le the aggressive kind is
always blameworthy; where there is great injustice in the _status
quo_, the exact opposite may be the case, and ordinarily neither is
justifiable.

State interference with the actions of individuals is necessitated by
possessiveness. Some goods can be acquired or retained by force,
while others cannot. A wife can be acquired by force, as the Romans
acquired the Sabine women; but a wife's affection cannot be acquired
in this way. There is no record that the Romans desired the affection
of the Sabine women; and those in whom possessive impulses are strong
tend to care chiefly for the goods that force can secure. All
material goods belong to this class. Liberty in regard to such goods,
if it were unrestricted, would make the strong rich and the weak poor.
In a capitalistic society, owing to the partial restraints imposed by
law, it makes cunning men rich and honest men poor, because the force
of the state is put at men's disposal, not according to any just or
rational principle, but according to a set of traditional maxims of
which the explanation is purely historical.

In all that concerns possession and the use of force, unrestrained
liberty involves anarchy and injustice. Freedom to kill, freedom to
rob, freedom to defraud, no longer belong to individuals, though they
still belong to great states, and are exercised by them in the name of
patriotism. Neither individuals nor states ought to be free to exert
force on their own initiative, except in such sudden emergencies as
will subsequently be admitted in justification by a court of law. The
reason for this is that the exertion of force by one individual
against another is always an evil on both sides, and can only be
tolerated when it is compensated by some overwhelming resultant good.
In order to minimize the amount of force actually exerted in the
world, it is necessary that there should be a public authority, a
repository of practically irresistible force, whose function should be
primarily to repress the private use of force. A use of force is
_private_ when it is exerted by one of the interested parties, or by
his friends or accomplices, not by a public neutral authority
according to some rule which is intended to be in the public interest.

The regime of private property under which we live does much too
little to restrain the private use of force. When a man owns a piece
of land, for example, he may use force against trespas