2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



An obvious implication is that the ethics of Government, originally- 

 identical with the ethics of war, must long remain akin to them ; and 

 can diverge from them only as warlike activities and preparations 

 become less. Current evidence shows this. At present on the Con- 

 tinent, the citizen is free only when his services as a soldier are not 

 demanded ; and during the rest of his life he is largely enslaved in 

 supporting the military organization. Even among ourselves, a seri- 

 ous war would, by the necessitated conscription, suspend the liberties 

 of large numbers and trench on the liberties of the rest by taking 

 from them through taxes whatever supplies were needed — that is, 

 forcing them to labor so many days more for the state. Inevitably 

 the established code of conduct in the dealings of Governments with 

 citizens must be allied to their code of conduct in their dealings with 

 one another. 



I am not, under the title of this article, about to treat of the tres- 

 passes and the revenges for trespasses, accounts of which constitute 

 the great mass of history ; nor to trace the internal inequities which 

 have ever accompanied the external inequities. I do not propose here 

 to catalogue the crimes of irresponsible legislators, beginning with 

 that of King Khufu, the stones of whose vast tomb were laid in the 

 bloody sweat of tens of thousands of slaves toiling through long years 

 under the lash ; going on to those committed by conquerors, Egyptian, 

 Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, Roman, and the rest ; and ending 

 with those of Napoleon, whose ambition to set his foot on the neck of 

 the civilized world cost not less than two million lives.* Nor do I 

 propose here to enumerate those sins of responsible legislators seen in 

 the long list of laws made in the interests of dominant classes — a list 

 coming down in our own country to those under which there were 

 long maintained slavery and the slave-trade, inflicting on immense 

 numbers of negroes the horrors of " the middle passage " and killing 

 thirty per cent of them, and ending with that of the corn laws, by 

 which, says Sir Erskine May, "to insure high rents, it had been decreed 

 that multitudes should hunger." f 



Not, indeed, that a presentation of the conspicuous misdeeds of 

 legislators, responsible and irresponsible, would be useless. It would 

 have several uses — one of them relevant to the truth above pointed 

 out. Such a presentation would make clear how that identity of gov- 

 ernmental ethics with military ethics which necessarily exists during 

 primitive times, when the army is simply the mobilized society and 

 the society is the quiescent army, continues through long stages, and 

 even now afl:ects in great degrees our law-proceedings and our daily 

 lives. Having, for instance, shown that in numerous savage tribes the 

 judicial function of the chief does not exist, or is nominal, and that 

 very generally in early stages of the civilized races each man had to 

 defend himself, and rectify his private wrongs as best he might — hav- 

 * " Study of Sociology," p. 42. f " Constitutional History of England," ii, p. 61*7. 



