Page:Petr Kropotkin - Organised Vengeance Called 'Justice', Henry Glasse - The Superstition of Government (1902).djvu/7

Rh The fundamental ideas of Justice, essential to every society, have thus totally changed between the 11th and the 16th centuries. In our article on The State and its historic rôle we have endeavoured to explain how the State took possession of the free cities; let it be sufficient for our present purpose to remark that, when the evolution took place which brought the cities under the sway of the State, the communities had already forsaken, even in ideal, the principles of arbitration and compensation which were the essence of popular justice in the 11th century. When the State laid its hands upon the cities the old conception had entirely gone. Christianity and Roman law had already made States out of free cities. The next step was simply this, that the State established its empire upon the now enslaved cities.

Certainly, it would be interesting to study how economic changes happening during that length of time (five centuries), how distant commerce, exportation, creation of banks and of commercial loans, how wars, colonisation, and capitalist production taking the place of communal production, consumption and commerce—to study how all these factors influenced the leading ideas during the same period and helped to that change in the conception of Justice. Some splendid researches are here and there to be found in the works of the historians of the free cities. A few original researches upon the influence of Christian and Roman ideas also exist (though such studies are of a much more difficult nature and always heterodox). But it would be wrong to trace everything back to economics; it would be just the same sort of mistake as if, studying botany, we should say that the amount of heat received by a plant determined its life and growth, forgetting humidity, light and other important factors.

This historical resumé, short as it is, shows nevertheless how the State and the evolution of Vengeance, called Justice, are related institutions—derived from one another, supporting one another, being historically one.

But a moment of quiet thought is sufficient to understand how both institutions hold logically together, how both have a common origin in the same idea: Authority looking after the security of society and exercising vengeance upon those who break established rules or laws. If you admit the existence of judges, as specially selected members of society entrusted with the care of applying