2 hours of labour, the politician in embryo exclaims, "We must have a law to put all that to rights," instead of telling the workers that there ~re other, and much more effectual mea,ns of settling these things straight; namely, recoveriug from the employer the wealth of which he has been despoiling the workmen for generations. In short, a law everywhere and for everything! A law about fashions, a la.w about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law to put a stop to a.II the vices and all the evils which result from human indolence and ,cowardice. We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferule of ,a. law, which regulates every event in life_:our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship -that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose ·au initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves. Our society seems no longer able to understand that it is possible to exist otherwise than under the reign of Law, elaborated by a representative government and administered by a handful of· rulers; and even when it has gone so far as to emancipate itself from the thraldom, its first care has been to reconstitute it- immediately. "The Year I. of Liberty" has never lasted more than a. clay, for after procla.iming it men put themselves the very next morning under the yoke of Law and Authority. Indeed, for some thousands of years, those who govern us have done nothing but ring the changes upon "Roopect for Jaw, obedience to authority." This is the moral atmosphere in which parents bring up their children, and school only serves to confirm the impression. Cleverly assorted scraps of spurious science are inculcated upon the chiidren to prove necessity of law; obedience to the law is made a religion; moral goodness and the law of the masters are fused into one and the same divinity. The historical hero of the schoolroom is the man who obeys the law, and defends it against rebels. Later, when we enter upon public life, society and literature, impressing us day by day and hour by _hour, as the water-drop hollows the stone, continue tci inculcate the same prejudice. Books of history, of political science, of social economy, are BibliotecaGinoBianco
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