Page:A Handbook of Anarchy.djvu/5

 each other. This is true of almost all animals that have a nervous system, but in man so especially that a healthy individual feels to some extent the pleasures and woes of even the animals of other species with which he associates. But from a protective natural process, this susceptibility is closed where vital interests are in conflict. We share no grief in the death-agony of a tiger or a human enemy whose life would threaten our own or make it insupportable. Then, since law in the nature of things takes away the exercise of fellow-feeling by which that feeling is developed, substituting, instead, comparison with codes, and since by building on false generalisation it creates antagonistic interests, which cannot be adhered to without consequently closing up the bodily avenues of love for one's neighbor as for oneself, it is law that is a hideous creator of wickedness. It would moreover be as rational to allege that an honest man should not object to being chained up to prevent him from stealing, as that he should not object to being a bond-slave in his conduct to prevent him from doing wrong, and a bond-slave he is when he has to conform his actions to an imposed code to the exclusion of his own judgment of what accords with reason and human sentiment. The whole of law is exactly on a par with the contention of the rabid teetotallers who affirm that because one man may do wrong in drinking alcohol, everyone should be forbidden to drink it. Because a certain act committed by a person whose moral nature is deficient, or who is not sufficiently thoughtful in his conduct, may probably be, under those circumstances, an unjust act, moral and considerate men are to be forbidden to do that act under any circumstances! It is the same. And a man does, or abstains from doing, something, for one of two reasons: either because he concludes that this conduct is the most appropriate, or because such is the rule or law. The conduct may answer to both reasons, but the motive can be only one of them; if a man does a thing because he thinks it fitting, he does so whether it is in accord with law or not, and if he does it because such is the law, he does it whether it is fitting or not. This is regarding law as a moral