The Logic of the Law

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 5, 1 June 1913, Page 2

The Logic of the Law

Customs peculiar to any one race of people do not arise from any statutory code of laws. If it be customary amongst the workers —ever the majority—of any country ardently to desire the safeguarding of their master’s boodle, the statute book can be spared an unnecessary page or two. Penalty clauses never yet prevented the breach of custom.

The only laws really respected by the general mass are those the gist of which custom has engendered already. All others are to be enforced, either through trickery or the policeman’s club. When the whole story is written of the Evolution of Society, truthfully written, we shall read somewhere on the earlier pages that mankind, once on a day, enjoyed in common all the gifts of Nature and the rewards of Toil; that the early children of the earth knew nothing of the modern curse of Mine and Thine. No statute laws were necessary; custom was the only arbiter. Accidents befell, inevitable may be, and a slave class, denied communal right to everything, doomed to toilful misery, resulted. The shackle, the lash, the lack of Liberty, became accustomed things, and, with few exceptions, the slaves grew hardened and sub-' missive thereto, and their statutory degradation became a dead letter. Out of this slave class was begotten the modern working class, which for decades, tricked by the Pulpit., cowed by the specially inculcated superstition that ' the rights of private property owner-' ship are sacred, nay that property

itself—wood and stone—is a holy of holies, has quietly submitted, and borne the yoke. But now, selfishness and greed, personified in the monopolist, naturally the outcome of private ownership of property, have assumed such intolerable proportions that the old instincts of- communism are re-awakening in the hearts of the modern slaves, the logic of legalised oppression is being disputed, and its only offset—force—put into operation. The militant methods of the British Suffragists are but manifestations of this. The Home women have urged their claims for many years. Their right to the franchise was never seriously or widely questioned; hence peaceful propaganda prevailed. But the smiling patronage of a principle has been too long drawn out, nonmilitant methods have been cast aside, and the last logic of the Law —that relic of past usage—has been adopted, namely, force. The baton and bayonet rendered sterile. and away goes the sacred majesty of the Law. The militant suffragists at last recognise that, and are meeting the Law with a force greater than its own. One determined woman by destroying the contents of a letter box does that which the whole British Army, despite its glorious traditions, its esprit de corps, its alleged patriotism, cannot undo. The concentrated perjuries of Policedom can never recall the value of a Minister’s mansion gone up in smoke. The presiding Genius of the Law courts, with all its wisdom and awe, cannot stay the bursting of a bomb; nor the pulpit and the press piffle cunningly enough to persuade a rebel woman that she is

not so capable as she accounts herself to be. Whatever may be said against these tactics, one fact stands out clearly—the British Law-makers are giving an ear they never extended before. And the women aren’t through with them yet.

The world over, tactics like theirs are being carried on, and the good results are carefully excluded from the Press. The revolutionary organs teem with reports of successful strikes, and searching Sabotage, but little do we hear of it through the Capitalist channels of information.

And all rebels know why ! A.H.