Our Enemy, the State
Albert Jay Nock
[1935 / Part 7 of 7]
CHAPTER 6
Such has been the course of our experience from the beginning, and
such are the terms in which its stark uniformity has led us to think
of the State. This uniformity also goes far to account for the
development of a peculiar moral enervation with regard to the State,
exactly parallel to that which prevailed with regard to the Church in
the Middle Ages.[1] The Church controlled the distribution of certain
privileges and immunities, and if one approached it properly, one
might get the benefit of them. It stood as something to be run to in
any kind of emergency, temporal or spiritual; for the satisfaction of
ambition and cupidity, as well as for the more tenuous assurances it
held out against various forms of fear, doubt and sorrow. As long as
this was so, the anomalies presented by its self-aggrandizement were
more or less contentedly acquiesced in; and thus a chronic moral
enervation, too negative to be called broadly cynical, was developed
towards its interventions and exactions, and towards the vast
overbuilding of its material structure.[2]
A like enervation pervades our society with respect to the State, and
for like reasons. It affects especially those who take the State's
pretensions at face value and regard it as a social institution whose
policies of continuous intervention are wholesome and necessary; and
it also affects the great majority who have no clear idea of the
State, but merely accept it as something that exists, and never think
about it except when some intervention bears unfavourably upon their
interests. There is little need to dwell upon the amount of aid thus
given to the State's progress in self-aggrandizement, or to show in
detail or by illustration the courses by which this spiritlessness
promotes the State's steady policy of intervention, exaction and
overbuilding.[3]
Every intervention by the State enables another, and this in turn
another, and so on indefinitely; and the State stands ever ready and
eager to make them, often on its own motion, often again wangling
plausibility for them through the specious suggestion of interested
persons. Sometimes the matter at issue is in its nature simple,
socially necessary, and devoid of any character that would bring it
into the purview of politics.[4] For convenience, however,
complications are erected on it; then presently someone sees that
these complications are exploitable, and proceeds to exploit them;
then another, and another, until the rivalries and collisions of
interest thus generated issue in a more or less general disorder. When
this takes place, the logical thing, obviously, is to recede, and let
the disorder be settled in the slower and more troublesome way, but
the only effective way, through the operation of natural laws. But in
such circumstances recession is never for a moment thought of; the
suggestion would be put down as sheer lunacy. Instead, the interests
unfavourably affected - little aware, perhaps, how much worse the cure
is than the disease, or at any rate little caring - immediately call
on the State to cut in arbitrarily between cause and effect, and clear
up the disorder out of hand.[5] The State then intervenes by imposing
another set of complications upon the first; these in turn are found
exploitable, another demand arises, another set of complications,
still more intricate, is erected upon the first two;[6] and the same
sequence is gone through again and again until the recurrent disorder
becomes acute enough to open the way for a sharking political
adventurer to come forward and, always alleging "necessity, the
tyrant's plea," to organize a
coup d'État.[7]
But more often the basic matter at issue represents an original
intervention of the State, an original allotment of the political
means. Each of these allotments, as we have seen, is a charter of
highwaymanry, a license to appropriate the labour-products of others
without compensation. Therefore it is in the nature of things that
when such a license is issued, the State must follow it up with an
indefinite series of interventions to systematize and "regulate"
its use. The State's endless progressive encroachments that are
recorded in the history of the tariff, their impudent and disgusting
particularity, and the prodigious amount of apparatus necessary to
give them effect, furnish a conspicuous case in point. Another is
furnished by the history of our railway-regulation. It is nowadays the
fashion, even among those who ought to know better, to hold "rugged
individualism" and laissez-faire responsible for the riot
of stock-watering, rebates, rate-cutting, fraudulent bankruptcies, and
the like, which prevailed in our railway-practice after the Civil War,
but they had no more to do with it than they have with the precession
of the equinoxes. The fact is that our railways, with few exceptions,
did not grow up in response to any actual economic demand. They were
speculative enterprises enabled by State intervention, by allotment of
the political means in the form of land-grants and subsidies; and of
all the evils alleged against our railway-practice, there is not one
but what is directly traceable to this primary intervention.[8]
So it is with shipping. There was no valid economic demand for
adventure in the carrying trade; in fact, every sound economic
consideration was dead against it. It was entered upon through State
intervention, instigated by shipbuilders and their allied interests;
and the mess engendered by their manipulation of the political means
is now the ground of demand for further and further coercive
intervention. So it is with what, by an unconscionable stretch of
language, goes by the name of farming.[9] There are very few troubles
so far heard of as normally besetting this form of enterprise but what
are directly traceable to the State's primary intervention in
establishing a system of land-tenure which gives a monopoly-right over
rental-values as well as over use-values; and as long as that system
is in force, one coercive intervention after another is bound to take
place in support of it.[10]
II
Thus we see how ignorance and delusion concerning the nature of the
State combine with extreme moral debility and myopic self-interest -
what Ernest Renan so well calls
la bassesse de l'homme intéressé - to enable the
steadily accelerated conversion of social power into State power that
has gone on from the beginning of our political independence. It is a
curious anomaly. State power has an unbroken record of inability to do
anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or honestly; yet
when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social
power, the aid of the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately
called for. Does social power mismanage banking-practice in
this-or-that special instance - then let the State, which never has
shown itself able to keep its own finances from sinking promptly into
the slough of misfeasance, wastefulness and corruption, intervene to "supervise"
or "regulate" the whole body of banking-practice, or even
take it over entire. Does social power, in this-or-that case, bungle
the business of railway-management - then let the State, which has
bungled every business it has ever undertaken, intervene and put its
hand to the business of "regulating" railway-operation. Does
social power now and then send out an unseaworthy ship to disaster -
then let the State, which inspected and passed the Morro Castle,
be given a freer swing at controlling the routine of the shipping
trade. Does social power here and there exercise a grinding monopoly
over the generation and distribution of electric current - then let
the State, which allots and maintains monopoly, come in and intervene
with a general scheme of price-fixing which works more unforeseen
hardships than it heals, or else let it go into direct competition;
or, as the collectivists urge, let it take over the monopoly bodily. "Ever
since society has existed," says Herbert Spencer, "disappointment
has been preaching, 'Put not your trust in legislation'; and yet the
trust in legislation seems hardly diminished."
But it may be asked where we are to go for relief from the misuses of
social power, if not to the State. What other recourse have we?
Admitting that under our existing mode of political organization we
have none, it must still be pointed out that this question rests on
the old inveterate misapprehension of the State's nature, presuming
that the State is a social institution, whereas it is an anti-social
institution; that is to say, the question rests on an absurdity.[11]
It is certainly true that the business of government, in maintaining "freedom
and security," and "to secure these rights," is to make
a recourse to justice costless, easy and informal; but the State, on
the contrary, is primarily concerned with injustice, and its function
is to maintain a régime of injustice; hence, as we see daily,
its disposition is to put justice as far as possible out of reach, and
to make the effort after justice as costly and difficult as it can.
One may put it in a word that while government is by its nature
concerned with the administration of justice, the State is by its
nature concerned with the administration of law - law, which the State
itself manufactures for the service of its own primary ends. Therefore
an appeal to the State, based on the ground of justice, is futile in
any circumstances,[12] for whatever action the State might take in
response to it would be conditioned by the State's own paramount
interest, and would hence be bound to result, as we see such action
invariably resulting, in as great injustice as that which it pretends
to correct, or as a rule, greater. The question thus presumes, in
short, that the State may on occasion be persuaded to act out of
character; and this is levity.
But passing on from this special view of the question, and regarding
it in a more general way, we see that what it actually amounts to is a
plea for arbitrary interference with the order of nature, an arbitrary
cutting-in to avert the penalty which nature lays on any and every
form of error, whether wilful or ignorant, voluntary or involuntary;
and no attempt at this has ever yet failed to cost more than it came
to. Any contravention of natural law, any tampering with the natural
order of things, must have its consequences, and the only recourse for
escaping them is such as entails worse consequences. Nature recks
nothing of intentions, good or bad; the one thing she will not
tolerate is disorder, and she is very particular about getting her
full pay for any attempt to create disorder. She gets it sometimes by
very indirect methods, often by very roundabout and unforeseen ways,
but she always gets it. "Things and actions are what they are,
and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why, then,
should we desire to be deceived?" It would seem that our
civilization is greatly given to this infantile addiction - greatly
given to persuading itself that it can find some means which nature
will tolerate, whereby we may eat our cake and have it; and it
strongly resents the stubborn fact that there is no such means.[13]
It will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to think the matter
through, that under a régime of natural order, that is to say
under government, which makes no positive interventions
whatever on the individual, but only negative interventions in behalf
of simple justice - not law, but justice - misuses of social power
would be effectively corrected; whereas we know by interminable
experience that the State's positive interventions do not correct
them. Under a régime of actual individualism, actually free
competition, actual laissez-faire - a régime which, as
we have seen, can not possibly coexist with the State - a serious or
continuous misuse of social power would be virtually
impracticable.[14]
I shall not take up space with amplifying these statements because,
in the first place, this has already been thoroughly done by Spencer,
in his essays entitled The Man versus the State; and, in the
second place, because I wish above all things to avoid the appearance
of suggesting that a régime such as these statements
contemplate is practicable, or that I am ever so covertly encouraging
anyone to dwell on the thought of such a régime. Perhaps, some
aeons hence, if the planet remains so long habitable, the benefits
accruing to conquest and confiscation may be adjudged over-costly; the
State may in consequence be superseded by government, the political
means suppressed, and the fetiches which give nationalism and
patriotism their present execrable character may be broken down. But
the remoteness and uncertainty of this prospect makes any thought of
it fatuous, and any concern with it futile. Some rough measure of its
remoteness may perhaps be gained by estimating the growing strength of
the forces at work against it. Ignorance and error, which the State's
prestige steadily deepens, are against it; la bassesse de l'homme
intéressé, steadily pushing its purposes to greater
lengths of turpitude, is against it; moral enervation, steadily
proceeding to the point of complete insensitiveness, is against it.
What combination of influences more powerful than this can one
imagine, and what can one imagine possible to be done in the face of
such a combination?
To the sum of these, which may be called spiritual influences, may be
added the overweening physical strength of the State, which is ready
to be called into action at once against any affront to the State's
prestige. Few realize how enormously and how rapidly in recent years
the State has everywhere built up its apparatus of armies and police
forces. The State has thoroughly learned the lesson laid down by
Septimius Severus, on his death-bed. "Stick together," he
said to his successors, "pay the soldiers, and don't worry about
anything else." It is now known to every intelligent person that
there can be no such thing as a revolution as long as this advice is
followed; in fact, there has been no revolution in the modem world
since 1848 - every so-called revolution has been merely a coup d'État.[15]
All talk of the possibility of a revolution in America is in part
perhaps ignorant, but mostly dishonest; it is merely "the
interested clamours and sophistry" of persons who have some sort
of ax to grind. Even Lenin acknowledged that a revolution is
impossible anywhere until the military and police forces become
disaffected; and the last place to look for that, probably, is here.
We have all seen demonstrations of a disarmed populace, and local
riots carried on with primitive weapons, and we have also seen how
they ended, as in Homestead, Chicago, and the mining districts of West
Virginia, for instance. Coxey's Army marched on Washington - and it
kept off the grass.
Taking the sum of the State's physical strength, with the force of
powerful spiritual influences behind it, one asks again, what can be
done against the State's progress in self-aggrandizement? Simply
nothing. So far from encouraging any hopeful contemplation of the
unattainable, the student of civilized man will offer no conclusion
but that nothing can be done. He can regard the course of our
civilization only as he would regard the course of a man in a rowboat
on the lower reaches of the Niagara - as an instance of Nature's
unconquerable intolerance of disorder, and in the end, an example of
the penalty which she puts upon any attempt at interference with
order. Our civilization may at the outset have taken its chances with
the current of Statism either ignorantly or deliberately; it makes no
difference. Nature cares nothing whatever about motive or intention;
she cares only for order, and looks to see only that her repugnance to
disorder shall be vindicated, and that her concern with the regular
orderly sequences of things and actions shall be upheld in the
outcome. Emerson, in one of his great moments of inspiration,
personified cause and effect as "the chancellors of God";
and invariable experience testifies that the attempt to nullify or
divert or in any wise break in upon their sequences must have its own
reward.
"Such," says Professor Ortega y Gasset, "was the
lamentable fate of ancient civilization." A dozen empires have
already finished the course that ours began three centuries ago. The
lion and the lizard keep the vestiges that attest their passage upon
earth, vestiges of cities which in their day were as proud and
powerful as ours - Tadmor, Persepolis, Luxor, Baalbek - some of them
indeed forgotten for thousands of years and brought to memory again
only by the excavator, like those of the Mayas, and those buried in
the sands of the Gobi. The sites which now bear Narbonne and
Marseilles have borne the habitat of four successive civilizations,
each of them, as St. James says, even as a vapour which appeareth for
a little time and then vanisheth away. The course of all these
civilizations was the same. Conquest, confiscation, the erection of
the State; then the sequences which we have traced in the course of
our own civilization; then the shock of some irruption which the
social structure was too far weakened to resist, and from which it was
left too disorganized to recover; and then the end.
Our pride resents the thought that the great highways of New England
will one day lie deep under layers of encroaching vegetation, as the
more substantial Roman roads of Old England have lain for generations;
and that only a group of heavily overgrown hillocks will be left to
attract the archaeologist's eye to the hidden débris of our
collapsed skyscrapers. Yet it is to just this, we know, that our
civilization will come; and we know it because we know that there
never has been, never is, and never will be, any disorder in nature -
because we know that things and actions are what they are, and the
consequences of them will be what they will be.
But there is no need to dwell lugubriously upon the probable
circumstances of a future so far distant. What we and our more nearly
immediate descendants shall see is a steady progress in collectivism
running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer
centralization; a steadily growing bureaucracy; State power and faith
in State power increasing, social power and faith in social power
diminishing; the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of
the national income; production languishing, the State in consequence
taking over one "essential industry" after another, managing
them with ever-increasing corruption, inefficiency and prodigality,
and finally resorting to a system of forced labour. Then at some point
in this progress, a collision of State interests, at least as general
and as violent as that which occurred in 1914, will result in an
industrial and financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic
social structure to bear; and from this the State will be left to "the
rusty death of machinery," and the casual anonymous forces of
dissolution will be supreme.
III
But it may quite properly be asked, if we in common with the rest of
the Western world are so far gone in Statism as to make this outcome
inevitable, what is the use of a book which merely shows that it is
inevitable? By its own hypothesis the book is useless. Upon the very
evidence it offers, no one's political opinions are likely to be
changed by it, no one's practical attitude towards the State will be
modified by it; and if they were, according to the book's own
premises, what good could it do?
Assuredly I do not expect this book to change anyone's political
opinions, for it is not meant to do that. One or two, perhaps, here
and there, may be moved to look a little into the subject-matter on
their own account, and thus perhaps their opinions would undergo some
slight loosening - or some constriction - but this is the very most
that would happen. In general, too, I would be the first to
acknowledge that no results of the kind which we agree to call
practical could accrue to the credit of a book of this order, were it
a hundred times as cogent as this one - no results, that is, that
would in the least retard the State's progress in self-aggrandizement
and thus modify the consequences of the State's course. There are two
reasons, however, one general and one special, why the publication of
such a book is admissible.
The general reason is that when in any department of thought a person
has, or thinks he has, a view of the plain intelligible order of
things, it is proper that he should record that view publicly, with no
thought whatever of the practical consequences, or lack of
consequences, likely to ensue upon his so doing. He might indeed be
thought bound to do this as a matter of abstract duty; not to crusade
or propagandize for his view or seek to impose it upon anyone - far
from that! - not to concern himself at all with either its acceptance
or its disallowance; but merely to record it. This I say, might be
thought his duty to the natural truth of things, but it is at all
events his right; it is admissible.
The special reason has to do with the fact that in every
civilization, however generally prosaic, however addicted to the
short-time point of view on human affairs, there are always certain
alien spirits who, while outwardly conforming to the requirements of
the civilization around them, still keep a disinterested regard for
the plain intelligible law of things, irrespective of any practical
end. They have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with
emotion, concerning the august order of nature; they are impressed by
the contemplation of it, and like to know as much about it as they
can, even in circumstances where its operation is ever so manifestly
unfavourable to their best hopes and wishes. For these, a work like
this, however in the current sense impractical, is not quite useless;
and those of them it reaches will be aware that for such as
themselves, and such only, it was written.
Footnotes to Chapter 6
- Not long ago Professor Laski
commented on the prevalence of this enervation among our young
people, especially among our student-population. It has several
contributing causes, but it is mainly to be accounted for, I
think, by the unvarying uniformity of our experience. The State's
pretensions have been so invariably extravagant, the disparity
between them and its conduct so invariably manifest, that one
could hardly expect anything else. Probably the protest against
our imperialism in the Pacific and the Caribbean, after the
Spanish War, marked the last major effort of an impotent and
moribund decency. Mr. Laski's comparisons with student-bodies in
England and Europe lose some of their force when it is remembered
that the devices of a fixed term and an irresponsible executive
render the American State peculiarly insensitive to protest and
inaccessible to effective censure. As Mr. Jefferson said, the one
resource of impeachment is "not even a scarecrow."
- As an example of this
overbuilding, at the beginning of the sixteenth century one-fifth
of the land of France was owned by the Church; it was held mainly
by monastic establishments.
- It may be observed, however,
that mere use-and-wont interferes with our seeing how egregiously
the original structure of the American State, with its system of
superimposed jurisdictions and reduplicated functions, was
overbuilt. At the present time, a citizen lives under half-a-dozen
or more separate overlapping jurisdictions, federal, state,
county, township, municipal, borough, school-district, ward,
federal district. Nearly all of these have power to tax him
directly or indirectly, or both, and as we all know, the only
limit to the exercise of this power is what can be safely got by
it; and thus we arrive at the principle rather naïvely
formulated by the late senator from Utah, and sometimes spoken of
ironically as "Smoot's law of government" - the
principle, as he put it, that the cost of government tends to
increase from year to year, no matter which party is in power. It
would be interesting to know the exact distribution of the burden
of jobholders and mendicant political retainers - for it must not
be forgotten that the subsidized "unemployed" are now a
permanent body of patronage - among income-receiving citizens.
Counting indirect taxes and voluntary contributions as well as
direct taxes, it would probably be not far off the mark to say
that every two citizens are carrying a third between them.
- For example, the basic
processes of exchange are necessary, non-political, and as simple
as any in the world. The humblest Yankee rustic who swaps eggs for
bacon in the country store, or a day's labour for potatoes in a
neighbour's field, understands them thoroughly, and manages them
competently. Their formula is: goods or services in return for
goods or services. There is not, never has been, and never will
be, a single transaction anywhere in the realm of "business"
- no matter what its magnitude or apparent complexity - that is
not directly reducible to this formula. For convenience in
facilitating exchange, however, money was introduced; and money is
a complication, and so are the other evidences of debt, such as
cheques, drafts, notes, bills, bonds, stock-certificates, which
were introduced for the same reason. These complications were
found to be exploitable; and the consequent number and range of
State interventions to "regulate" and "supervise"
their exploitation appear to be without end.
- It is one of the most
extraordinary things in the world, that the interests which abhor
and dread collectivism are the ones which have most eagerly urged
on the State to take each one of the successive single steps that
lead directly to collectivism. Who urged it on to form the Federal
Trade Commission; to expand the Department of Commerce; to form
the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Farm Board; to
pass the Anti-trust Acts; to build highways, dig out waterways,
provide airway services, subsidize shipping? If these steps do not
tend straight to collectivism, just which way do they tend?
Furthermore, when the interests which encouraged the State to take
them are horrified by the apparition of communism and the Red
menace, just what are their protestations worth?
- The text of the Senate's
proposed banking law, published on the first of July, 1935, almost
exactly filled four pages of the Wall Street Journal!
Really now - now really - can any conceivable absurdity surpass
that?
- As here in 1932, in Italy,
Germany and Russia latterly, in France after the collapse of the
Directory, in Rome after the death of Pertinax, and so on.
- Ignorance has no assignable
limits; yet when one hears our railway-companies cited as
specimens of rugged individualism, one is put to it to say whether
the speaker's sanity should be questioned, or his integrity. Our
transcontinental companies, in particular, are hardly to be called
railway-companies, since transportation was purely incidental to
their true business, which was that of land-jobbing and
subsidy-hunting. I remember seeing the statement a few years ago -
I do not vouch for it, but it can not be far off the fact - that
at the time of writing, the current cash value of the political
means allotted to the Northern Pacific Company would enable it to
build four transcontinental lines, and in addition, to build a
fleet of ships and maintain it in around-the-world service. If
this sort of thing represents rugged individualism, let future
lexicographers make the most of it.
- A farmer, properly speaking,
is a freeholder who directs his operations, first, towards making
his family, as far as possible, an independent unit, economically
self-contained. What he produces over and above this requirement
he converts into a cash crop. There is a second type of
agriculturist, who is not a farmer, but a manufacturer, as much so
as one who makes woolen or cotton textiles or leather shoes. He
raises one crop only - milk, corn, wheat, cotton, or whatever it
may be - which is wholly a cash crop; and if the market for his
particular commodity goes down below cost of production, he is in
the same bad luck as the motor-car maker or shoemaker or
pantsmaker who turns out more of his special kind of goods than
the market will bear. His family is not independent; he buys
everything his household uses; his children can not live on cotton
or milk or corn, any more than the shoe-manufacturer's children
can live on shoes. There is still to be distinguished a third
type, who carries on agriculture as a sort of taxpaying subsidiary
to speculation in agricultural land-values. It is the last two
classes who chiefly clamour for intervention, and they are often,
indeed, in a bad way; but it is not farming that puts them there.
- The very limit of
particularity in this course of coercive intervention seems to
have been reached, according to press-reports, in the state of
Wisconsin. On 31 May, the report is, Governor La Follette signed a
bill requiring all public eating-places to serve two-thirds of an
ounce of Wisconsin-made cheese and two-thirds of an ounce of
Wisconsin-made butter with every meal costing more than
twenty-four cents. To match this for particularity one would
pretty well have to go back to some of the British Trade Acts of
the eighteenth century, and it would be hard to find an exact
match, even there. If this passes muster under the "due
process of law" clause - whether the eating-house pays for
these supplies or passes their cost along to the consumer - one
can see nothing to prevent the legislature of New York, say, from
requiring each citizen to buy annually two hats made by Knox, and
two suits made by Finchley.
- Admitting that the lamb in
the fable had no other recourse than the wolf, one may none the
less see that its appeal to the wolf was a waste of breath.
- This is now so well
understood that no one goes to a court for justice; he goes for
gain or revenge. It is interesting to observe that some
philosophers of law now say that law has no relation to justice,
and is not meant to have any such relation. In their view, law
represents only a progressive registration of the ways in which
experience leads us to believe that society can best get along.
One might hesitate a long time about accepting their notion of
what law is, but one must appreciate their candid affirmation of
what it is not.
- This resentment is very
remarkable. In spite of our failure with one conspicuously
ambitious experiment in State intervention, I dare say there would
still be great resentment against Professor Sumner's ill-famed
remark that when people talked tearfully about "the poor
drunkard lying in the gutter," it seemed never to occur to
them that the gutter might be quite the right place for him to
lie; or against the bishop of Peterborough's declaration that he
would rather see England free than sober. Yet both these remarks
merely recognize the great truth which experience forces on our
notice every day, that attempts to interfere with the natural
order of things are bound, in one way or another, to turn out for
the worse.
- The horrors of England's
industrial life in the last century furnish a standing brief for
addicts of positive intervention. Child-labour and woman-labour in
the mills and mines; Coketown and Mr. Bounderby; starvation wages;
killing hours; vile and hazardous conditions of labour; coffin
ships officered by ruffians - all these are glibly charged off by
reformers and publicists to a régime of rugged
individualism, unrestrained competition, and laissez-faire.
This is an absurdity on its face, for no such régime ever
existed in England. They were due to the State's primary
intervention whereby the population of England was expropriated
from the land; due to the State's removal of the land from
competition with industry for labour. Nor did the factory system
and the "industrial revolution" have the least thing to
do with creating those hordes of miserable beings. When the
factory system came in, those hordes were already there,
expropriated, and they went into the mills for whatever Mr.
Gradgrind and Mr. Plugson of Undershot would give them, because
they had no choice but to beg, steal or starve. Their misery and
degradation did not lie at the door of individualism; they lay
nowhere but at the door of the State. Adam Smith's economics are
not the economics of individualism; they are the economics of
landowners and mill-owners. Our zealots of positive intervention
would do well to read the history of the Enclosures Acts and the
work of the Hammonds, and see what they can make of them.
- When Sir Robert Peel proposed
to organize the police force of London, Englishmen said openly
that half a dozen throats cut in Whitechapel every year would be a
cheap price to pay for keeping such an instrument of potential
tyranny out of the State's hands. We are all beginning to realize
now that there is a great deal to be said for that view of the
matter.
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