authority; and not only does it corrupt those who rule it, but its evil effects extend to those whom they govern, for every extension of governmental function assists in decreasing and dwarfing the energies and self-reliance of the people themselves and making them more helpless, cowardly, and servile than before. Our social system, by its politically-fostered monopolies, is continually driving men to poverty, intemperance, and debauchery, and driving women to prostitution or the slavery of unhappy marriage; its exploitations render the parents so poor, and their struggles for existence so keen and uncertain, that they have neither the wealth, time, inclination nor ability, to properly clothe, feed, educate, and make moral their children, but allow them to grow up a criminal and vicious generation, and one too well qualified to perpetuate the present evils.
No political machinery can destroy the evils which the political machinery has brought into being; for it is the nature of ruling institutions to conserve the bad, to support and extend conventional and reactionary opinion, and to check all progressive thought in religion, sociology and philosophy. Laws are made to be obeyed—not to be repealed for the public good. They are essentially conservative of privilege. All law is made to protect property and proprietors alone. There is no law for the poor. Legal victory is a luxury which it requires money to purchase. If you have no money, you cannot go to law; or if you manage to, you may safely reckon on coming out on the wrong side of the ledger. The justice of a thing has little to do with a legal decision—that decision has previously been inscribed on the Statute Books on the basis of property and its right of exploitation. Plutocracy rules the world.
The existing evils of society are too gigantic to toy with. It is useless to appeal to an extension of suffrage, when the suffrage can offer nothing more than a choice of masters elected to carry on a system of destruction. It is equally useless to pin your hopes on fine-spun theories of the taxation of land-values, when those values exist only in the imagination and all taxes are paid in the products of labor. It is useless to preach thrift to those who have nothing to save, or to hope for universal prosperity when the enrichment of the few is caused by the plunder of the many. Again is it foolish to imagine that a general patronage of savings banks, building societies, sharebroking institutions, and the like, will ever tend to ameliorate social wrongs; for their gains always implies someone else’s loss. Speculations in investments in stocks, shares, railway, mining and other companies, are all speculations on the possible future of losses of labor. Dividends do not create themselves—they are all filched from labor. If the laborers ceased to be plundered, there will be no dividends. These “remedies” are no remedies at all.
