“The more you tell me, the more easily do I understand the sudden violences and crafts of your mind, and the disorders through which you think. But has there been none who has pointed out to you either the road of freedom, or the road of concord? Are you content with a social state as uncontrolled as the bodies in which you live so briefly? Have you no lawmakers whom you can reverence, and whom you can obey with serenity?”
I answered, “In the country in which I live, we have invented a very curious state, in which we believe that we ourselves make all laws, for ourselves or each other. When I consider it, I know that it is not true, but it is a fact of many consequences that we believe it to be so.
“You must allow for the fact that if, in any part of our world, there should arise a trusted ruler—and there have been such, who have been followed gladly by its best men, and who have made such laws that their race has prospered and increased—he will probably have lived most of his life before he gain his position, and his body will quickly decay, and there will be none to succeed him.
“In my own land we had, at one time, a custom that the son of a ruler should be a ruler after him, whether he were fit or not. Some of them did good, or at least attempted to do so. Few of them did great harm. They took more than their share of the good things of the land, and they gave to their friends. They sometimes made war when their people would have been content to remain at peace. They sometimes—but less often—prevented war, when their people desired it.
“They interfered little with the personal freedom of their subjects, so long as their own pleasures were gratified. For their own sakes they liked to be popular. Few laws were made, and if such as there were should be considered oppressive, the people would unite to insist that they should be reduced or altered. When the king and his subjects differed, it was always that they wanted less law, and there was confusion, and sometimes violence, till they succeeded in their desire.
“They objected particularly to having their goods or money taken by taxation, and their kings did not dare to tax them heavily. To enforce many laws requires the employment of many men, and great expenditure of treasure, from which a king gets no benefit. Had the king made many laws, he would have had no money to administer them, even had he wished to do so.
“But even so, men were not satisfied. There is an old tale with us of a colony of frogs in a river, which had no king, and thinking that it would increase their importance to have one, they petitioned their Creator, and he, being kindly, showed them a dead log in the stream, and told them that their king was there. But when they found that this king was inactive, they complained again, and he, being angered at their folly, gave them a stork, who chased and ate them as often as hunger moved him. The tale says that they were no more pleased than before, but that they complained in vain, for their Creator would hear them no further. We, having tried kings of both qualities, the predatory and the inactive, and being no more satisfied than the frogs, have devised an imagination which has conquered those who conceived it. Even though we recognise the incubus which is upon us, and that it is of our own devising, we cannot hereby perceive any way to remove it.
“The fact is this. Our ancestors of a previous century, believing that they had discovered a way to freedom, devised a plan by which the people of each locality should choose one of their number, and these men, meeting together, should have power to frame laws, and to make impositions upon them. Every few years a new choice should be made, so that they could replace any with whose actions they were dissatisfied.
“This procedure has now been followed for many years, with a variety of unforeseen consequences, all of which I could not explain without a previous understanding of the whole social order—or disorder—in which it is rooted.
“But one sequel is simple. These men, being appointed to make laws, have proceeded to do so for many years with uninterrupted diligence, and there is no power to stop them.
“How can they be stopped, but by a law of their own making? And that is the last law which they would consider.
“The result is that we are oppressed by a weight of laws, to which we render a partial and bewildered obedience, aware that there are many of which we have not even heard; and every year hundreds of thousands of us, most of whom have no intention of law-breaking—are indeed nervously anxious to avoid it—are insulted and plundered by the innumerable officials through whom these laws are administered, and whom we toil to support for our own undoing.”
I went on to show her pictures of the life from which I came, so that she should realise the existence which was possible under such conditions, where personal freedom had disappeared beyond anything which our planet had previously known, or is ever likely to experience again; where you might not even die in peace, except under the penalty that your body would afterwards be seized and cut open, to ascertain how you had contrived to do it.
Horror, pity, curiosity, disgust, contempt, and wonder chased themselves across the surface of my companion’s mind as the nature of this life became visualised before her. With these there was a satisfaction that I had escaped,
