I 
 
 :iii 
 
 
 I
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE ORTHOCRATIC STATE
 
 THE ORTHOCRATIC 
 
 STATE 
 
 THE UNCHANGING PRINCIPLES OF 
 CIVICS AND GOVERNMENT 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN SHERWIN CROSBY 
 
 flew l^otft 
 
 STURGIS & WALTON 
 
 COMPANY 
 
 1915 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Copyright, 1915 
 By STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY 
 
 Set DP and electrotrped. Published May, 1915
 
 
 To 
 
 JOHN J. MURPHY, LAWSON PURDY, 
 CHARLES H. INGERSOLL 
 
 AND 
 
 WILLIAM LUSTGARTEN 
 
 But for whose kind offices it might not have 
 
 been published, this booklet is 
 
 affectionately dedicated, (in an 
 
 hour of physical darkness). 
 
 J. S. C. 
 
 1561 260
 
 PREFACE 
 
 There is no lack of books telling what govern- 
 ment has been and is. This little volume may 
 aid the student in his endeavour to determine for 
 himself what it ought to be and to do, as well as 
 what it ought not to undertake. There is per- 
 haps no greater hindrance to civic progress than 
 the impression that principles of government are 
 too abstruse for common understanding, to which 
 is often added the handicap of starting out in the 
 study of government with a confident knowledge 
 of "so much that isn't so," and of reasoning from 
 maxims rather than axioms. 
 
 What we ought to do, whether as citizens or as 
 men, in matters affecting our fellow men, is not 
 a question of precedent but of principle, and is 
 to be learned not so much from history as by use 
 of that common sense upon which we rely in form- 
 ing our judgments of history, whose lessons serve 
 'but to illustrate and confirm our perhaps innate 
 ideas of right and wrong as between man and 
 
 man. It was the deliberate conclusion of Im- 
 
 7
 
 8 The Orthocratic State 
 
 manuel Kant, as expressed in his "Critique of 
 Pure Reason," that with regard to the essential in- 
 terests of human nature the highest philosophy- 
 can achieve no more than that guidance which 
 nature has vouchsafed even to the meanest under- 
 standing. 
 
 The political inquiry, whose methods and out- 
 come are hereinafter briefly outlined, was first 
 impelled by what seemed to be the importance, 
 the justice even, of meeting the evidently serious 
 contention of the Anarchists with something more 
 intelligent and intelligible than mere denial, and 
 was prosecuted with the endeavour to determine by 
 what right, if any, the compulsory State is main- 
 tained ; for if it has no right to be, it can have no 
 right to act. Nor was answer to the question 
 readily to be found. In no treatise on govern- 
 ment, in no declaration of sovereign authority, 
 although much was often taken for granted, was 
 it clearly shown by what right any majority can 
 compel an unwilling and otherwise unoffending 
 minority to unite with them in organising and 
 maintaining the State, or with what justice any 
 man not desiring to co-operate in its maintenance, 
 not asking its aid, and himself interfering with no 
 man's freedom, can be forcibly compelled to be-
 
 Preface 9 
 
 come a supporting member of it, and, to that ex- 
 tent at least, responsible for its action. There 
 were other questions calling for definite answer, 
 among which was that raised by the Socialists, as 
 to how far the State may justly go in assuming 
 control of the means and methods of wealth pro- 
 duction. Conclusions resulting from such in- 
 quiry, finally reached a generation or more ago 
 and but confirmed by the experience, observation 
 and reflection of subsequent years, are now sub- 
 mitted, not as presenting anything entirely new 
 in political thought, but as suggesting the impor- 
 tance of much that, however familiar to that 
 thought, is almost entirely overlooked in political 
 action. 
 
 Brief as they are, the chapters following will 
 be found to contain an orderly exposition of what 
 are believed to be the basic principles of govern- 
 ment; a definite outline, simple analysis, and 
 serviceable classification of its legitimate func- 
 tions ; as well as a summary of present-day abuses 
 of its power, and of problems resulting therefrom. 
 The reader's attention is respectfully directed to 
 the consideration given to the doctrine of natural 
 rights, to the question of absolute right to main- 
 tain the compulsory State, and to the limits of its
 
 10 The Orthocratic State 
 
 authority; to the distinction made between things, 
 functions and values in their nature individual 
 and private, and those which are no less naturally 
 social or public; to the relation shown to exist be- 
 tween corporations and the trusts; as well as to 
 suggestions in regard to solving problems of 
 government. 
 
 In so far as it has yet to be filled in with the 
 actuality of practice, the outline presented is of 
 necessity a mere theory, a purely abstract concep- 
 tion of what may or may not be realised, as at one 
 time or another might have been as truly said of 
 any and every most approved theory now in 
 practice. But we need not wait on practice to 
 know this much, that in so far as a theory of 
 government ignores basic principles of justice as 
 between man and man, it will ultimately fail in 
 practice. History has nowhere contradicted this 
 categorically imperative, a priori conclusion. 
 
 Justice and freedom, its object and comple- 
 ment, are but abstractions, toward the realisation 
 of which the race seems to be surely if slowly ad- 
 vancing. The only conception of justice with 
 which the State has any proper concern is that 
 arising from consideration of man's conduct to- 
 ward man. As said by an able political writer
 
 Preface 11 
 
 and now distinguished statesman, in his admirable 
 text-book "The State," "Government, in its last 
 analysis, is organised force." It is, moreover, 
 always a force exerted by man upon man, and its 
 justice depends on how it affects individual en- 
 joyment of the natural, inalienable rights of man. 
 Once it wrongs the individual, it has begun its 
 injury to Society, which can suffer only through 
 its members. In order to determine whether an 
 act of government is or would be unjust or not, 
 it is necessary to inquire what would be its nature, 
 whether it would be unjust toward any human 
 being, if performed without civil authority; for 
 that which would be harmful and unjust if done 
 by an individual or a mob, can be neither harmless 
 nor just when done by the State. If such ques- 
 tion is not to be answered, it is idle to talk of civic 
 righteousness, of good government, or of an 
 orthocratic, or rightly governing State. 
 
 New York, 1913.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 chapter page 
 
 Preface 7 
 
 I Introduction 17 
 
 II Society and the State 26 
 
 III The Functions of Government ... 50 
 
 IV Abuses of Civil Power 84 
 
 V Civic Problems 122
 
 THE ORTHOCRATIC STATE
 
 THE 
 ORTHOCRATIC STATE 
 
 // 
 
 /CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Of all the useful arts that of government alone, 
 although so long and universally practised, is yet 
 without its kindred science. Practice of the other 
 arts has in each instance led to the discovery and 
 systematic arrangement of the principles, to de- 
 velopment of the science, upon which correct prac- 
 tice depends. Not so with government. The 
 "Politics" of Aristotle is a work quite as scientific 
 as any most modern treatise on government. 
 
 Different reasons may be assigned for the slow 
 progress of the art of government toward the 
 scientific stage. One obstacle has been the per- 
 sistent opposition of the governing classes to even 
 the discussion of new political theories, lest their 
 adoption might interfere with existing privileges; 
 
 but this attitude of tlie privileged classes will 
 
 17
 
 18 The Orthocratic State 
 
 hardly account for the continued acceptance of un- 
 scientific theories by political writers of un- 
 doubted ability, sincerity and courage. These all 
 agree in holding with Aristotle that justice is the 
 end of political science, and then like him attempt 
 to develop the science from hypotheses as fanci- 
 ful as was that of the vortices from which the 
 early astronomers sought to construct their science. 
 It is, of course, impossible to develop a true, 
 scientific theory of government from a false 
 hypothesis regarding a matter so fundamentally 
 vital as the nature of the State and the seat or 
 source of its authority to govern. Aristotle sup- 
 posed the State to be "one of the works of nature," 
 and held that the supreme power should be exer- 
 cised by men of pre-eminent and heroic virtue, 
 *'if such be found." A somewhat similar mis- 
 conception of the State has been that of those who 
 have regarded it as a department or bureau, as it 
 were, of an all-embracing theocratic government, 
 and as existing and governing by divine authority. 
 When it came to be realised that government, in- 
 cluding the formation of the State as well as the 
 maintenance and exercise of its power, is made up 
 of activities as human as any in which mankind 
 engages and as subject as any to the human will,
 
 Introduction 19 
 
 it was sought to account for existence of the State 
 by supposing it to have been in some way estab- 
 lished by and according to the will of man, and 
 in order to preserve the idea of justice, the estab- 
 lishment was assumed to have been by general 
 agreement or common consent of all men. 
 
 The hypothesis of a social compact was stated 
 by Hobbes in his "Leviathan" as follows: 
 
 "A commonwealth is said to be instituted when 
 a multitude of men do agree and covenant, every 
 one with every one, that to whatever man or as- 
 sembly of men shall be given by the major part 
 the right to present the person of them all, that is 
 to say, to be their representative; every one, as 
 well he that voted for it as he that voted against 
 it, shall authorise all the actions and judgments 
 of that man or assembly of men in the same man- 
 ner as if they were his own, to the end to live 
 peaceably amongst themselves and be protected 
 against other men. 
 
 "From this institution of a commonwealth are 
 derived all the rights and faculties of him or them 
 on whom sovereign power is conferred by the con- 
 sent of the people assembled." 
 
 Locke, writing but a few years after Hobbes, 
 stated the hypothesis as follows:
 
 20 The Orthocratic State 
 
 "Whosoever, therefore, out of a state of na- 
 ture unite into a community, must be understood 
 to give up all the power necessary to the ends for 
 which they unite into society to the majority of 
 the community, unless they expressly agreed on 
 any number greater than the majority. And this 
 is done by barely agreeing to unite into one poli- 
 tical society, which is all the compact that is or 
 needs be between the individuals that enter into 
 or make up a commonwealth. And thus that 
 which begins and actually constitutes any political 
 society is nothing but the consent of any number 
 of freemen, capable of majority, to unite and in- 
 corporate into such society. And thus that, and 
 that only, which did or could give beginning to 
 any lawful government in the world." 
 
 He also held that a man's tacit consent to an 
 established government was to be inferred from 
 the mere fact of his being within its dominions. 
 
 Rousseau nearly a century after Locke wrote 
 as follows: 
 
 "If therefore we take from the social contract 
 everything that is not essential to it, we shall find 
 it reduced to the following terms : 'We, the con- 
 tracting parties, do jointly and severally submit 
 our persons and abilitie? to the supreme direction
 
 Introduction 21 
 
 of the general will of all ; and in a collective body 
 receive each member into that body as an in- 
 divisible part of the whole.' " 
 
 He held further that, although the clauses of 
 the contract may perhaps never have been for- 
 mally promulgated, they are yet universally the 
 same, and everywhere tacitly acknowledged and 
 received. 
 
 The statement in the preamble to the Declara- 
 tion of Independence to the effect that govern- 
 ments derive their just powers "from the con- 
 sent of the governed," has been regarded by some 
 as recognising the social contract, but it is not 
 probable that Jefferson meant to assert anything 
 more than that the governed should always have 
 a voice in the government. He had in mind the 
 imposition upon the American people of laws 
 passed by a parliament in which they had no rep- 
 resentation. 
 
 Writers of the present day, in attempting to ac- 
 count for authority of the State, seldom if ever 
 resort to the fiction of a social contract. Recog- 
 nising the absurdity of assuming that each mem- 
 ber of society gives his individual consent to or- 
 ganisation of the State, they assume it to have 
 been organised by the people, but by the people
 
 22 The Orthocratic State 
 
 acting in some other than their individual capac^ 
 ity and by some right, if any, other than individ- 
 ual, natural right. 
 
 One able and learned author, writing on "The 
 Nature of the State," states his conclusions as 
 follows: 
 
 "It therefore appears that the origin of the 
 State must be conceived as an act of the People 
 rather than of individuals. The existence of a 
 common or 'General Will' must be predicated, 
 and the creation of the State held to be due to its 
 volition." . . . 
 
 "The existence of the State is rationally justi- 
 fied because the result of the exercise of its author- 
 ity is in all cases, as a matter of fact, to preserve 
 freedom rather than to destroy it." . . . 
 
 "There is no onus upon the State to justify 
 its existence as an infringement upon a predicated 
 natural freedom of the individual." 
 
 It is not readily to be seen how a practical 
 science of government can be developed from this 
 latest hypothesis, that of a "predicated" General 
 Will. Government can be nothing more nor less 
 than human power humanly organised for the 
 control of human conduct. The very organisa- 
 tion of that power, the act of instituting the State,
 
 Introduction 23 
 
 is merely human conduct, which in its last an- 
 alysis is always either right or wrong, just or un- 
 just, as between man and man. No man can 
 justify his voluntary acts by any appeal to the 
 general will. That will can never be more than 
 the concurring wills of all the people. When- 
 ever it calls for forcible control of any of the 
 people, it is clear that their wills are not in ac- 
 cord with the general, and that they have only to 
 outnumber their opponents to have a general will 
 of their own. For all the practical purposes of 
 government, including that of establishing the 
 State, the general will can manifest itself only as 
 the will of a majority in numbers or power, and 
 whether it be just or not must depend upon the 
 wills of the individuals composing such majority. 
 Authority for establishment and maintenance 
 of the compulsory State has been challenged by 
 individual wills as sincere as any composing the 
 general will, and their challenge is not to be an- 
 swered by any hypothesis regarding the just war- 
 rant for such establishment. It may not be clear 
 to them that *'the result of the exercise of its 
 (the State's) authority is in all cases, as a matter 
 of fact, to preserve freedom rather than to de- 
 stroy it." The struggle through all the ages has
 
 24 The Ortliocratic State 
 
 been to preserve freedom from encroachments 
 which could not have been maintained but for the 
 State, and to-day there are many staunch believers 
 in the authority of the State who nevertheless ap- 
 prehend the danger of an unjust and tyrannical 
 extension of its power over the industrial activi- 
 ties and private affairs of its members. 
 
 The people are fast waking to a sense of their 
 "sovereign power," and, like the sovereigns of all 
 time, are not unlikely to experiment with it. 
 Notwithstanding any and all need of legislative 
 reform, of which there may indeed be much, it 
 might nevertheless be well for all legislation to 
 cease for a time, provided the people would mean- 
 while try to learn by what right they legislate; to 
 get a clear understanding of what the State really 
 is; of the just and only warrant for its existence 
 or for exercise of its power; of what it may justly 
 do, and of what it ought to let alone. Nor is the 
 acquirement of such an understanding by any 
 means so difficult as might appear from reading 
 laboured treatises on government. As was said by 
 Aristotle, "The multitude even though they know 
 nothing of the political science and hold no mag- 
 istracy, still can form a good practical judgment 
 upon government in general, and even a better
 
 Introduction 25 
 
 one than those in office who can not see their own 
 defects and errors." 
 
 In the chapters following, attempt is made not 
 only to account for the well-warranted existence 
 of the State, but also to point out the source and 
 mark the limits of its authority, not from any 
 hypothesis, but on grounds as plain, rational and 
 substantial as any upon which human conduct can 
 possibly be justified.
 
 ./ 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 SOCIETY AND THE STATE 
 
 I _ 
 "Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made 
 us men." 
 
 Lowell. 
 
 / \ 
 
 
 ■'■■^ f Civics is that branch of ethics, or of the science 
 / of human duty, which treats of man's duty as a 
 \ citizen, or member of the State. In order to un- 
 derstand our duties as citizens we must know what 
 the State is, as well as why and how we came to 
 be members of it. We all know in a general way 
 that it is an association formed for the main- 
 tenance of that orderly regulation of human con- 
 duct and affairs which is called civil government, 
 but we may not have sufficiently considered the 
 nature and purpose of its authority to be fully 
 alive to our individual responsibility for the ex- 
 ercise of its power. 
 
 Born into the already long-established State, 
 we are prone to look upon its much-exploited 
 power as having its existence in the nature of 
 
 26
 
 Society and the State 27 
 
 things, and to utilise it as we do the forces of 
 nature for any and every purpose to which it may 
 seem adapted. Or, if we realise that it is human 
 power contributed by and belonging to all the 
 people in common, we may make the mistake of 
 supposing that it may at least be used for any pur- 
 pose to which the majority may choose to apply 
 it. 
 
 It is true that in deciding what the action of an 
 organised body of individuals shall be it is from 
 the nature of things necessary for the will of the 
 majority to prevail, but no majority can justly 
 make use of any organisation for any other pur- 
 pose than that for which it is formed and its 
 power maintained. Even if the State were an 
 association into which the people had all of them 
 voluntarily entered and from which they could 
 withdraw at will, its power could not be justly 
 used for any other purpose than that for which it 
 was contributed. Much less can civil power, at- 
 tained and upheld as it is through that compulsory 
 organisation which the State actually is and from 
 which no member can withdraw, whatever the 
 majority may do, — much less can power so ac- 
 quired and maintained be justly used by any ma- 
 jority however great for any ultimate purpose
 
 28 The Orthocratic State 
 
 other than that which alone justifies the compul- 
 sion necessary to its support. Civil power is a 
 sacred trust, one not voluntarily confided but 
 arbitrarily assumed, and we can not be too scrupu- 
 lous in the discharge of its obligations. 
 
 The first of civic duties is that of endeavouring 
 to find out — each one for himself — in what they 
 consist. To rely too confidently upon the opinion 
 of others is to depend upon the accident of en- 
 vironment and association. Engaged as we are 
 in what is called self-government but really in 
 the government of one another, it is of the first 
 importance, no less from altruistic than from self- 
 regarding considerations, that each shall under- 
 stand just what he is doing as well as by what 
 warrant he does it. Nor is this primary duty of 
 the citizen so difficult as may be supposed. If the 
 principles of government were hard to understand, 
 if they were indeed beyond the comprehension of 
 people in general, there would be no just warrant 
 for the maxim that every man is presumed to 
 know the law, and little of promise would there 
 be in government by the people. 
 
 Propositions hereinafter advanced are assumed 
 to be statements of self-evident truth or of logical 
 deduction therefrom, and are hence submitted for
 
 Society and the State 29 
 
 the most part without argument or citation of 
 authority. If a proposition seems to be untrue or 
 unreasonable the reader will be slow to accept it 
 on whatever authority, but before rejecting it he 
 should be quite sure that he understands its mean- 
 ing, which if at first obscure may become clear in 
 the light of subsequent statement. 
 
 In order to understand what the State actually 
 is, in what its authority consists, what its legiti- 
 mate functions are, as well as what constitutes 
 abuse of its power, we must know in what way, 
 for what purpose, and by what just warrant it is 
 established and maintained. The State is not to 
 be confounded with Society. The two associa- 
 tions comprise the same individual membership 
 and occupy one and the same territory, but they 
 are not identical. 
 
 By Society is meant that natural, uncontrived 
 association into which mankind are unconsciously 
 brought and in which they are ever held by im- 
 mutable conditions of a common existence upon 
 the earth. Society as such has no organisation, 
 no common will or concert of action, no legisla- 
 tures nor courts of justice, no authority and no 
 persons in authority over it, no duties and no laws 
 other than those imposed upon all human beings
 
 30 The Orthocratic State 
 
 alike by reason of the relations which they natu- 
 rally sustain to one another and to the earth. Its 
 members as such act individually or in volunta- 
 rily associated groups, each enforcing as judge in 
 his own case as best he may whatever judgment 
 he wills. Society has no welfare other than that 
 of the individuals composing it, and can not be 
 wronged except as they wrong one another, which 
 they may do as members of Society merely, or as 
 members of the State and through its agency, that 
 is, through government. 
 
 The State, on the other hand, is an artificial, 
 organised association formed by the power and 
 according to the will of man. The members of 
 Society are by that power alone compelled to be- 
 come and remain members also of the State, and to 
 conform to its regulations. The State formulates, 
 promulgates and enforces laws or rules for the 
 guidance of its members in their conduct toward 
 one another, and also performs all services of a 
 public nature, that is, such as are necessary to an 
 equitable public order and can not be performed 
 without public, or civil, authority. The State 
 does not subvert or supersede Society, but coexists 
 with that pre-existent, indissoluble association of 
 mankind, to whose irrepealable laws they are no
 
 Society and the State 31 
 
 less subject as citizens or members of the State 
 than as members of Society. 
 
 The State has to do with conduct. Its object 
 is to control conduct. All its deliberations and 
 acts are directed to that end. It prescribes this 
 and prohibits that particular conduct, resorting 
 to force when necessary to compel obedience to its 
 commands. Moreover, since no act of the State 
 can be more or other than that of individuals com- 
 posing it, its will being but the will of man and 
 its power but human, government itself, the ac- 
 tion of the State, is always conduct, the conduct 
 of man toward man. 
 
 It follows that conduct must constitute the sub- 
 ject-matter of a science of government, and that 
 all questions regarding the State, whether they 
 relate to its organisation and maintenance, to the 
 nature, purpose and extent of its authority, or 
 to exercise of its power, are to be considered and 
 answered with reference to principles of human 
 conduct. 
 
 The justice of any first step toward organisa- 
 tion of the State or the establishment of govern- 
 ment, must of necessity depend upon principles 
 existing at the time the step is taken, and no tak- 
 ing of such step or of the greatest number of sub-
 
 32 The Orthocratic State 
 
 sequent steps, can change those principles or create 
 new ones. It is, therefore, upon principles exist- 
 ing in the nature of things, upon the natural laws 
 of Society, that the State must depend for what- 
 ever warrant there may be for its existence or for 
 exercise of its power. In other words, the rela- 
 tions which men by the nature of their being sus- 
 tain to one another and to the earth and upon 
 whose integrity they depend for the preservation 
 and normal development of that being, precede 
 any organisation of the State, and no action of the 
 State, no government however long continued, can 
 change those relations or relieve any human being 
 from the obligations which they impose upon 
 every member of Society. But for such obliga- 
 tions and the possibility of their disregard, there 
 would be no criterion by which to judge the con- 
 duct of man toward man, no principles by which 
 to be guided in any individual or collective at- 
 tempt to control it; in short, no just warrant or 
 authority for forcible interference with human 
 conduct, whether by government or otherwise. 
 
 It follows that inquiry into the nature and func- 
 tions of the State involves consideration of the 
 principles by which men should be guided in their 
 conduct toward one another as members of Society,
 
 Society and the State 83 
 
 that natural, unorganised association, which, as 
 already seen, precedes and must be distinguished 
 from the artificial organisation comprising the 
 same individual membership and known as the 
 State. 
 
 Principles of conduct as between man and man 
 are merely general rules of action which it is the 
 duty of human beings to observe toward one an- 
 other. A duty always implies something due or 
 owed from or by one person to another, but it is 
 evident that if one owes anything to another it is 
 because the latter may demand it as a right, and 
 that there can be no duty without a correlative 
 right. It necessarily follows that principles of 
 duty as between man and man, the natural laws 
 of human conduct, depend upon certain no less 
 natural rights of man. 
 
 The natural rights of man, which are indeed his 
 only rights, are not, as they are sometimes slight- 
 ingly characterised, mere metaphysical concep- 
 tions, visionary conceits of the imagination, but 
 actual, necessary physical conditions of normal 
 human existence, as easily perceptible to the 
 bodily senses as any most palpable entities. We 
 take cognisance of them whenever we say of any 
 man, as we often instinctively do, that he is "all
 
 34 The Orthocratic State 
 
 right," meaning thereby that the conditions in 
 mind have not been impaired. To doubt the 
 reality of such natural conditions, or to question 
 the propriety of calling them rights, is the hyper- 
 metaphysical illusion against which to guard, for 
 they constitute the only demonstrable basis for a 
 standard of right and wrong as between man and 
 man. Without rights, men could not wrong one 
 another. 
 
 Natural, human rights consist in the essential 
 relations of man to the earth and to his fellow 
 men, and have their sanction in the universal in- 
 stinct of self-preservation. They are to a science 
 of conduct, and hence to a science of government, 
 what the axioms of mathematics are to a science 
 of quantity. If man had no natural rights he 
 could not have any rights whatever, for he would 
 have no right to acquire or possess any. If he had 
 no natural rights, he would have no right to es- 
 tablish the State, and whatever government he 
 might maintain, being without natural, human 
 right, would of necessity be either by supernatural, 
 divine right, or without any right whatever. 
 
 A right, as commonly understood and defined, 
 is that, whatever it may be, to which one is justly 
 entitled, and if it exists in the nature of things
 
 Society and the State 35 
 
 it may well be termed a natural right. The 
 natural condition or physical relation of being 
 alive would surely seem to be one which every 
 human being is entitled to maintain as against the 
 effort or intent of any other to deprive him of it. 
 Certain it is that if the validity of any man's title 
 to life is to be contested the burden devolves upon 
 those who dispute it and who in order to prevail 
 must show better title than his. But what title 
 to the life of another shall they assert who, by 
 denying the existence of natural rights, virtually 
 disclaim any right or title to their own? The 
 right to life is not only natural but inherent and 
 inalienable, it being impossible to conceive of its 
 transfer, or of any man's becoming possessed of or 
 entitled to the life of another. 
 
 Moreover, since that would be a right in name 
 only which did not involve and carry with it the 
 right of enjoyment, it follows that if man has a 
 right to life he must also have the right to enjoy 
 whatever nature has established or provided for 
 the support or happiness of life, that is, freedom 
 from interference by any other man or men with 
 his enjoyment of whatever has been so established 
 or provided. Man's right to maintain his natural 
 relation to the earth and to his fellow men, as
 
 36 The Orthocratic State 
 
 against the effort of any other to deprive him of 
 such freedom, is called the right to liberty, which 
 being essential to the inalienable right to life is 
 therefore itself inalienable. 
 
 As the right to life involves the right to liberty, 
 so does the latter right include among others cer- 
 tain relations of such importance as to be them- 
 selves also denominated rights although included 
 in the right to liberty. The relation of owner- 
 ship which naturally obtains between every human 
 being and the direct or indirect product of his 
 labour is called the right of property, that is, 
 the right of proprietorship and control over such 
 product, which is itself termed his property, or 
 wealth. The relation which one naturally sus- 
 tains to his fellow men with respect to the ex- 
 change of labour or property is called the right of 
 contract, which includes the natural freedom of 
 every human being to exchange his labour or prop- 
 erty for the labour or labour-products of any 
 and every other willing to make the exchange, in 
 the natural market, a market consisting in the un- 
 restricted competition of unprivileged natural 
 persons only. 
 
 It is of course understood that the right to life 
 includes security from bodily harm, and that the
 
 Society and the State 87 
 
 right to liberty embraces not only freedom from 
 physical restraint, from manacles, fetters and 
 prison walls, but freedom of location and of loco- 
 motion, that is, the freedom of every human being 
 to be and to go wherever he will, as well as free- 
 dom to embrace and enjoy whatever opportuni- 
 ties nature affords for the support and happiness 
 of life, and to make whatever use of them seems 
 to him best, provided always that he does not in- 
 terfere with the equal freedom of any other human 
 being; also freedom of thought, speech and action, 
 from verbal abuse and from injury to reputation. 
 Clearer conception of what is meant by a 
 natural right may perhaps be had by conceiving of 
 a man alone upon the earth. He would depend 
 for existence upon his ability to utilise natural op- 
 portunities for the support of life, but his natural 
 freedom of action would hardly occur to him as a 
 right, for there would be no one to question it or 
 against whom to assert it. Upon the coming of 
 never so many other men there would be no 
 change in the first man's relation to the earth and 
 no less necessity for freedom of action on his part, 
 nor would their relation to the earth or their de- 
 pendence upon individual freedom of action be 
 different from his. And even then not until some
 
 38 The Orthocratic State 
 
 one or more of them interfered with the freedom 
 of some other would it be conceived of as a right. 
 The first conception would perhaps be that of an 
 injury or wrong suffered by reason of such inter- 
 ference. It is not possible, however, to conceive 
 of a wrong without a correlative right. One is 
 wronged only when something to which he is 
 justly entitled is as it were wrung from him. But 
 for one to deprive another of life, or of any condi- 
 tion, relation or opportunity natural to its preser- 
 vation or enjoyment, is to wrong the latter, that is, 
 to wring from him that to which he is justly en- 
 titled as against effort of the former to deprive him 
 of it, and which may therefore in the ordinary 
 use of the word be termed a right, and, because 
 existing in the nature of things, a natural right. 
 In the exercise and enjoyment of his natural 
 rights, it is evident that every man is primarily 
 dependent upon his own judgment. His physical 
 powers are naturally the servitors of his own mind 
 and not of the will of any other man. Alone 
 upon the earth he must of necessity be guided by 
 his own understanding, nor is there any reason in 
 the nature of things why after the coming of an- 
 other man either of them should abandon his own 
 judgment or submit his conduct to control of the
 
 Society and the State 39 
 
 other, so long as neither interferes with the natural 
 autonomy of the other. Attempt by one forcibly 
 to control conduct of the other, might show which 
 was for the time the stronger or more crafty, but 
 could in no event determine anything as to right- 
 ness of conduct. 
 
 It is therefore clear that the fundamental, uni- 
 versal principle of human conduct, the general 
 rule by which mankind should be guided in all 
 their actions affecting one another, is simply this: 
 — that no human being should interfere with or 
 infringe upon any natural right of another. It is 
 also clear that so long as a man observes this rule 
 his conduct can not justly be subjected to forcible 
 control by any other man. 
 
 It is no less clear, however, that, whenever one 
 man, disregarding this rule, attempts to interfere 
 with another's enjoyment of any natural right, 
 the latter may justly defend himself against such 
 aggression, for the former has no right so to in- 
 terfere and therefore is not wronged by being even 
 forcibly prevented. 
 
 The right to defend one's self is natural, as all 
 rights indeed are, but it is secondary or subsidiary 
 in that it never arises or comes into play except 
 when necessary to prevent infringement of some
 
 40 The Orthocratic State 
 
 one or more of the rights of life, liberty, property 
 and contract, which may for distinction be termed 
 primary natural rights. This subsidiary natural 
 right, known as the right of self-defence, is called 
 the first law of nature, and is indeed the first and 
 only law or principle by virtue of which any one 
 man can justly exercise forcible control over con- 
 duct of another. 
 
 Inquiry may next be made as to whether several 
 or any greatest number of men acting collectively 
 for forcible control of conduct are to be guided by 
 the same principle as when acting individually 
 and independently of one another, or whether 
 with increase in the number of those undertaking 
 such control there arise additional or modified 
 principles or rules of action in that regard. 
 
 It has been seen that of two men, one, the sec- 
 ond for instance, has no right to interfere with 
 conduct of the first except in self-defence; nor can 
 he have other or greater right simply by reason of 
 the presence or co-operation of a third man. Since 
 neither the second nor third has any right of con- 
 trol over the first except in self-defence, they can 
 not both together have any except in defence of 
 one or both of them. If the first infringes any 
 right of either the second or third they may justly
 
 Society and the State 41 
 
 co-operate to prevent such aggression, but so long 
 as he does not attempt so to infringe they are each 
 in duty bound not to interfere with his conduct. 
 Let the number of men be increased to whatever 
 extent, so long as the first infringes no natural 
 right of any one of the others, they can not col- 
 lectively or all together have any right to interfere 
 with or forcibly to control his conduct. 
 
 The only just warrant, then, for either indi- 
 vidual or collective action for forcible control of 
 any man's conduct, is the natural, individual 
 right of self-defence, which arises only upon in- 
 fringement of some primary natural right, and 
 may then be exercised as justly by one over many 
 as by them over him, the right of control depend- 
 ing in no way or degree upon the number of those 
 assuming to exercise it, but solely upon the indi- 
 vidual self-defensive right of some one or more 
 of them. 
 
 It follows that the right to govern, the author- 
 ity to establish the State, and to maintain and 
 exercise civil power, is and can be nothing more 
 or other than the natural, individual right of self- 
 defence; and it remains to inquire through what 
 exercise of that right it is that all persons, even 
 those not interfering with any natural right of
 
 42 The Orthocratic State 
 
 anybody and perhaps not caring themselves to re- 
 sist aggression, may be compelled to unite with 
 others in support of government. 
 
 If the State were a wholly voluntary associa- 
 tion which one might enter and leave at will, war- 
 rant for its existence would not be hard to find, 
 for it is clear that all the members of Society 
 would have the right voluntarily to unite and co- 
 operate for the defence of each and all against 
 the fraud or violence of any. Some such unani- 
 mous action is implied in the theory that govern- 
 ment is founded on social contract, but no such 
 action has ever been taken. Question as to 
 whether they preferred to maintain or to do en- 
 tirely without government was never yet sub- 
 mitted to all the people of any considerable ter- 
 ritory, and there are those who contend that there 
 ought not to be any government by force, and 
 who have never voluntarily consented to any. 
 The State is essentially a compulsory association 
 of which all the people within the territory of its 
 jurisdiction are forced to become and remain sup- 
 porting members, however much against their in- 
 clination; and, as already seen, the question first 
 to be answered is: — By what just warrant can 
 any man be compelled by others to unite with
 
 Society and the State 43 
 
 them in support of the State and in the exercise 
 of its power? 
 
 If the ultimate object or moving purpose in 
 organising the State were to protect individuals 
 from the fraud or violence, the intentional ag- 
 gressions of other individuals, no number of men, 
 no majority however great, would have any right 
 or authority to compel any man to co-operate with 
 them to that end. Their only right to combine 
 for such purpose would consist in the individual 
 right of self-defence, a right, however, which be- 
 longs to him as well as to them, and by virtue of 
 which he might well decline so to co-operate, on 
 the ground that according to his judgment he 
 could thereby best defend himself. In other 
 words, any man in the exercise of his right of 
 self-defence may justly decline aid in the defence 
 of others. Even if one recognised the necessity 
 of combination with others for purposes of self- 
 defence, he might well prefer to unite with an or- 
 ganisation of his own choosing if not of his own 
 forming. No man or number of men have any 
 right to dictate to any man how he shall defend 
 himself, so long as in so doing he does not infringe 
 upon any natural right of any man. 
 
 On the other hand, however, if one man in de-
 
 44 The Orthocratic State 
 
 fending himself against another thereby inter- 
 feres with any natural right of still another, the 
 last may justly defend himself against such inter- 
 ference however unintentional; and it will be 
 found upon further consideration that it is the 
 necessity for providing efficient defence against 
 such interference, against unintentional aggres- 
 sions arising from individual self-defensive dis- 
 turbance of public peace and order, that consti- 
 tutes the primary and only just warrant for the 
 compulsion essential to the establishment of the 
 State and the maintenance of civil power. 
 
 In Society without government the settlement 
 of differences between individuals would be left 
 to those personally interested, nor, as already 
 seen, would the mere fact that one or more were 
 suffering wrong at the hands of others warrant 
 any majority in compelling the smallest minority 
 to aid in preventing such wrong. Sooner or later, 
 however, it would be found that unrestrained, un- 
 regulated exercise of the right of self-defence by 
 everybody is incompatible with permanent en- 
 joyment of natural rights by anybody. Disputes 
 between individuals would so multiply, con- 
 tinue and extend, involving neighbours and 
 neighbourhoods in the resulting strife, that tu-
 
 Society and the State 45 
 
 mult and riot would overwhelm even those who 
 had no differences of their own and whom no one 
 desired to molest or intended to disturb. Those 
 so peaceably disposed and so averse to strife as 
 to suffer wrong rather than disturb the peace of 
 others, would find their own peace destroyed and 
 their property and lives endangered by the heed- 
 less violence of contending factions in whose con- 
 troversies they had no personal concern. 
 
 It is clear that any individual, if he had the 
 power, might justly defend himself against such 
 blind aggressions of public disorder by compel- 
 ling all persons to refrain from peace-disturbing 
 self-defence, provided they were afforded as sure 
 and complete defence as they were compelled to 
 forego making each for himself. Nor is it any 
 less clear that any number of individuals would 
 have the right voluntarily to unite and co-oper- 
 ate for the same self-defensive purpose, and to 
 organise themselves into an association for the 
 maintenance of a just peace, an equitable public 
 order, an order in which the peaceable enjoyment 
 of natural rights is secured to all persons subject 
 to its jurisdiction. It is evident, however, that 
 if there should be at the same time more than one 
 organisation attempting forcibly to maintain
 
 46 The Orthocratic State 
 
 peace and order throughout the same terri- 
 tory, the best endeavours in that behalf would 
 be frustrated by inevitable peace-disturbing 
 conflicts of authority and power resulting in 
 perpetual strife, and that nothing short of an or- 
 ganisation exercising exclusive authority over all 
 persons within its territory can maintain perma- 
 nent peace and an equitable public order therein. 
 Not only in justice to those who obey the 
 command to forego peace-disturbing self-defence 
 but also to insure obedience to it, the organisation 
 issuing it must provide for all persons required to 
 obey it as complete and reliable defence as they 
 might otherwise have made each for himself; and 
 since it would be impossible in any case to deter- 
 mine how complete defence might have been so 
 made, it devolves upon the organisation in all 
 cases to provide the most complete and reliable 
 defence possible. This it can not do unless its 
 power be at all times greater than any and all 
 powers against which it may at any time have to 
 contend. If any persons within the territory of 
 its jurisdiction were permitted to stand aloof 
 from and independent of the organisation, it 
 would be so much the weaker, so much the less
 
 Society and the State 47 
 
 able to enforce obedience to its commands, its 
 power so much less than supreme. 
 
 It is for such reason only and upon such ground 
 alone that all the members of Society may 
 justly be compelled to become and remain mem- 
 bers also of the organisation known as the State, 
 whose primary object and only authorising pur- 
 pose is, not to force any man to aid in the de- 
 fence of any other, but rather to compel all 
 persons to refrain from peace-disturbing self- 
 defence. The warrant for such compulsion con- 
 sists not in the will or power of any majority but 
 in the natural right of every human being to de- 
 fend himself against the aggressions of public 
 disorder, and to unite with others in doing what- 
 ever may be necessary to that end, provided that 
 they thereby interfere with no man's enjoyment 
 of any primary right, and that all are allowed to 
 participate equally in that collective, orderly 
 exercise of the subsidiary right of self-defence, 
 which is substituted for peace-disturbing indi- 
 vidual exercise thereof; in other words, that the 
 peace and order maintained be just and equitable. 
 
 There is, then, no warrant for the oft-repeated 
 dictum that man on entering the State thereby
 
 48 The Orthocratic State 
 
 surrenders certain natural rights in exchange for 
 the advantages of citizenship. Those rights are 
 inalienable and can not be surrendered. The 
 orthocratic, or rightly-governing, State restrains 
 man from indulging in no longer necessary self- 
 defensive disturbance of public peace and order, 
 but deprives him of nothing to which he is enti- 
 tled as a member of Society. 
 
 It will be observed that membership in the 
 State, although compulsory, is nevertheless an 
 equal membership. Members of the State are 
 not only all entitled to unrestricted enjoyment of 
 primary natural rights, but, since they all have 
 the same inalienable although subsidiary natural 
 right to defend themselves, they are also all enti- 
 tled to equal voice and participation in that or- 
 ganised, civil exercise thereof which, for the sake 
 of peace and order by virtue of that very right, 
 the State substitutes in place of its prohibited 
 individual exercise. 
 
 It follows that the jurisdiction of the State is 
 limited to the territory inhabited by its members, 
 and can justly be extended over additional terri- 
 tory only as the inhabitants thereof become 
 citizens of the State so enlarged, with an equal 
 voice in its government.
 
 Society and the State 49 
 
 The State may be defined as that organised 
 association into which the people of a definite 
 territory are compulsorily incorporated for the 
 solely self-defensive purpose of maintaining 
 peace and an equitable public order therein, and 
 through whose agency is effected that enforced 
 regulation of human conduct and affairs which 
 constitutes civil government.
 
 / CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT 
 
 "Governments may be corrupted and public misfor- 
 tunes induced by the failure to assume, as governmental, 
 functions that properly belong to government, — as well 
 as from interferences by government in the proper 
 sphere of individual action." 
 
 Henry George. 
 
 In considering the functions of government, 
 the uses to which the power of the State may be 
 put in order to effect the purpose of its organisa- 
 tion in no way affect the rights of any indi- 
 vidual or of the people as a whole, except as it 
 wisely secures or ignorantly interferes with their 
 enjoyment. As citizens, or members of the 
 State, the people have no greater or other right to 
 interfere with the conduct of any man than they 
 have as members of Society merely. What they 
 gain in that regard through organisation of the 
 State, is simply the power to do that which they 
 individually had and have the right to do but 
 
 50
 
 The Functions of Government 51 
 
 lack the power of doing, namely, to maintain 
 through exercise of the right of self-defence the 
 public peace and order necessary to enjoyment 
 of their natural rights. It is, moreover, evident 
 that, since no majority can justly compel any 
 man to do what it would be unjust for him to do 
 of his own volition merely, the State can not 
 justly do that which would be unjust if done by 
 an individual acting of his own accord and with- 
 out civil authority. It should, however, be at the 
 same time observed that, because it may do noth- 
 ing that the individual may not do, it by no means 
 follows that the State may do everything and all 
 that individuals may justly do. By reason of the 
 compulsory method of its organisation and sup- 
 port it can justly do only such things as any one 
 of its members having the power might rightly 
 compel the others to do, namely, whatever is es- 
 sential to self-defensive maintenance of a just 
 peace and an equitable public order. Distinction 
 should ever be made between civil power and civil 
 authority. The State must of necessity have the 
 power, or ability to do much that it has and can 
 have no authority, or right to do. 
 
 It has already been seen that in order to main- 
 tain a just peace the State must not only adopt
 
 / 
 
 52 The Orthocratic State 
 
 such measures as may be necessary to direct, im- 
 mediate preservation of the peace, but must also 
 secure its members individually against infringe- 
 ment of their primary natural rights by other in- 
 dividuals, security from such infringement being 
 essential not only to the permanence but also to 
 the justice of any peace maintained. An unjust 
 peace will sooner or later be disturbed, the sooner 
 the better for all concerned. The State must also 
 of necessity perform either directly or indirectly 
 all services of a public nature, that is, such as are 
 essential to an equitable public order and can not 
 be performed without exercise of public, or civil 
 authority. It must also do whatever is necessary 
 to a just maintenance of its own integrity and su- 
 preme power. The various activities necessary to 
 accomplishment of these four distinct objects con- 
 stitute the only legitimate functions of govern- 
 ment. 
 
 The different activities of the State all have 
 one and the same ultimate and only authorising 
 purpose, namely, the maintenance of peace and an 
 equitable public order, but, for convenience of 
 treatment, they may be classified according to 
 their respective direct, immediate objects. Those 
 activities which have the preservation of peace
 
 The Functions of Government 53 
 
 and order for dieir immediate object, as well as 
 for their ultimate and only purpose, may be said 
 to constitute the Peace-preserving function of 
 government; those whose immediate object is to 
 secure individuals against infringement of their 
 natural rights by other individuals, constitute 
 what may be called the Right-preserving func- 
 tion; those which have the performance of some 
 public service for their immediate purpose belong 
 to the Public-serving function; while those whose 
 direct object is to maintain the integrity and su- 
 preme power of the State itself fall within the 
 Self-preserving function. 
 
 All the legitimate uses of civil power are in- 
 cluded in the above named four and only func- 
 tions of government. Different classification 
 would in no way affect the activities to be consid- 
 ered. A single activity may serve more than one 
 governmental purpose and so fall within more 
 than one of such functions, but it can not be le- 
 gitimate, a proper exercise of civil power, unless 
 it be necessary to performance of one or more of 
 them. To use that power for accomplishment of 
 any other purpose however desirable is to abuse it. 
 
 In the discharge of its first, or Peace-preserving 
 function, the State prescribes and enforces regu-
 
 54 The Orthocratic State 
 
 lations whose direct and only object is to main- 
 tain peace and public order. This function is ex- 
 ercised largely in direct and timely prevention of 
 peace-disturbing self-defence, conduct commonly 
 characterised as taking the law into one's own 
 hands, that is, doing for one's self that which the 
 State for the sake of peace and order undertakes 
 to do for him. It has been seen that the State 
 can not justly prevent exercise of any primary 
 right, but that peace-disturbing exercise of the 
 subsidiary right of self-defence may be prohibited 
 in cases where adequate protection is provided for 
 the person foregoing such exercise. For in- 
 stance, if property be stolen or unjustly detained 
 or premises be wrongfully occupied, the person 
 injured has an undoubted self-defensive right to 
 use force if necessary in retaking such property or 
 possession of such premises; but the State for the 
 sake of public order forbids the use of peace-dis- 
 turbing force for such purpose and subjects who- 
 ever uses it to penalties imposed in the discharge 
 of its Peace-preserving function. In order, 
 however, to insure uniform and prompt obedience 
 to its peace-preserving regulation as well as in 
 justice to him who observes it, the State makes 
 provision for peaceable restoration of the property
 
 The Functions of Government 55 
 
 or premises through exercise of its Right-preserv- 
 ing function. As already suggested, however, in 
 case of direct aggression upon one's person, prop- 
 erty or premises, he may make such forcible re- 
 sistance as may be necessary to that immediate 
 defence which from the circumstances of the case 
 the State is unable to provide. 
 
 The Peace-preserving function is aiso exercised 
 in regulating conduct in public places and thor- 
 oughfares wherever conditions are such that lack 
 of regulation would result in public disorder; re- 
 quiring, for instance, that vehicles shall keep to 
 the right or to the left, as the rule may be, or that 
 they shall avoid certain thoroughfares altogether. 
 
 Care should of course be taken in the discharge 
 of this function, as well as of every other, not to 
 interfere with or infringe upon any primary natu- 
 ral right, to the end that the peace maintained 
 may be always just and equitable. 
 
 The second, or Right-preserving function, em- 
 braces whatever is to be done by the State for 
 direct protection of individuals from the aggres- 
 sions, the fraud or intentional violence of other 
 individuals. It is sometimes loosely said that 
 Society owes such protection to its members. It 
 is true that they are each in duty bound to refrain
 
 56 The Orthocratic State 
 
 from aggression, but Society owes nothing to any- 
 body, nor does anybody owe anything to Society, 
 except to its members individually. The State is 
 under obligation to protect its members for the 
 reason only that in commanding the peace it for- 
 bids them to protect themselves. 
 
 Efficient discharge of this function requires not 
 only a clear conception of natural rights, but also 
 a ready apprehension of their infringement as 
 well as of rational methods of preventing it. No 
 right will be secure unless it is affirmatively rec- 
 ognised by the State, and even when nominal 
 recognition is accorded it, a right will nevertheless 
 be insecure if there be not a definite and correct 
 understanding as to what constitutes infringement 
 of it. Moreover, the adoption of irrational 
 methods or measures in attempting to provide for 
 the security of rights will eventually result in 
 greater injustice than any so sought to be pre- 
 vented. Attempt to secure one right at the ex- 
 pense of another tends not only to impair the lat- 
 ter but also to vitiate enjoyment of the former. 
 
 The State recognises the rights of life, liberty, 
 property and contract, through imposition of 
 deterrent penalties for certain violations of the 
 first three of them, as well as by requiring repa-
 
 The Functions of Government 57 
 
 ration as far as practicable to be made for their 
 wilful or negligent infringement. It also pro- 
 vides for equitable adjustment of controversies 
 arising out of contract, sometimes by enforcing 
 performance, sometimes by the award of dam- 
 ages, as well as by providing for the collection of 
 debts. State regulation of marriage and divorce 
 has its warrant in the necessity for securing the 
 natural rights of the persons interested, including 
 children of the parties to the marriage contract, to 
 which the State is, however, no more a party than 
 to any other private contract. 
 
 The State can not justly lend its power to pur- 
 poses of revenge, retaliation being foreign to the 
 functions of government, which has properly 
 nothing to do with so-called retributive justice. 
 Penalties imposed by the State can have but one 
 legitimate object, the self -defensive purpose of 
 rendering the enjoyment of natural rights more 
 secure than it would be without such penalties. 
 The penalty most likely to promote general se- 
 curity of those rights from individual aggression 
 is evidently whatever one is best calculated to 
 render all persons, especially those upon whom it 
 is inflicted, less inclined to aggression. Experi- 
 ence has shown what reason teaches, that men are
 
 58 The Ortliocratic State 
 
 deterred from crime not so much by the severity 
 of ultimate punishment as by the certainty of 
 immediate restraint. It is also known that brutal 
 and degrading punishments, not only fail to im- 
 prove the character of those upon whom they are 
 inflicted, but also tend to brutalise and degrade a 
 people that inflicts them. In fixing the penalty 
 for any offence however heinous, care should be 
 taken not to subject the offender to any treatment 
 tending to lessen his or any other man's self-re- 
 spect or regard for the rights of others. In all 
 its acts the State should as by example endeavour 
 to strengthen rather than weaken popular sense 
 of the sanctity of human rights, and ought never 
 to countenance the fiction of their forfeiture to 
 Society or to the State, for they are inalienable. 
 Like offences by whomsoever committed should 
 be visited with like penalties. There should, for 
 instance, be no imprisonment of any for offences 
 to be atoned for by others in a different way, as 
 by payment of a fine. The payment of money 
 should never be exacted as a deterrent penalty, 
 but only in reparation for an injury or in satis- 
 faction of a just claim. The luxury of disobey- 
 ing the law should be beyond the means of any 
 citizen however wealthy. Reparation for an in-
 
 The Functions of Government 59 
 
 jury incident to a criminal offence should always 
 be separate and distinct from any deterrent pen- 
 alty imposed, and the damages awarded should be 
 collected like any other indebtedness. Provision 
 for the collection of debts that the debtor is able 
 but unwilling to pay, has its warrant if any in 
 the rights of property and contract. If two men 
 enter into a contract, and one of them after re- 
 ceiving value thereunder refuses to perform his 
 part of the contract, he is of course justly indebted 
 to the other, who has a natural right to recover 
 from him, if he has it, the value so received. The 
 State, however, for the sake of peace forbids dis- 
 orderly recovery and is therefore in justice bound 
 to provide for peaceable restitution, the object 
 being, not to insure any one against the ordinary, 
 voluntarily assumed hazards of trade, but to com- 
 pel payment whenever refusal to pay evidences 
 the intentional wrong of withholding that which 
 belongs to another. 
 
 The activities of the first and second functions 
 of government are seen to be of a somewhat nega- 
 tive and restrictive character, their immediate pur- 
 pose being to prevent interference with the enjoy- 
 ment of natural rights. Those of the third, or 
 Public-serving function, on the other hand, will
 
 60 The Orthocratic State 
 
 be found to have the more constructive purpose 
 of providing facilities for such enjoyment, their 
 direct object being to render positively helpful 
 services, necessary to an equitable public order, but 
 exceeding the compass of unprivileged private en- 
 terprise, such services being termed public in con- 
 tradistinction to such as can be rendered by 
 private persons without civil authority. All 
 human services and functions are in the nature of 
 things either private or public ; that is, they either 
 can or can not be performed by unprivileged 
 natural persons. There are no quasi-public func- 
 tions. 
 
 The performance of private services can not be 
 undertaken by the State without thereby unjustly 
 interfering with the natural right of individuals 
 to render them. By virtue of the right of con- 
 tract every human being is entitled to a natural 
 market in which to offer whatever services he may 
 be able to render his fellow men. It is mainly 
 through exchange of such services that the labour- 
 made necessities and comforts of life are pro- 
 duced and enjoyed. If the State were to enter 
 the competitive field the natural market for ex- 
 change of services, and with it all economic free- 
 dom, would be utterly destroyed.
 
 The Functions of Government 61 
 
 On the other hand, since in the rendering of 
 public services there is no natural competition 
 possible, that is, since they can not be rendered 
 by unprivileged natural persons, their perform- 
 ance by the State involves no interference 
 with natural rights. It is, however, a serious 
 interference with those rights for the State to 
 farm out or entrust to private persons the per- 
 formance of any public service. To the persons 
 so privileged advantages are thereby given as un- 
 natural and unjust and as eagerly sought as any 
 arising from the bestowal of rank and title, ad- 
 vantages which can not be given to the few 
 except to the disadvantage of the many. The 
 State can not justly lend to or share with any part 
 of the people any portion however small of that 
 power which it holds in its corporate capacity for 
 the common benefit of all. It should mind its 
 own business and have no partners. 
 
 The first in time and importance of services 
 distinctly public are those which are rendered in 
 regulating the occupancy and facilitating the use 
 of its territory by the people of the State. All 
 the members of Society, by virtue of their com- 
 mon relation to the earth and of their equal right 
 to liberty, have one and the same inalienable
 
 62 The Orthocratic State 
 
 right to occupy and use land necessary and natu- 
 ral to their individual support and happiness, the 
 right of location. Disputes in regard to the lo- 
 cation or extent of holdings for such purpose 
 would naturally be among the first of those dis- 
 turbances of the peace which render government 
 necessary. In order to maintain peace the State 
 must prescribe uniform terms and conditions 
 upon which it undertakes to secure individuals in 
 exclusive, permanent and undisturbed possession 
 of their respective holdings. Those terms should 
 of course be just and equitable, giving no man 
 any advantage over any other and securing to all 
 alike their equal, natural, right to the earth. 
 Unjust and most inequitable would be a peace 
 maintained on any other terms, upon terms, for 
 instance, allowing any greater or less number of 
 persons to appropriate more than an equitable 
 share of the land or of its values. 
 
 It is, however, not in the nature of things pos- 
 sible so to apportion the territory of the State 
 that all shall enjoy exclusive individual posses- 
 sion of equal areas of equally valuable land or of 
 equally valuable holdings of whatever land. 
 Land cannot be so divided, nor can the enjoyment 
 of equal rights to land be secured by any mere
 
 The Functions of Government 63 
 
 allotment of It; lands so differ in value, some 
 having no value at all, that they are not suscepti- 
 ble of equitable distribution in kind. 
 
 Those who occupy land having no value, the 
 least desirable in use, enjoy thereby no economic 
 advantage over any of their fellow men, for such 
 land yields no return beyond the wages and in- 
 terest of any labour and capital expended upon it, 
 the holder realising therefrom only what he earns. 
 On the other hand, those who hold valuable land 
 do enjoy such advantage, for the returns from 
 such land exceed the mere wages and interest of 
 the labour and capital spent upon it, the excess 
 being in proportion to the value of the land, of 
 which it is indeed the cause. To the extent of 
 such excess the holder of the land receives a value 
 which he does not earn, and which does not belong 
 to him in particular any more than does the land 
 from which it is derived. The State by securing 
 him in the exclusive possession and control of such 
 land enables him not only to appropriate as he 
 should the values answering to the wages and in- 
 terest of the labour and capital expended on it, but 
 also to receive into his possession the excess, 
 or ground rent arising from superiority of loca- 
 tion.
 
 64 The Orthocratic State 
 
 Bearing in mind that the use of the earth at any 
 time belongs to the people then living upon it, 
 and that they are equally entitled not only to 
 occupy and use it, but also to share alike in the 
 economic advantages arising from the possession 
 of superior locations, or valuable land, one having 
 as much right to such possession as another, it 
 is clear that land values are social; that they be- 
 long to no particular individual or class of in- 
 dividuals but to the people collectively; and that 
 the only way for all to enjoy their equal rights 
 to land, is for each to account for and pay over 
 to all, to the public, the value if any of whatever 
 occupancy of it he is by the State enabled to main- 
 tain to the exclusion of others. To require such 
 payment would not only secure equal participa- 
 tion by all in advantages arising from the use of 
 valuable land, but would also insure equal oppor- 
 tunity for all to occupy and use land whether 
 valuable or not, for when its values shall be no 
 longer appropriated to private uses it will not be 
 sought or held for speculation, but will in its nat- 
 ural and beneficent abundance become available 
 for the equitable occupancy of any and all persons 
 desiring to use it. 
 
 The system of land-holding maintained by the
 
 The Functions of Government 65 
 
 State is as it were the ground in which its other 
 institutions have their root and of whose elemental 
 character they necessarily partake, the injustice 
 of an inequitable system being so broadly funda- 
 mental and all-pervasive that no public institu- 
 tion, no governmental function, no private inter- 
 est nor personal relation, industrial or social, can 
 fail to be injuriously affected thereby. 
 
 Complementary to the service which the State 
 renders in adopting and maintaining a system of 
 land tenure for private purposes, is that of regu- 
 lating and facilitating public or common uses of 
 land. Every human being has not only a natural 
 right to exclusive possession of land essential to his 
 abode and self -employment, the right of location, 
 but also the right to go to and from one place to 
 another, the right of locomotion, and it is neces- 
 sary to peaceable exercise of the latter right as well 
 as to undisturbed enjoyment of land held for per- 
 manent occupancy, that stretches of land conven- 
 ient for the purpose be set apart over which one 
 may pass to and fro without trespassing upon the 
 private holdings of other persons. And since it 
 would be impracticable to provide a separate right 
 of way for each and every individual, the State 
 establishes and maintains public thoroughfares for
 
 66 The Orthocratic State 
 
 the accommodation of all in common, as well as 
 places for public assembly and recreation. 
 
 And not only is the establishment and main- 
 tenance of such highways a public service, but no 
 less so is any and every necessary service requiring 
 exclusive or monopolistic use of a highway, since 
 such use can not be enjoyed without special author- 
 ity of the State. To this class of services belong 
 the construction and operation of railways, of teler 
 graph and telephone lines, and of plants for gen- 
 eral distribution of water, light, heat and power. 
 The transportation of passengers and freight and 
 the transmission of intelligence, in so far as they 
 require monopolistic use of rights of way, are also 
 public services, since they can not be rendered 
 without special exercise of the authority and power 
 of the State. 
 
 That the monopolistic use of a public highway 
 or right of way for whatever purpose is a public 
 use or service, appears further from the fact that, 
 whenever the mistake is made of farming out any 
 such service and authorising its performance by 
 private persons, the State finds it necessary to sup- 
 plement its authority by the loan of its power, 
 which it does by creating an artificial person, the 
 so-called public-service corporation. The State
 
 The Functions of Government 67. 
 
 has no right to create artificial persons, or corpora- 
 tions for any purpose whatever. Such exercise of 
 its power is not only unnecessary to the discharge 
 of any of its functions, and therefore prima facie 
 a misuse of that power, but is also destructive of 
 the natural market, which obtains among natural 
 persons only. 
 
 Further indication that such services are public 
 rather than private is to be seen in the necessity 
 for State regulation of the charges, if any, to be 
 made therefor, no such necessity ever existing in 
 case of private services so long as rendered by un- 
 privileged natural persons. The only way of as- 
 certaining the just price of any service or commod- 
 ity is through competition in a natural market. 
 Such competition being impossible in the case of 
 public services, which are necessarily and naturally 
 monopolistic, there is no way justly to determine 
 the price to be paid for their performance by pri- 
 vate persons. If a charge is to be made for their 
 performance by the State, it should of course not 
 exceed the cost of the service, any greater charge 
 so made being an arbitrary and unjust tax, as it 
 also is, in so far as the State is concerned, when 
 exacted by a public-service corporation. 
 
 Argument that this or that public service can be
 
 68 The Orthocratic State 
 
 rendered by private enterprise at a less cost than 
 by the State, is not to the point. The State should 
 mind its own business. It might entrust to the 
 lowest bidder the discharge of all its functions to- 
 gether with the authority and power necessary to 
 their performance, but there would be no just war- 
 rant for such delegation of its authority or power, 
 nor is there any better reason for farming out some 
 of its activities, those that the farmers-general find 
 profitable, than for placing them all in private 
 hands. The State is not organised to make or 
 even to save money, nor to make anything cheap, 
 nor to provide opportunities for the investment of 
 capital or the employment of labour, but rather to 
 maintain an equitable public order in which 
 natural opportunities for the employment of 
 labour and capital shall be equally open to all. 
 The power which it forcibly assumes for that sole 
 and only authorising purpose can not justly be 
 granted or loaned for any purpose whatever. 
 
 Objection to direct performance of all its func- 
 tions by the State itself, on the ground that the 
 number of public servants and the power of pat- 
 ronage would be thereby increased, might as well 
 be made to any and all such servants and patron- 
 age. There would seem to be no stronger argu-
 
 The Functions of Government 69 
 
 ment in support of the theory that government is 
 unnecessary and therefore unjust, than that sug- 
 gested by government itself, when it practically 
 concedes that some of its most important functions 
 can be better performed by private persons than 
 by the State. The seeming force of the argument 
 of course disappears when it is considered that in 
 no instance can a really public service be rendered 
 without authority and power derived from the 
 State. Not only is that authority essential to the 
 monopolistic control necessary to such service, but 
 the public-service corporation, now so-called, is, 
 as it was formerly wont to be termed, an arm of 
 the State, without whose aid the service could not 
 be rendered by private enterprise. Evils to be ap- 
 prehended from direct exercise of its power by the 
 State can not be greater than those arising from the 
 grant or loan of it to private persons. The 
 former, moreover, can be overcome by efficient 
 government, but evils of the latter class will in- 
 evitably persist in spite of all that government can 
 do, so long as it continues their causal abuse. 
 
 Another important public service is that of pro- 
 viding a circulating medium of exchange. In or- 
 der to maintain itself and perform its other func- 
 tions, the State calls upon individuals for com-
 
 70 The Orthocratic State 
 
 modities and services for which it pays value for 
 value, expending for that purpose the public rev- 
 enue which it collects from the people. Since 
 neither payment for such commodities and services 
 nor collection of such revenue can be effected 
 through barter, the State adopts some more or less 
 convenient medium of exchange to be accepted by 
 individuals in payment of claims against the State, 
 and also by the State in payment of its revenue. 
 In order that it may be the more readily accepted, 
 and also that it may be of service in the judicial 
 settlement of disputes between individuals, the 
 State provides that it shall be recognised as a meas- 
 ure of values and be receivable throughout the 
 State in payment of all dues public and private, 
 making it a legal-tender currency. This, like any 
 other public service, should be performed by the 
 State itself without intervention of private per- 
 sons, natural or artificial, to the end that it may be 
 just and equitable, affording no man any advan- 
 tage over any other. 
 
 In the discharge of its Public-serving function, 
 the State should also make whatever equitable 
 general regulations may be necessary to protect the 
 public against false weights and measures, impure 
 foods, dangerous employments, unsanitary hous-
 
 The Functions of Government 71 
 
 ing, fire, communicable disease, and any other evils 
 against which the individual can not effectually 
 guard, or, at least, not without disturbance of the 
 peace. Much of present necessity for such regula- 
 tions, including regulation of the hours of labour 
 for men, women and children, as well as provision 
 for support of the disemployed, will, however, dis- 
 appear when natural opportunities for existence 
 are secured to all, as they will be whenever the 
 State, instead of making needless, ever-increasing 
 and seemingly endless work for itself, shall limit 
 the use of its power to efficient discharge of its 
 legitimate functions. 
 
 The fourth, or Self -preserving function of gov- 
 ernment, embraces whatever has to be done by the 
 State to maintain its integrity and supreme power, 
 including whatever is necessary to its defence 
 against insurrection from within or invasion from 
 without. The surest defence against each of these 
 dangers is to be found in a just and equitable ad- 
 ministration by the State of its own affairs, which 
 necessarily precludes any intermeddling with the 
 affairs of other States. There can be little danger 
 of dissension within a State where the enjoyment 
 of natural rights is secured to all. It should be 
 observed, moreover, that the State is organised to
 
 72 The Ortliocratic State 
 
 secure that enjoyment within its own territory 
 only, and has no legitimate concern in what may 
 be done within or by other States, so long as its 
 own peace is not necessarily disturbed thereby. 
 If citizens of one State elect to invest their capital 
 in territory of another or to lend it to another 
 State, they can justly look for protection in their 
 venture only to the State in which they have 
 chosen to make it. The best and only legitimate 
 way for a State to promote just government 
 abroad is to maintain it at home, affording the 
 oppressed of other States an asylum within its 
 own territory. The State that really does this 
 need fear no invasion, for it will grow stronger as 
 others become weaker, by reason of the immigra- 
 tion it invites, and its example will sooner or 
 later be followed by other States, if merely to 
 keep their people at home, for it is only through 
 exploitation of the many that the few can largely 
 profit. Landlords might as well lose their land 
 as to lose the people who labour on it, and capital 
 even is profitable only when used as an adjunct to 
 labour. 
 
 It is in the discharge of this function that the 
 State is warranted if at all in making provision 
 for compulsory education of its citizens. Such
 
 The Functions of Government 73 
 
 provision is not necessary to immediate preserva- 
 tion of the peace; nor to direct prevention of the 
 infringement of natural rights; nor is the educa- 
 tion of the young a public service in the sense that 
 it could not be performed by unprivileged natural 
 persons. When the State shall efficiently dis- 
 charge its legitimate functions, industrial and so- 
 cial conditions may perhaps be such that the people 
 individually in their private capacity will as nat- 
 urally and as surely make suitable provision for 
 the education of their children as for the feeding, 
 clothing and sheltering of them. The only valid 
 reason there can be for a system of compulsory ed- 
 ucation by the State, is that under existing condi- 
 tions, for which the State itself is more or less 
 responsible, it may be necessary in order to insure 
 the general intelligence essential to stability of 
 popular government. To what extent and to 
 what particular, intermediate ends the State 
 should for that purpose assume control and direc- 
 tion of opportunities and methods for education, 
 is a question worthy of more attention than it 
 has yet received. No majority however learned 
 can be wise enough to warrant its using the power 
 of government to mould the opinions, or. Sparta- 
 like, to shape the habits of a people.
 
 74 The Orthocratic State 
 
 That the maintenance of a compulsory system 
 of education, however necessary it may seem under 
 existing conditions, is not a normal activity of the 
 State, appears from the difficulty encountered in 
 attempting to maintain an efficient system vt^ithout 
 interfering with natural rights of both parent and 
 child. Such a system would seem to require not 
 only that the pupil shall be in regular, continuous 
 attendance upon a more or less extended course of 
 study calculated to make him an intelligent citi- 
 zen, but also that he be in such attendance after 
 his mind has become sufficiently mature to profit 
 thereby, say, from twelve or fourteen to eighteen 
 or twenty years of age. It is evident, however, 
 that during those same years he must acquire if 
 ever the skill and proficiency essential to efficient 
 prosecution of whatever vocation he may after- 
 wards follow, and that if he is required during 
 ^^ those years to devote all his time to improvement 
 of his mind he must necessarily go without the 
 industrial training essential to efficient self-sup- 
 port in after life. Hence it is that the State 
 vainly attempts to give him the required mental 
 discipline while he is yet too young to profit, and 
 may indeed be injured, by it, dismissing him from 
 compulsory school attendance at about the time he
 
 The Functions of Government 75 
 
 should begin it, if its purpose be to make him an 
 intelligent citizen. And even if from voluntary 
 attendance upon a secondary, or high-school course 
 of study, provided for such as can afford to take 
 it, he thereafter attains a certain intellectual dis- 
 cipline, it must be at the loss of a practical busi- 
 ness training. 
 
 If the necessity for popular education be so im- 
 perative as to warrant the State in assuming the 
 imperious and virtually exclusive control over the 
 education of children which it now begins to exer- 
 cise almost as soon as they are out of the cradle, it 
 is at least pertinent to ask whether that so neces- 
 sary end is to be accomplished by such arbitrary 
 interference with parental prerogatives and such 
 prison-like detention of those whose only offence is 
 that they are children and too young to defend 
 themselves. The scheme is too unnatural to be 
 lasting, and the day will come when the State, in 
 defence of the child and in the interest of rational 
 education, will prohibit the doing of much that 
 it now compels to be done. Under its present 
 compulsory system of so-called education the 
 State is acting more as nursery maid than as school- 
 master. 
 
 State-enforced school attendance should not be
 
 76 The Orthocratic State 
 
 required of children until after they are at least 
 twelve years of age, and then for one-half only 
 f\ of each day, in which to form habits of thinking, 
 I the other half being left open to employments in 
 \ which to acquire habits of doing. Let a student, 
 from the time he is twelve or fourteen until he is 
 • eighteen or twenty years of age, give but one half 
 of each day to mental effort and the other half to 
 some industrial pursuit, as long as, at that age, he 
 should be continuously held to either task, resting 
 alternately in the one from fatigue of the other, 
 and coming fresh to each; and he will have not 
 only a better intellectual development and equip- 
 ment than one who even from an earlier age de- 
 votes the entire day to study, but also a practical 
 acquaintance with business, which the other will 
 necessarily lack, having been prevented from ac- 
 quiring it at the proper time, that is, during the 
 habit-forming age. The former, moreover, will 
 have acquired none of that contempt for manual 
 labour which continuous exclusive attendance upon 
 school is wont to develop in minds it is fondly 
 supposed to educate. He will also be likely to 
 have formed lasting habits of industry both bodily 
 and mental, together with some intelligent idea of 
 his own vocational tastes and capabilities. Any
 
 The Functions of Government 77 
 
 educational training enforced by the State should 
 be the same for all, each being allowed to profit 
 therefrom according to his ability, and that with- 
 out having his perhaps more or less mediocre abil- 
 ity emphasised and stigmatised by the ostentatious 
 conferring of invidious and needlessly discrimi- 
 nating honours upon those who happen to have 
 greater natural ability. Any attempt by the 
 State to prescribe for the child an educational 
 training suited to some particular station in life 
 officiously assumed to be his proper one, would be 
 a long step toward his exclusion by government 
 from any better station. The legitimate object 
 of compulsory education by the State is, not to 
 educate for this or that trade or profession or for 
 any particular station in life, but so to develop and 
 train the mind as to form the habit of correct 
 thinking, especially in regard to matters of gov- 
 ernment, a habit quite as essential to good citizen- 
 ship as that of saluting the flag, but demanding 
 for its acquirement greater maturity of mind than 
 is ordinarily possessed before the age at which 
 most children now leave school. 
 
 In the discharge of its Self-preserving function 
 it devolves upon the State to make equitable pro- 
 vision for defraying the expenses of government.
 
 78 The Orthocratic State 
 
 This has never yet been done, the history of taxa- 
 tion being a continued story of fiscal injustice. 
 The very generally accepted doctrine that the in- 
 dividual should be taxed according to his ability 
 to pay, is of course inequitable unless he owes his 
 ability to the State; nor is attempted practise of 
 the theory any less iniquitous because those os- 
 tensibly so taxed generally shift the burden to 
 those having less ability, with result that the peo- 
 ple are in reality taxed not so much according 
 to ability to pay as to their inability to avoid 
 paying. 
 
 So unsuccessful have been all attempts in that 
 direction that it has come to be regarded as im- 
 possible to devise an equitable system of taxation, 
 it being said that nature gives no whisper about 
 ' any taxes. Certain it is that there is not in the 
 nature of things any principle or just warrant by 
 virtue of which any man or majority of men, any 
 State, can forcibly take or tax from any man that 
 which he does not owe. Even if the State could 
 devise some plan by which to compel every man to 
 contribute to its revenue exactly the same amount 
 as every other, it could in no case rightly enforce 
 such contribution unless it was for some reason 
 due and owing to that corporate body; nor as al-
 
 The Functions of Government 79 
 
 ready suggested can it justly take from any man 
 more than from others simply because he has more 
 than they have. A public revenue is necessary 
 to the support of government, but it must be a 
 just one if government is to be just. If the col- 
 lection of a just revenue be indeed impracticable, 
 the Anarchists are right in their contention that 
 all government by force is unjust. 
 
 The State is a self-defensive organisation in 
 which all the people of its territory are entitled 
 to equal membership, whose services should be for 
 the equal benefit of all, and for whose expenses all 
 are equally responsible and should therefore be 
 equally assessed, if any assessment be necessary. 
 More can not be justly exacted from any one 
 member than from others except in payment for 
 some advantage which the State enables him to 
 enjoy over them, and then not as an assessment 
 or tax, but as the value of the advantage, for 
 which he should account regardless of any public 
 expenses and of any assessments therefor. If the 
 amount realised from payments so made should 
 prove sufficient to defray all the expenses of gov- 
 ernment, it is clear that no assessments or taxes 
 would be necessary. It has already been seen 
 that individuals who are by the State enabled to
 
 80 The Orthocratic State 
 
 enjoy the advantages of holding valuable land 
 ought to account to the public for their values. 
 When the State shall require such accounting to 
 be made and shall apply all such values to public 
 uses there will be no need of any taxation, nor 
 will there be any difference in amounts contributed 
 by individuals to the support of government, 
 since those values belong to the people in common. 
 The distinction between services that are public 
 and those that are private is not more marked 
 than is that between public and private revenues. 
 Land values constitute the natural revenues of 
 the State. They could not be collected or even 
 determined without the action of government, for 
 without it there would be neither buyers nor sell- 
 ers of land, and so no market in which to deter- 
 mine its values. The relation of landlord and 
 tenant is neither natural nor primarily contractual 
 but institutional, the landlord being a duly au- 
 thorised collector of specific public revenues for 
 which he should duly account. 
 
 In studying the functions of government it will 
 be observed that considerations of expediency are 
 never of themselves a sufficient warrant for ex- 
 ercise of its power; they are of weight in civic 
 affairs only in deciding upon the best, the most
 
 The Functions of Government 81 
 
 rational way of doing what justice betwe'en man 
 and man requires to be done. It is not the 
 business of the State to do good, or to make any- 
 body good; to promote the greatest goo4 of the 
 greatest number, or, better still, even of the whole 
 number; to promote this or that, be it industry, 
 morality, progress, the socially useful, or whatever 
 else; for even if such ends were really and 
 directly attainable through government, they 
 would not, desirable as they are, justify the com- 
 pulsion-necessary to its support. Nor can any 
 human conception or forecast of what would be 
 good or useful for mankind be taken as a guide, 
 much less as a warrant, for civil action. What- 
 ever the State may do toward promotion of the 
 good or the useful will be incidental to rational 
 government, to the maintenance of an equitable 
 order in which men shall be free to be as good as 
 they like, and to promote whatever they will, pro- 
 vided they do not interfere with that order. 
 
 The question whether any existing or proposed 
 use of civil power is or would be legitimate, may 
 always be determined by inquiring as to which 
 one, if any, of the four functions of government it 
 belongs, any action by the State not necessary to 
 performance of some one or more of them being
 
 82 The Orthocratic State 
 
 wholly unwarranted and an abuse of its power. 
 As its members become less and less disposed to 
 aggression, as they will under more rational gov- 
 ernment; as fraud and violence among them shall 
 gradually diminish, there will be less and less ne- 
 cessity for exercise of its Right-preserving func- 
 tion by the State. There will doubtless be at the 
 same time an also resulting diminution in activi- 
 ties of the Peace-preserving and Self-preserving 
 functions, whose exercise may eventually be neces- 
 sary, the one merely to provide the orderly direc- 
 tion essential to the peace and safety of public 
 thoroughfares and assemblies, and the other to 
 collection of the public revenues, the tendency be- 
 ing to ultimate disappearance of all necessity for 
 punitive or sensibly coercive government. On the 
 other hand, it is evident that activities of the 
 Public-serving function will increase with increas- 
 ing necessity for services of a public nature, those 
 which are essential to an equitable public order 
 and can not be rendered without civil authority; 
 and that government will, for that reason also, 
 tend to become preponderatingly administrative 
 rather than coercive in the exercise of its power. 
 The maintenance of its highways, including its 
 legalised circulating medium of exchange, to-
 
 The Functions of Government 83 
 
 gether with any necessarily monopolistic uses of 
 those public utilities, will eventually constitute 
 the principal activities of the State, all private 
 business, enterprises and affairs being of course 
 left to the unhampered conduct and control of 
 unprivileged private persons and associations.
 
 /! 
 
 ckAPTER IV 
 
 ABUSES OF CIVIL POWER 
 
 "So I returned and considered all the oppressions that 
 are done under the sun; and beheld the tears of such 
 as were oppressed, . . . and on the side of their op- 
 pressors there was power." 
 
 Book of Ecclesiastes. 
 
 It having been seen what the State ought to do, 
 and what is quite as important, that it ought not to 
 do anything else, it should not be difficult at any 
 time to determine whether it is in any way abusing 
 its power. There are three ways in which the State 
 can abuse its power; first, by neglecting to use it 
 for a proper purpose ; second, by using it in an im- 
 proper manner although for a proper purpose; and 
 third, by using it or permitting it to be used for an 
 improper purpose. Abuses of the first kind are 
 exceedingly rare, the tendency being to over-use of 
 power. How often is it said that there ought to 
 be a law, for this or for that, when the trouble 
 really is that there already is too much law for this 
 and for that. Abuses of the second class consist 
 
 84
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 85 
 
 in the use of irrational methods in the attempted 
 discharge of legitimate functions. An abuse of 
 the third class occurs whenever civil power is used 
 for any purpose other than that of performing one 
 or more of such functions. 
 
 Of the first kind of abuse no example will be 
 given, for reason already suggested, that there is 
 hardly any matter or interest susceptible to govern- 
 mental interference that has not been made the 
 subject of some sort of prohibitive, regulative or 
 stimulative legislation. 
 
 Abuses of the second class are to be seen in at- 
 tempts made to perform governmental functions 
 by methods involving infringement of natural 
 rights. For instance, the State abuses its power 
 whenever, although for the purpose of maintaining 
 public order, it suppresses free expression of in- 
 dividual opinion, however unpopular or incorrect 
 it may be, lest it cause disturbance of the peace by 
 opponents of such opinion. No man can be pre- 
 vented from thinking his own thoughts, and 
 whether they be right or wrong is not to be deter- 
 mined by majority rule. Whatever a man may 
 think or say, he is not justly subject to interference 
 by any other man or by the State, so long as he 
 infringes no natural right of any man. Those
 
 86 The Orthocratic State 
 
 who deny the existence of natural rights may in- 
 deed seem to disclaim any right to express or even 
 to have an opinion, but there can of course be no 
 valid disclaimer of that which is inherent and in- 
 alienable. It is not any expression of opinion but 
 forcible opposition to its expression that should be 
 prohibited by the State, in the exercise not only of 
 its Peace-preserving but also of its Right-preserv- 
 ing function. Freedom of speech and of the press 
 is essential to enjoyment of the right to liberty, 
 without which there can be no equitable public 
 order. 
 
 A most irrational and unjust method of at- 
 tempting to perform a legitimate function, that of 
 securing the right to life, is to be seen in what is 
 called capital punishment. It has been seen that 
 the only legitimate purpose of any penalty im- 
 posed by the State is to provide greater security 
 against the offence for which it is imposed. Se- 
 curity against repetition of the offence by any 
 particular offender can be provided by his incar- 
 ceration, nor has it ever been demonstrated that 
 other possible offenders are to be deterred more 
 by fear of the death penalty than by the more im- 
 minent and readily conceivable probability of im- 
 prisonment.
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 87 
 
 It is not easy for man to conceive of his own, 
 personal mortality, or fully to realise that he is 
 indeed himself ever to die even the death that he 
 knows must sooner or later come to all ; much less 
 can any apprehension of a contingency rarely hap- 
 pening even to those incurring liability to it be so 
 lively as to exert a controlling influence over his 
 conduct in time of temptation. It is, moreover, 
 at least an open question whether any deterrent in- 
 fluence the penalty may have in general is not more 
 than counterbalanced by its inevitable tendency to 
 weaken popular sense of and regard for the sanc- 
 tity of human life. 
 
 But even if its effects were known to be pre- 
 ponderatingly deterrent, infliction of the death 
 penalty would nevertheless be unjust not only for 
 the reason that the punishment rarely falls so 
 heavily on the offender as upon his unfortunate 
 but innocent relatives and friends whom the State 
 has no right to punish, but also for the further 
 reason that the State has no right in cold blood to 
 take the life of any human being whatever his 
 offence, since it can not justly do that which no 
 one of its members has any right to do. No man 
 can justly take the life of another except in de- 
 fence against actual or impending aggression ; and
 
 88 The Orthocratic State 
 
 if no man has a right to take the life of another 
 simply because the latter has taken human life, no 
 more has any number of men, any mob or the 
 State. The advocate of capital punishment neces- 
 sarily assumes that he has a right not only himself 
 to take life otherwise than in self-defence, but also 
 to compel others to aid him in so doing. The 
 death penalty is in fact demanded not so much to 
 secure human life as to appease human resentment. 
 
 A too common and still growing abuse is that 
 of permitting persons charged with crime, but 
 entitled to the presumption of innocence, to be 
 treated by agents of the State not merely as if 
 presumed to be guilty, but even as if already con- 
 victed, and judicially sentenced to indignities put 
 upon them. To say nothing of the injustice of 
 such practice, its demoralising influence and tend- 
 ency to weaken public confidence in the rectitude 
 of government should be enough to condemn it. 
 
 There is perhaps no greater misuse of civil 
 power than that involved in the prevailing sys- 
 tem of land tenure, which, by causing land to be 
 held as by right of property, not only denies the 
 natural right of man to the earth but at the same 
 time tends to vitiate the right of property. The 
 latter right, consisting as it does in the relation
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 89 
 
 which a man naturally sustains to the product of 
 his labour, is nugatory and barren without nat- 
 ural opportunity for labour. Denied freedom to 
 enjoy his right to land, a man is deprived of the 
 enjoyment not only of that right but also of his 
 right to property, because compelled to depend 
 upon unnatural conditions, upon the will and con- 
 sent of other men, for whatever limited opportu- 
 nity to produce it they may see fit to allow him. 
 The right of property, which the State has seemed 
 more solicitous to magnify, exalt and extend than 
 correctly to define, natural and sacred as it is, can 
 not be more so than is the right to land, which the 
 State ignores and virtually denies by confound- 
 ing it with the right of property, forgetting that 
 the wild fruit a man eats by right of property 
 is gathered only by virtue of his right to land. 
 
 The property right or relation is one of exclu- 
 sive ownership and control and carries with it 
 the right even to destroy the particular property 
 owned. It arises from the effort of man and ob- 
 tains only between him and the result of his effort, 
 the concrete exchangeable product of his labour, 
 that is, his property, or wealth. Other things may 
 be in a sense his own, but not in the property sense. 
 A footprint may be his but not in the same sense
 
 90 The Orthocratic State 
 
 as the shoe that made it. The position or place 
 that he temporarily and perhaps wrongfully oc- 
 cupies in a crowd is his as distinguished from the 
 position of others therein. The land that he cul- 
 tivates or otherwise improves is his in the sense 
 that he rather than some one else occupies and 
 uses it, but it is not and can not be his in the same 
 sense as the crop that he raises or the house that he 
 builds upon it. Whether a man has a right to ac- 
 tual property or not depends upon whether he has 
 produced and saved any, the right of property be- 
 ing as it were inchoate, and not vesting until there 
 is a labour-product between which and its producer 
 the relation may exist. 
 
 The right to land, on the other hand, waits not 
 on the action or will of any man, but is a con- 
 stituent element of that natural freedom which is 
 the inalienable birthright of every human being. 
 If any man were to have other than his natural 
 right to land, he would of necessity have to ac- 
 quire it from some other man or men; but they 
 have only their natural right, which being in- 
 alienable can be neither transferred to nor ac- 
 quired by any man. 
 
 The existing system of land tenure not only fails 
 to secure equal enjoyment of the right to land, but
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 91 
 
 deprives an ever increasing majority of all en- 
 joyment of that right. Held as by right of prop- 
 erty, the land sooner or later passes into the ex- 
 clusive possession and so-called ownership of a 
 more or less limited number of men who are by 
 the State empowered and virtually obliged to 
 exact from other men a price for being on earth. 
 That any man should be indebted to another for 
 occupancy or use of the earth, would never occur 
 to them as members of Society merely, there being 
 nothing in the nature of things, no human relation, 
 to suggest any such obligation. And yet the State 
 decrees that whatever earthly opportunities a land- 
 less man would enjoy he must purchase from some 
 other man or men, as if they were, as they legally 
 are, the only ones having any right on earth. 
 Nor can any so-called owner of land be legally 
 compelled to sell or even to lease any part of it 
 however much he may hold, for he holds it as 
 by right of property and may use it or not as he 
 pleases, and might even destroy it if he could. 
 It is a dear price that is paid for any advantages 
 such a system may have over even no system at 
 all; a price, however, that is not paid by those 
 who enjoy the advantages. Under it, as already 
 seen, most men are deprived of all natural op-
 
 92 TJie Orthocratic State 
 
 portunities for self-support; not only of the op- 
 portunity to employ themselves, but also of the 
 natural market for sale of their labour, which they 
 needs must sell if they are to live, but which no 
 man is compelled to buy. It would be hard to 
 conceive of a system more subversive of human 
 rights or more incompatible with an equitable 
 order. 
 
 A kindred abuse is to be seen in the usual 
 method of performing services tliat require monop- 
 olistic use of public highways. Such services 
 have been seen to be public, or governmental in 
 their nature, and ought therefore to be performed 
 by the State itself, to the end that they be con- 
 ducted solely in the interest of the public, and in 
 such manner as not to interfere with private 
 interests or the enjoyment of natural rights. 
 Farmed out as they very generally are to public- 
 service corporations, they can not in the nature 
 of things be rendered with an eye single to the 
 public interest, for their performance becomes a 
 divided duty involving the service of two mas- 
 ters, the stockholder and the State, whose inter- 
 ests are by no means identical. Moreover, the 
 prestige and power that come from connection 
 with the public-service corporation will inevita-
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 93 
 
 bly and not unnaturally be utilised by its mem- 
 bers to their advantage over their unprivileged 
 competitors in private business, as well as over 
 the public in matters of civic interest. The po- 
 litical boss about whom there is so much innocent 
 prattle, and who when deposed gives place to 
 another, is generally the political choice of the 
 public-service and other powerful corporations, 
 holding his place by virtue of their more or less 
 hidden but no less influential support. 
 
 There is no good reason why all services re- 
 quiring monopolistic operation or use of rail- 
 roads, telegraph and telephone lines, and plants 
 for general distribution of water, light, heat and 
 power, including the transportation of passen- 
 igers and freight and the transmission of intelli- 
 Igence, should not be conducted by the State di- 
 rectly, and with as little discrimination or favour- 
 itism as ordinarily obtains among travellers along 
 a country road. The individual, natural persons 
 employed in the governmental conduct of such 
 services would have but one set of interests to 
 serve, and but one employer, the State. 
 
 Nor will there be any such actual addition as 
 may be supposed to the responsibilities and ac- 
 tivities of the State when it shall itself in a di-
 
 94 The OrtJiocratic State 
 
 rectly administrative and rational manner dis- 
 charge public functions whose necessarily unsat- 
 isfactory performance by corporations it now 
 wastes so much time and effort in futile attempts 
 to regulate. There is no right way of doing 
 wrong, no saving of time or toil in the endeavour 
 to reach by devious ways a goal to which there 
 is a direct and open road, nor does the State les- 
 sen so much as it complicates its responsibilities 
 by seeking to avoid them. Its highways are in 
 their nature public and their monopolistic use for 
 private gain is as unreasonable and unjust and 
 quite as incompatible with an equitable public 
 order as it would be for the State to assume con- 
 trol and operation of enterprises of a private 
 nature. The distinction between what is social 
 and what is individual, between things, functions 
 and values that are public and those that are 
 private, exists in their very nature and can not be 
 ignored without disturbance of the natural order, 
 an unjust and injurious interference with that 
 equal enjoyment of natural rights which the State 
 is in duty bound to secure. All public services 
 will eventually be rendered by the State without 
 charge, their cost being paid out of the values 
 which they add to land.
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 95 
 
 The State abuses its power whenever in mak- 
 ing provision for a legal-tender currency it adopts 
 an unstable measure of values, as well as when 
 it authorises private persons natural or artificial 
 to perform the public service and governmental 
 function of providing the legalised circulating 
 medium of exchange. Such currency should be 
 so constituted and controlled as to afford the pub- 
 lic an unvarying measure of values as well as an 
 equitably available medium for the exchange of 
 commodities and services. It should not be such 
 as to become itself the subject of barter, but 
 should serve only to facilitate barter through the 
 economic device of a sale. 
 
 A sale differs from barter in that it consists in 
 the exchange of some commodity or service, not 
 for some other, but for money, some medium of 
 exchange generally receivable in payment for all 
 subjects of barter, the sale being as it were a half- 
 completed barter of which the money is evidence, 
 and which is completed when some other com- 
 modity or service is finally received for and in 
 place of the money. When the money, the me- 
 dium of exchange, is itself a commodity, gold or 
 silver for instance, its value fluctuates as do the 
 values of other commodities, and so fails to re-
 
 96 The Orthocratic State 
 
 main a fixed, stable measure of value. Whoever 
 holds it or has it owing to him for any consider- 
 able time will be either a gainer or loser thereby, 
 for its value although apparently fixed by its 
 being the legalised and generally accepted meas- 
 ure of values, becomes in reality greater or less 
 than that with which he parted for it. 
 
 Whenever the promissory notes of private per- 
 sons natural or artificial are given any advantages 
 of circulation over those of people in general, the 
 persons so privileged are not only given that 
 advantage but are thereby enabled to exert an 
 undue influence over the legalised medium of 
 exchange. The currency authorised by the State 
 should be as free from private monopoly and 
 control as the public highways. It is indeed it- 
 self a public highway for the passing to and fro 
 of values in exchange; as commodities are trans- 
 ported from seller to buyer by means of the rail- 
 way, so are their values transmitted from buyer 
 to seller by means of the currency. 
 
 Reference has already been made to the rais- 
 ing of public revenues by methods so irrational 
 as to constitute most evident abuses of civil 
 power. It would be difficult to specify in what 
 respect ordinary methods of taxation can be re-
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 97 
 
 garded as rational or just. They are unjust in 
 that they cause the burdens of taxation, of which 
 indeed there should be none, to be borne for the 
 greater part by those who are not only the least 
 able to bear them, but who derive the least if any 
 benefit from expenditures of the public revenue. 
 It has yet to be shown that the majority of man- 
 kind are economically benefitted by existing gov- 
 ernment. But for the legalised system of land 
 tenure, the perhaps dull-witted but able-bodied 
 tramp might well maintain himself in possession 
 of a cabin-patch of ground sufficient for his self- 
 support, and that without injury to any man. 
 
 Taxes upon wealth or upon the means or 
 methods of producing it, including tariff and ex- 
 cise taxes, are needless and unjust interferences 
 with and hindrances to industry; great as is their 
 total amount it is perhaps not greater than the 
 loss which they occasion to the production of 
 wealth. They tend to destroy the natural mar- 
 ket and so to defeat the object for which they are 
 collected, the maintenance of an equitable public 
 order. They are, moreover, in much the greater 
 part, paid by those who are also obliged to pay 
 the tribute of earth-rent to private persons privi- 
 leged to appropriate it.
 
 98 The Orthocratic State 
 
 The abuses to which attention has so far been 
 directed consist in the use of improper means or 
 methods for accomplishing legitimate ends, in 
 attempts to secure natural rights through their 
 infringement. It remains to notice abuses of the 
 third class, those which consist in the use of civil 
 power, not for such ends, not in attempting to 
 discharge governmental functions, but for pur- 
 poses wholly unwarranted by any most extended 
 authority of government and absolutely foreign 
 to all of its functions. 
 
 In considering abuses of this class it should be 
 remembered that, no matter how desirable the end 
 in view, if it is not necessary to maintenance of 
 an equitable public order, to the discharge of 
 some one or more of the four only legitimate 
 functions of government, attempt to accomplish 
 that end through the exercise of civil power 
 tends to destroy that order. With the best of 
 motives, but with no very lively sense of the 
 moral obligation devolving upon the State as 
 trustee of the power it forcibly assumes to exer- 
 cise, the mistake is often made of using it in un- 
 necessarily vain attempts not only to promote mo- 
 rality and social progress at heme, but even to ad- 
 vance civilisation abroad.
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 99 
 
 That the State cannot justly undertake to en- 
 force any code of morals appears clearly from the 
 self-evident proposition that no man has any 
 right to use force in the attempt to make another 
 moral, and that still less has any man a right to 
 compel others to aid him in any such attempt, so 
 long as the immorality involves infringement of 
 no natural right. If a man's immorality or wick- 
 edness does not interfere with any other human 
 being's freedom to be moral or good, his merely 
 immoral conduct is not subject to forcible control 
 by any other man or by the State. Whenever 
 the immoral conduct involves an aggression, the 
 infringement of a natural right, as it often does, 
 it is of course amenable to self-defensive control 
 by those whom it injures and hence by the State, 
 but it is the aggression rather than the immo- 
 rality with which the State has to deal, and with 
 that for purposes of peace and order only and not 
 of morality. Under just government, men must, 
 as men, have the freedom to do, according to their 
 respective abilities, if but peaceably, whatever 
 things they have the right, as between man and 
 man, to do as members of Society; and as cit- 
 izens they can justly do only such other things 
 as they find it self-defensively necessary and
 
 100 The Orthocratic State 
 
 therefore right for them to do, but lack ability to 
 accomplish without the aid of government. To 
 attempt more than this, tends to destroy that 
 freedom, and to set man as a citizen against man 
 as man, an antagonism to which the evils of gov- 
 ernment are largely due. The only way in which 
 the State can really promote morality is to be 
 itself moral, that is, by permitting no immoral, 
 unjust use of its power. 
 
 The most that the State can do for civilisation 
 and social progress is to mind its own business. 
 With the promotion of civilisation abroad it can 
 have no proper concern, while the progress of its 
 own people can be really promoted only by se- 
 curing them in the free and equal enjoyment of 
 natural opportunities for progress. For the 
 State to undertake more than this is to be itself 
 retrogressive, immoral and unjust, and to retard 
 rather than promote the progress of mankind. 
 
 How irrational, for instance, and even crim- 
 inally insane, how purposeless and impertinent, 
 and how entirely evil in its effects, is the pitiful 
 absurdity of punishing a man for failing to suc- 
 ceed in the attempt to take his own life. It is 
 no part of any function of government to protect 
 a sane man against himself, or to punish the in-
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 101 
 
 sane. Much better would it be for the State to 
 see that it is never itself in any way responsible 
 for the despair that drives to suicide. 
 
 A favourite abuse of civil power is that of 
 using it for the supposed promotion of industry. 
 There are legitimate activities of the State which 
 are essentially promotive of industry, as are 
 nearly all those constituting its Public-serving 
 function; they are governmental, however, not 
 because they promote industry, but for the reason 
 that they are necessary to an equitable public 
 order and can not be carried on without civil au- 
 thority. No matter how much of aid or encour- 
 agement to industry it may seem to promise, any 
 exercise of civil power not necessary to that order 
 is prima facie an abuse of that power, and will 
 be found to involve inequitable interferences with 
 enjoyment of natural opportunities for industry. 
 
 Such an abuse is to be seen in the maintenance 
 of protective tariffs, for they belong to no func- 
 tion of government; not to the first, since they 
 are not essential to peace, but rather tend to dis- 
 turb it; not to the second, for they protect no 
 man from the aggression of another, but infringe 
 upon the right of all men to a natural market; 
 not to the third, for their maintenance is not nee-
 
 102 The Orthocratic State 
 
 essary to an equitable public order, but tends 
 rather to inequitable disorder; and not to the 
 fourth, for they are not essential to the integrity 
 of the State, but invite hostility to it. They are 
 not only unnecessary to the discharge of any gov- 
 ernmental function and therefore a prima facie 
 abuse of civil power, but they are, moreover, a 
 positively injurious interference by government 
 itself with that freedom of contract and exchange 
 which it is in duty bound to maintain. 
 
 The object of a protective tariff is to render 
 prosecution of the favoured industry more profit- 
 able than it would be without protection, which 
 is accomplished by forcing consumers to pay more 
 than they otherwise would for its products. This 
 evident injustice to them is supposed to be in 
 some way offset or atoned for through the alleged 
 payment of higher wages than could otherwise 
 be paid to employes of the protected industry. 
 It is clear, however, that no such uncertain, hap- 
 hazard balancing of opposing tendencies can re- 
 sult in doing justice or in giving equal advantage 
 to all the people. A tariff can not increase the 
 wealth of any portion of a people, except at the 
 expense of some other portion, for it cannot in- 
 crease the sum total of the wealth of the whole
 
 Abuses of Civil Power ^ 103 
 
 people. With respect to foreign trade, a State 
 must of necessity be in one of three situations. 
 Its people may themselves consume all the wealth 
 they produce, and so have no surplus for export; 
 they may have a surplus, for the whole of which 
 they find a ready market abroad; or they may 
 find such a market for only a part of their sur- 
 plus. In the first case, having no exports, they 
 can have no imports against which to protect any- 
 body. In the second place, their exports are ex- 
 changed more or less directly for desired imports 
 which they thereby obtain at a less cost, or ex- 
 penditure of wealth, than would be incurred by 
 their protected production at home. Nor is there 
 anything that protection can do to relieve the 
 situation in the third case. That part of the sur- 
 plus which finds a market abroad is there ex- 
 changed for imports costing less than they would 
 if produced at home, or they would not be im- 
 ported. With regard to any remaining surplus, 
 to things for which there is no market at home or 
 abroad, it is evident that their production must 
 sooner or later give place to that of things for 
 which there is a demand ; but there can be no pro- 
 tection necessary or all-around helpful to making 
 the industrial change, since it contemplates the
 
 104 The OrtJiocratic State 
 
 production of things of which there is a scarcity, 
 and of which there are no competing importa- 
 tions against which there can be any possible need 
 of protection. Whenever any portion of the 
 people, be they capitalists or wage-workers, are 
 benefited by a protective tariff or by any other 
 privilege, it must of necessity be to the corre- 
 sponding injury of other capitalists and labour- 
 ers. The State should not interfere with the 
 \ natural returns to labour and capital, with either 
 \ wages or interest, and would have no occasion to 
 \ do so but for abuses of its power tending to de- 
 \ stroy the natural market, in which alone can be 
 \ determined what is a just wage for labour, a fair 
 \ interest on capital, or a reasonable price for any 
 \ commodity or service. 
 
 1 A kindred abuse obtains in the grant of sub- 
 
 1 sidies. They are not necessary to the discharge 
 
 ■. of any function of government, and whatever of 
 
 ^ advantage they bring to those privileged to re- 
 
 / ceive them is at the expense and to the disadvan- 
 
 , tage of the unprivileged. Assistance that the 
 
 / State renders to anybody and not to all, must be 
 
 to the detriment of somewhat less than all, less 
 
 by the number of those assisted. If there be any 
 
 undertakings necessary to peace and public order
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 105 
 
 but exceeding the compass of unsubsidised pri- 
 vate enterprise, they constitute public services 
 and should be carried on by the State for the 
 equal benefit of all. 
 
 The grant of so-called patent rights is another 
 civil abuse and patent wrong. Rights are not 
 and cannot be granted. They exist in the nature 
 of things or not at all, and are not transferable. 
 Property itself may indeed be transferred even as 
 it may be abandoned or destroyed, but in any case 
 it is the specific thing, the concrete property alone 
 that is parted with and not the owner's abstract 
 and only right of property, which merely ceases 
 to obtain with respect to the particular property 
 transferred. When, through exercise .of the right 
 of contract, property passes from grantor to 
 grantee, it becomes the latter's by virtue of his 
 own right of property, the grantor no more part- 
 ing with the right by which he held the property 
 than with the hand in which he held it. Natural 
 rights, and there can be no other, are not the sub- 
 ject of barter; it is through their exercise that 
 barter is carried on, that contracts and grants are 
 made. All that the State can do with respect to 
 rights is either to secure or to interfere with the 
 enjoyment of rights which belong to mankind as
 
 106 The Orthocratic State 
 
 members of Society, and by virtue of which they 
 establish the State. It can create no rights, and 
 can grant no man any right without first taking 
 it from some other man, and that it cannot really 
 do, since rights are inalienable. Any right the 
 State undertakes to grant is in reality a wrong, an 
 interference with the enjoyment of rights. 
 
 The so-called owner of a patented device may 
 for reasons of his own not only neglect to intro- 
 duce it into use but also forbid anybody else to 
 use it, thereby denying the people all benefit of 
 that which any one of them might himself have 
 devised and used but for the State's interference. 
 No man can justly be deprived of the freedom 
 to make use of any method or mode of applying 
 a principle that he might himself have discovered 
 or invented and so have utilised but for prohibi- 
 tion of the State. The inventor of the first rude 
 implement whatever it may have been had no 
 right forcibly to prevent any other man from 
 making or using a similar one; and so of any in- 
 vention or improvement, its use is never a prop- 
 erty right. It is the concrete product and not the 
 manner of producing it that constitutes property. 
 If a mere device, scheme, or mode of contrivance 
 were indeed property, the State should maintain
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 107 
 
 the owner in permanent control and enjoyment of 
 it as in case of other property, and could not 
 justly limit proprietorship of it to any number of 
 years. 
 
 If it could be shown that a discovery or in- 
 vention of substantial benefit to all the people 
 was wholly due to the purposeful effort of any 
 individual, the State might seem warranted in 
 making him suitable return for his service to the 
 public. The advantages of the invention would 
 then be immediately shared by all the people in 
 common rather than monopolised to the emolu- 
 ment of those privileged to exploit it, among 
 whom the inventor is not always to be found. 
 
 Reference has already been made to the arti- 
 ficial persons known as corporations. Their 
 creation by the State being unnecessary to the 
 discharge of any of its functions is prima facie 
 an abuse of its power. Their use has become so 
 prevalent, however, not only in the performance 
 of public services but also in the conduct of 
 private business of almost every sort, that the 
 abuse calls for more than passing notice. Re- 
 sort to the privilege of incorporation for purposes 
 of industrial combination has indeed become so 
 customary and familiar as to induce a tendency
 
 108 The Orihocratic State 
 
 of the public mind to confound the governmental 
 act of incorporation with the natural right of co- 
 operation, and to regard any criticism of the cor- 
 poration as evidence of hostility to combination 
 in general. Such criticism has been likened to 
 the one-time hostility of labourers to labour-sav- 
 ing machinery. The comparison is faulty for 
 the reason that corporations have a different effect 
 upon industrial and social conditions from any 
 produced by machinery, and is especially inapt in 
 that the machine is the legitimate child of labour, 
 whereas the corporation is the irregular offspring 
 of civil power. 
 
 Industrial combinations that can be formed 
 and maintained without special favour of the 
 State may indeed be as beneficial as labour-sav- 
 ing machines. Any governmental restriction 
 imposed upon unprivileged partnerships and busi- 
 ness associations would be as irrational as any 
 antagonism to the introduction of machinery. 
 Co-operation voluntary and unprivileged is sim- 
 ply an exercise of the natural right of contract. 
 It requires neither aid nor permission of the 
 State, and is properly no more subject to govern- 
 mental interference or supervision than any 
 simplest form of individual enterprise. Any
 
 Abuses of Civil Power ^ 109 
 
 man has an undoubted right to enter into agree- 
 ment with any number of other men whereby 
 they undertake for a stipulated wage to assist 
 him in the prosecution of any legitimate busi- 
 ness. He and they have no less right to make 
 a different agreement according to which they 
 combine to carry on the same or any other busi- 
 ness for their joint or common benefit. The 
 State has properly no more concern with the lat- 
 ter contract than with the former, its legitimate 
 function in regard to either being merely to pro- 
 vide for peaceable and equitable adjustment of 
 any differences arising therefrom, which it does 
 not especially or primarily for the sake of parties 
 to the difference, but for the sake of an equitable 
 public order. 
 
 Natural combinations, those that can be 
 formed without authority or aid of the State, are 
 subject to beneficent limitations of natural law 
 in regard both to the number of individuals who 
 will combine as well as to the length of time they 
 will continue to act together, and consequently 
 also in regard to the amount of capital they can 
 command and the influence they will be able to 
 exert. There is nothing in reason or experience 
 to warrant apprehension that any body of men
 
 110 The Orthocratic State 
 
 will merely by reason of such combination ever 
 become so great or powerful as to monopolise 
 any considerable industry. Any approach that a 
 natural combination may make toward such 
 monopoly will be due to some sort of privilege 
 enjoyed by it rather than to its collective char- 
 acter. The more intelligent and trustworthy 
 men become the more readily will they unite and 
 co-operate with one another for common pur- 
 poses, with a tendency no doubt to larger and 
 larger combinations, but this natural and there- 
 fore beneficent tendency should not be con- 
 founded with the present abnormal drift toward 
 utter displacement of natural associations by arti- 
 ficial combinations made possible by the grant of 
 corporate privilege, the loan of civil power. 
 
 The corporation is a politico-economic device 
 whereby natural persons desiring to co-operate 
 for one purpose or another are by favour of the 
 State more or less relieved from limitations which 
 nature wisely imposes upon natural associations, 
 and the collective body which they are so enabled 
 to form becomes an artificial person having at- 
 tributes and powers not enjoyed by natural per- 
 sons or associations, being unnatural and peculiar 
 to the body politic, the State, from which they are
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 111 
 
 derived. The corporation was originally de- 
 vised for the purpose of clothing individuals with 
 civil authority to perform some apparently pub- 
 lic service which did not seem to have been ade- 
 quately provided for in the ordinary machinery 
 of government. Services so performed having 
 been in reality sometimes public and at other 
 times private, the privilege of incorporation has 
 more or less gradually come to be granted for the 
 prosecution of undertakings of nearly every char- 
 acter and finally to be had for the asking; so that 
 charters or articles of incorporation, being now 
 nominally free to all, are sometimes thought to 
 be no longer privileges. It is evident, however, 
 that the incorporated company has advantages 
 over the mere partnership, for otherwise the 
 former would not have become as it has the rule 
 and the latter the increasingly rare exception in 
 almost every line of business. That such advan- 
 tages are privileges has been unanimously held 
 by the Supreme Court of the United States in 
 affirming constitutionality of the Federal Corpo- 
 ration Tax law, the Court saying: "The tax is 
 laid upon the privileges which exist in conducting 
 business with the advantages which inhere in the 
 corporate capacity of those taxed, and which are
 
 112 The Orthocratic State 
 
 not enjoyed by private persons or individuals. 
 These advantages are obvious and have led to the 
 formation of such companies in nearly all 
 branches of trade. The continuity of the busi- 
 ness without interruption by death or dissolution; 
 the transfer of property interests by the disposi- 
 tion of shares of stock; the advantages of busi- 
 ness controlled and managed by corporate di- 
 rectors; the general absence of individual 
 liability; these and other things inhere in the ad- 
 vantages of business thus conducted, which do 
 not exist when the same business is conducted by 
 private individuals or partnerships. It is this 
 distinctive privilege which is the subject of tax- 
 ation, and not the mere buying or selling or hand- 
 ling of goods, which may be the same, whether 
 done by corporations or individuals." 
 
 It is clear that the advantages of incorporation 
 cannot be enjoyed by all, but only by those who 
 already have an advantage over their less suc- 
 cessful fellow men, in that they have capital to 
 invest; that they are privileges beyond the reach 
 of those who have only their labour to depend 
 upon, and so tend to widen the economic distance 
 between the labourer and the capitalist. Nor is 
 it the labourer alone whom they put to an un-
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 113 
 
 natural disadvantage. There are many possessors 
 of capital who do not find it practicable or do not 
 care to avail themselves of the privilege of incor- 
 poration, but who would be glad to engage in 
 business as natural persons, opportunity to do 
 which the State should secure to them instead of 
 depriving them of it, as it does by forcing them 
 to compete if at all with abnormally powerful 
 persons of its own meddlesome creation. Such 
 possessors of capital cannot themselves employ it, 
 but must, not from fault of their own or from 
 any natural cause or process of evolution but at 
 the arbitrary behest of the State, let it remain 
 idle and unproductive or risk it on the ability 
 and honesty of strangers, in stock speculation. 
 In all the fields of industrial activity, natural 
 persons and associations, the only ones having 
 any right to compete in the production and accu- 
 mulation of wealth, are being supplanted by 
 artificial ones which have not even the right to 
 be, for the reason that rights are of necessity al- 
 ways natural. 
 
 Nature produces inequalities enough in the 
 common struggle for human existence, and it 
 would seem that if there is to be any interference 
 by the State it should be in behalf of the weaker
 
 114 The Orthocratic State 
 
 rather than the stronger. On the contrary, how- 
 ever, it is the latter who are authorised and en- 
 abled to merge themselves and their interests in 
 that artificial personality, the corporation, which 
 inoculated with the virus of privilege enters the 
 competitive field immune from ordinary vicissi- 
 tudes, relieved from the infirmities of disease, 
 death and conscience, and sooner or later outdis- 
 tances its unprivileged competitors by lengths 
 that could never be attained by natural persons 
 or associations one over another. It is some- 
 times said, as in extenuation of the destruction of 
 individual enterprise by corporate monopoly, 
 that it is natural for big fish to swallow little 
 ones, which may be true, but it is to be remem- 
 bered that they do not become big or devour their 
 kind through the power of government instituted 
 and maintained by themselves in the name of jus- 
 tice. 
 
 The State abuses its power in so far as it neg- 
 lects to provide for the free, equal, active and 
 most effective expression possible of the indi- 
 vidual opinion and preference of its members in 
 regard to all matters of government, by women 
 as well as by men, by poor as well as by rich, and 
 by the illiterate as well as by the learned; for the
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 115 
 
 sake of peace and order they are all alike required 
 to forego individual exercises of the right of 
 self-defence, and are hence all alike entitled to 
 share in whatever collective, orderly exercise 
 thereof is substituted therefor. The casting of a 
 ballot is merely civilised exercise of the natural 
 right of self-defence. Not to have the ballot is 
 to be governed by those who have it. To be 
 governed by others than ourselves is to enjoy the 
 civil liberty allowed to slaves. It would be 
 clearly unjust for the poor however great their 
 majority to deny the rich an equal voice in gov- 
 ernment, and for women to exclude men from 
 participation therein would be as irrational as it 
 is for men to exclude women. Nor are the 
 learned much more likely than the illiterate to 
 correct abuses in government. The most highly 
 educated are often the stanchest defenders of 
 privilege. No government by a self-selected 
 class, however fit to govern they may have 
 deemed themselves, has ever been so nearly per- 
 fect as to warrant excluding from its councils 
 anybody interested in its administration. Any 
 man however unlearned can understand govern- 
 ment so long as it minds its own business. It is 
 only when the State exercises its power beyond
 
 116 The Orthocratic State 
 
 right that the learning which transcends common 
 sense becomes necessary to what is deemed a 
 proper understanding of statecraft. 
 
 It is an abuse of civil power to permit any ex- 
 ercise of it to pass beyond direct control of the 
 people. Their will as indicated by their suf- 
 frages must from the nature of things be carried 
 out by agents through what is called representa- 
 tive government, but the more direct the re- 
 sponsibility of its agents, the more truly repre- 
 sentative will be the government which the State 
 maintains. Like any other agents, public serv- 
 ants should be at all times subject to discharge 
 by their principals, the people; otherwise they 
 would become for the time virtually principals, 
 and might execute their own rather than the peo- 
 ple's will. However independent of each other 
 different branches of the government may be, 
 they should never any of them be independent of 
 the people. 
 
 A kindred abuse is to be seen whenever the 
 people of one day or generation attempt through 
 constitutional or other prohibitions in any way to 
 hamper themselves or their successors in the ex- 
 ercise of civil power. The true relation of con- 
 stitutional provisions to legislative enactments is
 
 Abuses of Civil Power 117 
 
 not unlike that which rules of parliamentary 
 procedure adopted by a deliberative body sustain 
 to the resolutions and acts of such body. As a 
 general rule, subject to modification under excep- 
 tional circumstances, as in case of a federation 
 like that of the United States of America, a con- 
 stitution should prescribe the manner rather than 
 the matter or limits of legislation, and in any 
 case should be itself readily amendable. Consti- 
 tutional prohibitions are quite as likely to retard 
 as to promote that progress toward rational 
 government which should at all times be feasible 
 through statutory enactment unhampered by any 
 restrictions other than those imposed by require- 
 ments of an equitable public order. What need 
 of charter or bill of rights have a people who 
 have no political superior, who are free to govern 
 themselves and whose agents are ever subject to 
 the popular will, or with what wisdom shall they 
 tie their own hands as against themselves? 
 
 It is also an abuse of civil power for the State 
 to require questions of merely local concern, gen- 
 erally of expediency rather than of absolute right, 
 to be submitted for determination to persons out- 
 side of the locality concerned. As the individual 
 should be free to order his private conduct in his
 
 118 The Orthocratic State 
 
 own way so long as he interferes with no natural 
 right of another, and as the family in the man- 
 agement of its affairs should be free from inter- 
 ference by others of the neighbourhood, so should 
 the people of each political subdivision of the 
 State, of a city or county for instance, be free to 
 order their city or county affairs in their own way, 
 provided they thereby infringe no natural right 
 and cause no disturbance of the public order. 
 There may be many different ways in which a 
 county might perform some particular service 
 devolving upon it. If each of a number of such 
 ways has to be tried by as many or more different 
 counties of the State at the same time, it will take 
 at least as many years to try them all and ex- 
 perimentally to determine which is best. If, on 
 the other hand, each county were free to act in- 
 dependently of the others and to try whatever 
 methods it would, they might all be tried and 
 question as to which was the best determined in 
 a single year. This principle underlies the doc- 
 trine of home rule or local option, as it also does 
 any rational theory of State rights as against fed- 
 eral authority. 
 
 It is another abuse of its power for the State 
 to exclude from its territory any well-intentioned
 
 Abuses of Civil Power ^ 119 
 
 person voluntarily seeking to make his home 
 therein. No man can justly be prevented by 
 another from locating wherever on earth he will, 
 provided he does not thereby interfere with the 
 rightful location of any other, nor can the State 
 justly do what it would be unjust for any one of 
 its individual members to do. It has little more 
 right to prevent a man's peaceable coming into its 
 territory than to forbid his being born therein; 
 if it seems to be crowded it is probably because 
 somebody is taking up too much room. Seem- 
 ing necessity for the exclusion of would-be immi- 
 grants will disappear upon the adoption of a just 
 system of land tenure, unjust systems being 
 among the principal causes of emigration. Love 
 of country is generally strong in hearts out of 
 which it has not been crushed by tyranny, the 
 exercise of power beyond right. 
 
 It would seem soon enough to inquire into the 
 object of a man's coming when his conduct indi- 
 cates an evil purpose. That he does not believe 
 in government is hardly sufficient reason for ex- 
 cluding him. His experience may have been 
 such as to induce a disbelief which the State 
 would do well not to confirm, and he may never- 
 theless prove a better citizen than he would if he
 
 120 The Orthocratic State 
 
 believed too much in government, or in too much 
 of it. When one considers "all the oppressions 
 that are done under the sun," and that they could 
 not persist without the support or connivance of 
 civil power, he will hardly wonder that men 
 sometimes lose faith in government. 
 
 It will be observed that the foregoing conclu- 
 sions are not so much mere opinions as they are 
 the logical, inevitable result of reasoning from 
 the self-evident proposition that the only just 
 warrant or authority for any exercise of civil 
 power is the natural, individual right of self-de- 
 fence; and that it devolves upon those who reject 
 that proposition and yet believe in government, 
 to show by what other right than that of self-de- 
 fence any man, any number of men, or any State,^ 
 can forcibly control the conduct of any man. 
 
 It is only through correction of the abuses of 
 civil power that civic progress is to be made. 
 That progress must of necessity be more or less 
 gradual and sometimes exasperatingly slow, but 
 every step in the right direction makes the next 
 one easier. True reform in government is to be 
 effected not through the enactment of more law 
 but by the amendment or repeal of superabun- 
 dant existing law. Laws involving abuses of the
 
 Abuses of Civil Power ^ 121 
 
 second class, the use of irrational methods in the 
 endeavour to accomplish legitimate ends, must 
 be amended by substituting rational methods; 
 while those constituting abuses of the third class, 
 the use of civil power for illegitimate purposes, 
 must be repealed. After such amendment and 
 repeal, there may be as little of necessity as there 
 now is of room for what is called constructive 
 legislation.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 CIVIC PROBLEMS 
 
 Polonius : 
 
 "And now remains, 
 "That we find out the cause of this effect; 
 "Or rather say, the cause of this defect, 
 "For this effect defective comes by cause." 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Before entering upon any briefest considera- 
 tion of so-called problems of government, it 
 should be observed that a problem may be social, 
 a matter of even serious common or social con- 
 cern, and yet not be civic, that is, susceptible of 
 solution by the State. It is not a problem of 
 government unless it arises from conditions due to 
 some governmental fault of omission or commis- 
 sion, to some one or more abuses of civil power. 
 Whenever the State shall be fully and efficiently 
 performing all its legitimate functions, which 
 precludes the use of its power for any other pur- 
 pose, it will be discharging its whole duty and for 
 the time thereby exhausting its authority. Any 
 
 122
 
 Civic Problems 123 
 
 problems then remaining will be non-civic and 
 will have to be solved, as indeed they always 
 must be if at all, by the members of Society act- 
 ing in their private capacity and not as citizens. 
 For the State to undertake the solution of any 
 such problem or to lend its power for that pur- 
 pose, would be to abuse its power and to compli- 
 cate the problem. There is no doubt, however, 
 that the solution of non-civic problems is greatly 
 retarded and in many cases wholly prevented by 
 the persistence of civic problems, and that not 
 only civic progress but all human advancement 
 awaits the correction of those governmental abuses 
 from which civic problems arise. In other 
 words, abuses of civil power not only give rise to 
 troublesome civic problems but also stand in the 
 way of solving those not civic. Who shall say 
 to what extent solution of the non-civic problem 
 of promoting moral progress is hindered by the 
 persistence of involuntary poverty, that great 
 civic problem and prolific cause of man's degra- 
 dation and misery. 
 
 Problems of government have been aptly 
 called symptoms of disease in the body politic, 
 but it is not necessary to wait for development of 
 the symptoms in order to know that the disease
 
 124 The Orthocratic State 
 
 exists. When the abuses to which the disorder 
 is due are known to exist they should be corrected 
 without waiting for it to culminate in what is 
 called a problem of government. And yet, 
 though an abuse of civil power is always from its 
 beginning directly injurious to somebody, it is 
 nevertheless generally allowed to continue until 
 its evil effects, either of themselves or in conjunc- 
 tion with those of other abuses, become so wide- 
 spread and acute as to cause that degree of pop- 
 ular unrest which eventually compels the attention 
 of the State. And even then the so-called prob- 
 lem may be for the time disposed of without 
 correction of the causal abuse, which may not 
 only remain but be even more firmly entrenched 
 than ever before. Popular discontent aroused 
 by the irritating spectacle of vast landed estates 
 may be allayed by reducing the size and increas- 
 ing the number of individual holdings, but the 
 basic wrong, the abuse of holding land as if it 
 were property, will have as many more inter- 
 ested defenders as there are additions to the num- 
 ber of so-called land owners, while the hard lot 
 of the great mass of the people still expropriated 
 from the soil, will be little if any improved. 
 Dissolution of the combinations called trusts into
 
 Civic Problems 125 
 
 their constituent corporations, does not render the 
 latter any the less destructive of natural compe- 
 tition, but gives them the additional security of 
 express or implied judicial approval. 
 
 As the moving purpose in attempting to dispose 
 of this or that problem is often not so much to do 
 even tardy justice as to allay the peace-disturbing 
 unrest, attention is generally directed more to 
 mitigation of the troublesome effect than to cor- 
 rection of the abuse that causes it. Nor is it al- 
 vt^ays easy to determine whether the problem is 
 indeed civic, one to be solved by the State, or to 
 identify all the abuses that may have contributed 
 to complex conditions of industrial and social 
 hardship, which are often charged to causes most 
 diverse as well as remote, industrial panics, for in- 
 stance, having been attributed even to spots on 
 the sun. It is, however, upon such incidental oc- 
 casions and irrational methods that the State is 
 wont to rely for correction of civic abuses. As the 
 abuses should have been corrected before the re- 
 sulting problem arose and as they must be cor- 
 rected before it can be finally solved, it is clearly a 
 waste of time and a further abuse of its power for 
 the State to putter and pother over this and that 
 problem, vainly trying to identify and distinguish
 
 126 The Orthocratic State 
 
 the different causes that may or may not have con- 
 tributed to a complex evil result, when it can more 
 easily and much sooner remove all abuses, and 
 with them all civic problems, than it can satis- 
 factorily or finally solve any one problem. If the 
 patient is known to have swallowed poison, the 
 physician does not spend much time in diagnosing 
 the case, but applies the stomach-pump, and of 
 course forbids the taking of more poison. 
 
 A difficulty to be encountered in considering any 
 one of the problems of government arises from 
 their essential interrelation, the solution of one 
 often involving that of one or more others. It is 
 not easy, for instance, to think of any one of them 
 that is not in some way related to the problem of 
 poverty. Be it the problem of labour and capital, 
 of the trusts, of the railroads and other branches 
 of public service, of the currency, of graft, or of 
 so-called swollen fortunes, the wrong it connotes 
 tends to impoverishment of some of the people, 
 while the problems of disease, vice and crime 
 necessarily involve consideration of poverty both 
 as cause and effect of the evils they connote. 
 
 Poverty due to indolence, improvidence, intem- 
 perance, to vices of the individual, is chargeable to 
 government so far only as the State is responsible
 
 Civic Problems 127 
 
 if at all for his having those vices. It would not 
 be reasonable, however, to assume that poverty is 
 always due to such causes when others are known 
 to exist. Long-continued or oft-repeated idleness 
 whether voluntary or enforced will impoverish all 
 who depend upon their labour for support, as will 
 also an insufficient wage however industrious and 
 saving the worker, and it therefore devolves upon 
 the State to inquire whether it is in any degree 
 responsible for the enforced idleness or insufficient 
 wage and consequent poverty of any man. 
 
 If the enjoyment of natural opportunities for 
 self -employment as well as for the sale of one's 
 labour were secure to all men, the State would not 
 be responsible for the non-employment of any. 
 On the other hand, if that employment be not 
 secured to all it is impossible to know how many 
 are for that reason disemployed or underpaid, or 
 to what extent the State is therefore answerable 
 for existing poverty. The only way to be assured 
 that it is not at all so responsible is to provide that 
 no man shall be in any way deprived of such en- 
 joyment. That, as already seen, the State has not 
 yet done, but, on the contrary, has itself deprived 
 the great majority of men not only of natural op- 
 portunities for self -employment but also of a nat-
 
 128 The Orthocratic State 
 
 ural market for the sale of labour. It is of course 
 impossible to know to what extent poverty is due 
 to these causes, nor is it necessary to know; they 
 can not fail to have their effect, and even if there 
 were no problem of poverty, no poverty even, it 
 would nevertheless be the duty of the State to see 
 that no man is by any other man or by the State 
 itself denied any natural opportunity for self-sup- 
 port or for the pursuit of happiness. 
 
 It has been seen that the holding of land as by 
 right of property not only deprives the majority 
 of men of their natural and only opportunity for 
 self -employment, but destroys the natural market 
 for the sale of labour. Denied access to land, men 
 who would otherwise be not only self-employers 
 but eventually buyers of other men's labour, are 
 forced into the ranks of those who must seek to 
 sell their labour. Owing to this artificial. State- 
 enforced increase in the supply of wage labour as 
 well as decrease in the demand for it, there are 
 oftentimes, if not always, more would-be sellers 
 than can find buyers at any price, no matter how 
 low the market may fall. It is from the hard 
 conditions of such unnatural, State-imposed 
 market, still further demoralised by other govern- 
 mental interferences, that arise wasteful, peace-
 
 Civic Problems 129 
 
 disturbing conflicts between labour and capital, or, 
 correctly speaking, between the sellers and the 
 buyers of labour, as well as among the sellers 
 themselves. The employer of labour is forced to 
 buy it as low as it can be bought by others or be 
 driven from the competitive field, while the em- 
 ploye feels compelled to combine with others for 
 protection against the competition of fellow toilers 
 who to save life are eager to sell their labour even 
 for less than a living wage. 
 
 Responsibility of the citizen for this virtual 
 destruction of all freedom of contract for the sale 
 of labour, is not to be escaped through any show 
 of righteous indignation at the however wrongful 
 interference of hard-pressed union-labourers with 
 such pitiful remnant of that freedom as may re- 
 main to their non-union competitors. No offence 
 for which the State punishes the striking wage- 
 worker is to be compared with the prior wrong, 
 the strike-causing abuse, of which the State and 
 every citizen consenting thereto are guilty. The 
 State should at once begin the work so long and 
 stupidly delayed of restoring to all men that equal 
 enjoyment of natural opportunities for self-em- 
 ployment of which they are deprived by the 
 legalised holding of land as if it were property.
 
 130 The Orthocratic State 
 
 That can be accomplished only by appropriating 
 land values to public rather than private uses. 
 Whether restoration of the land to the people 
 would wholly solve the problems of labour and 
 capital, is not to the point; they can not be solved 
 without such restoration, and even if they could 
 the governmental absurdity and State-stultifying 
 abuse of legalised land monopoly should no longer 
 be tolerated, for it involves greater injustice and 
 more far-reaching wrong than any the State un- 
 dertakes to prevent. 
 
 It is, moreover, only through righting of this 
 wrong that can come any solution of the problem 
 of taxation. The appropriation of land values 
 to public uses will afford the State a just revenue 
 amply sufficient for all its needs, doing away 
 with all complaint of inequitable and burden- 
 some taxes, with all necessity for borrowing, and 
 eventually with the demoralising embarrassment 
 of a public debt. The time will come when there 
 will be no man or class of men, no part of the 
 people, richer than the State, the whole of the 
 people; when the State will be able to pay as it 
 goes, without asking for or interfering with the 
 wealth of any man, even after he is dead and un- 
 able to protest. Another result of treating nat-
 
 Civic Problems 131 
 
 ural opportunities not as wealth, but as its com- 
 mon source, will be the disappearance of industrial 
 panics, for when industry shall be no longer 
 arrested and held up by periodic or other specula- 
 tive inflations of land values, its operation will be 
 as continuous and uninterrupted as the continuing 
 and ever increasing wants of the people. 
 
 In considering the disappointment, inconven- 
 ience and possible hardship that landholders and 
 the holders of securities based upon land values 
 may experience by reason of appropriating those 
 values to their just and proper use, it will be 
 borne in mind not only that persons liable to such 
 hardship will be few in comparison with the vast 
 number of those now unjustly expropriated from 
 the land, but also that their hardships will be less 
 severe as well as more readily escaped than those 
 imposed upon the victims of land monopoly; 
 further, that while in the one case the hardships 
 are necessarily incident to the righting of a great 
 civic wrong; in the other they are the inevitable 
 result of its continuance; further yet, that in one 
 case they will become fewer and fewer until they 
 finally disappear, while in the other they must in- 
 crease in number and severity as long as the wrong 
 shall continue; and, further still, that the neces-
 
 132 The Orthocratic State 
 
 sarily gradual change from private to public use 
 of land values will be accompanied by such im- 
 provement in economic conditions as to reduce in- 
 dustrial hardships to a minimum. Moreover, the 
 State will then be able to provide for the decent, 
 comfortable support of all persons for any reason 
 incapable of self-support, for it will not have to 
 provide as now for that much greater number who 
 will for the first time become self-supporting and 
 a help rather than a burden to the State when no 
 longer denied natural opportunities to be so. Nor 
 will provision which the State shall then miake for 
 the unfortunate carry with it any suggestion of 
 almsgiving, for it will not be made out of the 
 means or at the expense of any individual, but 
 from land values, from that social fund to whose 
 maintenance there are no contributions, either vol- 
 untary or enforced, of individual or private 
 wealth. 
 
 It is evident that in dealing with the mixed 
 problems of land monopoly and taxation, which 
 are seen to underlie so many other problems, the 
 State must of necessity choose between two 
 courses of deliberate action; the one involving no 
 injustice, but merely the temporary hardships 
 necessarily incident to the righting of a great and
 
 Civic Problems 133 
 
 long-continued civic wrong, hardships, however, 
 which will be felt only for a time, and by only a 
 few of the people, and from whose severity the 
 State may well afford relief; the other involving 
 the positive injustice of continuing that wrong, 
 and with it the ever enduring hardship which it 
 entails upon a vast and ever increasing majority 
 of the people, and from whose severity, and count- 
 less evil results to the whole people, the State can 
 afford no adequate relief so long as the wrong 
 shall continue. Along which of these two only 
 courses, in which direction, lies the path of civic 
 righteousness sometimes thought so hard to find, 
 is a question to be answered by every citizen for 
 himself. 
 
 The problem of the trusts is so recent as to 
 suggest the likelihood of its being due to some 
 comparatively recent cause, and yet attempts at 
 its solution have been as usual directed mainly 
 to consideration of effects rather than causes. 
 Nor are the difficulties inevitably to be encoun- 
 tered in attempts so made by any means wanting 
 in this instance. It is contended on the one hand 
 that the trusts are not an evil, and on the other 
 that they are wholly so. Some say that there are 
 good and bad trusts and that the latter should be
 
 134 The Ortliocratic State 
 
 regulated, but with little agreement as to how they 
 should be regulated, while some contend that there 
 is no just regulation possible, no right way of 
 doing wrong, even by rule. 
 
 If the trusts are wrong it must be for the rea- 
 son that they wrong somebody, that is, that they 
 interfere with individual enjoyment of some one 
 or more of the natural rights of man, for in no 
 other way can any man be wronged. It is claimed 
 on one side that trusts wrong the people by ex- 
 torting through monopoly and restraint of trade 
 an exorbitant price for commodities in which 
 they deal, and on the other that through economies 
 made possible by combination they reduce prices. 
 But who shall say what is a just price for any 
 commodity when there is no natural market for the 
 sale and no free competition in the manufacture of 
 it? The price may seem so high that one feels he 
 is being robbed, or so low that he knows some one 
 else has been, but what is a just price neither he 
 nor anybody else can determine under existing 
 conditions. For the sake of peace government 
 may decree what shall be a legal price, but the 
 price so fixed may in spite of best intent and en- 
 deavour be as far from just as are the conditions 
 which render governmental action necessary.
 
 Civic Problems 135 
 
 Neither the statutory nor the commercial rate of 
 interest is a reliable index, since the one is arbi- 
 trary and may be too high or too low for all any 
 one can tell, while the other is no less subject 
 than other prices to inequitable influences that 
 obtain in an unnatural market. 
 
 But the evil that the trusts may do is not con- 
 fined to the enhancement of prices. The people 
 are interested not more in buying at a fair price 
 than in producing wherewith to buy, and if the 
 trusts interfere with individual enjoyment of 
 whatever of natural opportunity for the produc- 
 tion of wealth survives the encroachments of land 
 monopoly and other privileges, they are an evil 
 even though they may reduce prices. If a result- 
 ing reduction in prices were to be held sufficient 
 warrant for the grant of privileges tending to de- 
 stroy natural competition, there would be no rea- 
 son why a still further reduction should not be 
 held to warrant its total destruction, even through 
 State monopoly of all the means of production. 
 
 Land monopoly, which is by no means confined 
 to the holding of land for private uses but includes 
 the private holding of railroads and other rights 
 of way in their nature public, is so clearly de- 
 structive of natural competition that it is some-
 
 136 The Orthocratic State 
 
 times thought to constitute, together with tariff, 
 patent-right, and certain money privileges, the en- 
 tire composite trust evil. But while it is true 
 that such monopoly and privileges are so largely 
 exploited as to be almost monopolised by the 
 trusts, it is not upon them that the combinations 
 under consideration depend for their distinctive 
 character, nor would the abolition of that monop- 
 oly and of those privileges wholly destroy the 
 trusts or deprive them of their peculiar power for 
 injury. 
 
 A combination or trust is of course reprehensible 
 whenever and only when the individuals compos- 
 ing it are so combined as to have an unnatural 
 advantage over their actual or would-be competi- 
 tors in business. It has been seen, however, that 
 the natural and therefore beneficent tendency to 
 combine is so evenly balanced by opposing tend- 
 encies and natural hindrances as to prevent un- 
 privileged natural combinations becoming so 
 large or powerful as to be permanently monopolis- 
 tic. However extended a partnership may be- 
 come, so long as it is unprivileged there will be 
 others able and willing to cope with it. What- 
 ever restraint such associations may exert wrongs 
 no man unless by direct illegal interference with
 
 Civic Problems 137 
 
 some natural right, against which collective ag- 
 gression the State should of course afford protec- 
 tion the same as if it were individual. There is 
 no wrong in unprivileged combination and co- 
 operation for the production of wealth. If two 
 men have a right to combine, so have hundreds 
 or thousands, as far as they can without privilege, 
 and, as already seen, it is not in the nature of 
 things, not in human nature, for unprivileged 
 combinations so to extend and continue as to mo- 
 nopolise any field of industry. The reprehensible 
 trust is therefore never a natural association, but 
 always a corporation or combination of corpora- 
 tions, and could not maintain its integrity with- 
 out the cohesive force of corporate privilege, 
 which indeed constitutes its essentially distinctive 
 characteristic. 
 
 That corporations have abnormal power will 
 hardly be questioned. As said by the Supreme 
 Court of Tennessee: "Great corporations may 
 do great mischief and wrong; may make and 
 break merchants at will; may crush out competi- 
 tion, limit employment and foster monopolies, 
 and thus greatly injure individuals and the public; 
 but power is inherent in size and strength, num- 
 bers and wealth, and the law can not set bounds
 
 138 The Orthocratic State 
 
 to it unless it is exercised unlawfully." If that 
 be, as it seems, correct statement of fact and 
 sound conclusion of law, by what just warrant 
 does the State assume to increase the strength of 
 this or that body of men, as it does by every act 
 of incorporation? Every corporation however 
 small owes more or less of whatever strength or 
 power it has to the privilege of incorporation, and 
 to that extent embodies the characteristic privi- 
 lege and evil of the larger corporation or trust. 
 By means of their peculiar advantages, one of 
 which is the control of capital in such way and 
 to such amount as to warrant risking some part 
 of it in underselling unprivileged competitors, cor- 
 porations have gradually driven natural persons 
 out of almost every considerable branch of busi- 
 ness. This has been as surely in restraint of trade 
 as it is for the trust to undersell and so crush out 
 competing corporations. The wrong in either 
 case consists not so much in the underselling, which 
 is not in and of itself any infringement of natural 
 right, as in granting the privilege without which 
 such underselling could not be safely undertaken. 
 Trade is restrained whenever and only when some- 
 body is restrained from trading. Natural com- 
 petition is merely the exercise of economic free-
 
 Civic Problems 139 
 
 dom, and consists in the unrestricted, unprivileged 
 and commendable endeavour of natural persons to 
 render each the most acceptable and readily ex- 
 changeable service to his fellow men. To ex- 
 clude any man from natural opportunities for such 
 endeavour, or to subject him to any artificial, 
 State-imposed disadvantages in the making of it, 
 is restraint of trade as unjust and as unreasonable 
 as any that can obtain, and is none the less un- 
 reasonable or unjust because unconsciously im- 
 posed and ignorantly borne. 
 
 The trust is but the logical, inevitable outcome 
 of granting corporate privilege. By forcing nat- 
 ural persons out of the competitive field, corpora- 
 tions first destroy whatever of natural competition 
 until then obtains in spite of land monopoly and 
 other privileges. Then follows the only compe- 
 tition possible among artificial persons, a compe- 
 tition as unnatural as the competitors, governed 
 and governable by no natural law. The cor- 
 porations must either combine or go on cutting one 
 another's throats, but whichever they do the trust 
 is inevitable, for if the throat-cutting continues 
 it must sooner or later result in the defeat of all 
 but the one victorious and dominating corpora- 
 tion left in control of the field, and so holding as
 
 140 The Orthocratic State 
 
 great a monopoly as any to be acquired through 
 combination. There is some excuse, seeming 
 necessity even, for the combinations called trusts, 
 their object being to avoid a self-destructive com- 
 petition; but there is no excuse to be offered for 
 creating the corporation, which is not only un- 
 necessary to the performance of any governmental 
 function but is in and of itself necessarily de- 
 structive of the natural competition essential to 
 industrial liberty. Outcry of the corporation 
 against encroachment of the trust is heard be- 
 cause of a vocal potency that comes with privilege. 
 The plaint of the individual, the natural person, 
 as he goes down perhaps before that same corpora- 
 tion, is too faint to be heard, and he helplessly, 
 hopelessly, takes his place in the already over- 
 crowded ranks of those who are forced, not by 
 any natural law or evolutionary process but by 
 abuse of the power of the State, to offer their 
 labour in a market where the State neither buys 
 nor compels any one to buy. 
 
 Corporate privilege was originally presumed to 
 be granted only "for the advantage of the public," 
 the Courts holding until times quite recent that 
 the purpose of incorporation should always be 
 "the accomplishment of some public good." The
 
 Civic Problems 141 
 
 theory was stated by the Supreme Court of the 
 United States some years ago as follows: "The 
 wants of the public are often so imperative that 
 a duty is imposed on government to provide for 
 them ; and as experience has proved that the State 
 should not attempt directly to do this, it is neces- 
 sary to confer on others the faculty of doing what 
 the sovereign power is unwilling to undertake." 
 More recent experience goes to prove, as far as 
 it is possible to prove what is self-evident, that 
 the State should not attempt to do its duty in 
 any other way than directly. The railroad and 
 other public-service problems are the result of 
 conferring on others the faculty of doing what the 
 sovereign power has seemed unwilling to under- 
 take, and their solution awaits the time when the 
 State shall be willing to do its duty. 
 
 Whether industrial corporations, those formed 
 for the prosecution of private business, have been 
 "for the advantage of the public," is a question 
 which would seem to be sufficiently answered by 
 the problem of the trusts. The Government has 
 at last deemed it necessary to assume such control 
 of their affairs as it would never be necessary or 
 proper for it to exercise over the business of natu- 
 ral persons; a control, however, which the larger
 
 142 The Orthocratic State 
 
 corporations may welcome in the not unreasonable 
 expectation that it will maintain them in the now 
 doubly legalised and judicially reinforced enjoy- 
 ment of already virtually all-encompassing privi- 
 leges, free from all further worries whether of 
 competition or of combination, for the corpora- 
 tions will hardly be lacking in power to direct 
 whatever control of their overgrown affairs they 
 compel the State to assume. In view of the diffi- 
 culty government has always had in controlling 
 natural persons, what reason is there for presuming 
 that it will ever be able effectually to control the 
 so much more powerful ones of its own, Franken- 
 stein-like creation? A corporation that does no- 
 body any harm will do nobody any good. There 
 is no natural law nor can man prescribe any 
 equitable rule for the conduct of unnatural per- 
 sons. There is no rule of reason applicable to 
 things intrinsically unreasonable. 
 
 Solution of the trust problem must abide the 
 time when the State shall realise that it can not 
 create artificial persons without infringing the 
 rights of natural persons. As it has had to dis- 
 solve the trust by resolving it into its constituent 
 corporations, so will it eventually have to resolve 
 the latter into the individual natural persons of
 
 Civic Problems ^ 143 
 
 whom they are respectively composed. The al- 
 ternative is State socialism, toward which the at- 
 tempted regulation of corporations by government 
 now tends. Their power for injury may, how- 
 ever, be meanwhile greatly diminished by the 
 abolition of privileges which they now exploit in 
 common with any natural persons not as yet driven 
 from fields of such exploitation; for, as already 
 observed, corporations tend to monopolise not 
 only natural opportunities for the production of 
 wealth, but also all privileges, or State-given ad- 
 vantages of inequitable appropriation. They are 
 quivers of privilege in which to gather and carry 
 all the arrows of privilege. 
 
 That many industries have come to be con- 
 ducted on a larger scale than individuals or even 
 partnerships would be able to maintain does not 
 prove that they ought to be so carried on. Their 
 present gigantic proportions are as unnecessary 
 and abnormal as the privilege to which they owe 
 their enormous expansion. And yet it should be 
 remembered that there is nothing reprehensible in 
 mere magnitude even of business, for when due 
 as it may be to natural causes alone it is itself 
 natural and therefore right. When it is really a 
 symptom of economic disease, and it can never be
 
 144 The Orthocratic State 
 
 more than a symptom, the corrective treatment 
 should be applied to the disease rather than to the 
 symptom. The evils of a privileged and there- 
 fore abnormally expanded business are not to be 
 remedied by reducing the magnitude of its opera- 
 tions. To scatter a disorder is not to cure it. 
 
 If there be any necessary undertakings which 
 can not be conducted without the privilege of in- 
 corporation, it is evident that they are not private 
 but public in their nature, and should be carried 
 on by the State, the only corporation that can 
 justly be maintained, other corporations being 
 but its irregular and vicious progeny. If any in- 
 dustry necessary to an equitable public order be 
 indeed in the nature of things beyond the com- 
 pass of unprivileged private enterprise, it is clearly 
 one in which natural persons have no right to en- 
 gage. That any really private industry as car- 
 ried on by corporations has become too unwieldy 
 for natural persons or associations to conduct, does 
 not, however, make it a public service, but is 
 merely evidence of unnatural, privileged combina- 
 tion and that the industry should revert to the 
 control of natural persons, who have a natural 
 right to engage in its prosecution and will gladly 
 do so when no longer prevented by the restraint of
 
 Civic Problems 145 
 
 corporate privilege. Dissolution of the corpora- 
 tions and virtual abolition of the privilege of in- 
 corporation might be effected through imposition 
 of a sufficiently drastic tax on the privilege, pro- 
 vided shifting of the tax from the privilege to the 
 public were prevented, but as that would require 
 government regulation of prices the remedy would 
 be worse than the disease. 
 
 The currency question seems more nearly than 
 any other to approach the perplexity of a problem. 
 It is clear that the legalised medium of exchange 
 should be issued and controlled by the State, but 
 not so clear what it should be. If it be a metallic 
 currency, a certain weight, of gold or silver for 
 instance, is made the unstable unit, the ever shrink- 
 ing or expanding and therefore unreliable and in- 
 equitable measure of value; while a paper cur- 
 rency, by which the State undertakes or guaran- 
 tees the payment of gold or silver, has the addi- 
 tional imperfection of being exposed to the danger 
 that the State may not be at all times able to keep 
 its promise, the gold or silver not being always 
 readily obtainable. 
 
 A legalised medium of exchange should bear 
 evidence that the holder has parted with value to 
 the amount indicated, and is legally entitled to a
 
 146 The Orthocratic State 
 
 generally transferable hand-to-hand credit there- 
 for. The abstract unit by which the value is 
 measured and known must necessarily be appre- 
 hended and identified in the first instance as being 
 equal to the then value of some definite quantity 
 of something having value, of silver or gold for 
 instance, but it is no more a unit of silver or gold 
 value than of any other, for if it is to be a fixed 
 and unvarying measure of value, it must be and re- 
 main independent of all values and unaffected by 
 any. Once it has been identified and adopted 
 there is no necessity for its being thereafter tied to 
 or influenced by the value of any particular com- 
 modity, nor can it be without losing its identity. 
 Whenever, whether for purposes of approximate 
 identification or for any other reason, it is made 
 to follow the value of the metal or other commod- 
 ity used in making the original identification, it 
 sooner or later becomes a different unit and value 
 from that originally selected, and the value of the 
 currency will consequently shrink or expand as the 
 case may be, as will also all credits measured in 
 terms of the currency. 
 
 In order that the unit selected may remain a 
 fixed and reliable measure of value, it must be al- 
 lowed to do the measuring and not be itself sub-
 
 Civic Problems 147 
 
 ject to a measurement which means continual 
 modification. Its delicate functionings should 
 not be disturbed by any changes in the value of 
 this or that commodity, of gold or silver. If those 
 metals were wholly to disappear, values and units 
 of value would still remain, and any unit in use 
 could be easily identified and continued in use 
 without reference to the value of any particular 
 commodity; for, at any time after that abstract 
 entity, a unit of value, a dollar for instance, has 
 once begun to measure the values of those no less 
 abstract entities known as debts and credits, and 
 measured in dollars, that unit or dollar will, if 
 permitted, continue its unchanging measurement 
 not only of those values but also of the values of 
 all commodities and services, since it is in such 
 commodities and services tliat debts are in reality 
 finally paid. 
 
 If the State should on a certain day call in all 
 the legalised money in circulation, redeeming all 
 or as much of it as might be voluntarily sur- 
 rendered, and in exchange therefor should issue 
 dollar for dollar a paper currency receivable in 
 payment for all dues public and private, and 
 thereafter constituting the only legal-tender 
 money, the value of a dollar as of that day and
 
 148 The Orthocratic State 
 
 as indicated by such currency would continue to 
 be the unit by which that currency would measure 
 all values including the values of silver and gold; 
 for a dollar of such currency, being made receiv- 
 able in payment and satisfaction of any dollar 
 of then existing indebtedness, would be thereby 
 arrested and thereafter held by continuing to be 
 so received. In other words, the abstract unit 
 and measure of value obtaining on the day the 
 currency was issued and then measuring the values 
 of all credits, and of all existing indebtedness 
 whether matured or not, would be and continue to 
 be the unit and measure by which such currency 
 would thereafter serve to transfer such credits 
 and to pay such indebtedness as it should from 
 time to time mature, as well as the unit by which 
 it would measure values involved in obligations 
 incurred after issue of the currency and payable 
 therein. A dollar of such currency would not be 
 subject to fluctuations in the value of gold, of 
 silver or of any other commodity, but would be 
 and remain, as it should, a purely abstract and at 
 the same time stable unit for measurement of the 
 values of all commodities and services, as well as 
 legal evidence of the holder's title to a general 
 credit for the value indicated.
 
 Civic Problems ^ 149 
 
 Such a currency will not be a promise to pay, 
 made perhaps to be broken, but a governmental 
 undertaking and assurance that it shall and will 
 be receivable in all payments, whether to the 
 State or to its individual members. It will be as 
 safe and sound as the State itself or as any bonds 
 the State can issue, while every holder of it and 
 every creditor whether of the State or of its citi- 
 zens will be conscious of personal, pecuniary in- 
 terest in maintaining the integrity of government. 
 It will, moreover, never leave the territory of the 
 State, in which it should remain, like any other 
 public utility, unaffected by monetary vicissitudes 
 of other States. With such a currency in use, 
 gold and silver, not being required for legal-tender 
 uses, would be more readily obtainable than now 
 for any purposes of domestic or foreign trade as 
 well as for meeting existing obligations calling 
 for payment in those metals. The volume of the 
 currency, automatically adjusted through collec- 
 tion and expenditure of the public revenue, would 
 always be such as to preclude any danger of insuffi- 
 ciency in the quantity of money in circulation, 
 while every dollar of it, however large the volume 
 in circulation, would represent and call for the 
 value for which it was originally issued. Being is-
 
 150 The Orthocratic State 
 
 sued always and only for value received, that is, 
 first in exchange for money in circulation at the 
 time of issuing the currency and afterwards only 
 in payment for commodities and services furnished 
 the State, and accepted in payment of public reve- 
 nues as well as in discharge of private obligations, 
 such a currency would serve all the purposes of 
 an equitable legal-tender money. 
 
 With the business of banking, when limited to 
 the borrowing and lending of money, the State 
 has properly no more concern than with any other 
 private enterprise, its duty in that regard being 
 done when it protects bankers and their customers, 
 as it should everybody else, from fraud or violence. 
 If provision for the safe deposit of money, or for 
 convenient transmission of money or of credits, 
 be necessary to equitable functioning of the cur- 
 rency, and can not be had without the aid of gov- 
 ernment, the State should of course itself make 
 such provision. 
 
 In considering the problem of swollen or ex- 
 orbitant fortunes, question arises as to what the 
 State has to do with any man's fortune if it be 
 indeed his. If the mere magnitude of it may 
 warrant interference by government, how many 
 millions may be accumulated without incurring
 
 Civic Problems 151 
 
 such liability'? Is still further accumulation per- 
 missible provided the excess be appropriated to 
 beneficent uses, or is it presumed that possessions 
 beyond the limit do not rightfully belong to their 
 possessor ; that they are not his even to give away, 
 but ought to be restored to their rightful owners? 
 If so, may not the unjust accumulation have been 
 going on so long that it is now somewhat too late 
 to indemnify or even to identify those whose sub- 
 stance has gone to swell the fortune? 
 
 The amount of a man's wealth may indeed be 
 so great as to suggest the improbability of its hav- 
 ing been equitably accumulated, but can hardly 
 be taken as proof that it was not legally acquired. 
 If so acquired it would ill become the State to 
 deprive him of it so long as the methods by which 
 he acquired it continue to receive the approval of 
 government. In so doing, the State would in 
 effect say to the man: "The methods b)^ which 
 you have acquired the great wealth you possess 
 though legal are so clearly inequitable that you 
 will not be permitted to retain the entire amount 
 of it, it having become the policy of the State 
 to limit the extent to which one may go on ap- 
 propriating wealth belonging to others, to the end 
 that there may seem to be no monopoly of that
 
 152 The Orthocratic State 
 
 privilege. If you had spent the wealth as you 
 acquired it, as others may have done even to a 
 larger amount than you have imprudently saved, 
 nothing might have been said, for although the 
 wrong done to the rightful owners would have 
 been the same it would have attracted little if 
 any attention. Others are to be sure making use 
 of the same inequitable but legal methods of ac- 
 cumulation, as they must if they are to succeed 
 or even engage in business, but it is to be hoped 
 that they will take warning from your case and 
 not carry the joke too far." It is evidently any- 
 thing but a scientific diagnosis that assumes to 
 determine at what point unjust but legal accumu- 
 lation of wealth passes from healthy growth to 
 abnormal increase or swelling. 
 
 The problem in so far as it is at all govern- 
 mental must necessarily involve more or less of 
 what has come to be called graft, so named after 
 the familiar process by which one organism is en- 
 abled to thrive on nourishment produced by an- 
 other, upon which it is said to be grafted. If the 
 fortune of any man has been to any extent built 
 upon wealth belonging to others, its growth has 
 been so far due to some form of graft. If the 
 graft be illegal, the law is presumed to provide
 
 Civic Problems \ 153 
 
 some means for preventing it; if legal, the State 
 is responsible for and should put an end to it. So 
 fai' as wealth has been lawfully acquired, no mat- 
 ter how inequitable the accumulation or how vast 
 the possession, the State can not equitably inter- 
 fere with it, for it can not now be restored to 
 those from whom it was wrongfully taken. 
 Wrongs suffered by men of a past generation can 
 seldom be righted by anything done by or for 
 those of the present, and small consolation to 
 those who are being robbed in the present is it 
 to be told that when they and the robber are dead 
 the hoard he shall leave will be taxed to re- 
 duce the taxes of robbers still living. 
 
 But this conclusion by no means disposes of 
 the problem. Few if any so-called fortunes con- 
 sist entirely or even mainly of wealth. They are 
 generally more or less swollen with the dropsical 
 affection of privilege, the capitalized value of 
 which is accounted part of the fortune of its posses- 
 sor. If the State were to grant to some man 
 possessed of no wealth whatever the privilege 
 thenceforth to collect but a penny a year from 
 each of its inhabitants, he would be rated as a man 
 of fortune although he might not save a dollar 
 of his income. And if the privilege should be
 
 154 The Orthocratic State 
 
 revoked the fortune would disappear, but the man 
 would thereby be deprived of no wealth. He 
 would simply cease to appropriate the wealth of 
 others. And so of all fortunes; to whatever ex- 
 tent they are based on privilege, to that extent 
 will they be reduced by its abolition, and that 
 without interference with any wealth of which 
 they may be as they generally are in part com- 
 posed. As a rule, however, the greater the for- 
 tune, the greater the proportion of privilege to be 
 found in its make-up. A fortune of a hundred 
 millions means perhaps sixty or seventy millions 
 of capitalized privilege, to say nothing of any in- 
 equitably but legally acquired wealth it may con- 
 tain. Abolish land monopoly, protective tariffs, 
 subsidies and patent-rights so-called, together with 
 corporate privileges, the State assuming control 
 of all public utilities, and there will not long re- 
 main any fortunes so large as to attract envious 
 attention or as to enable their possessors to dom- 
 inate the business world. 
 
 The confused and seemingly inexplicable jum- 
 ble of economic and industrial conditions, result- 
 ing from governmental interferences with auto- 
 matic operation of the natural laws of wealth
 
 Civic Problems 155 
 
 production and distribution, has led many to be- 
 lieve that in order to secure an equitable distribu- 
 tion the State should assume ownership and con- 
 trol of all the means of production and distribu- 
 tion. The proposition necessarily implies not 
 only a present inequitable distribution but also the 
 possibility of making provision for a just one. It 
 is clear, however, that before the State can make 
 such provision it must determine what would be 
 a just distribution, and to that end must first as- 
 certain the natural law of wealth distribution. 
 That law can be deduced only from the natural 
 laws of wealth production, for it is impossible to 
 know how anything produced by and belonging to 
 several owners ought to be divided among them, 
 without first knowing what were their respective 
 contributions to its production. Assuming the 
 production to have resulted from the combined 
 effort of equally efficient producers, it will hardly 
 be contended that one who has laboured for a day 
 only would be justly entitled to as large a share 
 as would one who had laboured for many days; 
 and even if the proposition is to be understood as 
 involving supposition that any distribution to be 
 made by the State shall be equal, it is of course
 
 156 The Orthocratic State 
 
 no less necessary to consider those natural laws, 
 in order to determine whether such equal distribu- 
 tion would be equitable. 
 
 There are two primary factors which enter into 
 the production of all wealth, namely, land and 
 labour. If the land has no value, no superiority 
 in productivity over other land in use, the product 
 is due solely to labour, and belongs in its entirety 
 to the labourer. He owns it; it is his to possess 
 and control, and constitutes his property, or in- 
 dividual wealth. If the land be valuable, the 
 same labour will produce thereon more wealth 
 than upon the land having no value, but, since the 
 labourer's contribution to the product is no 
 greater in the latter case than in the former, the 
 additional production is due solely to his oc- 
 cupancy in the latter case of a better natural op- 
 portunity than in the former. And since the ad- 
 vantage of such occupancy does not belong to him 
 in particular but to all the people in common, they 
 have a lien upon the product for the value due to 
 the advantage, a lien which is discharged upon 
 payment of the rental value of the land to the 
 State, for the use of the people. 
 
 The only other factor in the production of 
 wealth is capital, that is, any wealth used in such
 
 Civic Problems ^ 157 
 
 production. It is a secondary factor in that it is 
 a product of the two primary factors, but inas- 
 much as it is wealth belonging to somebody and 
 not always to the labourer, but sometimes to some 
 other owner who consents to its use on condition 
 that he shall share in the product, it becomes 
 necessary, in order to determine the latter's share, 
 to consider capital as a separate factor in produc- 
 tion. 
 
 Whenever these three wealth-producing factors, 
 valuable land, labour and capital, enter into the 
 production of any wealth, they contribute to its 
 value in proportion to their respective values as 
 measured in terms of rent, wages and interest. 
 Under just conditions, those that would obtain in 
 a natural market, whoever should make use of all 
 of these factors, and should have to hire all the 
 labour but his own, and to borrow all the capital 
 used, would, after payment of rent, wages and 
 interest, have left of the total value produced so 
 much only as was contributed by his own labour; 
 but would, however, by reason of such payment, 
 become the individual owner of the entire concrete 
 product. If the capital used were his own. he 
 would of course have to pay out only rent and 
 wages, but the proportional distribution according
 
 158 The Orthocratic State 
 
 to the respective values of the different factors 
 would be the same in each and every case. 
 
 Such a distribution of wealth, or of its value, 
 would evidently be equitable, nor is it easy to con- 
 ceive of any other that would be just, or of any 
 other way of arriving at an equitable one. Any 
 distribution to be equitable must necessarily be 
 according to value, which can be determined only 
 in a natural market, where and where alone it is 
 that a just price, the only reliable index of value, 
 whether of land, labour or capital, can be ascer- 
 tained, and where it is automatically adjusted by 
 a sensitive measurement to be had only through a 
 balancing of the forces of supply and demand. 
 The natural law for the production and distribu- 
 tion of wealth is simply this, — that production, 
 which always includes any necessary exchange, 
 shall be carried on under conditions affording 
 equal access to and use of natural opportunities 
 for human effort or labour, including freedom of 
 contract in the exchange of labour and its prod- 
 ucts. 
 
 Under such conditions, the fact that a man had 
 agreed to accept a certain share of any wealth to 
 whose production he had contributed, or a cer- 
 tain wage or rate of interest, would be prima facie
 
 Civic Problems 159 
 
 evidence that such share, wage or interest was 
 all to which he was entitled, for he would be sub- 
 ject to no duress but free to do with his labour 
 and capital as he pleased. At present, however, 
 most men are subject to a duress imposed by 
 abuses of civil power, a duress of which they may 
 not be fully aware, but of whose resulting evils 
 there is happily a growing consciousness. But 
 how is the State to remedy those evils, how can it 
 remove the duress, except by discontinuing the 
 abuses^ In what other way can it provide for a 
 natural, equitable distribution of wealth? Cer- 
 tainly not by ignoring and losing sight of the 
 natural and only laws by which such distribution 
 can be determined. 
 
 For the State to assume the ownership of all the 
 means of production, of all wealth used as capital, 
 would be but an assumption. The ownership of 
 wealth is primarily an individual relation, and 
 can not become collective without the voluntary 
 contractual consent of the individual owner. 
 The State can no more do away with that relation 
 or with the obligations which it imposes upon the 
 members of Society than it can annul the relation- 
 ship of parent and child and the obligations 
 thereby imposed. It can no more deprive the in-
 
 160 The Orthocratic State 
 
 dividual of the ownership of his property than of 
 his right to produce it. Nor does the individual 
 abandon private ownership of his wealth by using 
 it as capital ; he thereby merely exercises the right 
 of control which ownership implies. Individual, 
 private ownership of the wealth of a people, 
 whether used as capital or not, can become collec- 
 tive or public only by express, voluntary consent 
 of its millions of individual owners, a consent 
 which if secured to-day, as it can not be, would 
 in no way affect any ownership of newly begin- 
 ning wealth-producers of to-morrow. And if the 
 State can not become the owner, it can not justly 
 assume control, of such capital, since to owner- 
 ship belongs control. Scant benefit would there 
 be to any man in the ownership of wealth over 
 which he had no control. 
 
 Through purchase from its individual owners, 
 paying them out of land values, which have been 
 seen to belong to the public, the State, in the exer- 
 cise of the Public-serving function of government, 
 will become the public, collective owner of all the 
 wealth it can justly control, and had better dis- 
 charge the manifold obligations and exacting du- 
 ties of such ownership and control before it as- 
 sumes an ownership which it can not in the nature
 
 Civic Problems 161 
 
 of things acquire, and a control it has and can 
 have no right to exercise. 
 
 It may be well to observe in this connection 
 that the State is not the owner, in the property 
 sense of ownership, even of the factor, land, 
 whether valuable or not, for that which no man 
 can so own can not be so owned by all men, by 
 Society, nor by the State. Land is the natural 
 and only opportunity for human existence, whose 
 use belongs by natural relation and right equally 
 to each and every individual of the passing gener- 
 ations of men. Its value, arising from the com- 
 petition of the people for advantages of location, 
 belongs to them in common, being the value of a 
 use in which they are each and all entitled to en- 
 joyment of an equal share. Neither land nor the 
 value of land is either property or wealth. The 
 value of any land is merely the measure of an 
 obligation devolving upon its holder to account 
 for the value of the advantage of occupying it to 
 the exclusion of others, which he does by trans- 
 ferring to the State wealth of equal value, under 
 the name of rent. 
 
 It is to misconception of the nature of property 
 and to consequent interference with the right of 
 property, that prevailing injustice in the distribu-
 
 162 The Orthocratic State 
 
 tion of wealth is largely due. Publicists, and 
 political economists even, not infrequently talk of 
 property as if it were an institution, something 
 established by the State and to be disestablished 
 at will. It is not an institution, but has its be- 
 ing in the nature of things, prior to and independ- 
 ently of any institution or establishment, even of 
 the State itself. The individual precedes the 
 State, which is but an institution which he main- 
 tains for the preservation of his rights, including 
 the right of property, rather than for such irre- 
 sistible and irremediable violation of that right as 
 State control of any part of his wealth, whether 
 used as capital or not, would inevitably involve. 
 Evils arising from disregard of the right of prop- 
 erty are not to be remedied by still further disre- 
 gard and virtual abandonment of it. The sensi- 
 tive, economic threads that feed the loom of co- 
 operative industry have become snarled and must 
 be untangled before they can be warp or woof of 
 a perfect weaving. Nor will it do either to strain 
 or to compress them to the texture of a set, un- 
 yielding fabric. They must maintain vitality of 
 fibre, and lend one another the firm but resilient 
 support of a continuously voluntary and natural 
 interweaving.
 
 Civic Problems 163 
 
 Since problems with which the State has any 
 proper concern are such only as arise from condi- 
 tions due to abuses of its power, it is clear that the 
 conditions and the problems will disappear when 
 and only when the abuses shall have ceased. It is 
 to privilege, which is always special, and neces- 
 sarily incompatible with equal enjoyment of 
 rights, that are due not only the swollen fortunes 
 of the rich but also the no less swollen misfortunes 
 of the poor, correlative evils caused by the same 
 abuses, and perhaps equally injurious in their 
 effect upon the character of a people. Confronted 
 as they are with contrasts in fortune, to be ac- 
 counted for on no theory of justice, but neverthe- 
 less approved by the State, or apologetically at- 
 tributed to ways of an inscrutable providence ; and 
 living under, and long required patriotically to up- 
 hold, institutions and laws which they instinc- 
 tively know that the State has no more right to 
 establish or enforce than has the mob or any indi- 
 vidual member of it; who shall say to what extent 
 a people's innate sense of justice and right may 
 thereby become eventually warped and deadened? 
 
 It is sometimes urged that the State should make 
 special effort to promote individual, personal 
 righteousness, from the absence of which the evils
 
 164 The Oi'tJiocratic State 
 
 of government are assumed to arise; but in view 
 of the example set by the State itself the wonder 
 is that men are as upright in their dealings with 
 one another and even in public affairs as most of 
 them are. Righteousness means right-way-ness, 
 and civic righteousness consists in the endeavour 
 of the citizen to have civil power used only in the 
 right way, that is, in such way as to wrong nobody. 
 Individual, private wrongs, which sometimes at- 
 tract so much attention, as indeed they always 
 should, are nevertheless almost negligible, in re- 
 spect to their evil results, when compared with 
 those committed by the people in their collective, 
 civic capacity. It is to the latter class of wrongs 
 that governmental problems are due, and it is to 
 correction of their causal abuses that the citizen 
 should direct his attention, remembering that how- 
 ever scrupulous he may be in the ordering of his 
 private conduct, he can not be a truly righteous 
 man if he neglects his duty as a citizen. 
 
 The citizen should bear in mind, however, in 
 considering problems of popular interest that, not- 
 withstanding such interest in it, a problem may 
 not be really governmental. Unless the evil con- 
 ditions sought to be remedied are due to some 
 abuse or abuses of civil power, to some govern-
 
 Civic Problems ^ 165 
 
 mental fault of omission or commission, the 
 problem, as already seen, although in a sense so- 
 cial, is not civic, and it would be an abuse as well 
 as a waste of civil power for the State to undertake 
 its solution. How to remedy evils resulting from 
 the neglect of individuals to make rational use 
 of their faculties and from their consequent lack 
 of virtues essential to the highest social well-be- 
 ing, is a problem to be solved by men as men and 
 not as citizens, and without resort to civil author- 
 ity. The State has indeed no authority to act in 
 such behalf, and whenever it assumes to do so, 
 when it attempts, for instance, to prohibit vices 
 involving no infringement of any natural right, 
 no interference with human freedom, it invites 
 official graft and weakens popular respect for 
 legitimate authority. When it shall limit the use 
 of its power to efficient discharge of its proper 
 functions there will doubtless be less of such 
 evils, for the freer men shall be the better will they 
 be, but there never may come a time when they 
 will be equally virtuous, moral or benevolent, or 
 when there will not be some nobly striving to lead 
 their fellows to higher thinking and better living. 
 Enthusiastic leaders in such worthy endeavour 
 will seldom lack the support of sympathetic co-
 
 166 The Orthocratic State 
 
 workers, but however numerous or influential they 
 may become they have no right to compel others 
 to aid them in their benevolent work, as they 
 would by resorting to civil power for its advance- 
 ment. However beneficent its activities, the 
 State has properly nothing to do with benevolence 
 or generosity. It has nothing with which to be 
 generous, and is concerned only with justice, and 
 with that only for the self -defensive purpose of 
 maintaining an equitable public order. 
 
 When that order shall obtain, not only will the 
 problems of government all have been solved, but 
 the ways will be cleared as they never yet have 
 been for the making of whatever progress it is in 
 the nature of mankind to achieve. Human na- 
 ture has never yet had half a chance, and yet 
 what noble specimens have there been in every age 
 and land. What may we not expect of it when it 
 shall come into its own; when man, no longer the 
 slave of precedent nor the victim of experiment in 
 government, shall establish the orthocratic, or 
 rightly governing State, a State whose activities 
 and the use of whose power shall be limited and 
 intelligently directed to the maintenance of a civil 
 order founded in that reason, justice and freedom 
 which constitute the natural order?
 
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