t the executioner was always masked.

This is the first essential element in government, coercion; a necessary
but not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people say
that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the
foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on
force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of
justice. A king or a community holding a certain thing to be abnormal,
evil, uses the general strength to crush it out; the strength is his
tool, but the belief is his only sanction. You might as well say that
glass is the real reason for telescopes. But arising from whatever
reason the act of government is coercive and is burdened with all the
coarse and painful qualities of coercion. And if anyone asks what is the
use of insisting on the ugliness of this task of state violence since
all mankind is condemned to employ it, I have a simple answer to that.
It would be useless to insist on it if all humanity were condemned to
it. But it is not irrelevant to insist on its ugliness so long as half
of humanity is kept out of it.

All government then is coercive; we happen to have created a government
which is not only coercive; but collective. There are only two kinds
of government, as I have already said, the despotic and the democratic.
Aristocracy is not a government, it is a riot; that most effective
kind of riot, a riot of the rich. The most intelligent apologists of
aristocracy, sophists like Burke and Nietzsche, have never claimed
for aristocracy any virtues but the virtues of a riot, the accidental
virtues, courage, variety and adventure. There is no case anywhere of
aristocracy having established a universal and applicable order, as
despots and democracies have often done; as the last Caesars created
the Roman law, as the last Jacobins created the Code Napoleon. With
the first of these elementary forms of government, that of the king or
chieftain, we are not in this matter of the sexes immediately concerned.
We shall return to it later when we remark how differently mankind
has dealt with female claims in the despotic as against the democratic
field. But for the moment the essential point is that in self-governing
countries this coercion of criminals is a collective coercion. The
abnormal person is theoretically thumped by a million fists and kicked
by a million feet. If a man is flogged we all flogged him; if a man
is hanged, we all ha