November 8, IQ17 
LAND & WATER 
II 
power is rather the sign of weakness further back ? Evidently 
we should argue, these people are weak in the principle of 
honoiu-, weak in the sense of parental duty, weak in self 
respect and intelligence, or they would not require so many 
laws and so many policemen to compel them to keep their 
promises, to educate their children, to provide for their old 
age, and to behave decently in the streets. Suppose some 
genial philosopher should take us to a chemist's shop and say, 
'• Here are the signs of the health of the people. See how 
powerfully science is grappling with the ills of the body. 
An appropriate remedy for every disease ! Not one of them 
without its corresponding bottle of physic '.Lethal weapons for 
the microbe ! Death for colic, gout, measles ! You are in 
the very temple of health." 
What should we answer to our genial philosopher ? " Your 
argument," we should say, " is a bad one." 
Let us try a bolder image still. Suppose we could be intro- 
duced in turn to two planets. The first we will imagine to be 
roaring with " government " of the type or types that now 
exist on this earth ; parliaments in lull swing everywhere ; 
laws pouring out from the Senate house like sausages from a 
Chicago pork-factory ; an incorruptible policeman at every 
street comer ; and a good substantial jail to cheer the eye of the 
traveller at the entrance of every to\vn. Our second planet 
shall have none of these things. Its inhabitants shall manage 
their affairs by means of an understanding, such as exists in 
every well-regulated family, tliat they are to trust one another 
for decent behaviour. On which of these two planets should 
wc see the plainest signs of the power of the people ? I give 
my vote, without hesitation, for the second. 
But all this, it may be said, is not quite fair. Granted 
that the laws and the courts of justice and the jails and the 
policemen, and all the other means the people take to keep 
themselves in order, do suggest what you say — namely that 
the principle of order must be weak to Begin with. But they 
suggest something else as well, which is, that the people 
know their weakness and are taking the appropriate means to 
make themselves strong. It is because they recognise the 
importance of their duties and are resolved to acquire the 
habit of doing them, that they set up a government and con- 
tinually increase its scope. The government is a sign of power . 
after all. 
Functions of Government 
Very good. But now, if this line of reasoning is sound what 
are we entitled to expect ? We are entitled to expect that as 
time goes on there will be a gradual dimunition of the function 
of government. As the people acquire the habits of order and 
goodwill which the laws and the police are intended to teach 
them, the output of law and the number of pohcemen will 
steadily decrease. But they don't decrease. They increase- 
by leaps and bounds. Day by day there are more orders to 
obey and more compulsion to submit to. The habit of 
spontaneous good behaviour is not being acquired. The habit 
that is being acquired is of a very different kind. It is the 
habit of relying upon government to effect everything which 
we might easily effect for ourselves. And my contention is 
that the growth of that habit measures not the power of the 
people but its weakness. 
So then I am driven to the conclusion that the true test of 
growth in the power of the people lies not in the amount of 
government it creates, but in the amount of government it can 
disp,?nse with ; not in the number of laws it enacts, but in the 
number it can do without. This is my answer to the question 
with which I set out. 
The cry is ever for more government and more laws ; and 
when one pleads, as I am always doing, for less government and' 
fewer laws, and argues that a sovereign people should show its 
sovereignty by abstaining from the misconduct which renders 
policemen necessary, there is an inevitable shout of derision : 
"What! No courts of law! No jails! No law>'ers ! 
No elections ! No Secretaries of State ! " Thus the Spectator 
not long ago, in criticising certain pacifist proposals of a rather 
foolish nature, had this sentence : '' There would certainly be 
greater waste of money and greater human suffering ii we 
disbanded our police force, pulled dowTi our jails and placed 
no check on private greed and private passion." Quite truo. 
But my point is that whatever sign of a people's power may 
l)e read in the jails and policemen appointed to check its evil 
passions, there is a sign of greater weakness in the evil passions 
that need to be so checked. 
There is a much shorter cut to the same end than that 
provided by the jails and policemen, wliicli is, of course, to 
gel rid of the evil passions in tlie first instance ; and tliat, 
I contend, is what we should expect a really power jnl people 
to do. I suppose most persons would grant no obvious a 
commonplace. Why then has no sovereign people so far taken 
this obvious shorter cut ? Because we have a wrong notion 
of sovereignty; because wc consistently look to our masters to 
do for us what we could do much better for ourselves ; because 
we have fallen so deeply into the habit of trusting to jails and 
policemen to do the business that we have forgotten how 
easily the whole business might be done by the exercise of 
qualities which anybody might acquire* 
Dominance of the Policeman 
Nothing is more curious in the political thought of our dav 
than the dominance in it of the idea of the policeman. It 
would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that our ultimate 
category of political thought is the police. And not of our 
poUtical thought alone, for the God whom many of us worship 
. . . . But let us keep to politics. The very "pacifists" whom 
the Spectator trounces for wanting to get rid of the police, 
have oddly enough a scheme of their owti on hand for setting 
up an international police as a means of preventing war. 
There seems no getting rid of the police obsession — no per- 
suading people, not even pacifists, to take the short cut of 
common sense instead of the roundabout way of police 
supervision. 
I belie\e I am as sound a democrat as anybody who maj; 
chance to read this article and perhaps disagree with it. But 
the democracy I believe in is not a system ol government. 
It is a method of learning, by very slow degrees, to do without 
government. In other words it is a method of education, 
the final object of which is to develop the true power of the 
people by throwing them more and more on their own res- 
ponsibility, by weaning them from the bad habit of trusting 
to external force thinly disguised under the name of law. 1 
know the immense difficulty and danger of such an ideal and 
would agree with anybody who deemed it all but hopeless. 
The bad habit with which one has to contend is so wide- 
spread and of such long standing that vast multitudes have 
lost the power of acting on their own responsibility, so that 
if, for example, you want to make them sober the only way is 
by Act of Parliament. So with the other things— such as pro- 
viding for old age. The reason why many, who could easily do 
it, fail to provide for their old age is simply that, under the 
system which has so long prevailed, they have fallen into the 
habit of waiting to do their duty until the law makes them— 
like the young men in some of our villages before conscription 
who, when you told them they ought to join the army, 
answered, " I shall not go till they fetch me." So conscription 
had to come, and its coming pointed to a weakness in the com- 
munity — the weakness of those who would not go until they 
were fetched. At the same time there were hundreds of 
thousands of men who did their duty without being compelled ; 
and this suggests to my mind that in regard to many other 
matters there are vast reserves of voluntary good behaviour 
in the people whicli a wise statesmanship should set itself to 
develop. 
" State interference " has not yet entirely killed out this 
greatest of all our national assets — the power of acting on our 
own responsibility ; so that people like myself have really some 
ground for looking forward to a far distant time when 
democracy shall have got rid of " conscription " in countless 
other forms in which it now exists and flourishes — when we 
shall all be " volunteers " in regard to the general body of 
duty which it behoves a decent citizen to observe. Mean- 
while so long as men are such idiots that they will not come out 
of a public-house until they are fetched, we must pay the 
penalty for the system which has helped them onwards to that 
state of idiocy, and send a policeman to throw them out, thus 
making them sober by Act of Parliament — that is, unless they 
are drunk already. 
In a previous article I took as my text the instance of a 
family who, as a measure of war economy, had got rid of fheir 
servants and found to their surprise that the thing was not only 
possible but a great success. In this article I have ventured 
a bolder flight by suggesting the possibility that we might, with 
advantage, get rid of our masters, or at least reduce them in 
nuniber. Our masters are the laws and the despots, or the 
lawyers who make them. I am inclined to think, against the 
general opinion of my contemporaries, that the second is not 
more difficult to get rid of than the first. It will be granted 
that some of us, in the present age, have too many servants. 
May it not also be true that all of us have too many masters ? 
The war is giving us a chance such as we never had before, 
and mav never have again, of getting out of our ruts. I 
suggest that this notion of curing our ills by piling on more 
legislation and more government is a rut, and a very bad one 
too, in spite of .ill that philosophers have said to prove the 
contrary. Wliat the peojile want in order to develop their 
pmver, is less government, less legislation, and aiwayi^ h'^s until 
at last we reach the Golden Age when there will lie none at all. 
Legislation is physic, and society can no more live on legisla- 
tion than a man can liw on Epsom salts and backache pills. 
Meanwhile the vendors of this physic ha\c the market-place 
to themselves. But many of those . gentlemen arc quacks. 
