Part 25
Books, in which the most trivial and personal details are published in print by those who should veil their faces like the Latin in sorrow and veil them in their purples, could only be possible in an age in which vulgarity has even reached up and sapped the very foundations of all thrones. One cannot but feel pity for the poor dead princess, who would surely have writhed under such indignity, when one sees in the crudeness and cruelty of print her homely descriptions of suckling her children and struggling with a narrow purse, descriptions so plainly intended for no eyes but those of the person to whom they were addressed. Better—how much better!—have buried with her those humble letters in which the soul is seen naked as in its prayer-closet, and which are no more fit to be dragged out into the garish day of publicity than the bodily nakedness of a chaste woman is fit to be pilloried in a market-place. I repeat, only an age intensely and despairingly vulgar could have rendered the publication of such letters as those royal letters to royal persons possible. Letters of intimacy are the most sacred things of life; they are the proofs of the most intimate trust and confidence which can be placed in us; and to make them public is to violate all the sweetest sanctities of life and of death.
_La pudeur de l’âme_ is forever destroyed where such exposure of feelings, the most intimate and the most personal, becomes possible. In the preface to those letters it is said that the public will in these days know everything about us, and therefore it is better that they should know the truth from us. Not so; this attitude is indeed submission to the mob: it is unveiling the bosom in the market-place. Any amount of calumny cannot destroy dignity; but dignity is forever destroyed when it condescends to call in the multitude to count its tears and see its kisses.
The great man and the great woman should say to the world: ‘Think of me what you choose. It is indifferent to me. You are not my master; and I shall never accept you as a judge.’ This should be the attitude of all royalty, whether that of the king, the hero, or the genius.
THE STATE AS AN IMMORAL FACTOR
The tendency of the last years of the nineteenth century is toward increase in the powers of the state and decrease in the powers of the individual citizen. Whether the government of a country be at this moment nominally free, or whether it be avowedly despotic, whether it be an empire, a republic, a constitutional monarchy, or a self-governing and neutralised principality, the actual government is a substitution of state machinery for individual choice and individual liberty. In Servia, in Bulgaria, in France, in Germany, in England, in America, in Australia, anywhere you will, the outward forms of government differ widely, but beneath all there is the same interference of the state with personal volition, the same obligation for the individual to accept the dictum of the state in lieu of his own judgment. The only difference is that such a pretension is natural and excusable in an autocracy; in a constitutional or republican state it is an anomaly, even an absurdity. But whether it be considered admirable or accursed, the fact is conspicuous that every year adds to the pretensions and powers of the state, and every year diminishes the personal freedom of the man.
To whatever the fact be traceable, it is there, and it is probably due to the increase of a purely _doctrinaire_ education, which with itself increases the number of persons who look upon humanity as a drill-sergeant looks upon battalions of conscripts; the battalions must learn to move mechanically in masses, and no single unit of them must be allowed to murmur or to fall out of the ranks. That this conscript, or that, may be in torture all the while matters nothing whatever to the drill-sergeant. That what would have been an excellent citizen makes a rebellious or inefficient conscript is not his business either; he only requires a battalion which moves with mechanical precision. The state is but a drill-sergeant on a large scale, with a whole nationality marched out on the parade-ground.
Whatever were in other respects the evils attendant on other ages than this, those ages were favourable to the development of individuality, and therefore of genius. The present age is opposed to such development; and the more the state manipulates the man, the more completely will individuality and originality be destroyed. The state requires a tax-paying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colourless, spiritless, moving unanimously and humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight, high road between two walls. That is the ideal of every bureaucracy; and what is the state except a crystallised bureaucracy? It is the habit of those who uphold the despotism of government to speak as though it were some impersonal entity, some unerring guide, some half-divine thing like the pillar of fire which the Israelites imagined conducted them in their exodus. In actual fact, the state is only the executive; representing the momentary decisions of a majority which is not even at all times a genuine majority, but is, in frequent cases, a fabricated and fictitious preponderance, artificially and arbitrarily produced. There can be nothing noble, sacred, or unerring in such a majority; it is fallible and fallacious; it may be in the right, it may be in the wrong; it may light by accident on wisdom, or it may plunge by panic into folly. There is nothing in its origin or its construction which can render it imposing in the sight of an intelligent and high-spirited man. But the mass of men are not intelligent and not high-spirited, and so the incubus which lies on them through it they support, as the camel his burden, sweating beneath it at every pore. The state is the empty cap of Gessler, to which all but Tell consent to bow.
It has been made a reproach to the centuries preceding this one that in them privilege occupied the place of law; but, though privilege was capricious and often unjust, it was always elastic, sometimes benignant; law—civil law, such as the state frames and enforces—is never elastic and is never benignant. It is an engine which rolls on its own iron lines, and crushes what it finds opposed to it, without any regard to the excellence of what it may destroy.
The nation, like the child, becomes either brutalised by over-drilling, or emasculated by having all its actions and opinions continually prescribed for it. It is to be doubted whether any precautions or any system could compass what the state in many countries is now endeavouring to do, by regulation and prohibition, to prevent the spread of infectious maladies. But it is certain that the nervous terrors inspired by state laws and by-laws beget a malady of the mind more injurious than the bodily ills which so absorb the state. Whether Pasteur’s inoculation for rabies be a curse or a boon to mankind, there can be no question that the exaggerated ideas which it creates, the fictitious importance which it lends to what was previously a most rare malady, the nightmare horrors it invokes, and the lies which its propagandists, to justify its pretences, find themselves compelled to invent, produce a dementia and hysteria in the public mind which is a disease far more widespread and dangerous than mere canine rabies (unassisted by science and government) could ever have become.
The dissemination of cowardice is a greater evil than would be the increase of any physical ill whatever. To direct the minds of men in nervous terror to their own bodies is to make of them a trembling and shivering pack of prostrate poltroons. The microbe may be the cause of disease; but the nervous terrors generated in the microbe’s name are worse evils than any bacillus. It is the physiologist’s trade to increase these terrors; he lives by them, and by them alone has his being, but when the state takes his crotchets and quackeries in earnest and forces them upon the public as law, the effect is physically and mentally disastrous. The cholera as a disease is bad enough, but worse than itself by far are the brutal egotism, the palsied terror, the convulsive agonies, with which it is met, and which the state in all countries does so much to increase. Fear alone kills five-tenths of its victims, and during its latest visitation in the streets of Naples people would spring up from their seats, shriek that they had cholera, and fall dead in convulsions, caused by sheer panic; whilst in many country places the villagers fired on railway trains which they imagined might carry the dreaded malady amongst them. This kind of panic cannot be entirely controlled by any state, but it might be mitigated by judicious moderation, instead of being, as it is, intensified and hounded on by the press, the physiologists, and the governments all over the known world.
The state has already passed its cold, hard, iron-plated arms between the parent and the offspring, and is daily dragging and forcing them asunder. The old moral law may say ‘Honour your father and mother,’ etc., etc., but the state says, on the contrary: ‘Leave your mother ill and untended whilst you attend to your own education; and summon your father to be fined and imprisoned if he dare lay a hand on you when you disgrace and deride him.’ The other day a working man in London was sentenced to a fortnight’s imprisonment with hard labour, because, being justly angry with his little girl for disobeying his orders and staying out night after night in the streets, he struck her twice with a leathern strap, and she was ‘slightly bruised.’ The man asked pertinently what was the world coming to if a parent might not correct his child as he thought fit. What can be the relations of this father and daughter when he leaves the prison to which she sent him? What authority can he have in her sight? What obedience will he be able to exact from her? The bruises from the strap would soon pass away, but the rupture, by the sentence of the tribunal, of parental and filial ties can never be healed. The moral injury done to the girl by this interference of the state is irreparable, ineffaceable. The state has practically told her that disobedience is no offence, and has allowed her to be the accuser and jailer of one who, by another canon of law, is said to be set in authority over her both by God and man.
The moral and the civil law alike decree and enforce the inviolability of property; anything which is the property of another, be it but of the value of a copper coin, cannot be taken by you without your becoming liable to punishment as a thief. This, by the general consent of mankind, has been esteemed correct, just and necessary. But the state breaks this law, derides it, rides rough-shod over it, when for its own purposes it requires the property of a private person; it calls the process by various names—condemnation, expropriation, annexation, etc.; but it is a seizure, a violent seizure, and a essentially seizure against the owner’s will. If a man enter your kitchen-garden and take a few onions or a few potatoes, you can hold, prosecute and imprison him; the state takes the whole garden, and turns you out of it, and turns it into anything else which for the moment seems to the state excellent or advantageous, and against the impersonal robber you can do naught. The state considers it compensation enough to pay an arbitrary value; but not only are there many possessions, notably in land, for the loss of which no equivalent could reconcile us, but the state herein sets up a principle which is never accorded in law. If the man who steals the onions offers to pay their value, he is not allowed to do so, nor is the owner of the onions allowed to accept such compensation; it is called ‘compounding a felony.’ The state alone may commit this felony with impunity, and pay what it chooses after committing it.
The state continually tampers with and tramples on private property, taking for itself what and where and how it pleases; the example given to the public is profoundly immoral. The plea put forth in excuse for its action by the state is that of public benefit; the interests of the public cannot, it avers, be sacrificed to private interest or ownership or rights of any sort. But herein it sets up a dangerous precedent. The man who steals the potatoes might argue in his own justification that it is better in the interest of the public that one person should lose a few potatoes than that another person should starve for want of them, and so, either in prison or in poorhouse, become chargeable to the nation. If private rights and the sacredness of property can be set at naught by the state for its own purposes, they cannot be logically held to be sacred in its courts of law for any individual. The state claims immunity for theft on the score of convenience, so then may the individual.
If the civil law be in conflict with and contradiction of religious law, as has been shown elsewhere,[N] it is none the less in perpetual opposition to moral law and to all the finer and more generous instincts of the human soul. It preaches egotism as the first duty of man, and studiously inculcates cowardice as the highest wisdom. In its strenuous endeavour to cure physical ills it does not heed what infamies it may sow broadcast in the spiritual fields of the mind and heart. It treats altruism as criminal when altruism means indifference to the contagion of any infectious malady. The precautions enjoined in any such malady, stripped bare of their pretences, really mean the naked selfishness of the _sauve qui peut_. The pole-axe used on the herd which has been in contact with another herd infected by pleuro-pneumonia or anthrax would be used on the human herd suffering from typhoid, or small-pox, or yellow fever, or diphtheria, if the state had the courage to follow out its own teachings to their logical conclusions. Who shall say that it will not be so used some day in the future, when increase of population shall have made mere numbers of trifling account, and the terrors excited by physiologists of ungovernable force?
Footnote N:
See article ‘The Failure of Christianity.’
We have gained little by the emancipation of human society from the tyranny of the churches if in its stead we substitute the tyranny of the state. One may as well be burned at the stake as compelled to submit to the prophylactic of Pasteur or the serum of Roux. When once we admit that the law should compel vaccination from small-pox, there is no logical reason for refusing to admit that the law shall enforce any infusion or inoculation which its chemical and medical advisers may suggest to it, or even any surgical interference with Nature.
On the first of May, 1890, a French surgeon, M. Lannelongue, had a little imbecile child in his hospital; he fancied that he should like to try trepanning on the child as a cure for imbecility. In the words of the report,—
‘Il taillait la suture sagittale et parallèlement avec elle une longue et étroite incision cranienne depuis la suture frontale à la suture occipitale; il en resulta pour la partie osseusse une perte de substance longue de 9 centimetres et large de 6 millimetres, et il en resulta pour le cerveau un véritable débridement.’
If this child live, and be no longer imbecile, the parents of all idiots will presumably be compelled by law to submit their children to this operation of trepanning and excision. Such a law would be the only logical issue of existing hygienic laws.
In the battlefield the state requires from its sons the most unflinching fortitude; but in civil life it allows them, even bids them, to be unblushing poltroons.
An officer, being sent out by the English War Office this year to fill a distinguished post in Hong Kong, was ordered to be vaccinated before going to it; and the vaccination was made a condition of the appointment. In this instance a man thirty years old was thought worthy of confidence and employment by the state, but such a fool or babe in his own affairs that he could not be trusted to look after his own health. You cannot make a human character fearful and nervous, and then call upon it for the highest qualities of resolve, of capacity, and of courage. You cannot coerce and torment a man, and then expect from him intrepidity, presence of mind and ready invention in perilous moments.
A few years ago nobody thought it a matter of the slightest consequence to be bitten by a healthy dog; as a veterinary surgeon has justly said, a scratch from a rusty nail or the jagged tin of a sardine-box is much more truly dangerous than a dog’s tooth. Yet in the last five years the physiologists and the state, which in all countries protects them, have succeeded in so inoculating the public mind with senseless terrors that even the accidental touch of a puppy’s lips or the kindly lick of his tongue throws thousands of people into an insanity of fear. Dr Bell has justly said: ‘Pasteur does not cure rabies; he creates it.’ In like manner the state does not cure either folly or fear: it creates both.
The state is the enemy of all volition in the individual: hence it is the enemy of all manliness, of all force, of all independence, and of all originality. The exigencies of the state, from its monstrous taxation to its irritating by-laws, are in continual antagonism with all those who have character uncowed and vision unobscured. Under the terrorising generic term of the law, the state cunningly, and for its own purposes, confounds its own petty regulations and fiscal exactions with the genuine solemnity of moral and criminal laws. The latter any man who is not a criminal will feel bound to respect; the former no man who has an opinion and courage of his own will care to observe. Trumpery police and municipal regulations are merged by the ingenuity of the state into a nominal identity with genuine law; and for all its purposes, whether of social tyranny or of fiscal extortion, the union is to the state as useful as it is fictitious. The state has everywhere discovered that it is lucrative and imposing to worry and fleece the honest citizen; and everywhere it shapes its civil code, therefore, mercilessly and cunningly towards this end.
Under the incessant meddling of government and its offspring, bureaucracy, the man becomes poor of spirit and helpless. He is like a child who, never being permitted to have its own way, has no knowledge of taking care of itself or of avoiding accidents. As, here and there, a child is of a rare and strong enough stuff to break his leading-strings, and grows, when recaptured, dogged and sullen, so are there men who resist the dogma and dictation of the state, and when coerced and chastised become rebels to its rules. The petty tyrannies of the state gall and fret them at every step; and the citizen who is law-abiding, so far as the greater moral code is concerned, is stung and whipped into continual contumacy by the impertinent interference of the civil code with his daily life.
Why should a man fill up a census-return, declare his income to a tax-gatherer, muzzle his dog, send his children to schools he disapproves, ask permission of the state to marry, or do perpetually what he dislikes or condemns, because the state wishes him to do these things? When a man is a criminal, the state has a right to lay hands on him; but whilst he is innocent of all crime his opinions and his objections should be respected. There may be many reasons—harmless or excellent reasons—why publicity about his life is offensive or injurious to him; what right has the state to pry into his privacy and force him to write its details in staring letters for all who run to read? The state only teaches him to lie.
‘You ask me things that I have no right to tell you,’ replied Jeanne d’Arc to her judges. So may the innocent man, tormented by the state, reply to the state, which has no business with his private life until he has made it forfeit by a crime.
The moment that the states leaves the broad lines of public affairs to meddle with the private interests and actions of its people, it is compelled to enlist in its service spies and informers. Without these it cannot make up its long lists of transgressions; it cannot know whom to summon and what to prosecute.
That duplicity which is in the Italian character so universally ingrained there that the noblest natures are tainted by it—a duplicity which makes entire confidence impossible, and secrecy an instinct strong as life—can be philosophically traced to the influences which the constant dread of the detectives and spies employed under their various governments for so many centuries has left upon their national temperament. Dissimulation, so long made necessary, has become part and parcel of the essence of their being. Such secretiveness is the inevitable product of domestic espionage and trivial interference from the state, as the imposition of a gate-tax makes the peasantry who pass the gate ingenious in concealment and in subterfuge.
The requisitions and regulations of the state dress themselves vainly in the pomp of law; they set themselves up side by side with moral law; but they are not moral law, and cannot possess its impressiveness. Even a thief will acknowledge that ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is a just and solemn commandment: but that to carry across a frontier, without declaring it, a roll of tobacco (which you honestly bought, and which is strictly your own) is also a heinous crime, both common-sense and conscience refuse to admit The Irish peasant could never be brought to see why the private illicit whisky-still was illicit, and as such was condemned and destroyed, and the convictions which followed its destruction were amongst the bitterest causes of Irish disaffection. A man caught in the act of taking his neighbour’s goods knows that his punishment is deserved; but a man punished for using or enjoying his own is filled with chafing rage against the injustice of his lot. Between a moral law, and a fiscal or municipal or communal imposition or decree, there is as much difference as there is between a living body and a galvanised corpse. When in a great war a nation is urged by high appeal to sacrifice its last ounce of gold, its last shred of treasure, to save the country, the response is willingly made from patriotism; but when the revenue officer and the tax-gatherer demand, threaten, fine and seize, the contributor can only feel the irritating impoverishment of such a process, and yields his purse reluctantly. Electoral rights are considered to give him a compensating share in the control of public expenditure; but this is mere fiction: he may disapprove in every item the expenditure of the state; he cannot alter it.
Tolstoï has constantly affirmed that there is no necessity for any government anywhere: it is not _a_ government, but _all_ governments, on which he wages war. He considers that all are alike corrupt, tyrannical and opposed to a fine and free ideal of life. It is certain that they are not ‘the control of the fittest’ in any actual sense, for the whole aspect of public life tends every year more and more to alienate from it those whose capacity and character are higher than those of their fellows: it becomes more and more a routine, an _engrenage_, a trade.