t up all
night on New Year's Eve. The State, like the householder, is sane if
it can treat such exceptions as exceptions. Such desperate remedies
may not even be right; but such remedies are endurable as long as they
are admittedly desperate. Such cases, of course, are the communism of
food in a besieged city; the official disavowal of an arrested spy;
the subjection of a patch of civil life to martial law; the cutting of
communication in a plague; or that deepest degradation of the
commonwealth, the use of national soldiers not against foreign
soldiers, but against their own brethren in revolt. Of these
exceptions some are right and some wrong; but all are right in so far
as they are taken as exceptions. The modern world is insane, not so
much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the
normal.

We see this in the vague extension of punishments like imprisonment;
often the very reformers who admit that prison is bad for people
propose to reform them by a little more of it. We see it in panic
legislation like that after the White Slave scare, when the torture of
flogging was revived for all sorts of ill defined and vague and
variegated types of men. Our fathers were never so mad, even when they
were torturers. They stretched the man out on the rack. They did not
stretch the rack out, as we are doing. When men went witch-burning
they may have seen witches everywhere--because their minds were fixed
on witchcraft. But they did not see things to burn everywhere, because
their minds were unfixed. While tying some very unpopular witch to the
stake, with the firm conviction that she was a spiritual tyranny and
pestilence, they did not say to each other, "A little burning is what
my Aunt Susan wants, to cure her of back-biting," or "Some of these
faggots would do your Cousin James good, and teach him to play with
poor girls' affections."

Now the name of all this is Anarchy. It not only does not know what it
wants, but it does not even know what it hates. It multiplies
excessively in the more American sort of English newspapers. When this
new sort of New Englander burns a witch the whole prairie catches
fire. These people have not the decision and detachment of the
doctrinal ages. They cannot do a monstrous action and still see it is
monstrous. Wherever they make a stride they make a rut. They cannot
stop their own thoughts, though their thoughts are pouring into the
pit.

A final instance, which can be