Page:Petr Kropotkin - Organised Vengeance Called 'Justice', Henry Glasse - The Superstition of Government (1902).djvu/4

4 However, while laying stress upon the hierarchical, centralised, jacobin, anti-libertarian principles of the State, we are, perhaps, apt to neglect our criticism of what has been called Justice. This report has been written with the special desire to draw attention on the origin of this institution and to invite a discussion which would throw light upon that subject.

A careful study of the development of society forces upon us the conviction that State and Justice are two institutions which not only co-exist in society down the stream of history, but are connected together by the bond of cause and effect. Whosoever admits the necessity of separate, chosen members of society for the special function of distributing punishments to those who have broken the law, needs a body which enacts these laws, codifies them, establishes standards of punishment—needs special schools for teaching the manufacture and interpretation of laws—needs gaol, gaolers, police, hangmen and army—needs the State.

The primitive tribe, always Communist, does not know of any judge: within the tribe theft, homicide, murder do not exist. Customs are sufficient to prevent them. But in the very rare cases in which a member would disregard the sacred rules of the tribe, he would be stoned or burned to death by the tribe as a whole. Each member of it would throw his stone or bring his bundle of wood, in order that it should not be this or that man who has put the culprit to death, but the tribe in its entirety.

When a member of another tribe has injured someone, then the whole tribe of the wronged one is responsible for the carrying out of an equal injury; and the whole tribe of the assailant is responsible, so that any of its members as opportunity arises may be chosen by any member of the wronged tribe for the retaliation—according to the principle of life for life, tooth for tooth, and so on; wounds to be inflicted exactly as they were received, the grain of corn being the standard of measurement of each wound. That is the primeval conception of justice.

Later on, in the village life of the first centuries of our era, the conception changed. The idea of Vengeance is by and by left aside—very slowly, of course, chiefly among agricultural populations, still surviving among the warriors—and the idea of Compensation is developed; compensation to the wronged man, or to his family or to the tribe. As the patriarchal family appears, in possession of cattle and of slaves stolen from other tribes,