CHAPTER IV

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.