That Article on Laws.
To the Editor of Liberty:
So far as I can see, my propositions about laws will survive
being demolished at the rate you begin. Do you mean, in your first
sentence, that it is desirable to have no laws? If so, the proposition has some
novelty, and would be worth expanding and aruging. If by some laws
can be enforced only by violence,
it does not follow that keeping certain
laws,
and not thus enforcing them is an impossibility; it is only necessary
that the some
and the certain
be not the same laws. Mr.
Byington’s proposal to make the enforcement of law by violence itself a
violation of the law seems to complicate matters unnecessarily,
you say;
but this is what has always been the proposal of all who have called themselves
Anarchists, though they have differed as to whether the sense should be
enforcement of any law
or enforcement of some law.
You say that I
have not proved the necessity for a law that ought not to be
enforced—by violence, if necessary.
Nor have I asserted it; so I
don’t have to prove it. I wouldn’t much mind saying it, perhaps, but
I would rather find out what is thought of what I did say before I complicate
the matter by bringing in other issues. You say that my simplest and
clearest solution
(which was stated thus: to say, We will hold it
legitimate for the attacked party to use force in resistance to force, but not
for the assailant to use force against the defensive force of the attacked; and
we will not countenance any use of force on either side when we find much
difference of opinion as to which side our rule would favor
) is not
simplest and clearest, and you prefer saying at once that we shall not
hold it legitimate for any one to agress, the right of self-defence following as
a corollary.
You will see that your statement and the first half of mine
are practically identical; the difference is that you omit to mention the case
where it is debatable who is the aggressor. This omission doubtless makes it
simpler, but hardly clearer, at least to one who remembers the existence of
differences of opinion. But, since in your next sentence you defend the
Anarchist jury system, you must be in practical agreement with me on this point
that you leave unexpressed. As to the clumsiness of the jury system, that was
not part of my case; I mentioned it by the way as a fact not disputed; I do not
yet see the grounds for hoping that it will be got rid of. The reason why juries
are so much used now, I take it, is in great measure the dominance of red tape
and conservatism. Anarchism will of course weave its own new red tape, but it
will begin by cutting a lot of the old, and it will give great opportunity to
future cutters whenever cutting is profitable; so there will surely be much more
opportunity to avoid the expense and trouble of juries than now. As to the
abolition of all oppressive laws, I was not disputing the prospect of such
abolition, but asking how we were then to prevent the growth of new oppressive
laws; this question you leave unanswered, except so far as you imply that you
agree with me. But your agreement with me doesn’t go far when you say,
Thus the anomaly of being obliged to use violence in preventing a man from
enforcing a law is one that will probably never be witnessed.
It is
witnessed almost daily now at least; a large part of the duty of sheriffs and
police is to use violence in preventing people from enforcing such laws as the
government does not like. Your happy time coming, when nobody feels tempted to
regulate some one else’s affairs and has to be restrained by the thought
of what will probably be done to him, is evidently a sort of millennium. I
always insist that I know nothing about millenial
men; all my plans are for such men as we now have around us, with the
familiar brand of human nature.
Let me add a word about typographical errors. In the footnote at
the bottom of the first column on page 4, it is printed are not to end
where I wrote are wont to end
or something like that, giving a directly
contrary sense. In the first footnote of the same column, the sentence
will read more smoothly if the word anywhere
is changed to the two words
any where.
At the bottom of the third column on that page,
automobile
will seem more like what I had in mind if corrected to
abominable.
The second line of the last column of my article seems
to belong somewhere else—apparently between the second and third lines of
the first column on the next page, in Comrade Labadie’s
article.