Anarchy and Laws

THE KILLING anarchist, curiously enough, owes his survival to the benevolence of that government which he thinks he hates. After its destruction he himself would be the first to perish under the system which he advocates. No crueller punishment could have been devised for the Buffalo specimen than to expel him from the prison which was his refuge. So faulty is our obedience to laws at the best that he would hardly have lived to walk twenty paces from the jail door. The “oppressed” people would have converted him into souvenirs. To go farther back, the creatures of which Czolgosz is a type would rarely survive their infancy, except under a system that in some degree mitigates the harshness of the natural order. The laws which they despise—often unjust, oftener stupid, mostly springing from the coldest sort of selfishness, tend nevertheless to genuine and ever-increasing altruism, and, taken as a whole, slowly enlarge the number of fit that can survive. Czolgosz and his kind are the nurslings of the laws they hate. That the strong make the laws and coerce the weak to obey them is undeniable. That they will ever cease to do so is inconceivable. But that the strong controlled the weak before there were laws is equally undeniable, and that they would refrain from doing so if again there were no laws is equally inconceivable. Under the anarchy of which some very intelligent people prate, an “unfit” like Czolgosz would early be weeded out. If the present system produced any large number like him, we should have anarchy here and now until they were exterminated; or, rather, lest we offend the sentimental theorist who calls himself an anarchist, we should have that condition of disorder which would ensue if he were to get what he thinks he wants. Happily there are not enough degenerates of the Czolgosz type or sentimentalists of the pseudo-scientific type to make protection from anarchy anything more than one of the ordinary police duties.