Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/168

154 matters, to carry out certain undertakings, which will promote the personal interests of each individual, but which alone he could neither have planned nor accomplished. Well then: we must admit that the State fulfills these theoretical presuppositions but very imperfectly, hardly better than the primitive, barbarous communities, which allowed their members an incomparably larger share of individual liberty than the civilized State of modern times. It ought to ensure to us our life and property. This it does not do, for it can not prevent wars, which cause the violent death of a horribly large number of citizens. Wars between civilized nations are no rarer and no less bloody than between savage races, and with all his laws and restrictions to liberty, the man of our civilization does not procure any greater security from the deadly weapon of his enemy than the barbarian, unrestricted by the blessings of a police guardianship. To find any actual difference in security to life and limb between the two, we must be convinced that the death that comes to a man in uniform from the hand of a murderer also clothed in uniform and obeying the word of command, is less of a death than that caused by the tomahawk of some painted warrior, acting according to no manual of regulations. Some isolated minds dream of the abolition of wars and the substitution of arbitration in their place. What will be, will be. I am not speaking of a future that may never arrive, but of the present. All the sacrifices of his personal liberty during times of peace do not relieve the individual from the necessity of defending his own skin at critical moments, the same as the savage in the jungles of Africa. And even aside from war, all our regulations and restrictions do not protect the life of the single citizen any more than the unrestrained freedom of barbarism. Murders between the members of a savage tribe occur no more