“But is social life possible without power?  Without power men would be continually robbing and killing one another,” say those who believe only in human law.  People of this sort are sincerely convinced that men refrain from crime and live orderly lives only because of laws, courts of justice, police, officials, and armies, and that social life would become impossible without governmental power.  Men depraved by power fancy that since the government punishes some of the crimes committed in the state, it is this punishment that prevents men from committing other possible crimes.  But the fact that government punishes some crimes does not at all prove that the existence of law-courts, police, armies, prisons and death penalties holds men back from all the crimes they might commit.  That the amount of crime committed in a society does not at all depend on the punitive action of governments is quite clearly proved by the fact that, when society is in a certain mood, no increase of punitive measures by government is able to prevent the perpetration of most daring and cruel crimes, imperiling the safety of the community, as has been the case in every revolution, and as is now the case in Russia to a most striking degree.

The cause of this is that men, the majority of men (all the laboring folk), abstain from crimes and live good lives, not because there are police, armies, and executions, but because there is a moral perception, common to the bulk of mankind, established by their common religious understanding and by the education, customs, and public opinion founded on that understanding.  This moral consciousness alone, expressed in public opinion, keeps men from crimes, both in town centers and more especially in villages, where the majority of the population dwell.

I repeat that I know many examples of Russian agricultural communities emigrating to the Far East and prospering there for several decades.  These communes governed themselves, being unknown to the government and outside its control, and when they were discovered by government agents, the only result was that they experienced calamities unknown to them before, and received a new tendency towards the commission of crime.

Not only does the action of governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society.  Nor can this be otherwise, since always and everywhere a government, by its very nature, must put in the place of the highest, eternal, religious law (not written in books but in the hearts of men, and binding on everyone) its own unjust, man-made laws, the object of which is neither justice nor the common good of all, but various considerations of home and foreign expediency.

Such are all the existing, evidently unjust, fundamental laws of every government: laws maintaining the exclusive right of a minority to the land, which is the common possession of all; laws giving some men a right over the labor of others; laws compelling men to pay money for purposes of murder, or to become soldiers themselves and go to war; laws establishing monopolies in the sale of stupefying intoxicants, or forbidding the free exchange of produce across a certain line called a frontier; and laws regarding the execution of men for actions which are not so much immoral, as simply disadvantageous to those in power.

All these laws, and the exaction of their fulfillment by threats of violence, the public executions inflicted for the non-fulfillment of these laws, and above all the forcing of men to take part in wars, the habitual exaltation of military murders, and the preparation for them – all this inevitably lowers the moral social consciousness and its expression in public opinion.  Thus, governmental activity not only does not support morality, but, on the contrary, it would be hard to devise a more depraving action than that which governments have had, and still have, on the nations.

It could never enter the head of any ordinary scoundrel to commit all those horrors – the stake, the Inquisition, torture, raids, quarterings, hangings, solitary confinements, murders in war, and the plundering of nations – which have been and still are being committed, and committed ostentatiously, by all governments.  All the horrors of Sténka Rázin, Pougatchéf,[2] and other rebels were but results and feeble imitations of the horrors perpetrated by the Johns, Peters, and Birons,[3] which have been and are being perpetrated by all governments.  If the action of government does deter some dozens of men from crime (which is very doubtful), hundreds of thousands of other crimes are committed only because men are educated in crime by governmental injustice and cruelty.

If men taking part in legislation, in commerce, in industries, living in towns, and in one way or other sharing the advantages of power can still believe in the beneficence of that power, people living on the land cannot help knowing that government only causes them all kinds of suffering and deprivation, was never needed by them, and only corrupts those of them who come under its influence.

To try to prove to men that they cannot live without a Government, and that the injury the thieves and robbers among them may do is greater than both the material and spiritual injury which government continually does by oppressing and corrupting them, is as strange as it would have been to try to prove to slaves that it was more profitable for them to be slaves than to be free.  But just as, in the days of slavery, in spite of the obviously wretched condition the slaves were in, the slave-owners declared and created a belief that it was good for slaves to be slaves, and that they would be worse off if they were free (sometimes the slaves themselves became hypnotized and believed this), so now the government, and people who profit by it argue that governments which rob and deprave men are necessary for their well-being, and men yield to this suggestion.

Men believe in it all, and must continue to do so, because, not believing in the law of God, they must put their faith in human law.  Absence of human law for them means the absence of all law, and life for men who recognize no law, is terrible.  Therefore, for those who do not acknowledge the law of God, the absence of human law must seem terrible, and they do not wish to be deprived of it.

This lack of belief in the law of God is the cause of the apparently curious phenomenon of all the theoretical anarchists – clever and learned men, from Bakoúnin and Prudhon to Reclus, Max Stirner, and Kropotkin – who prove with indisputable correctness and justice the unreasonableness and harmfulness of power.  As soon as they begin to speak of the possibility of establishing a society without that human law which they reject, they fall at once into indefiniteness, verbosity, rhetoric, and quite unfounded and fantastic hypotheses.  This arises from the fact that none of these theoretic anarchists accept that law of God which is common to all men, and which it is natural for all to obey. 

Without the obedience of men to one and the same law – human or divine – human society cannot exist.  And deliverance from human law is only possible on the condition that one acknowledges a divine law common to all men.

[2] Translator’s note – Sténka Rázin and Pougatchéf were famous Russian rebels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

[3] Translator’s note – Biron, the favorite of the Empress Anne, ruled Russia for ten years (1730-1741).