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Title: Notes [Aug, 1887] Author: Freedom Press (London) Date: August, 1887 Language: en Source: Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Vol. 1, No. 11, online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3060, retrieved on April 14, 2020.
The admission made in the debate on the Navy Estimates by the First Lord
of the Admiralty, that our dockyard management is nothing better than a
gigantic job, somewhat tarnishes the glory of the brilliant naval
review, for which the workers had to pay last month. No sooner is one
government department officially whitewashed than another stands
revealed as a den of uncleanness.
The recently constructed Metropolitan Board of Works does not appear so
very much more immaculate than the ancient Corporation of London. Why,
in the name of human imbecility, do we continue tamely to submit our
lives and delegate the management of our business to successive bands of
self-interested irresponsibles? Practically irresponsibles, for our much
vaunted right of calling them over the coals seems remarkable
ineffective. These official administrators do nothing for the people
which the people could not do directly for themselves by voluntary
association.
Prostitutes, Salvationists, temperance lecturers, cab-drivers, and
socialists are not by any means the only persons who have doubts as to
the unmixed benefits of police supervision. Since its institution in
1829 the Metropolitan Police Force has managed to earn the detestation
of the whole proletariat of London.
Not that the police individually are at all worse than other men who are
corrupted by a false position. How can a man be brotherly and honest
when it is his business to be a human blood-hound hunting down to their
destruction the unfortunate and erring among his fellows? How can he be
just when it is his duty to maintain, by any means that fall short of
raising a public scandal, the outward appearance of order, where
disorder is only the natural and healthy, revolt against deep-rooted
social injustice and wrong? The paid guardians of class rule and the
monopoly of property are, after all, men of the people who have
thoughtlessly turned traitors to the popular cause, and sold themselves
to do dirty work that the masters are ashamed to be seen doing for
themselves.
The proposed Land Bill is a public confession on the part of the most
conservative of Englishmen of the justice of the Irish revolt, and
therefore the injustice of coercion.
Paris was in a state of siege on the commemoration of the taking of the
Bastille. The Republican government ordered its soldiers to fire on the
people if they showed the faintest inclination to follow in the steps of
the ancestors whom they were assembled to honor!
The people are everywhere losing respect for authority, for everywhere
they begin to perceive that it is nothing more respectable than the
brute-force of the masters, wrapped round with a cloak of false
morality. This mystification has been almost completely stripped away in
France. Nothing but a few miserable shreds of legality and statecraft
hang between the proletariat and middle class property-rule, and both
sides have come to see plainly that it is but a question of opportunity
and the best weapons between them.
The Czar is still busy concocting new measures where with to tighten his
failing grip on the throat of the Russian nation. The intellectual life
of the country is already all but stifled by the weight of police
supervision, and now the new regulations for the University of St.
Petersburg exclude all students who cannot produce a certificate showing
them to be well affected towards the existing tyranny! Moreover, during
their whole course of study they must reside with relatives or guardians
responsible to the police for the young men's continued good
behavior–indifference to the sufferings and wrongs of their unhappy
country.
It is with this same just and enlightened Russian Government that the
Pall Mall Gazette and Daily Telegraph are advocating a close British
alliance, that the spoils of Central Asia may not be spilled in division
between the two principal thieves.