Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; and
all nations have been ashamed of them. Nothing is more openly fallacious
than to fancy that in ruder or simpler ages ruling, judging and
punishing appeared perfectly innocent and dignified. These things were
always regarded as the penalties of the Fall; as part of the humiliation
of mankind, as bad in themselves. That the king can do no wrong was
never anything but a legal fiction; and it is a legal fiction still. The
doctrine of Divine Right was not a piece of idealism, but rather a piece
of realism, a practical way of ruling amid the ruin of humanity; a very
pragmatist piece of faith. The religious basis of government was not so
much that people put their trust in princes, as that they did not
put their trust in any child of man. It was so with all the ugly
institutions which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were
never talked of as good things; they were always talked of as necessary
evils. A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves just as a modern
business man speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks: “It’s very
horrible; but how else can society be conducted?” A mediaeval scholastic
regarded the possibility of a man being burned to death just as a modern
business man regards the possibility of a man being starved to death:
“It is a shocking torture; but can you organize a painless world?” It
is possible that a future society may find a way of doing without the
question by hunger as we have done without the question by fire. It
is equally possible, for the matter of that, that a future society may
reestablish legal torture with the whole apparatus of rack and fagot.
The most modern of countries, America, has introduced with a vague savor
of science, a method which it calls “the third degree.” This is simply
the extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue; which is surely uncommonly
close to their extortion by bodily pain. And this is legal and
scientific in America. Amateur ordinary America, of course, simply burns
people alive in broad daylight, as they did in the Reformation Wars. But
though some punishments are more inhuman than others there is no such
thing as humane punishment. As long as nineteen men claim the right in
any sense or shape to take hold of the twentieth man and make him even
mildly uncomfortable, so long the whole proceeding must be a humiliating
one for all concerned. And the proof of how poignantly men have always
felt this lies in the fact that the headsman and the hangman, the
jailors and the torturers, were always regarded not merely with fear but
with contempt; while all kinds of careless smiters, bankrupt knights
and swashbucklers and outlaws, were regarded with indulgence or even
admiration. To kill a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man lawfully
was unpardonable. The most bare-faced duelist might almost brandish his
weapon. But the executioner was always masked.
This is the first essential element in government, coercion; a necessary
but not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people say
that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the
foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on
force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of
justice. A king or a community holding a certain thing to be abnormal,
evil, uses the general strength to crush it out; the strength is his
tool, but the belief is his only sanction. You might as well say that
glass is the real reason for telescopes. But arising from whatever
reason the act of government is coercive and is burdened with all the
coarse and painful qualities of coercion. And if anyone asks what is the
use of insisting on the ugliness of this task of state violence since
all mankind is condemned to employ it, I have a simple answer to that.
It would be useless to insist on it if all humanity were condemned to
it. But it is not irrelevant to insist on its ugliness so long as half
of humanity is kept out of it.
All government then is coercive; we happen to have created a government
which is not only coercive; but collective. There are only two kinds
of government, as I have already said, the despotic and the democratic.
Aristocracy is not a government, it is a riot; that most effective
kind of riot, a riot of the rich. The most intelligent apologists of
aristocracy, sophists like Burke and Nietzsche, have never claimed
for aristocracy any virtues but the virtues of a riot, the accidental
virtues, courage, variety and adventure. There is no case anywhere of
aristocracy having established a universal and applicable order, as
despots and democracies have often done; as the last Caesars created
the Roman law, as the last Jacobins created the Code Napoleon. With
the first of these elementary forms of government, that of the king or
chieftain, we are not in this matter of the sexes immediately concerned.
We shall return to it later when we remark how differently mankind
has dealt with female claims in the despotic as against the democratic
field. But for the moment the essential point is that in self-governing
countries this coercion of criminals is a collective coercion. The
abnormal person is theoretically thumped by a million fists and kicked
by a million feet. If a man is flogged we all flogged him; if a man
is hanged, we all hanged him. That is the only possible meaning of
democracy, which can give any meaning to the first two syllables
and also to the last two. In this sense each citizen has the high
responsibility of a rioter. Every statute is a declaration of war, to
be backed by arms. Every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a
republic all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching.
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