The Law is for All

130 The Law is for All 1:34 veils itself from its nature. Thus the vast bulk of humanity is obsessed by an abject fear of freedom; the principal objections hitherto urged against my Law have been those of people who cannot bear to imagine the horrors which would result if they were free to do their own wills. The sense of sin, shame, self­ distrust, this is what makes folk cling to Christianity-slavery. People believe in a medicine just insofar as it is nasty; the meta­ physical root of this idea is in sexual degeneracy of the masochis­ tic type. Now “the Law is for all”; but such defectives will refuse it, and serve us who are free with a fidelity the more dog-like as the simplicity of our freedom denotes their abjection. Even such shallow soapsudmongers as Sir Walter Besant and Mr. James Rice have had an inkling of these ideas. I quote Ready- Money Mortiboy, Chapter xxiil: The big-bearded man stood towering over the children, with his right arm waving them out into the world—where? No matter where: somewhere away: somewhere into the good places of the world—not a boy’s heart but was stirred within him: and the brave old English blood rose in them as he spoke, in his deep bass tones, of the worth of a single man in those far-off lands;—an oration destined to bear fruit in after-days, when the lads, who talk yet with bated breath of the speech and the speaker, shall grow to man’s estate. “Dangerous, Dick,” said Farmer John. “What should I do with my labourers?” “Don’t be afraid,” said Dick. “There are not ten percent have the pluck to go. Let us help them, and you shall keep the rest.” He might have added that the employer would be better off without that percentage of yeast to ferment his infusion of harm­ less vegetable humans. No one is better aware than I am that the Labour Problem has to be settled by practical and not ideal considerations, but in this case the ideal considerations happen to be extremely practical. The mistake has been in trying to produce a standard article to supply the labour market; it is an error from the point of view of capital and labour alike. Men should not be taught to read and write unless they exhibit capacity or inclination. Compulsory