What is valid in Anarchism is that all Governments try to simplify their
task by destroying liberty and glorifying authority in general and their
own deeds in particular. But the difficulty in combining law and
order with free institutions is not a natural one. It is a matter of
inculcation. If people are brought up to be slaves, it is useless and
dangerous to let them loose at the age of twenty-one and say "Now you
are free." No one with the tamed soul and broken spirit of a slave can
be free. It is like saying to a laborer brought up on a family income of
thirteen shillings a week, "Here is one hundred thousand pounds: now you
are wealthy." Nothing can make such a man really wealthy. Freedom and
wealth are difficult and responsible conditions to which men must be
accustomed and socially trained from birth. A nation that is free at
twenty-one is not free at all; just as a man first enriched at fifty
remains poor all his life, even if he does not curtail it by drinking
himself to death in the first wild ecstasy of being able to swallow as
much as he likes for the first time. You cannot govern men brought up
as slaves otherwise than as slaves are governed. You may pile Bills
of Right and Habeas Corpus Acts on Great Charters; promulgate American
Constitutions; burn the chateaux and guillotine the seigneurs; chop
off the heads of kings and queens and set up Democracy on the ruins of
feudalism: the end of it all for us is that already in the twentieth
century there has been as much brute coercion and savage intolerance, as
much flogging and hanging, as much impudent injustice on the bench
and lustful rancor in the pulpit, as much naive resort to torture,
persecution, and suppression of free speech and freedom of the press,
as much war, as much of the vilest excess of mutilation, rapine, and
delirious indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants, old
and young, as much prostitution of professional talent, literary and
political, in defence of manifest wrong, as much cowardly sycophancy
giving fine names to all this villainy or pretending that it is "greatly
exaggerated," as we can find any record of from the days when the
advocacy of liberty was a capital offence and Democracy was hardly
thinkable. Democracy exhibits the vanity of Louis XIV, the savagery
of Peter of Russia, the nepotism and provinciality of Napoleon, the
fickleness of Catherine II: in short, all the childishnesses of all the
despots without any of the qualities that enabled the greatest of them
to fascinate and dominate their contemporaries.
And the flatterers of Democracy are as impudently servile to the
successful, and insolent to common honest folk, as the flatterers of
the monarchs. Democracy in America has led to the withdrawal of ordinary
refined persons from politics; and the same result is coming in England
as fast as we make Democracy as democratic as it is in America. This is
true also of popular religion: it is so horribly irreligious that nobody
with the smallest pretence to culture, or the least inkling of what
the great prophets vainly tried to make the world understand, will have
anything to do with it except for purely secular reasons.