ribunal, employing a slayer who
has no personal quarrel with the slain; and there is clearly no moral
difference between official and unofficial killing.

In short, all men are anarchists with regard to laws which are against
their consciences, either in the preamble or in the penalty. In London
our worst anarchists are the magistrates, because many of them are so
old and ignorant that when they are called upon to administer any law
that is based on ideas or knowledge less than half a century old, they
disagree with it, and being mere ordinary homebred private Englishmen
without any respect for law in the abstract, naively set the example of
violating it. In this instance the man lags behind the law; but when
the law lags behind the man, he becomes equally an anarchist. When some
huge change in social conditions, such as the industrial revolution of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, throws our legal and
industrial institutions out of date, Anarchism becomes almost a
religion. The whole force of the most energetic geniuses of the time in
philosophy, economics, and art, concentrates itself on demonstrations
and reminders that morality and law are only conventions, fallible and
continually obsolescing. Tragedies in which the heroes are bandits, and
comedies in which law-abiding and conventionally moral folk are
compelled to satirize themselves by outraging the conscience of the
spectators every time they do their duty, appear simultaneously with
economic treatises entitled "What is Property? Theft!" and with
histories of "The Conflict between Religion and Science."

Now this is not a healthy state of things. The advantages of living in
society are proportionate, not to the freedom of the individual from a
code, but to the complexity and subtlety of the code he is prepared not
only to accept but to uphold as a matter of such vital importance that
a lawbreaker at large is hardly to be tolerated on any plea. Such an
attitude becomes impossible when the only men who can make themselves
heard and remembered throughout the world spend all their energy in
raising our gorge against current law, current morality, current
respect ability, and legal property. The ordinary man, uneducated in
social theory even when he is schooled in Latin verse, cannot be set
against all the laws of his country and yet persuaded to regard law in
the abstract as vitally necessary to society. Once he is brought to
repudiate the laws and institut