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Title: Burying the Dead Author: Freedom Press Date: April 1, 1888 Language: en Topics: Freedom Press, Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism Source: Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Vol. 2 -- No. 19, retrieved on August 29, 2019, from http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=2967. Notes: Freedom Press, London
THE original free, unconsciously Anarchist, institutions of our country,
which Kemble describes as during the Saxon period "supplying a mutual
guarantee of peace, security, and freedom for the inhabitants of a
district," have constituted down to the present day the boast of
Englishmen. But how changed they are: oh I quantum mutatabillis I.
These originally free institutions of the English people have been
attacked on both sides; by the over-growth of central government, and by
the usurpations of that class whose fortune has been the misery of the
people.
The process of such political "enclosures," as it were, was extremely
varied. Now the committee of the people's assembly was substituted for
the assembly itself; now the function of moderator or executor in such
assemblies was invested in a permanent and authoritative official.
Again, the oppressive centralized system of criminal justice has
gradually grown out of the original -sworn inquest"; just as the police
organization has grown out of the "frank pledge" and "hue and cry," and
superseded the old methods of mutual responsibility.
As property became more and more of a monopoly, property qualifications
were more rigorously exacted as the basis of all claim to a right to
fulfill public functions, and popular franchises gradually disappeared
under a network of self-appointed rulers. Briefly, justice,
administration, education, sanitation, roads---even charity-fell into
the hands of the propertied class, and became their privilege. A part of
the nation ceased to exist, or to appear in public life. The poor were
eaten up or condensed in, or, as the language now runs, represented by
the rich.
The process, however, having been brought about by successive
encroachments on popular rights and slow alteration of early
institutions, has at length become so cumbrous, so hampering, that it is
thought fit to introduce in it a little order and uniformity. The Local
Government Bill now under the consideration of our legislators, proposes
to sink all the irregularities and anomalies of the present system in
the more centralized one of 11 County Councils."
Shall we therefore be better off I Not a wit. To the rule of country
gentlemen is to succeed the rule of the trading bourgeoisie, the rule of
political parties or big electors. This means the end of one illusion,
the beginning of another This means the political Continentalization of
England following on the economical Anglization of the Continent. This
means, however, also that we approach the end, and therefore revert to
the beginning-to the free organization, which was at the bottom of the
early English institutions.