Edward Carpenter Quotes

Most people agree nowadays in the view that the growth of bureaucracy and officialism in the modern State is a serious evil, and that the extension of Government interference and the multiplication of Laws are a great danger. We all know that the institution of the Law and the Courts actually creates and gives rise to huge masses of evil--bribery, blackmail, perjury, spying and lying, wrongful accusation, useless and deliberate suffering and cruelty; that it publicly sanctions and organises violence, even in extreme forms; that it quite directly and deliberately supports vast and obvious wrongs in Society--as for instance land-monopoly; that it is absurd and self-contradictory in much of its theory and practice; that (as Herbert Spencer so frequently insists) it paralyses the folk that submit or trust to it; and finally that it is today for the most part so antiquated and out of date that (even if this were thought desirable) it might well seem impracticable to patch it up for real human use. Yet in these cases--though we admit that the things are evil--our defence usually is that they carry some compensations with them, and that anyhow they are necessary evils, which we cannot dispense with, and without which disorder, violence and social disruption would ensue. It may be worth while to consider this defence more closely; for curiously enough the history of nations and peoples is, on the whole, to contrary effect. Not only have all the early tribes of the world got on and cohered together in order and social amity without any rigid and ponderous system of laws; but even among the peasant peoples of today--like the Irish or the Swedes or the Swiss or the Chinese--where they are still living in moderately primitive conditions, we find the same thing. Governmental law and its operations and institutions occupy but a very small part in their lives.