facts: first, that

the selections are made, not by the assassins themselves, but by some

central control inaccessible to individual preference and unaffected

by the fortunes of its instruments; second, that there is a constant

purpose to manifest an antagonism, not to any individual ruler, but to

rulers; not to any system of government, but to Government. It is a war,

not upon those in authority, but upon Authority. The issue is defined,

the alignment made, the battle set: Chaos against Order, Anarchy against

Law.

M. Vaillant, the French gentleman who lacked a "good opinion of the

law," but was singularly rich in the faith that by means of gunpowder

and flying nails humanity could be brought into a nearer relation with

reason, righteousness and the will of God, is said to have been nearly

devoid of a nose. Of this affliction M. Vaillant made but slight

account, as was natural, seeing that but for a brief season did he need

even so much of nose as remained to him. Yet before its effacement by

premature disruption of his own petard it must have had a certain value

to him--he would not wantonly have renounced it; and had he foreseen its

extinction by the bomb the iron views of that controversial device would

probably have been denied expression. Albeit (so say the scientists)

doomed to eventual elimination from the scheme of being, and to the

Anarchist even now something of an accusing conscience, the nose is

indubitably an excellent thing in man.

This brings us to consideration of the human nose as a measure of

human happiness--not the size of it, but its numbers; its frequent or

infrequent occurrence upon the human face. We have grown so accustomed

to the presence of this feature that we take it as a matter of course;

its absence is one of the most notable phenomena of our observation--"an

occasion long to be remembered," as the society reporter hath it

Yet "abundant testimony showeth" that but two or three centuries ago

noseless men and women were so common all over Europe as to provoke

but little comment when seen and (in their disagreeable way) heard

They abounded in all the various walks of life: there were honored

burgomasters without noses, wealthy merchants, great scholars, artists,

teachers. Amongst the humbler classes nasal destitution was almost as

frequent as pecuniary--in the humblest of all the most common of all.

Writing in the thirteenth century, Salsius mentions the retainers and

servants of certain Suabian noblemen as having hardly a whole ear among

them--for until a comparatively recent period man's tenure of his ears

was even more precarious than that of his nose. In 1436, when a Bavarian

woman, Agnes Bemaurian, wife of Duke Albert the Pious, was dropped off

the bridge at Prague, she persisted in rising to the surface and trying

to escape; so the executioner gave himself the trouble to put a long

pole into her hair and hold her under. A contemporary account of the

matter hints that her disorderly behavior at so solemn a moment was due

to the pain caused by removal of her nose; but as her execution was by

order of her own father it seems more probable that "the extreme penalty

of the law" was not imposed. Without a doubt, though, possession of a

nose was an uncommon (and rather barren) distinction in those days among

"persons designated to assist the executioner," as the condemned were

civilly called. Nor, as already said, was it any too common among

persons not as yet consecrated to that service: "Few," says Salsius,

"have two noses, and many have none."

Man's firmer grasp upon his nose in this our day and generation is

not altogether due to invention of the handkerchief. The genesis and

development of his right to his own nose have been accompanied with a

corresponding advance in the possessory rights all along the line of

his belongings--his ears, his fingers and toes, his skin, his bones, his

wife and her young, his clothes and his labor--everything that is (and

that once was not) his. In Europe and America today these things can

not be taken away from even the humblest and poorest without somebody

wanting to "know the reason why." In every decade the nation that is

most powerful upon the seas incurs voluntarily a vast expense of blood

and treasure in suppressing a slave trade which in no way is injurious

to her interests, nor to the interests of any but the slaves.

So "Freedom broadens slowly down," and today even the lowliest incapable

of all Nature's aborted has a nose that he dares to call his own and

bite off at his own sweet will. Unfortunately, with an unthinkable

fatuity we permit him to be told that but for the very agencies that

have put him in possession he could successfully assert a God-given and

world-old right to the noses of others. At present the honest fellow is

mainly engaged in refreshing himself upon his own nose, consuming that

comestible with avidity and precision; but the Vaillants, Ravechols,

Mosts and Willeys are pointing his appetite to other snouts than his,

and inspiring him with rhinophagic ambition. Meantime the rest of us are

using those imperiled organs to snore with.

'Tis a fine, resonant and melodious snore, but it is not going to last:

there is to be a rude awakening. We shall one day get our eyes open to

the fact that scoundrels like Vaillant are neither few nor distant.

We shall learn that our blind dependence upon the magic of words is a

fatuous error; that the fortuitous arrangement of consonants and vowels

which we worship as Liberty is of slight efficacy in disarming the

lunatic brandishing a bomb. Liberty, indeed! The murderous wretch loves

it a deal better than we, and wants more of it. Liberty! one almost

sickens of the word, so quick and glib it is on every lip--so destitute

of meaning.

There is no such thing as abstract liberty; it is not even thinkable.

If you ask me, "Do you favor liberty?" I reply, "Liberty for whom to do

what? Just now I distinctly favor the liberty of the law to cut off the

noses of anarchists caught red-handed or red-tongued. If they go in for

mutilation let them feel what it is like. If they are not satisfied with

the way that things have been going on since the wife of Duke Albert the

Pious was held under water with a pole, and since the servitors of the

Suabian nobleman cherished their vestigial ears, it is to be presumed

that they favor reversion to that happy state. There is grave objection,

but if we must we will. Let us begin (with moderation) by reverting

_them_."

I favor mutilation for anarchists convicted of killing or inciting to

kill--mutilation followed by death. For those who merely deny the right

and expediency of law, plain mutilation--which might advantageously take

the form of removal of the tongue.

Why not? Where is the injustice? Surely he who denies men's right to

make laws will not invoke the laws that they have wickedly made! That

were to say that they must not protect themselves, yet are bound

to protect him. What! if I beat him will he call the useless and

mischievous constabulary? If I draw out his tongue shall he (in the

sign-language) demand it back, and failing of restitution (for surely I

should cut it clean away) shall he have the law on me--the naughty law,

instrument of the oppressor? Why? that "goes neare to be fonny!"

Two human beings can not live together in peace without laws--laws

innumerable. Everything that either, in consideration of the other's

wish or welfare, abstains from is inhibited by law, tacit or expressed.

If there were in all the world none but they--if neither had come with

any sense of obligation toward the other, both clean from creation, with

nothing but brains to direct their conduct--every hour would evolve an

understanding, that is to say, a law; every act would suggest one. They

would have to agree not to kill nor harm each other. They must arrange

their work and all their activities to secure the best advantage. These

arrangements, agreements, understandings--what are they but laws? To

live without law is to live alone. Every family is a miniature State

with a complicate system of laws, a supreme authority and subordinate

authorities down to the latest babe. And as he who is loudest in

demanding liberty for himself is sternest in denying it to others,

you may confidently go to the Maison Vaillant, or the Mosthaus, for a

flawless example of the iron hand.

Laws of the State are as faulty and as faultily administered as those of

the Family. Most of them have to be speedily and repeatedly "amended,"

many repealed, and of those permitted to stand, the greater number fall

into disuse and are forgotten. Those who have to be entrusted with the

duty of administering them have all the limitations of intelligence and

defects of character by which the rest of us also are distinguished from

the angels. In the wise governor, the just judge, the honest sheriff

or the patient constable we have as rare a phenomenon as the faultless

father. The good God has not given us a special kind of men upon whom to

devolve the duty of seeing to the observance of the understandings that

we call laws. Like all else that men do, this work is badly done. The

best that we can hope for through all the failures, the injustice, the

disheartening damage to individual rights and interests, is a fairly

good general result, enabling us to walk abroad among our fellows

unafraid, to meet even the tribesmen from another valley without too

imminent peril of braining and evisceration. Of that small security the

Anarchist would deprive us. But without that nothing is of value and we

shall be willing to renounce all. Let us begin by depriving ourselves of

the Anarchist.

Our system of civilization being the natural outgrowth of our wretched

moral and intellectual natures, is open to criticism and subject

to revision. Our laws, being of human origin, are faulty and their

application is disappointing. Dissent, dissatisfaction, deprecation,

proposals for a better system fortified with better laws more

intelligently administered--these are permissible and should be welcome.

The Socialist (when he is not carried away by zeal to pool issues with

the Anarchist) has that in him which it does us good to hear. He may be

wrong b all else, yet right in showing us wherein we ourselves are

wrong. Anyhow, his mission is amendment, and so long as his paths are

peace he has the right to walk therein, exhorting as he goes. The

French Communist who does not preach Petroleum and It rectified is to be

regarded with more than amusement, more than compassion. There is room

for him and his fad; there are hospitable ears for his boast that Jesus

Christ would have been a Communist if there had been Communes. They

really did not "know everything down in Judee." But for the Anarchist,

whose aim is not amendment, but destruction--not welfare to the race,

but mischief to a part of it--not happiness for the future, but revenge

for the past--for that animal there should be no close season, for that

savage, no reservation. Society has not the right to grant life to one

who denies the right to live. The protagonist of reversion to the regime

of lacking noses should lack a nose.

It is difficult to say if the bomb-thrower, actual or potential, is

greater as scoundrel or fool. Suppose his aim is to compel concession by

terror. Can not the brute observe at each of his exploits a tightening

of "the reins of power?" Through the necessity of guarding against him

the mildest governments are becoming despotic, the most despotic more

despotic. Does he suppose that "the rulers of the earth" are silly

enough to make concessions that will not insure their safety? Can _he_

give them security?