Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/185

Rh he not able to attack and demolish all the regulations which reduce him to slavery?

Certainly. Representative legislation accomplishes all this. But unfortunately, only in theory. In practice it is a lie as enormous as all the other phases of our present state and social life. I must not omit to mention that the lies by which we are surrounded are of two kinds. Some wear the mask of the past, the rest the mask of the future. Some are forms which had once a substance—the others, forms which have as yet no substance at all. Religion and the monarchical form of government are lies because we allow the external forms to remain although we are convinced of the absurdity of the empty sham. Representative legislation, Parliamentism, on the other hand, is a lie because as yet it is only an external form, the internal organization of the State remaining completely unchanged. In the former case it is new wine in old bottles and in the latter, old dregs in new vessels.

Representative legislation is the machinery by which the principle of the sovereignty of the people becomes action. Strictly according to theory, the entire people should assemble in an immense mass meeting, make its own laws and appoint its employés, thus expressing its will directly and carrying it immediately into action, without the loss of power and the modifications it is sure to undergo as an inevitable consequence of repeated transmissions. But as civilization increases, it has a tendency to group the individuals into larger and larger communities, to unite into one nation all those speaking the same language, the entire race, and to enlarge the confines of the States to immense proportions. Consequently the direct practice of self-government by assembling the entire people, has already become a material impossibility in by far the largest number of countries,