Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to.  As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government.  It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing mankind.  All modes of government are failures.  Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.  Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few.  High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.  It has been found out.  I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading.  It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.  When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it.  When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising.  People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people’s standards, wearing practically what one may call other people’s second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.  ’He who would be free,’ says a fine thinker, ‘must not conform.’  And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of over-fed barbarism amongst us.

With authority, punishment will pass away.  This will be a great gain—­a gain, in fact, of incalculable value.  As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for school-boys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime.  It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can.  Wherever it has really diminished it, the results have always been extremely good.  The less punishment, the less crime.  When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness.  For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all.  Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.  That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting