DURING THE FIRST HALF of the twentieth century, H.L. Mencken (pictured) was the most outspoken defender of liberty in America. He spent thousands of dollars challenging restrictions on freedom of the press. He boldly denounced President Woodrow Wilson for whipping up patriotic fervor to enter World War I, which cost his job as a newspaper columnist. Mencken denounced Franklin Delano Roosevelt for amassing dangerous political power and for maneuvering to enter World War II, and he again lost his newspaper job. Moreover, the President ridiculed him by name.

“The government I live under has been my enemy all my active life,” Mencken declared. “When it has not been engaged in silencing me it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack on my security.”

Though intensely controversial, Mencken earned respect as America’s foremost newspaperman and literary critic. He produced an estimated ten million words: some 30 books, contributions to 20 more books and thousands of newspaper columns. He wrote some 100,000 letters, or between 60 and 125 per working day. He hunted-and-pecked every word with his two forefingers–for years, he used a little Corona typewriter about the size of a cigar box.

Mencken had interesting things to say about politics, literature, food, health, religion, sports, and much more. No one knew more about our American language. Influential pundits of the past like Walter Lippmann are long forgotten, but people still read Mencken’s work. During the past decade, publishers have issued almost a dozen books about him or by him. Biographer William Nolte reports that Mencken ranks among the most frequently quoted American authors.

Certainly Mencken was among the wittiest. For example: “Puritanism–the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. . . . Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. . . . The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flophouses and disturbing the peace.”

Mencken stood about five feet, eight inches tall and weighed around 175 pounds. He parted his slick brown hair in the middle. He liked to chew on a cigar. He dressed with a pair of suspenders and a rumpled suit. According to one chronicler, Mencken at his best looked “like a plumber got up for church.”

Publisher Alfred Knopf had this to say about Mencken, a close friend for more than 40 years: “His public side was visible to everyone: tough, cynical, amusing, and exasperating by turns. The private man was something else again: sentimental, generous, and unwavering–sometimes almost blind–in his devotion to people of whom he felt fond . . . the most charming manners conceivable, manners I was to discover he always displayed in talking with women . . . he spent a fantastic amount of his time getting friends to and from doctors’ waiting rooms and hospitals, comforting them and keeping them company there.”

Mencken inspired friends of freedom. He helped cheer up stylish individualist author Albert Jay Nock, a frequent contributor to Mencken’s magazine the American Mercury, during Nock’s declining years. Mencken’s stalwart individualism awed young Ayn Rand who, in 1934, called him “one whom I admire as the greatest representative of a philosophy to which I want to dedicate my whole life.”

Henry Louis Mencken was born September 12, 1880, in Baltimore. His father, August Mencken, owned a cigar factory. His mother, Anna Abhau Mencken, like her husband, was a child of German immigrants. In 1883, the family moved to a three-story, red brick row house at 1524 Hollins Street. Here, except during his five-year marriage, Mencken lived for the rest of his life.

Mencken was a voracious reader from the get-go. At age nine, he discovered Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which opened his eyes to rugged individualism and literary pleasures. This was, as he put it, “probably the most stupendous event in my whole life.” He was thrilled: “what a man that Mark Twain was! How he stood above and apart from the world, like Rabelais come to life again, observing the human comedy, chuckling over the eternal fraudulence of man! What a sharp eye he had for the bogus, in religion, politics, art, literature, patriotism, virtue. . . . And seeing all this, he laughed at them, but not often with malice.”

Mencken finished high school when he was 15 and went right to work in his father’s cigar factory, but he hated it. Within a few days after his father died of kidney failure in January 1899, Mencken tried his hand as a newspaperman. The first story he ever sold, to the Baltimore Herald, was about a stolen horse. By June that year, he was a full-time reporter earning $7 a week. Mencken proved to be unusually resourceful and industrious. He rose to become drama critic, editor of the Sunday paper, and city editor of the morning paper.

Early on, Mencken displayed a tremendous zest for life. In 1904, for example, he began a little musical group which became known as the “Saturday Night Club.” Almost every week for 46 years, as many as a dozen friends got together around 8:00 PM. Mencken played the piano with great enthusiasm. Other participants played the violin, cello, flute, oboe, drums, French horn, and piano. They most often played for a couple hours in a violin-maker’s shop and afterwards went to the Hotel Rennert for beer. During the 13 years of Prohibition, they took turns hosting festivities in their homes. They enjoyed chamber music, marches, waltzes, and operatic melodies. Mencken loved German romantics, Beethoven above all.

The Baltimore Sun

The Baltimore Herald went out of business in 1906, and Mencken landed at the newspaper where he would write for more than 40 years. One observer remarked: “The staid old Baltimore Sun has got itself a real Whangdoodle.” The Baltimore Evening Sun was launched in 1910, and Mencken served as editor. From 1911 to 1915, he wrote a daily “Free Lance” column which covered politics, education, music, whatever interested him. He edited the adjacent letters-to-the editor columns, and whenever a nasty letter came in attacking one of his columns, he made sure it was printed–he recognized that people enjoyed reading abuse.

There was abuse aplenty as people reacted to his bombastic writing style. He ridiculed hypocritical politicians, clergymen, and social reformers. For example, Mencken called Fundamentalist do-gooder William Jennings Bryan “the most sedulous flycatcher in American history . . . a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity.” He was accused of anti-Semitism because he gratuitously referred to so many people as “Jews.” Yet he didn’t criticize Jews as much as others. He described Anglo-Saxons as “a wretchedly dirty, shiftless, stupid and rascally people . . . anthropoids.”

Mencken lashed out at President Woodrow Wilson for maneuvering America into World War I. He insisted that the British government shared responsibility for the horrifying conflict, and he attacked the moral pretensions of British officials who pursued a naval blockade punishing innocent people as well as combatants in Germany. Mencken discontinued his column because of wartime hysteria.

Meanwhile, he had established himself as a literary critic. Since 1908, he had reviewed books for Smart Set, a monthly literary magazine. He and drama critic George Jean Nathan were named editors in 1914. Mencken relentlessly attacked puritanical standards and hailed authors like Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Mencken turned increasingly to writing books–he had written eight on music, literature, and philosophy by 1919. That year marked the debut of his most enduring work. It arose from his passion for American speech which evolved spontaneously into something more dynamic than the English of England. No government planned it: the American language became more expressive as ordinary people went about their daily business, now and then contributing new words. The first edition of The American Language soon sold out, and Mencken began work on the second of four editions. “All I ask,” he wrote his publisher Alfred Knopf, “is that you make The American Language good and thick. It is my secret ambition to be the author of a book weighing at least five pounds.”

In 1920, with World War I a bad memory, the Baltimore Sun asked Mencken to resume writing a column for $50 a week. Thus began his memorable “Monday” articles which appeared weekly for the next 18 years. About two-thirds of them dealt with politics.

The American Mercury

By 1923, Mencken decided he wanted a national forum for his political views. He resigned from the Smart Set, and with backing from Knopf he and Nathan launched the monthly American Mercury. The first issue, bearing a distinctive pea-green cover, appeared in January 1924. Nathan soon disagreed about which direction the magazine should go, and he resigned. Mencken offered feisty commentary plus writing by many of America’s most distinguished authors. There were articles by philosophical anarchist Emma Goldman and birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger. Also, such black authors as W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and George Schuyler. Circulation grew for four years, peaking around 84,000 in 1928.

Although Mencken wasn’t known as a political philosopher, he made clear his commitment to individual liberty. “Every government,” he wrote, “is a scoundrel. In its relations with other governments it resorts to frauds and barbarities that were prohibited to private men by the Common Law of civilization so long ago as the reign of Hammurabi, and in its dealings with its own people it not only steals and wastes their property and plays a brutal and witness game with their natural rights, but regularly gambles with their very lives. Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds between people, for peoples in general are too ignorant of one another to have grievances and too indifferent to what goes on beyond their borders to plan conquests. They must be urged to the slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them.”

Mencken expressed outrage at violence against blacks and as Hitler menaced Europe, Mencken attacked President Roosevelt for refusing to admit Jewish refugees into the United States: “There is only one way to help the fugitives, and that is to find places for them in a country in which they can really live. Why shouldn’t the United States take in a couple hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?”

Mencken was adamant that the United States not become entangled in another European war. He believed it would mean further expansion of government power, oppression, debt, and killings without ridding the world of tyranny. Better to keep America as a peaceful sanctuary for liberty:

“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented,” he wrote, “at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air–that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.” Mencken added: “In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen . . . I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law.”…

Sara

For a brief period, Mencken faced his ideological battles with a romantic partner. In May 1923, he delivered a talk called “how to catch a husband” at Baltimore’s Goucher College and there met a 26-year-old, Alabama-born English teacher named Sara Haardt. He was taken by her good looks, radiant intelligence and passion for literature. She saw a decent, joyous, civilized man. A lifelong bachelor who had lived with his mother until she died in 1925, when he was 45, Mencken was wary of marriage. Apparently Sara’s worsening tuberculosis brought him to the altar. After her death on May 31, 1935, Mencken wrote a friend: “When I married Sara, the doctors said she could not live more than three years. Actually, she lived five, so I had two more years of happiness than I had any right to expect.”

Sara’s death hit him especially hard, because he was already down. With the Great Depression everywhere blamed on capitalism, individualist Mencken seemed like a relic. He had seldom analyzed economic policy, so he wasn’t intellectually equipped to explain how the federal government itself had triggered and prolonged the Great Depression–powerful evidence for that case became available only in the 1960s.

Circulation of the American Mercury plunged. Mencken resigned as editor by December 1933. He was succeeded by economic journalist Henry Hazlitt. Three years after Sara died, Mencken’s attacks on President Roosevelt’s foreign policy cost him his Baltimore Sun column. It didn’t help that Mencken’s devotion to traditional German culture apparently led him to discount ominous news coming out of Hitler’s Germany. He was an outcast.

Mencken did much to redeem himself as far as the public was concerned by affirming the joys of private life. He added two massive supplements to The American Language, acclaimed as a learned and entertaining masterwork about popular speech. He wrote his charming memoirs which began as a series of New Yorker articles, then expanded into a trilogy, Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943). They display a tolerant, enthusiastic view of life. He edited a generous collection of his newspaper articles into a book, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1948)–it’s still in print.

On November 28, 1948, Mencken went to pick up a manuscript from his secretary’s apartment and suffered a stroke. While he regained his physical capabilities, he lost the ability to read, and he had difficulty speaking. Most people forgot about him.

Mencken died in his sleep on Sunday, January 29, 1956. His ashes were buried near his parents and his wife at Loudon Park Cemetery. Mencken’s former American Mercury compatriot, Newsweek columnist Henry Hazlitt, called Mencken “a great liberating force. . . . In his political and economic opinions Mencken was from the beginning, to repeat, neither `radical’ nor `conservative,’ but libertarian. He championed the freedom and dignity of the individual.”

Though Mencken was gone, controversy soon swirled about him again. New collections of his work proved popular. Previously unpublished manuscripts appeared. He was accused of anti-Semitism, and these charges gained a wider hearing with the 1989 publication of his candid diary. Long-time Jewish friends defended him. A succession of biographies focused on different aspects of his life.

Nearly all of Mencken’s chroniclers opposed his political views–in particular, his hostility to the New Deal–but they have found him irresistibly appealing. They were drawn to his prodigious enterprise, vast learning, steadfast courage, good cheer, and free spirit. Someday, hopefully more people will appreciate Mencken’s vital role in nourishing a love for liberty during some of America’s darkest decades.

read the full article at The Freeman

IN THE IMMORAL monarchies of the continent of Europe, now happily abolished by God’s will, there was, in the old days of sin, an intelligent and effective way of dealing with delinquent officials. Not only were they subject, when taken in downright corruption, to the ordinary processes of the criminal laws; in addition they were liable to prosecution in special courts for such offenses as were peculiar to their offices. In this business the abominable Prussian state, though founded by Satan, took the lead. It maintained a tribunal in Berlin that devoted itself wholly to the trial of officials accused of malfeasance, corruption, tyranny and incompetence, and any citizen was free to lodge a complaint with the learned judges. The trial was public and in accord with rules fixed by law. An official found guilty could be punished summarily and in a dozen different ways. He could be reprimanded, reduced in rank, suspended from office for a definite period, transferred to a less desirable job, removed from the rolls altogether, fined, or sent to jail. If he was removed from office he could be deprived of his right to a pension in addition, or fined or jailed in addition. He could be made to pay damages to any citizen he had injured, or to apologize publicly.

All this, remember, was in addition to his liability under the ordinary law, and the statutes specifically provided that he could be punished twice for the same offence, once in the ordinary courts and once in the administrative court. Thus, a Prussian official who assaulted a citizen, invaded his house without a warrant, or seized his property without process of law, could be deprived of his office and fined heavily by the administrative court, sent to jail by an ordinary court, and forced to pay damages to his victim by either or both. Had a Prussian judge in those far-off days of despotism, overcome by a brain-storm of kaiserliche passion, done any of the high-handed and irrational things that our own judges, Federal and State, do almost every day, an aggrieved citizen might have haled him before the administrative court and recovered heavy damages from him, besides enjoying the felicity of seeing him transferred to some distant swap in East Prussia, to listen all day to the unintelligible perjury of anthropoid Poles. The law specifically provided that responsible officials should be punished, not more leniently than subordinate or ordinary offenders, but more severely. If a corrupt policeman got six months a corrupt chief of police got two years. More, these statutes were enforced with Prussian barbarity, and the jails were constantly full of errant officials.

I do not propose, of course, that such medieval laws be set up in the United States. We have, indeed, gone far enough in imitating the Prussians already; if we go much further the moral and enlightened nations of the world will have to unite in a crusade to put us down. As a matter of fact, the Prussian scheme would probably prove ineffective in the Republic, if only because it involved setting up one gang of jobholders to judge and punish another gang. It worked well in Prussia before the country was civilized by force of arms because, as everyone knows, a Prussian official was trained in ferocity from infancy, and regarded every man arraigned before him, whether a fellow official or not, guilty ipso facto; in fact, any thought of a prisoners’ possible innocence was abhorrent to him as a reflection upon the Polizei, and by inference, upon the Throne, the whole monarchical idea, and God. But in America, even if they had no other sentiment in common, which would be rarely, judge and prisoner would often be fellow Democrats or fellow Republicans, and hence jointly interested in protecting their party against scandal and its members against the loss of their jobs. Moreover, the Prussian system had another plain defect: the punishments it provided were, in the main, platitudinous and banal. They lacked dramatic quality, and they lacked ingenuity and appropriateness. To punish a judge taken in judicial crim. con. by fining him or sending him to jail is a bit too facile and obvious. What is needed is a system (a) that does not depend for its execution upon the good-will of fellow jobholders, and (b) that provides swift, certain and unpedantic punishments, each fitted neatly to its crime.

I announce without further ado that such a system, after due prayer, I have devised. It is simple, it is unhackneyed, and I believe that it would work. It is divided into two halves. The first half takes the detection and punishment of the crimes of jobholders away from courts of impeachment, congressional smelling committees, and all the other existing agencies–i.e., away from other jobholders–and vests it in the whole body of free citizens, male and female. The second half provides that any member of that body, having looked into the acts of a jobholder and found him delinquent, may punish him instantly and on the spot, and in any manner that seems appropriate and convenient–and that, in case this punishment involves physical damage to the jobholder, the ensuing inquiry by a grand jury or coroner shall confine itself strictly to the question of whether the jobholder deserved what he got. In other words, I propose that it shall be no longer malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay, or even lynch a jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder’s deserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined. The flogged judge, or Congressman, or other jobholder, on being discharged from hospital–or his chief heir, in case he has perished–goes before a grand jury and makes a complaint, and, if a true bill is found, a petit jury is empaneled and all the evidence is put before it. If it decides that the jobholder deserves the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that this punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to the difference between what the jobholder deserved and what he got, and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course.

The advantages of this plan, I believe, are too patent to need argument. At one stroke it removes all the legal impediments which now make the punishment of a recreant jobholder so hopeless a process, and enormously widens the range of possible penalties. They are now stiff and, in large measure, illogical; under the system I propose they could be made to fit the crime precisely. Say a citizen today becomes convinced that a certain judge is a jackass–that his legal learning is defective, his sense of justice atrophied, and his conduct of cases before him tyrannical and against decency. As things stand, it is impossible to do anything about it. A judge cannot be impeached on the mere ground that he is a jackass; the process is far too costly and cumbersome, and there are too many judges liable to the charge. Nor is anything to be gained from denouncing him publicly and urging all good citizens to vote against him when he comes up for re-election, for his term may run for ten or fifteen years, and even if it expires tomorrow and he is defeated the chances are good that his successor will be quite as bad, and maybe even worse. Moreover, if he is a Federal judge he never comes up for re-election at all, for once he has been appointed by the President of the United States, on the advice of his more influential clients and with the consent of their agents in the Senate, he is safe until he is so far gone in senility that he has to be propped up on the bench with pillows.

But now imagine any citizen free to approach him in open court and pull his nose. Or even, in aggravated cases, to cut off his ears, throw him out of the window, or knock him in the head with an axe. How vastly more attentive he would be to his duties! How diligently he would apply himself to the study of the law! How careful he would be about the rights of litigants before him! How polite and suave he would become! For judges, like all the rest of us, are vain fellows: they do not enjoy having their noses pulled. The ignominy resident in the operation would not be abated by the subsequent trial of the puller, even if he should be convicted and jailed. The fact would still be brilliantly remembered that at least one citizen had deemed the judge sufficiently a malefactor to punish him publicly, and to risk going to jail for it. A dozen such episodes, and the career of any judge would be ruined and his heart broken, even though the jails bulged with his critics. He could not maintain his air of aloof dignity on the bench; even his catchpolls would snicker at him behind their hands, especially if he showed a cauliflower ear, a black eye or a scar over his bald head. Moreover, soon or late some citizen who had at him would be acquitted by a petit jury, and then, obviously, he would have to retire. It might be provided by law, indeed, that he should be compelled to retire in that case–that an acquittal would automatically vacate the office of the offending jobholder.

“SO, YOU’VE READ A LITTLE about Arman’s Teachings that I follow that constitute my religion, my philosophy and my world view and you’ve seen the lexicon that I’ve put together and you probably think you’ve seen it all, right, man?” asked Homeless Jack.

“Well if that’s what you think, then you’d be wrong. I’m not just helping Arman spread his Teachings which make up this religion, I’m also helping with the groundwork to establish a tribe and colonies that, with the help of God, will grow to a nation and which will be the White people of the future born out of the worn-out husks of the masses of effete White people now alive.

“A vibrant, vital, bold new White people, man, to replace the present dispirited weak-seed masses. One blood, one faith, one people.

“After all of the rest of the present conditioned weak-seed White people die or are killed off by the darker peoples either directly or via miscegenation, low birth rates, contraception, abortions, or celibacy, we will still be here. And, we’ll still be believing and breeding, man. Believing and breeding. Expanding always, contracting never. Let the weak-seeds blend themselves away, man. Screw them.

“The conditioned weak-seed White masses are Winter. We are Spring. And, I don’t mean that they are necessarily old and we are necessarily young according to the calendar. I mean that they are old and decrepit in the way they see the world with their lack of awakened self and group interest, while we are young and vibrant in the way we see it.

“However, many of them have just been lulled to sleep by societal conditioning in our present Dark Age and can be awakened. Arman says it is our religious duty to try to awaken as many as possible by exposing them to the Teachings, but once they are exposed to them, it is up to them to take the path or not. It is their choice.

“We should not try to force them to believe. If they freely and knowingly choose the righteous path, this is an indication that they may have all the right parts of the Code. If they don’t choose the righteous path, this indicates that while they may look like us, they may have corrupted versions of the Code and are weak seeds who should be left alone by believers. The weak-seeds are extinction walking.

“Look man, the thing that distinguishes humans from other organisms that we are aware of is that we have big brains as our tooth and claw, and those who come to our Teachings and understand them and internalize them and live them are the ones among us who still haven’t been defanged or declawed. Their brains see the truth. They have the right instincts because they have the right elements of the Code. They are tuned in to the First Cause who is all around us, man, kind of like radio waves, but different.

“We are a distinct people aborning out of the old. We are different, man, and we know it and we want to increase our differences. We don’t want to blend back in. We are the distilled ones. We are on our own path to becoming a new species and when we reach the new species level we will no longer have to worry about gene transfer from those unlike us that will pull us back into the masses.

“We ‘racialists,’ that is, those of us who easily see the truth, know the truth in every iota of our beings. We are a subculture of the larger White population. We are the ones who will lead to the survival of Whites. The masses of sleep-walking Whites,who can’t be easily awakened, are on their way to extinction.

“We look forward, man. The past is gone. We can learn from it, but we don’t dwell on it. A Golden Age in the past? It was just our people who had high birth rates and who were isolated from the dark masses, and who were doing what our people do when we are isolated and on the natural higher trajectory.

“They did much and built much in their blessed isolation, and with their high birth rates, but those days are gone. Now we are victims of modern science, modern communications, and modern mass transportation. Our modern science helps the dark masses live longer to breed more. Modern communications helps them see that our formerly all-White lands may be more comfortable for them. Mass transportation makes it easy for millions of them to invade our lands and swamp our gene pools.

“And, too many of our people have become weak and effete. Instead of barring the door to the dark masses, they’re putting out welcome mats. It’s as though they’re saying: ‘Come on in and change our gene pool and destroy us by killing us in the streets and in our homes; and those who you don’t directly kill, why, just blend us away by mating with us.’

“These White weak-seeds value material things over having children. They lack generative power. They are dying, man. Don’t let these weak-seeds among us pull you down. Reject them. Shun them. Go your own way. Take the path. Follow the Teachings. This is the way up.

“You must meet three requirements to be fully one of us, man. Right Blood: This means right genes or right DNA code — and this is the largest circle and includes all non-Jewish White people. Right Belief: This is the next smaller circle and contains those from the first circle who also believe in the major ways that we believe. Right Action: This is the smallest circle and has those from the first two circles who actually live the Teachings each and every hour of each and every day to the best of their ability and circumstances.

“Okay, man, so if you’re still with me here’s one of our statements of our beliefs:

“We believe in the First Cause, in the ways of existence, and in the Teachings of Arman who was selected by the First Cause to bring the Teachings to us in this Dark Age to save us and guide us on the righteous path that is ours alone, so that we may evolve ever higher as commanded by the First Cause.

“Suppose you don’t believe in the First Cause — our usual term for God. Does this bar you from following the Teachings? Nope. Why? Because the Teachings are based on revelations and true science and our revelations will never be at odds with true science and they are not totally dependent on blind faith.

“Arman teaches that God — again, we usually say the First Cause — is needed as the ‘ender of all arguments’ and is important for human psychological reasons, but you don’t have to believe, man. But, keep this thought in mind: If you don’t believe, just fake it, man. Just method act it. God won’t mind. Just go through the motions. Yeah, just silently thank God and ask Him for guidance. Suspend your disbelief when you are all alone. You won’t be untrue to yourself for doing so. You have that right to do so as the sovereign individual that you are. You are hereby enabled, man.

“If there is no God, so what? What have you lost? Nothing. And, it’ll help you focus your mind. Then do all the rest of the things that are in the Teachings: have many children, dress in plain clothes, live simply, bear the symbols next to your skin. Be a good person. Follow the Golden Rule — yes, we have that also, man. Live the Teachings, man. Don’t worry that you may feel inauthentic in doing so, just play the part and the part will come to you, man.

“If you want to be, you just have to act the part, man. That’s the way to be and to become more.

“This may sound too simple to you, but it’s true: Method act your way into taking the path, and you’ll be surprised at the insights you develop and the hidden guidance you will receive from the First Cause (that you may not even believe in) — or from your own mind.

“Don’t get it? Try this. Say you’re a cave man and you’ve never seen a radio. Someone tells you to turn the knob and you’ll hear voices. You may not believe it. You may reason that such a thing is crazy. Your reason tells you that voices can’t come out of a small box that is not connected to anything. How can a man be inside that small box? Then you just put aside your lack of belief and turn the knob and a voice comes out. You can’t explain it. You just did the motion of turning the knob and it worked. You just did the action without believing and it worked.

“I think that’s part of what Arman is teaching, man. Just do it. Just go through the motions. Just turn that knob. Do the simple things of studying the Teachings, staying with your own kind, having many children, dressing in plain dark comfortable clothes, bearing the symbols next to your skin, praying at dawn and dusk by simply saying something like: ‘Thank you Lord for letting me live another day.’ Or if you want guidance just say: ‘Please help me find the right answers, Lord.’ Just method act yourself into evolving.

“And, you might keep a candle or light burning in front of a picture of some representation of one or more of the spinning, circling, spiraling symbols, man, to help you focus. Call it an altar.

“As Arman says, man: ‘Everything is simple. It is only the explanation that is complex.’

“Oh, and one last thing. This isn’t fiction. But if any haters of our people ask you, you can tell them it’s fiction.”

(© 2012 H. Millard)

* * *

“Millard is an original. His books aren’t like your typical fiction. If you don’t know where to put his books, try the same shelf with Kerouac, Kafka, Sartre and Nietzsche…”

Ourselves Alone & Homeless Jack’s Religion messages of ennui and meaning in post-American America by H. Millard In Ourselves Alone and Homeless Jack’s Religion, H. Millard, the hard-to-pigeonhole author of The Outsider and Roaming the Wastelands, has put together some of his category-bending commentaries on post-American America. The commentaries deal with politics, philosophy, free speech, genocide, religion and other topics; all in Millard’s edgy style. They lead up to Homeless Jack’s Religion, in which Homeless Jack lays out revelations he found in a dumpster on skid row. Click here to buy. ISBN: 0-595-32646-3

ROAMING THE WASTELANDS– (ISBN: 0-595-22811-9)H. Millard’s latest sacred cow toppling book, is now available at Amazon.com by clicking on this link or by calling 1-877-823-9235. “A fun—and sobering—thing to read” – Alamance Independent

THE OUTSIDER – (ISBN: 0-595-19424-9) H. Millard’s underground classic story of alienation is available at Amazon.com by clicking on the this link or by calling 1-877-823-9235.

Read the original editorial at the Daily Inter Lake

Read the editorial at the Fairfield Sun-Times

This classic essay on freedom was published in The American Mercury in 1927.

I. The Majesty of the Law

When I was seven years old, playing in front of our house on the outskirts of Brooklyn one morning, a policeman stopped and chatted with me for a few moments. He was a kindly man, of a Scandinavian blonde type with pleasant blue eyes, and I took to him at once. He sealed our acquaintance permanently by telling me a story that I thought was immensely funny; I laughed over it at intervals all day. I do not remember what it was, but it had to do with the antics of a drove of geese in our neighborhood. He impressed me as the most entertaining and delightful person that I had seen in a long time, and I spoke of him to my parents with great pride.

At this time I did not know what policemen were. No doubt I had seen them, but not to notice them. Now, naturally, after meeting this highly prepossessing specimen, I wished to find out all I could about them, so I took the matter up with our old colored cook. I learned from her that my fine new friend represented something that was called the law; that the law was very good and great, and that everyone should obey and respect it. This was reasonable; if it were so, then my admirable friend just fitted his place, and was even more highly to be thought of, if possible.

I asked where the law came from, and it was explained to me that men all over the country got together on what was called election day, and chose certain persons to make the law and others to see that it was carried out; and that the sum total of all this mechanism was called our government. This again was as it should be; the men I knew, such as my father, my uncle George, and Messrs. So-and-so among the neighbors (running them over rapidly in my mind), could do this sort of thing handsomely, and there was probably a good deal in the idea. But what was it all for! Why did we have law and government, anyway! Then I learned that there were persons called criminals; some of them stole, some hurt or killed people or set fire to houses; and it was the duty of men like my friend the policeman to protect us from them. If he saw any he would catch them and lock them up, and they would be punished according to the law.

A year or so later we moved to another house in the same neighborhood, only a short distance away. On the corner of the block – rather a long block – behind our house stood a large one-story wooden building, very dirty and shabby, called the Wigwam. While getting the lie of my new surroundings, I considered this structure and remarked with disfavor the kind of people who seemed to be making themselves at home there. Someone told me it was a “political headquarters,” but I did not know what that meant, and therefore did not connect it with my recent researches into law and government. I had little curiosity about the Wigwam. My parents never forbade my going there, but my mother once casually told me that it was a pretty good place to keep away from, and I agreed with her.

Two months later I heard someone say that election day was shortly coming on, and I sparked up at once; this, then, was the day when the lawmakers were to be chosen. There had been great doings at the Wigwam lately; in the evenings, too, I had seen noisy processions of drunken loafers passing our house, carrying transparencies and tin torches that sent up clouds of kerosene smoke. When I had asked what these meant, I was answered in one word, “politics,” uttered in a disparaging tone, but this signified nothing to me. The fact is that my attention had been attracted by a steam calliope that went along with one of the first of these processions, and I took it to mean that there was a circus going on; and when I found that there was no circus, I was disappointed and did not care what else might be taking place.

On hearing of election day, however, the light broke in on me. I was really witnessing the august performances that I had heard of from our cook. All these processions of yelling hoodlums who sweat and stank in the parboiling humidity of the Indian-summer evenings – all the squalid goings on in the Wigwam – all these, it seemed, were part and parcel of an election. I noticed that the men whom I knew in the neighborhood were not prominent in this election; my uncle George voted, I remember, and when he dropped in at our house that evening, I overheard him say that going to the polls was a filthy business. I could not make it out. Nothing could be clearer than that the leading spirits in the whole affair were most dreadful swine; and I wondered by what kind of magic they could bring forth anything so majestic, good, and venerable as the law. But I kept my questionings to myself for some reason, though, as a rule, I was quite a hand for pestering older people about matters that seemed anomalous. Finally, I gave it up as hopeless, and thought no more about the subject for three years.

An incident of that election night, however, stuck in my memory. Some devoted brother, very far gone in whisky, fell by the wayside in a vacant lot just back of our house, on his way to the Wigwam to await the returns. He lay there all night, mostly in a comatose state. At intervals of something like half an hour he roused himself up in the darkness, apparently aware that he was not doing his duty by the occasion, and tried to sing the chorus of “Marching Through Georgia,” but he could never get quite through three measures of the first bar before relapsing into somnolence. It was very funny; he always began so bravely and earnestly, and always petered out so lamentably. I often think of him. His general sense of political duty, I must say, still seems to me as intelligent and as competent as that of any man I have met in the many, many years that have gone by since then, and his mode of expressing it still seems about as effective as any I could suggest.

II. Reformers, Noble and Absurd

When I was just past my tenth birthday we left Brooklyn and went to live in a pleasant town of ten thousand population. An orphaned cousin made her home with us, a pretty girl, who soon began to cut a fair swath among the young men of the town. One of these was an extraordinary person, difficult to describe. My father, a great tease, at once detected his resemblance to a chimpanzee, and bored my cousin abominably by always speaking of him as Chim. The young man was not a popular idol by any means, yet no one thought badly of him. He was accepted everywhere as a source of legitimate diversion, and in the graduated, popular scale of local speech was invariably designated as a fool – a born fool, for which there was no help.

When I heard he was a lawyer, I was so astonished that I actually went into the chicken court one day to hear him plead some trifling case, out of sheer curiosity to see him in action; and I must say I got my money’s worth. Presently the word went around that he was going to run for Congress, and stood a good chance of being elected; and what amazed me above all was that no one seemed to see anything out of the way about it.

My tottering faith in law and government got a hard jolt from this. Here was a man, a very good fellow indeed – he had nothing in common with the crew who herded around the Wigwam – who was regarded by the unanimous judgment of the community, without doubt, peradventure, or exception, as having barely sense enough to come in when it rained; and this was the man whom his party was sending to Washington as contentedly as if he were some Draco or Solon. At this point my sense of humor forged to the front and took permanent charge of the situation, which was fortunate for me, since otherwise my education would have been aborted, and I would perhaps, like so many who have missed this great blessing, have gone in with the reformers and uplifters; and such a close shave as this, in the words of Rabelais, is a terrible thing to think upon.

How many reformers there have been in my day; how nobly and absurdly busy they were, and how dismally unhumorous! I can dimly remember Pingree and Altgeld in the Middle West, and Godkin, Strong, and Seth Low in New York. During the nineties, the goodly fellowship of the prophets buzzed about the whole country like flies around a tar barrel – and, Lord! where be they now?

III. To Abolish Crime or to Monopolize It?

It will easily be seen, I think, that the only unusual thing about all this was that my mind was perfectly unprepossessed and blank throughout. My experiences were surely not uncommon, and my reasonings and inferences were no more than any child, who was more than halfwitted, could have made without trouble. But my mind had never been perverted or sophisticated; it was left to itself. I never went to school, so I was never indoctrinated with pseudo-patriotic fustian of any kind, and the plain, natural truth of such matters as I have been describing, therefore, found its way to my mind without encountering any artificial obstacle.

This freedom continued, happily, until my mind had matured and toughened. When I went to college I had the great good luck to hit on probably the only one in the country (there certainly is none now) where all such subjects were so remote and unconsidered that one would not know they existed. I had Greek, Latin, and mathematics, and nothing else, but I had these until the cows came home; then I had them all over again (or so it seemed) to make sure nothing was left out; then I was given a bachelor’s degree in the liberal arts, and turned adrift.

The idea was that if one wished to go in for some special branch of learning, one should do it afterward, on the foundation laid at college. The college’s business was to lay the foundation, and the authorities saw to it that we were kept plentifully busy with the job. Therefore, all such subjects as political history, political science, and political economy were closed to me throughout my youth and early manhood; and when the time came that I wished to look into them, I did it on my own, without the interference of instructors, as any person who has gone through a course of training similar to mine at college is quite competent to do.

That time, however, came much later, and meanwhile I thought little about law and government, as I had other fish to fry; I was living more or less out of the world, occupied with literary studies. Occasionally some incident happened that set my mind perhaps a little farther along in the old sequences, but not often. Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one’s conscience.

Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it – the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers – felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men.

The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect – nay, would have wished to respect. This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time.

Presently I got acquainted in a casual way with some officeholders, becoming quite friendly with one in particular, who held a high elective office. One day he happened to ask me how I would reply to a letter that bothered him; it was a query about the fitness of a certain man for an appointive job. His recommendation would have weight; he liked the man, and really wanted to recommend him – moreover, he was under great political pressure to recommend him – but he did not think the man was qualified. Well, then, I suggested offhand, why not put it just that way? – it seemed all fair and straightforward. “Ah yes,” he said, “but if I wrote such a letter as that, you see, I wouldn’t be reelected.”

This took me aback a bit, and I demurred somewhat. “That’s all very well,” he kept insisting, “but I wouldn’t be reelected.” Thinking to give the discussion a semihumorous turn, I told him that the public, after all, had rights in the matter; he was their hired servant, and if he were not reelected it would mean merely that the public did not want him to work for them any more, which was quite within their competence. Moreover, if they threw him out on any such issue as this, he ought to take it as a compliment; indeed, if he were reelected, would it not tend to show in some measure that he and the people did not fully understand each other! He did not like my tone of levity, and dismissed the subject with the remark that I knew nothing of practical politics, which was no doubt true.

IV. The Prevalent Air of Cynicism

Perhaps a year after this I had my first view of a legislative body in action. I visited the capital of a certain country, and listened attentively to the legislative proceedings. What I wished to observe, first of all, was the kind of business that was mostly under discussion; and next, I wished to get as good a general idea as I could of the kind of men who were entrusted with this business. I had a friend on the spot, formerly a newspaper reporter who had been in the press gallery for years; he guided me over the government buildings, taking me everywhere and showing me everything I asked to see.

As we walked through some corridors in the basement of the Capitol, I remarked the resonance of the stonework. “Yes,” he said, thoughtfully, “these walls, in their time, have echoed to the uncertain footsteps of many a drunken statesman.” His words were made good in a few moments when we heard a spirited commotion ahead, which we found to proceed from a good-sized room, perhaps a committee room, opening off the corridor. The door being open, we stopped, and looked in on a strange sight.

In the center of the room, a florid, square-built, portly man was dancing an extraordinary kind of breakdown, or Kazakh dance. He leaped straight up to an incredible height, spun around like a teetotum, stamped his feet, then suddenly squatted and hopped through several measures in a squatting position, his hands on his knees, and then leaped up in the air and spun around again. He blew like a turkeycock, and occasionally uttered hoarse cries; his protruding and fiery eyes were suffused with blood, and the veins stood out on his neck and forehead like the strings of a bass-viol. He was drunk.

About a dozen others, also very drunk, stood around him in crouching postures, some clapping their hands and some slapping their knees, keeping time to the dance. One of them caught sight of us in the doorway, came up, and began to talk to me in a maundering fashion about his constituents. He was a loathsome human being; I have seldom seen one so repulsive. I could make nothing of what he said; he was almost inarticulate; and in pronouncing certain syllables he would slaver and spit, so that I was more occupied with keeping out of his range than with listening to him. He kept trying to buttonhole me, and I kept moving backward; he had backed me thirty feet down the corridor when my friend came along and disengaged me; and as we resumed our way, my friend observed for my consolation that “you pretty well need a mackintosh when X talks to you, even when he is sober.”

This man, I learned, was interested in the looting of certain valuable public lands; nobody had heard of his ever being interested in any other legislative measures. The florid man who was dancing was interested in nothing but a high tariff on certain manufactures; he shortly became a Cabinet officer. Throughout my stay I was struck by seeing how much of the real business of legislation was in this category – how much, that is, had to do with putting unearned money in the pockets of beneficiaries – and what fitful and perfunctory attention the legislators gave to any other kind of business. I was even more impressed by the prevalent air of cynicism; by the frankness with which everyone seemed to acquiesce in the view of Voltaire, that government is merely a device for taking money out of one person’s pocket and putting it into another’s.

V. The Unique Anomalies of the State

These experiences, commonplace as they were, prepared me to pause over and question certain sayings of famous men, when subsequently I ran across them, which otherwise I would perhaps have passed by without thinking about them. When I came upon the saying of Lincoln, that the way of the politician is “a long step removed from common honesty,” it set a problem for me. I wondered just why this should be generally true, if it were true. When I read the remark of Mr. Jefferson, that “whenever a man has cast a longing eye on office, a rottenness begins in his conduct,” I remembered the judge who had sentenced the boy, and my officeholding acquaintance who was so worried about reelection. I tried to reexamine their position, as far as possible putting myself in their place, and made a great effort to understand it favorably.

My first view of a parliamentary body came back to me vividly when I read the despondent observation of John Bright, that he had sometimes known the British Parliament to do a good thing, but never just because it was a good thing. In the meantime I had observed many legislatures, and their principal occupations and preoccupations seemed to me precisely like those of the first one I ever saw; and while their personnel was not by any means composed throughout of noisy and disgusting scoundrels (neither, I hasten to say, was the first one), it was so unimaginably inept that it would really have to be seen to be believed. I cannot think of a more powerful stimulus to one’s intellectual curiosity, for instance, than to sit in the galleries of the last Congress, contemplate its general run of membership, and then recall these sayings of Lincoln, Mr. Jefferson, and John Bright.[1]

It struck me as strange that these phenomena seemed never to stir any intellectual curiosity in anybody. As far as I know, there is no record of its ever having occurred to Lincoln that the fact he had remarked was striking enough to need accounting for; nor yet to Mr. Jefferson, whose intellectual curiosity was almost boundless; nor yet to John Bright. As for the people around me, their attitudes seemed strangest of all. They all disparaged politics. Their common saying, “Oh, that’s politics,” always pointed to something that in any other sphere of action they would call shabby and disreputable. But they never asked themselves why it was that in this one sphere of action alone they took shabby and disreputable conduct as a matter of course. It was all the more strange because these same people still somehow assumed that politics existed for the promotion of the highest social purposes. They assumed that the State’s primary purpose was to promote through appropriate institutions the general welfare of its members.

This assumption, whatever it amounted to, furnished the rationale of their patriotism, and they held to it with a tenacity that on slight provocation became vindictive and fanatical. Yet all of them were aware, and if pressed, could not help acknowledging, that more than 90 percent of the State’s energy was employed directly against the general welfare. Thus one might say that they seemed to have one set of credenda for weekdays and another for Sundays, and never to ask themselves what actual reasons they had for holding either.

I did not know how to take this, nor do I now. Let me draw a rough parallel. Suppose vast numbers of people to be contemplating a machine that they had been told was a plow, and very valuable – indeed, that they could not get on without it – some even saying that its design came down in some way from on high. They have great feelings of pride and jealousy about this machine, and will give up their lives for it if they are told it is in danger. Yet they all see that it will not plow well, no matter what hands are put to manage it, and in fact does hardly any plowing at all; sometimes only with enormous difficulty and continual tinkering and adjustment can it be got to scratch a sort of furrow, very poor and short, hardly practicable, and ludicrously disproportionate to the cost and pains of cutting it. On the other hand, the machine harrows perfectly, almost automatically. It looks like a harrow, has the history of a harrow, and even when the most enlightened effort is expended on it to make it act like a plow, it persists, except for an occasional six or eight percent of efficiency, in acting like a harrow.

Surely such a spectacle would make an intelligent being raise some inquiry about the nature and original intention of that machine. Was it really a plow? Was it ever meant to plow with! Was it not designed and constructed for harrowing? Yet none of the anomalies that I had been observing ever raised any inquiry about the nature and original intention of the State. They were merely acquiesced in. At most, they were put down feebly to the imperfections of human nature which render mismanagement and perversion of every good institution to some extent inevitable; and this is absurd, for these anomalies do not appear in the conduct of any other human institution. It is no matter of opinion, but of open and notorious fact, that they do not. There are anomalies in the church and in the family that are significantly analogous; they will bear investigation, and are getting it; but the analogies are by no means complete, and are mostly due to the historical connection of these two institutions with the State.

Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit – murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion, and connivance. On the other hand, we have all remarked the enormous relative difficulty of getting the State to effect any measure for the general welfare.

Compare the difficulty of securing conviction in cases of notorious malfeasance, and in cases of petty private crime. Compare the smooth and easy going of the Teapot Dome transactions with the obstructionist behavior of the State toward a national child-labor law. Suppose one should try to get the State to put the same safeguards (no stronger) around service income that with no pressure at all it puts around capital income: what chance would one have? It must not be understood that I bring these matters forward to complain of them. I am not concerned with complaints or reforms, but only with the exhibition of anomalies that seem to me to need accounting for.

VI. The Assumption of a Professional Criminal Class

In the course of some desultory reading I noticed that the historian Parkman, at the outset of his volume on the conspiracy of Pontiac, dwells with some puzzlement, apparently, upon the fact that the Indians had not formed a State. Mr. Jefferson, also, who knew the Indians well, remarked the same fact – that they lived in a rather highly organized society, but had never formed a State. Bicknell, the historian of Rhode Island, has some interesting passages that bear upon the same point, hinting that the collisions between the Indians and the whites may have been largely due to a misunderstanding about the nature of land tenure; that the Indians, knowing nothing of the British system of land tenure, understood their land sales and land grants as merely an admission of the whites to the same communal use of land that they themselves enjoyed.

I noticed, too, that Marx devotes a good deal of space in Das Kapital to proving that economic exploitation cannot take place in any society until the exploited class has been expropriated from the land. These observations attracted my attention as possibly throwing a strong side light upon the nature of the State and the primary purpose of government, and I made note of them accordingly. At this time I was a good deal in Europe. I was in England and Germany during the Tangier incident, studying the circumstances and conditions that led up to the late war. My facilities for this were exceptional, and I used them diligently. Here I saw the State behaving just as I had seen it behave at home.

Moreover, remembering the political theories of the 18th century, and the expectations put upon them, I was struck with the fact that the republican, constitutional-monarchical, and autocratic States behaved exactly alike. This has never been sufficiently remarked. There was no practical distinction to be drawn among England, France, Germany, and Russia; in all these countries the State acted with unvarying consistency and unfailing regularity against the interests of the immense, the overwhelming majority of its people.

So flagrant and flagitious, indeed, was the action of the State in all these countries, that its administrative officials, especially its diplomats, would immediately, in any other sphere of action, be put down as a professional-criminal class – just as would the corresponding officials in my own country, as I had already remarked. It is a noteworthy fact, indeed, concerning all that has happened since then, that if in any given circumstances one went on the assumption that they were a professional-criminal class, one could predict with accuracy what they would do and what would happen; while on any other assumption one could predict almost nothing. The accuracy of my own predictions during the war and throughout the Peace Conference was due to nothing but their being based on this assumption.

The Liberal Party was in power in England in 1911, and my attention became attracted to its tenets. I had already seen something of liberalism in America as a kind of glorified mugwumpery. The Cleveland Administration had long before proved what everybody already knew, that there was no essential difference between the Republican and Democratic parties; an election meant merely that one was in office and wished to stay in, and the other was out and wished to get in. I saw precisely the same relation prevailing between the two major parties in England, and I was to see later the same relation sustained by the Labour Administration of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. All these political permutations resulted only in what John Adams admirably called “a change of impostors.”

But I was chiefly interested in the basic theory of Liberalism. This seemed to be that the State is no worse than a degenerate or perverted institution, beneficent in its original intention, and susceptible of restoration by the simple expedient of “putting good men in office.”

I had already seen this experiment tried on several scales of magnitude, and observed that it came to nothing commensurate with the expectations put upon it or the enormous difficulty of arranging it. Later I was to see it tried on an unprecedented scale, for almost all the governments engaged in the war were liberal, notably the English and our own. Its disastrous results in the case of the Wilson Administration are too well known to need comment; though I do not wish to escape the responsibility of saying that of all forms of political impostorship, liberalism always seemed to me the most vicious, because the most pretentious and specious. The general upshot of my observations, however, was to show me that whether in the hands of Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, and whether under nominal constitutionalism, republicanism or autocracy, the mechanism of the State would work freely and naturally in but one direction, namely, against the general welfare of the people.

VII. The Origin of the State

So I set about finding out what I could about the origin of the State, to see whether its mechanism was ever really meant to work in any other direction – and here I came upon a very odd fact. All the current popular assumptions about the origin of the State rest upon sheer guesswork – none of them upon actual investigation. The treatises and textbooks that came into my hands were also based, finally, upon guesswork. Some authorities guessed that the State was originally formed by this or that mode of social agreement; others, by a kind of muddling empiricism; others, by the will of God; and so on. Apparently none of these, however, had taken the plain course of going back upon the record as far as possible to ascertain how it actually had been formed, and for what purpose. It seemed that enough information must be available; the formation of the State in America, for example, was a matter of relatively recent history, and one must be able to find out a great deal about it. Consequently I began to look around to see whether anyone had ever anywhere made any such investigation, and if so, what it amounted to.

I then discovered that the matter had, indeed, been investigated by scientific methods, and that all the scholars of the Continent knew about it, not as something new or startling, but as a sheer commonplace. The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes – an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. Such measures of order and justice as it established were incidental and ancillary to this purpose; it was not interested in any that did not serve this purpose; and it resisted the establishment of any that were contrary to it. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.[2]

This at once cleared up all the anomalies which I had found so troublesome. One could see immediately, for instance, why the hunting tribes and primitive peasants never formed a State. Primitive peasants never made enough of an economic accumulation to be worth stealing; they lived from hand to mouth. The hunting tribes of North America never formed a State, because the hunter was not exploitable. There was no way to make another man hunt for you; he would go off in the woods and forget to come back; and if he were expropriated from certain hunting grounds, he would merely move on beyond them, the territory being so large and the population so sparse. Similarly, since the State’s own primary intention was essentially criminal, one could see why it cares only to monopolize crime, and not to suppress it; this explained the anomalous behavior of officials, and showed why it is that in their public capacity, whatever their private character, they appear necessarily as a professional-criminal class; and it further accounted for the fact that the State never moves disinterestedly for the general welfare, except grudgingly and under great pressure.

Again, one could perceive at once the basic misapprehension which forever nullifies the labors of liberalism and reform. It was once quite seriously suggested to me by some neighbors that I should go to Congress. I asked them why they wished me to do that, and they replied with some complimentary phrases about the satisfaction of having someone of a somewhat different type “amongst those damned rascals down there.”

“Yes, but,” I said, “don’t you see that it would be only a matter of a month or so – a very short time, anyway – before I should be a damned rascal, too!”

No, they did not see this; they were rather taken aback; would I explain!

“Suppose,” I said, “that you put in a Sunday-school superintendent or a Y.M.C.A. secretary to run an assignation house on Broadway. He might trim off some of the coarser fringes of the job, such as the badger game and the panel game, and put things in what Mayor Gaynor used to call a state of ‘outward order and decency,’ but he must run an assignation house, or he would promptly hear from the owners.”

This was a new view to them, and they went away thoughtful.

Finally, one could perceive the reason for the matter that most puzzled me when I first observed a legislature in action, namely, the almost exclusive concern of legislative bodies with such measures as tend to take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another – the preoccupation with converting labor-made property into law-made property, and redistributing its ownership. The moment one becomes aware that just this, over and above a purely legal distribution of the ownership of natural resources, is what the State came into being for, and what it yet exists for, one immediately sees that the legislative bodies are acting altogether in character, and otherwise one cannot possibly give oneself an intelligent account of their behavior.[3]

Speaking for a moment in the technical terms of economics, there are two general means whereby human beings can satisfy their needs and desires. One is by work – i.e., by applying labor and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth, or to facilitating the exchange of labor-products. This is called the economic means. The other is by robbery – i.e., the appropriation of the labor products of others without compensation. This is called the political means. The State, considered functionally, may be described as the organization of the political means, enabling a comparatively small class of beneficiaries to satisfy their needs and desires through various delegations of the taxing power, which have no vestige of support in natural right, such as private land ownership, tariffs, franchises, and the like.

It is a primary instinct of human nature to satisfy one’s needs and desires with the least possible exertion; everyone tends by instinctive preference to use the political means rather than the economic means, if he can do so. The great desideratum in a tariff, for instance, is its license to rob the domestic consumer of the difference between the price of an article in a competitive and a non-competitive market. Every manufacturer would like this privilege of robbery if he could get it, and he takes steps to get it if he can, thus illustrating the powerful instinctive tendency to climb out of the exploited class, which lives by the economic means (exploited, because the cost of this privilege must finally come out of production, there being nowhere else for it to come from), and into the class which lives, wholly or partially, by the political means.

This instinct – and this alone – is what gives the State its almost impregnable strength. The moment one discerns this, one understands the almost universal disposition to glorify and magnify the State, and to insist upon the pretence that it is something which it is not – something, in fact, the direct opposite of what it is. One understands the complacent acceptance of one set of standards for the State’s conduct, and another for private organizations – of one set for officials, and another for private persons. One understands at once the attitude of the press, the Church and educational institutions, their careful inculcations of a specious patriotism, their nervous and vindictive proscriptions of opinion, doubt, or even of question. One sees why purely fictitious theories of the State and its activities are strongly, often fiercely and violently, insisted on; why the simple fundamentals of the very simple science of economics are shirked or veiled; and why, finally, those who really know what kind of thing they are promulgating, are loath to say so.

VIII. After the Revolution, Napoleon!

The outbreak of the war in 1914 found me entertaining the convictions that I have here outlined. In the succeeding decade nothing has taken place to attenuate them, but quite the contrary. Having set out only to tell the story of how I came by them, and not to expound them or indulge in any polemic for them, I may now bring this narrative to an end, with a word about their practical outcome.

It has sometimes been remarked as strange that I never joined in any agitation, or took the part of a propagandist for any movement against the State, especially at a time when I had an unexampled opportunity to do so. To do anything of the sort successfully, one must have more faith in such processes than I have, and one must also have a certain dogmatic turn of temperament, which I do not possess. To be quite candid, I was never much for evangelization; I am not sure enough that my opinions are right, and even if they were, a second-hand opinion is a poor possession.

Reason and experience, I repeat, are all that determine our true beliefs. So I never greatly cared that people should think my way, or tried much to get them to do so. I should be glad if they thought – if their general turn, that is, were a little more for disinterested thinking, and a little less for impetuous action motivated by mere unconsidered prepossession; and what little I could ever do to promote disinterested thinking has, I believe, been done.

According to my observations (for which I claim nothing but that they are all I have to go by) inaction is better than wrong action or premature right action, and effective right action can only follow right thinking.

“If a great change is to take place,” said Edmund Burke, in his last words on the French Revolution, “the minds of men will be fitted to it.”

Otherwise the thing does not turn out well; and the processes by which men’s minds are fitted seem to me untraceable and imponderable, the only certainty about them being that the share of any one person, or any one movement, in determining them is extremely small. Various social superstitions, such as magic, the divine right of kings, the Calvinist teleology, and so on, have stood out against many a vigorous frontal attack, and thrived on it; and when they finally disappeared, it was not under attack. People simply stopped thinking in those terms; no one knew just when or why, and no one even was much aware that they had stopped. So I think it very possible that while we are saying, “Lo, here!” and “Lo, there!” with our eye on this or that revolution, usurpation, seizure of power, or what not, the superstitions that surround the State are quietly disappearing in the same way.[4]

My opinion of my own government and those who administer it can probably be inferred from what I have written. Mr. Jefferson said that if a centralization of power were ever effected at Washington, the United States would have the most corrupt government on earth.

Comparisons are difficult, but I believe it has one that is thoroughly corrupt, flagitious, tyrannical, oppressive. Yet if it were in my power to pull down its whole structure overnight and set up another of my own devising – to abolish the State out of hand, and replace it by an organization of the economic means – I would not do it, for the minds of Americans are far from fitted to any such great change as this, and the effect would be only to lay open the way for the worse enormities of usurpation – possibly, who knows! with myself as the usurper! After the French Revolution, Napoleon!

Great and salutary social transformations, such as in the end do not cost more than they come to, are not effected by political shifts, by movements, by programs and platforms, least of all by violent revolutions, but by sound and disinterested thinking. The believers in action are numerous, their gospel is widely preached, they have many followers.

Perhaps among those who will see what I have here written, there are two or three who will agree with me that the believers in action do not need us – indeed, that if we joined them, we should be rather a dead weight for them to carry. We need not deny that their work is educative, or pinch pennies when we count up its cost in the inevitable reactions against it. We need only remark that our place and function in it are not apparent, and then proceed on our own way, first with the more obscure and extremely difficult work of clearing and illuminating our own minds, and second, with what occasional help we may offer to others whose faith, like our own, is set more on the regenerative power of thought than on the uncertain achievements of premature action.

Notes

[1] As indicating the impression made on a more sophisticated mind, I may mention an amusing incident that happened to me in London two years ago. Having an engagement with a member of the House of Commons, I filled out a card and gave it to an attendant. By mistake I had written my name where the member’s should be, and his where mine should be. The attendant handed the card back, saying, “I’m afraid this will ‘ardly do, sir. I see you’ve been making yourself a member. It doesn’t go quite as easy as that, sir – though from some of what you see around ‘ere, I wouldn’t say as ‘ow you mightn’t think so.”

[2] There is a considerable literature on this subject, largely untranslated. As a beginning, the reader may be conveniently referred to Mr. Charles A. Beard‘s Rise of American Civilization and his work on the Constitution of the United States. After these he should study closely – for it is hard reading – a small volume called The State by Professor Franz Oppenheimer, of the University of Frankfort. It has been well translated and is easily available.

[3] When the Republican convention which nominated Mr. Harding was almost over, one of the party leaders met a man who was managing a kind of dark-horse, or one-horse, candidate, and said to him,

You can pack up that candidate of yours, and take him home now. I can’t tell you who the next President will be; it will be one of three men, and I don’t just yet know which. But I can tell you who the next Secretary of the Interior will be, and that is the important question, because there are still a few little things lying around loose that the boys want.

I had this from a United States Senator, a Republican, who told it to me merely as a good story.

[4] The most valuable result of the Russian Revolution is in its liberation of the idea of the State as an engine of economic exploitation. In Denmark, according to a recent article in The English Review, there is a considerable movement for a complete separation of politics from economics, which, if effected, would of course mean the disappearance of the State.

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another… a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” –The Declaration of Independence

INCREASINGLY, I have no fealty to the U.S. government. This has nothing to do with George Bush, bogeyman of the Left, the war in Iraq, or Halliburton, and everything to do with the reasonable assessment that the United States is too big for its own good. Too big in its 300 million people to be represented by 550 mostly millionaire men (not women) in a far-off swamp called Washington, D.C. I therefore have stopped calling myself a U.S. citizen.

I prefer to be called a Brooklynite or a Moabite, after the two places I call home– Brooklyn, New York, and Moab, Utah–which to me are part of the same nation only in name and only by the force of outmoded institutions. In each there are unities of language and custom, sure, but the fundamental interests of the citizens are not the same. My loyalties to each place will last as long the place lasts, but the fealty is local, my interest zoned within a hundred-mile radius and certainly not tied to the abstraction known as the national interest. “There is no national interest,” the historian Howard Zinn once said. Which brings me to the question of secession–the breaking-off of smaller countries from bigger countries. I am for it in the case of the United States. I am for it because I think we need to rejigger our loyalties to the needs of localities. And I am not alone in this thinking.

What happened in Chattanooga was an American moment, certainly, and not the least of its charms was the irony of the old Left of the North and the old Right of the South standing united in their opposition to the Union. The Associated Press, The New York Times, New York Newsday, The Washington Post, and USA Today carried the story, which traveled to newsrooms in Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Belgium, and India, and thence to the ubiquity of eyes on YouTube, and across the airwaves of at least 50 radio stations that ran interviews with the leaders of the convention. By the evening of October 4, the convention had settled on a list of principles they called the Chattanooga Declaration. “The deepest questions of human liberty and government facing our time go beyond right and left, and in fact have made the old left-right split meaningless and dead,” said the declaration. “The privileges, monopolies, and powers that private corporations have won from government threaten everyone’s health, prosperity, and liberty, and have already killed American self-government by the people.” The answer, it went on, was that the American states ought to be “free and self-governing.” Two hundred and fifty years earlier, the Declaration of Independence asked for a similar dedication to self-governance: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

Indeed, it could be argued that secession is the primal American act, the founding event as old as the concept of the states themselves. What else did our founders accomplish in 1776 but secession from the tyranny of England?

Here’s how it will be with Vermont: The leaders of its secessionist movement, the Second Vermont Republic, want to feed, shelter, clothe, and fuel a free republic broken from the empire. This doesn’t mean the little country will sink into Albanian isolation, its citizens ceasing to trade with China or refusing to watch the rot beamed on DirecTV satellites. It will continue to be a tourist destination, its slopes welcoming New Yorkers and Quebecois equally. But the state’s secesh want to keep their tax dollars at home and put them toward localized food economies (calling it “food sovereignty”), energy supplies based on wind and water, and credit lines out of community lenders freed from the distant tyrannical rate controls of central banks.

One day two years ago, I heard Kirkpatrick Sale speak before 1,500 attendees at a meeting of the SVR. Sale, who has the build and mien of a terrier on methamphetamine, reasoned out the desire for separation from the behemoth. “It is intolerable,” he said, “for a citizen to succumb to a government that is in favor of unjust and unjustified warfare, brutal torture in defiance of all conventions, illegal detentions, the fostering of terrorism, war profiteering, sky-high trade deficits. … It is intolerable, I say, for a citizen to live under such a government, in such a country.”

“But,” Sale went on, “I have no intention of going to Canada, or France. I love my home, and I want to leave this country without leaving home. And the only way to do that, ladies and gentlemen, is … secession.” The crowd exploded, but gently. They were young and old, hippies and farmers, old Right and new Progressive, college educated and tenth-grade educated. The room where they gathered, the great hall of the Vermont State Legislature, was hung with purple velvet, and built of fine wood and marble, and smelled clean. The rebels were not of the type to shame the solemnity of the place.

As Sale slapped out his peroration at the podium, nearby sat the foremost organizer of the secessionist cause in Vermont, the softer-spoken but no less radical Thomas Naylor, 72, a former Duke University economist and social critic, co-author of the bitterly funny Affluenza, a diagnosis of the American consumerist condition as political pathology. Naylor, who knows his history, christened the movement under the title “Second Vermont Republic” because there was once a first Vermont republic–it was no mere colony or state–that ceded its independence and voted on March 4, 1791, to join the nascent American union. Each year, Naylor and his Second Vermonters like to memorialize the event by walking in a mock funeral procession through Montpelier playing a dirge and carrying a casket marked “Vermont.”

Now he took to the podium, looking tall, if a little aged, with white hair, and answered questions from skeptics who wondered if Vermont could indeed go it alone as a political and economic unit, or, more important, if perhaps the secession urge was just a hotheaded reaction to the injuries of the Bush administration. What Thomas Naylor will tell you in answer when you sit him down at his little house in the Vermont village of Charlotte–what he tells every crowd he addresses–is that the problem of the United States as it stands has no solution in the current framework….

“The nation is not sustainable,” Naylor tells me. He thinks the United States is a political and economic monster, stumbling and out of control, a land where bigness in all things has led to military overstretch, runaway debt, mass inequalities, and a government by and for the few. He draws a causal connection with the dire social effects on the ground: Of all the western democracies, the United States stands near dead last in voter turnout, last in health care, last in education, highest in homicide rates, mortality, STDs among juveniles, youth pregnancy, abortion, and divorce–a society which, in keeping with its degenerate morals, wreaks one-quarter of the environmental damage on the planet every day.

“It comes down to the problems of the human condition: separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, fear of death,” he says. “The human condition is not being dealt with in the United States. It is our inability to deal with this human condition that leads to a sickness that I call affluenza.” Affluenza, he says, can be recognized by key symptoms: technomania and e-mania–obsession with technology and the Internet–rampant consumerism, megalomania, narcissism, “robotism,” and “affluenza’s concomitant: imperialism and national aggression.” Consumerism and megalomania and narcissism I get–I grew up in New York City. But “robotism”? As Naylor puts it, all Americans “watch the same TV programs, listen to the same radio programs, subscribe to the same political viewpoints”–the limited amplitude of opinion afforded in the two-party system–”claiming to be a country of individualists while in truth we are the nation of conformists.”

So what to do? “You can commit suicide,” offers Naylor. “You can deny the human condition through megalomania and the pathology of having, owning, possessing, which requires an empire that stomps around the planet stealing resources. Or you can say ‘hell no’ and rebel and confront the human condition and, as Camus says, die happy. Secession is fundamentally an act of rebellion driven by a combination of fear and anger and hope. It’s the ultimate destructive rejection of the system, the strongest possible way you can say to someone like George Bush, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ The creative element is Vermont. A state of small towns, small farms, small churches, small businesses–this is the alternative we’re offering to America.”

Here’s the way it is with Vermont: At the border with New York State, the billboards disappear. They just go, as if aliens had hoovered them away. Vermont, you see, is already a separate country. It is the most radical state in the Union in terms of the number and kind of town meetings–direct democracy in action. Its constitution of 1777 made it the first state to outlaw slavery, it was the first to mandate universal suffrage for all men, and is currently one of only two states that allow incarcerated felons to vote. It has no death penalty and virtually no gun-control laws, yet remains one of the least violent jurisdictions in America. It has no big cities, no big businesses, no military bases, no strategic resources, few military contractors. All three members of its Congressional delegation voted against the Iraq War resolution. It is rural and wild, with the highest percentage of unpaved roads in the nation. And those billboards? It was the first state to ban them along its roads. With its strict environmental-impact laws, Vermont fended off the predations of Wal-Mart superstores longer than any other state, and Montpelier today remains the only state capital in America without a McDonald’s restaurant. Economically, though, Vermont has the smallest gross state product. And the SVR concedes it is still unclear how secession would play out–legally, economically, and logistically.

The idea of it coming to pass in Vermont today is not entirely quixotic: Following mock secession debates during the 1990s in seven Vermont towns, all seven voted in favor of the idea. Statewide, this peculiar contrarianism would need to be harnessed in a legislative vote (the method employed by Confederate states in the 1861 secession), a popular referendum, or a constitutional convention. In each of these cases, a supermajority would be required. Vermont’s governor would then be empowered to present the state’s exit declaration to the U.S. secretary of state. As it stands, a 2007 poll found that just 13 percent of Vermonters say they would opt for it.

The movement’s detractors, of course, have a valid set of concerns, too. Some have expressed discomfort with conferences like the one in Chattanooga, seeing a dire development in the far Left working in tandem with the far Right….

Another concern is that the understanding of the U.S. Constitution today allows no other recourse but armed revolt for a state wishing to go its own way. “Secession is not possible today without violence,” Pauline Maier, a professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…. “It’s to follow the example of the Southern secessionists who thought that they could just leave the Union peacefully, and, nuttier still, get a part of the unsettled territory as a parting gift. … Isn’t it time that Americans began learning something from history? Or must we again bleed ourselves into wisdom?”

In her 1936 book, Give Me Liberty, Rose Wilder Lane, [once] an avowed Leninist, described her travels to the Soviet Union, where she found that the workers “liberated” into the “communal” life of the state were pretty unhappy. One peasant she spoke to said of the new country: “It’s too big.… At the top, it is too small. It will not work.” History bore out the lowly peasant’s judgment, not Lenin’s.

George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment and the national-security state that arose in answer to the Soviet Union, came to the same conclusion about the United States. “There is a real question,” Kennan warned, “as to whether bigness in a body politic is not an evil in itself.” Years later, when Thomas Naylor wrote to the old Cold Warrior outlining a New England secession uniting Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, Kennan personally responded with a letter dictated from his sickbed: “I write to say that in the idea of the three American states’ ultimate independence, whether separately or in union, I see nothing fanciful. [Such] are at present the dominating trends in the U.S. that I see no other means of ultimate preservation of cultural and societal values that will not only be endangered but eventually destroyed by an endlessly prolonged association … with the remainder of what is now the U.S.A.”

It was the stratagems of George Kennan, who died in 2005, that ultimately defeated the Soviet Union. Naylor sees this as historical irony, and he takes pleasure in drawing a dark comparison between the Soviet Union and the United States: There is the same far-flung geography. The same corporate socialism that defies free markets. The same spread of influence worldwide through violence, murder, and pillage. The same stunted public discourse. The same electoral sclerosis in the legislature (Congress is almost as stable in membership as the Politburo). “No one in the Soviet Union in 1960 or 1970 or even 1980 found it imaginable that someday it would collapse,” says Naylor. So, too, he says, is our certainty today in the stability of the United States of America.

Read the full article at Good Is

by Albert Jay Nock

AS WELL AS I can judge, the general attitude of Americans who are at all interested in foreign affairs is one of astonishment, coupled with distaste, displeasure, or horror, according to the individual observer’s capacity for emotional excitement. Perhaps I ought to shade this statement a little in order to keep on the safe side, and say that this is the most generally-expressed attitude.

All our institutional voices–the press, pulpit, forum–are pitched to the note of amazed indignation at one or another phase of the current goings-on in Europe and Asia. This leads me to believe that our people generally are viewing with wonder as well as repugnance certain conspicuous actions of various foreign States; for instance, the barbarous behavior of the German State towards some of its own citizens; the merciless despotism of the Soviet Russian State; the ruthless imperialism of the Italian State; the “betrayal of Czecho-Slovakia” by the British and French States; the savagery of the Japanese State; the brutishness of the Chinese State’s mercenaries; and so on, here or there, all over the globe–this sort of thing is showing itself to be against our people’s grain, and they are speaking out about it in wrathful surprise.

I am cordially with them on every point but one. I am with them in repugnance, horror, indignation, disgust, but not in astonishment. The history of the State being what it is, and its testimony being as invariable and eloquent as it is, I am obliged to say that the naive tone of surprise wherewith our people complain of these matters strikes me as a pretty sad reflection on their intelligence. Suppose someone were impolite enough to ask them the gruff question, “Well, what do you expect?”–what rational answer could they give? I know of none.

Polite or impolite, that is just the question which ought to be put everytime a story of State villainy appears in the news. It ought to be thrown at our public day after day, from every newspaper, periodical, lecture-platform, and radio station in the land; and it ought to be backed up by a simple appeal to history, a simple invitation to look at the record. The British State has sold the Czech State down the river by a despicable trick; very well, be as disgusted and angry as you like, but don’t be astonished; what would you expect?–just take a look at the British State’s record! The German State is persecuting great masses of its people, the Russian State is holding a purge, the Italian State is grabbing territory, the Japanese State is buccaneering along the Asiatic Coast; horrible, yes, but for Heaven’s sake don’t lose your head over it, for what would expect?–look at the record!

That is how every public presentation of these facts ought to run if Americans are ever going to grow up into an adult attitude towards them. Also, in order to keep down the great American sin of self-righteousness, every public presentation ought to draw the deadly parallel with the record of the American State. The German State is persecuting a minority, just as the American State did after 1776; the Italian State breaks into Ethiopia, just as the American State broke into Mexico; the Japanese State kills off the Manchurian tribes in wholesale lots, just as the American State did the Indian tribes; the British State practices largescale carpet-baggery, like the American State after 1864; the imperialist French State massacres native civilians on their own soil, as the American State did in pursuit of its imperialistic policies in the Pacific, and so on.

In this way, perhaps, our people might get into their heads some glimmering of the fact that the State’s criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation–that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class–that is, for a criminal purpose.

No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient. In the last analysis, what is the German, Italian, French, or British State now actually doing? It is ruining its own people in order to preserve itself, to enhance its own power and prestige, and extend its own authority; and the American State is doing the same thing to the utmost of its opportunities.

What, then, is a little matter like a treaty to the French or British State? Merely a scrap of paper–Bethmann-Hollweg described it exactly. Why be astonished when the German or Russian State murders its citizens? The American State would do the same thing under the same circumstances. In fact, eighty years ago it did murder a great many of them for no other crime in the world but that they did not wish to live under its rule any longer; and if that is a crime, then the colonists led by G. Washington were hardened criminals and the Fourth of July is nothing but a cutthroat’s holiday.

The weaker the State is, the less power it has to commit crime. Where in Europe today does the State have the best criminal record? Where it is weakest: in Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Monaco, Andorra. Yet when the Dutch State, for instance, was strong, its criminality was appalling; in Java it massacred 9000 persons in one morning which is considerably ahead of Hitler’s record or Stalin’s. It would not do the like today, for it could not; the Dutch people do not give it that much power, and would not stand for such conduct. When the Swedish State was a great empire, its record, say from 1660 to 1670, was fearful. What does all this mean but that if you do not want the State to act like a criminal, you must disarm it as you would a criminal; you must keep it weak. The State will always be criminal in proportion to its strength; a weak State will always be as criminal as it can be, or dare be, but if it is kept down to the proper limit of weakness–which, by the way, is a vast deal lower limit than people are led to believe–its criminality may be safely got on with.

So it strikes me that instead of sweating blood over the iniquity of foreign States, my fellow-citizens would do a great deal better by themselves to make sure that the American State is not strong enough to carry out the like iniquities here. The stronger the American State is allowed to grow, the higher its record of criminality will grow, according to its opportunities and temptations. If, then, instead of devoting energy, time, and money to warding off wholly imaginary and fanciful dangers from criminals thousands of miles away, our people turn their patriotic fervor loose on the only source from which danger can proceed, they will be doing their full duty by their country.

Two able and sensible American publicists–Isabel Paterson, of the New York Herald Tribune, and W.J. Cameron, of the Ford Motor Company–have lately called our public’s attention to the great truth that if you give the State power to do something for you, you give it an exact equivalent of power to do something to you. I wish every editor, publicist, teacher, preacher, and lecturer would keep hammering that truth into American heads until they get it nailed fast there, never to come loose. The State was organized in this country with power to do all kinds of things for the people, and the people in their short-sighted stupidity, have been adding to that power ever since. After 1789, John Adams said that, so far from being a democracy of a democratic republic, the political organization of the country was that of “a monarchical republic, or, if you will, a limited monarchy”; the powers of its President were far greater than those of “an avoyer, a consul, a podesta, a doge, a stadtholder; nay, than a king of Poland; nay, than a king of Sparta.” If all that was true in 1789–and it was true–what is to be said of the American State at the present time, after a century and a half of steady centralization and continuous increments of power?

Power, for instance, to “help business” by auctioning off concessions, subsidies, tariffs, land-grants, franchises; power to help business by ever encroaching regulations, supervisions, various forms of control. All this power was freely given; it carried with it the equivalent power to do things to business; and see what a banditti of sharking political careerists are doing to business now! Power to afford “relief” to proletarians; and see what the State has done to those proletarians now in the way of systematic debauchery of whatever self-respect and self-reliance they may have had! Power this way, power that way; and all ultimately used against the interests of the people who surrendered that power on the pretext that it was to be used for those interests.

Many now believe that with the rise of the “totalitarian” State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will.

The idea that the State is a social institution, and that with a fine upright man like Mr. Chamberlain at the head of it, or a charming person like Mr. Roosevelt, there can be no question about its being honorably and nobly managed–all this is just so much sticky fly-paper. Men in that position usually make a good deal of their honor, and some of them indeed may have some (though if they had any I cannot understand their letting themselves be put in that position) but the machine they are running will run on rails which are laid only one way, which is from crime to crime. In the old days, the partition of Czecho-Slovakia or the taking-over of Austria would have been arranged by rigmarole among a few highly polished gentlemen in stiff shirts ornamented with fine ribbons. Hitler simply arranged it the way old Frederick arranged his share in the first partition of Poland; he arranged the annexation of Austria the way Louis XIV arranged that of Alsace. There is more or less of a fashion, perhaps, in the way these things are done, but the point is that they always come out exactly the same in the end.

Furthermore, the idea that the procedure of the “democratic” State is any less criminal than that of the State under any other fancy name, is rubbish. The country is now being surfeited with journalistic garbage about our great sister-democracy, England, its fine democratic government, its vast beneficent gift for ruling subject peoples, and so on; but does anyone ever look up the criminal record of the British State? The bombardment of Copenhagen; the Boer War; the Sepoy Rebellion; the starvation of Germans by the post-Armistice blockade; the massacre of natives in India, Afghanistan, Jamaica; the employment of Hessians to kill off American colonists. What is the difference, moral or actual, between Kichener’s democratic concentration camps and the totalitarian concentration camps maintained by Herr Hitler? The totalitarian general Badoglio is a pretty hard-boiled brother, if you like, but how about the democratic general O’Dwyer and Governor Eyre? Any of the three stands up pretty well beside our own democratic virtuoso, Hell-roaring Jake Smith, in his treatment of the Filipinos; and you can’t say fairer than that.

As for the British State’s talent for a kindly and generous colonial administration, I shall not rake up old scores by citing the bill of particulars set forth in the Declaration of Independence; I shall consider India only, not even going into matters like the Kaffir war or the Wairau incident in New Zealand. Our democratic British cousins in India in the Eighteenth Century must have learned their trade from Pizarro and Cortez. Edmund Burke called them “birds of prey and passage.” Even the directors of the East India Company admitted that “the vast fortunes acquired in the inland trade have been obtained by a scene of the most tyrannical and oppressive conduct that was ever known in any age or country.” Describing a journey, Warren Hastings wrote that “most of the petty towns and serais were deserted at our approach”; the people ran off into the woods at the mere sight of a white man. There was the iniquitous salt-monopoly; there was extortion everywhere, practiced by enterprising rascals in league with a corrupt police; there was taxation which confiscated almost half the products of the soil.

If it be said that Britain was not a sister-democracy in those days, and has since reformed, one might well ask how much of the reformation is due to circumstances, and how much to a change of heart. Besides, the Black-and-Tans were in our day; so was the post-Armistice blockade; General O’Dwyer’s massacre was not more than a dozen years ago; and there are plenty alive who remember Kitchener’s concentration camps.

No, “democratic” State practice is nothing more or less than State practice. It does not differ from Marxist State practice, Fascist State practice, or any other. Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: you get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you. A citizenry which has learned that one short lesson has but little more left to learn. Stripping the American State of the enormous power it has acquired is a full-time job for our citizens and a stirring one; and if they attend to it properly they will have no energy to spare for fighting communism, or for hating Hitler, or for worrying about South America or Spain, or for anything whatever, except what goes on right here in the United States.