How can citizens be honestly described as free and equal who are not, who never were, ‘free and equal’ in any reasonable sense of the phrase? How can they be even considered men, whose whole lives are governed by cast-iron regulations; whose every movement is circumscribed and restrained by penal threats—even whose secret thoughts are in a constant state of silent repression?
It is no apology whatever to affirm that the people themselves enact all laws they are commanded to obey. Even that statement is a falsity and if it were true, it would not justify majority dictatorship or any other kind of dictatorship.
The Constitution under which all other laws are born, was accepted, not by us but by bewigged individuals who are long since rotten. We are ruled, in fact by cadavers—the inhabitants of tombs.
Why should agreements made by coffined dead men bind and mortgage living, pulsing, breathing beings?
Their bones have long ago mouldered into ozone and fertilizers, who drew up and signed the Bill of Rights; Magna Charta, the Sermon on the Mount, the Declaration of Independence, our Glorious Constitution, etc., etc. Rotten are the brains that concocted them and the fingers that signed and sealed them. Equally rotten are their irrational and infantile philosophies. Rotten also in their heart, are the men who obey under compulsion voices from the tomb.
No doubt those old documents served their purpose at the time, but ‘new occasions teach new duties,’ and new ages require, not only new leaders, but new deeds.
Again, most acts of Congress are the Machiavellian work of eminent rogues, curse them whose very names are almost forgotten except by partisan chroniclers, and printers of public school histories.
As for the Common Law, it is an inheritance from those interesting old days, when Saxon and Norman earls (they were genuine noblemen then, for they had won their position by risking their lives in battle) administered ‘justice’ direct, per media of knotted clubs, hilted knives, and long handled cleavers. That was the only kind of ‘Law’ understood by our ‘uncivilized’ forefathers, for they had not been ‘educated’ into the profound conviction that governments and laws ‘derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ Such an expression would have sent them into convulsions, and he who uttered it would be considered—a most excellent fool.
No doubt our ancestors were somewhat rude in their manners, somewhat deficient in sweetness and culture but in matters of frozen fact they were decidedly logical. They did not sneak to public meetings and swagger about ‘liberty,’ ‘justice’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ or ‘Rights of Man,’ when they knew full well that not only their lives, but everything they nominally possessed was ‘by leave’ of their conquerors and proprietors.
If they could come alive again how those old pirates and freebooters would stare in shame and scorn at the sight of their ‘tenderfoot’ posterity, walking up in solemn, horny- handed, hump-backed procession in shoddy rags before an idol-altar called a ballot-box, dropping into its gilded maw, printed invocations for Justice, Mercy, Liberty, ‘Peace in our time O! Lord!’—Protection,—cheap money,—‘more laws! more laws! more laws!’ How our blonde, clean-limbed ancestors would guffaw? Indeed, they would probably keep on guffawing, till they guffawed themselves to death again.
‘Oh!’ they would say:—‘to think that our seed should have sunk so low!’
