If anyone is to doubt the fact that there is a demon in man, he need only look at the tyrants that have from time immemorial ruled the human race. Surely it is an evil spirit that drives man to subject his fellow-man to his will.

There was a time when people thought that every human being must believe in some supernatural being,—be he God, Angel, Ghost, Devil, or Satan, and that anyone who did not entertain such beliefs must of necessity be incomplete and immoral. Hence they used to actually destroy one another because some happened to disbelieve in the inspired being, or to believe in a different God. Crusades, inquisitions, the thumbscrew, the rack, and the auto-da-fe were inaugurated to bring the heretic—religious, poltical, and social—to his senses. Even little children have always been compelled, by sheer force, when necessary, to think, believe, and act just as their parents did. Pupils were chastised and tortured for not believing just as their teachers and all the good people believed.

The most intelligent judge in the community used to condemn to death any poor woman accused of witchcraft; and every civilized country burned at the stake legions of such innocent men and women, having tortured them beforehand so as to make them confess that they had intimate relationship with the devil.

Nowadays we know that the real devils of those times were the judges and executioners themselves, who destroyed their guiltless fellow beings at the altar of ignorance and superstition. They alone were the devils incarnate, and until their wretched victims had come in contact with them, they had never had any business with demons at all.

We, the proud children of the twentieth century, sit in judgment upon witches no longer. The Jew and the religious heretic can no more be devoured by a Torquemada with impunity; altho blasphemy or sacrilege are still punishable by most States of our civilized world. But in our age we nevertheless still cling desperately to a superstition, which is far more fatal to human happiness and liberty than the one of religion—the superstition of organized invasion, or government of man over man.*

Foolish man created a Frankenstein with his own hands, and cannot get rid of him; is, in fact, a veritable slave to him. Thousands of years have passed and we are still continuing to hanker and fight for those very same wretched superstitions in the name of gods, devils, priests, kings, and rulers. Why should men hate, damn, and destroy one another for the sake of some savage creation of his phantasy! As if it were possible or desirable for every man to think, believe and act just as his neighbor does! And not satisfied with the God-and-Devil monsters beyond the clouds, we are crushed down by the Law-and-Order Monster here below.

What is government?

Government, in this sense of the so-called political science, is organized invasion, one or more men claiming either a divine or electoral right to coerce the people into submission. Government means brute force, the exercise of commanding authority in the administration of public affairs by statutes or legislative acts that extend their binding force to all the subjects of the State.

God is the supreme being in heaven; government is the supreme power on earth.

All the edicts, decrees, ordinances, rescripts, statutes, and man-made-laws originate from and are based upon organized force. Everybody must yield obedience to the rules prescribed by those in power; disobedience is severely punished. But those in power can never be reached by the law. No redress from the State, says the law made by the State.

Those in power compel you to act just as they think is fit and proper, or else just as it is in their material interests that you should act. Government is not an agreement, expressed or implied, between the rulers and ruled, since an agreement must needs be agreeable to both parties and absolutely voluntary. If I am compelled to support a body of people in idleness, crime and luxury for no other reason than because they pretend to be my shielding angels, where does the contract social come in?

No government is possible without an executive power to enforce its laws. The judiciary and legislature are null and void without the sheriff, gaolers or hangman standing ready to carry out the verdicts of the judge or the edicts of the emperor.

The State protects, not its citizens or subjects, but itself. It has always curbed the natural rights, privileges and opportunities of the nations, in its favor and for the benefit of a handful of greedy usurpers with whom it divides the spoils of exploitation and oppression.

It will always be thus under government. Give a man—the best man—power over another man, and he will surely abuse it, since power is infectious, even more so than is cholera. Power breeds power, just as dirt breeds disease. Domination is demoralizing both to the dominator and the domineered. Does not the hangman become more brutalized the more he murders?

Why then, you will ask, do the people believe in czars, kings, and rulers? Because they are duped and deluded. The priest—that eternal twin of the gendarme—has always managed to attract the attention of the people to the business of heaven and hell, so that the State could safely shove its hands into our pockets, grinning at the solemn face of the gentleman in black.

Slavery was at one time a sacred institution of society, sanctioned and sanctified by [3] the Church and the State. The people had to battle hard against the Bible of the one and the bayonet of the other, before the chattel slave was set free. So was witchcraft a holy institution; and so is government with all its wars, crimes and repressions.

The priest says: Confess, pray, fast, crush your passions and desires; obey the Lord in Heaven and Me, His missionary on earth. And the policeman says: Behave, crush your individuality, obey your Lord on the Throne and Me, His representative. One holds out a hell above for the disobedient heretic, the other a hell below for the disobedient rebel.

It is surely the brute in man that urges him to lord over his fellow man; as it is the dupe in man that makes him cringe before a master.

Is there still a rational human being in existence who doubts in the light of our twentieth century civilization, that the time is fast coming when this fatal superstition of government will be no more, when there will be no lords and no slaves, and all will live in peace and harmony, like brothers and sisters of one and the same human family?

M. A. C.

1. * The German anthropologist Bastian tells us that a sick native of Guinea who causes the fetish to lie by not recovering, is strangled, and we may reasonably suppose that among the Guinea people anyone audacious enough to call into question the power of the fetish would be promptly sacrificed. In days when governmental authority was enforced by strong measures, there was a kindred danger in saying anything disrespectful of the political fetish. Nowadays, however, the worst punishment to be looked for by anyone who questions its omnipotence, is that he will be reviled as a reactionary who talks laissez faire.

   (Herbert Spencer has evidently in mind the English government only; for in countries like Russia, Turkey, Spain, or Germany, to question the authority of government means imprisonment or exile. Nor has he forseen the time when the president of this glorious republic of ours will urge congress to pass repressive laws against people, who happen to think with Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, Henrik Ibsen, William Morris, Whitman, Emerson, Jefferson, Kropotkin, Warren, Edward Carpenter and others, that that government which governs is best which governs least. Roosevelt calls all Anarchists criminals, and urges all mankind to unite in their extermination, and this is not because of crimes committed but because they hold and utter ideas which are disrespectful to the authority of all government.)

   That any facts he may bring forward will appreciably decrease the established faith is not to be expected: for we are daily shown that this faith is proof against all adverse evidence. . . .

   This worship of the legislature is, in one respect, indeed, less excusable than the fetish worship to which I have tacitly compared it. The savage has the defense that his fetish is silent—does not confess its inability. But the civilized man persists in ascribing to this idol made with his own hands, powers which in one way or other it confesses it has not got.—Herbert Spencer, The Sins of Legislators..