Page:Petr Kropotkin - Organised Vengeance Called 'Justice', Henry Glasse - The Superstition of Government (1902).djvu/8

8 codified traditions, it does not matter by whom chosen or elected,—you have an embryo of State round which other powers that may be will gather. On the other hand, if you admit the centralised structure called State, one of its functions will be to administer justice. Hence the judges.

But can we not have judges elected by the people? Let us see where it leads us to. First it must be said that the idea of laws directly made by the people has never been seriously entertained; their drafting must always be left to some more enlightened man (hero, Uebermensch). Then, besides the judge and the lawmaker (legislator), other men will be needed to explain such laws, to interpret older ones, to study their connections and leading ideas: law universities with staff of teachers and students, acting like a drag on society with all the weight of their inherited traditions and their hair-splitting about the letter of the law. But that is nothing compared with the auxiliaries needed by the judge: on one side the gendarme, the police, the prostitute, the spy, the agent provocateur; on the other, the gaoler, the executioner and all the sequel of turpitude which necessarily accompanies them. Finally, you must supply some supervising body to keep all that army of functionaries going. You must not forget to provide money for their maintenance and so on. In short, there is not one function of the State today whose services can be dispensed with if we want to keep the judge—be he elected by the people or not.

But what about the Code? The Code, all codes, represents a gathering of traditions, of formulas borrowed from old conceptions absolutely repugnant to all Socialistic ideas of today; survivals of our slavish past, slavish in action, slavish in speech, slavish in thought. It is of no consequence that some of the leading moral ideas may be in accordance with our own; the moment a punishment is decreed for the non-fulfilment of a good action we will have nothing to do with it. A Code is the past stereotyped and put across the path of human progress.

Every legal punishment is legalised vengeance, vengeance made obligatory, and we must ask ourselves what is the use of vengeance? Does it help maintain social customs? Does it ever prevent the small minorities of breakers of good custom from doing so? Never. On the contrary, to proclaim the duties of vengeance