CHAPTER XI

FREE AGREEMENT

I

Accustomed as we are by heredity prejudices and our unsound education
and training to represent ourselves the beneficial hand of Government,
legislation and magistracy everywhere, we have come to believe that man
would tear his fellow-man to pieces like a wild beast the day the police
took his eye off him; that absolute chaos would come about if authority
were overthrown during a revolution. And with our eyes shut we pass by
thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves freely,
without any intervention of the law, and attain results infinitely
superior to those achieved under governmental tutelage.

If you open a daily paper you find that its pages are entirely devoted
to Government transactions and to political jobbery. A man from another
world, reading it, would believe that, with the exception of the Stock
Exchange transactions, nothing gets done in Europe save by order of some
master. You find nothing in the paper about institutions that spring up,
grow up, and develop without ministerial prescription! Nothing--or
almost nothing! Even where there is a heading, "Sundry Events" (_Faits
divers_, a favorite column in the French papers), it is because they are
connected with the police. A family drama, an act of rebellion, will
only be mentioned if the police have appeared on the scene.

Three hundred and fifty million Europeans love or hate one another,
work, or live on their incomes; but, apart from literature, theatre, or
sport, their lives remain ignored by newspapers if Governments have not
intervened in it in some way or other. It is even so with history. We
know the least details of the life of a king or of a parliament; all
good and bad speeches pronounced by the politicians have been preserved:
"speeches that have never had the least influence on the vote of a
single member," as an old parliamentarian said. Royal visits, the good
or bad humour of politicians, their jokes and intrigues, are all
carefully recorded for posterity. But we have the greatest difficulty to
reconstitute a city of the Middle Ages, to understand the mechanism of
that immense commerce that was carried on between Hanseatic cities, or
to know how the city of Rouen built its cathedral. If a scholar spends
his life in studying these questions, his works remain unknown, and
parliamentary histories--that is to say, the defective ones, as they
only treat of one side of social life--multiply;