Moribund Society and Anarchy

Indeed what is universal suffrage if not the right of the governed to choose their master, the right of choosing the rod to be whipped with? The voter is sovereign⁠—so far as to be able to choose his master! But he has not the right to dispense with him; for the one that his neighbor will have chosen will be his. From the moment he deposits his ballot in the box he has signed his abdication; he has no more to do but bend to the caprices of the masters of his choice; they will make the laws, will apply them to him, and throw him into prison if he resist.

You say you make war upon thieves and assassins; but what is a thief, or an assassin? Persons who claim the right to live without being useful, at the expense of society, you will say. But cast a glance over your society and you will discover that it is swarming with thieves, and that, far from punishing them, your laws are made for the express purpose of protecting them. Far from punishing laziness, society holds it up as an ideal, and awards the pleasure of doing nothing to those who can, by no matter what means, succeed in living well without being useful. You punish as a thief the unfortunate who, having no work, risks imprisonment to get hold of a piece of bread to appease his hunger; but you take off your hat and bow to the millionaire monopolist who by the help of his capital has cornered at a bargain those things necessary for the consumption of all, that he may sell them back at an enormous profit! You are eager to present yourselves, very humbly and submissively, in the antechamber of the financier who, by a stroke on the bourse, has ruined hundreds of families to enrich himself from the spoil! You punish the criminal who, to gratify his taste for idleness and debauchery, victimizes somebody; but who inculcated in him this idleness and debauchery, if not your society? You punish him who operates on a small scale, but you support whole armies that you may send them oversea to operate on a large scale against peoples unable to defend themselves.

Ah! One must have sojourned in that hell to understand all that a man of refined sensibilities can suffer there; one must have worn the uniform to know all the vileness and idiocy it engenders. Once matriculated you are no longer a man, but an automaton bound to obey the nod and beck of him who commands. You have a gun in your hands, but you must submit without flinching to the insolence of every petty officer who vents upon you his ill-humor or the fumes of the alcohol he has drunk. Not a move, not a word, or you may pay for it with your whole life or with many years of your liberty. In addition they will take care to read to you, every Saturday, the penal code, whose refrain “Death, death, death!” will haunt your brain whenever the instincts of rebellion begin buzzing beneath your skull.

But what exasperates you most are the thousand and one minutiae of the trade, the meddlings, the annoyances of rule. And for the subaltern who bears a grudge against you, or who, without having a grudge, is simply an unconscious brute, there are numberless opportunities daily to find fault with you, to make you submit to vexations of every sort which his brutishness may find pleasure in inflicting upon you. At roll-call for a poor adjustment of a strap, one button more tarnished than the rest, for the probable neglect to put on braces, etc., you get a blackguarding; the guardhouse, and faultfinding inspections without end!

Colonization is extending too widely, in the present epoch, for us to neglect to treat separately of this hybrid product of patriotism and mercantilism combined⁠—brigandage and highway robbery for the benefit of the ruling classes! A private individual goes into his neighbor’s house, breaks everything he lays his hands on, seizes everything he finds convenient for his own use: he is a criminal; society condemns him. But if a government find itself driven to a standstill by an internal situation which necessitates some external “diversion;” if it be encumbered at home by unemployed hands of which it knows not how to rid itself, of products which it cannot get distributed; let this government declare war against remote peoples which it knows to be too feeble to resist it, let it take possession of their country, subject them to an entire system of exploitation, force its products upon them, massacre them if they attempt to escape this exploitation with which it weighs them down⁠—oh, then, this is moral! From the moment you operate on a grand scale it merits the approbation of honest men. It is no longer called robbery or assassination; there is an honorable word for covering up the dishonorable deeds that government commits: this is called “civilizing” undeveloped peoples.

And let no one deem this exaggeration. No nation is reputed to be a colonizing one save when it has succeeded in getting out of a country the maximum product it is capable of yielding. Thus England is a colonizing country, because she knows how to “reward” her colonies with the prosperity of the people she sends out to rule them, how to gather back into her coffers the taxes with which she burdens them.

It is true that everything in nature is transformed by a slow process of evolution, by an uninterrupted sequence of progress acquired little by little, imperceptible if followed throughout its course, bursting upon the eye only when we pass suddenly from one period to another. It is thus that life progressed upon our globe, it is thus that man emerged from animality; and therefore it is that man in the nineteenth century no longer resembles man in the age of stone. But one thing only is ignored, viz., that in order that this evolution should go on without shocks it must meet no obstacles in its way; if it does, and the acquired impulse is stronger than the obstacles, it breaks them; if not, it is abortive. Every time that a shock occurs between progress and some existing thing there is a revolution, whether it be the swallowing up of a continent or the disappearance of a molecule in an organism⁠—the size of the thing does not matter. Nowadays it is admitted that great geologic revolutions, far from having been provoked by frightful convulsions and sudden changes proceeding from violent propulsions in the interior of our globe, are but the product of slow causes and imperceptible changes which have continued their effects through thousands of centuries. We know, likewise, that these same causes which have brought the earth to that condition in which we behold it are continuing their operation in our own days and preparing a new transformation.