personal government and impersonal government
There are only two kinds of social structure conceivable--
personal government and impersonal government. If my
anarchic friends will not have rules--they will have rulers.
Preferring personal government, with its tact and flexibility,
is called Royalism. Preferring impersonal government,
with its dogmas and definitions, is called Republicanism.
Objecting broadmindedly both to kings and creeds is called Bosh;
at least, I know no more philosophic word for it. You can
be guided by the shrewdness or presence of mind of one ruler,
or by the equality and ascertained justice of one rule; but you must
have one or the other, or you are not a nation, but a nasty mess.
Now men in their aspect of equality and debate adore the idea
of rules; they develop and complicate them greatly to excess.
A man finds far more regulations and definitions in his club,
where there are rules, than in his home, where there is a ruler.
A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance,
carries this mummery to the point of a methodical madness.
The whole system is stiff with rigid unreason;
like the Royal Court in Lewis Carroll. You would think
the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly silent.
You would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put
it on to go away; therefore he takes off his hat to walk out
and puts in on to stop in. Names are forbidden, and a man
must call his own father 'my right honorable friend the member
for West Birmingham.' These are, perhaps, fantasies of decay:
but fundamentally they answer a masculine appetite.
Men feel that rules, even if irrational, are universal;
men feel that law is equal, even when it is not equitable.
There is a wild fairness in the thing--as there is in tossing up.
