nursing are the only occupations of women that are mentioned. Here we
merely state that it naturally required a constantly increasing tax to
cover all these expenses.
Considerable items of expenditure were to be found under the heads,
'Statistics,' 'Warehouses,' and 'Bank'; but the relative cost of these
branches of the executive--notwithstanding their great absolute
growth--fell so rapidly in comparison with the taxable income, that in a
few years it had sunk to a minimal percentage of the total expenditure.
On the other hand, the departments of justice, police, military, and
finance, which in other countries swallow up nine-tenths of the total
budget, cost nothing in Freeland. We had no judges, no police organisation,
our tax flowed in spontaneously, and soldiers we knew not. Yet there was no
theft, no robbery, no murders among us; the payment of the tax was never in
arrears; and, as will be shown later on, we were by no means defenceless.
Our stores of weapons and ammunition, as well as our subsidies to the
warlike Masai, might be reckoned as a surrogate for a military budget. As
to the lack of a magistracy, we were such arrant barbarians that we did not
even consider a civil or a criminal code necessary, nor did we at that time
possess a written constitution. The committee, still in possession of the
absolute authority committed to it at the Hague, contented itself with
laying all its measures before public meetings and asking for the assent of
the members, which was unanimously given. For the settlement of
misunderstandings that might arise among the members, arbitrators were
chosen--at the recommendation of the committee--who should individually and
orally, to the best of their knowledge, give their judgment, and from them
appeal was allowed to the Board of Arbitrators; but they had as good as
nothing to do. Against vices and their dangerous results to the community,
we did not exercise any right of _punishment_, but only a right of
_protection_; and we esteemed _reformation_ the best and most effectual
means of protection. Since men with a normal mental and moral character, in
a community in which all the just interests of every member are equally
recognised, cannot possibly come into violent collision with the rights of
others, we considered casual criminals as mentally or morally diseased
persons, whose treatment it was the business of the community to provide
for. They were therefore, in proportion to their dangerousness to the
community, placed under surveillance or in custody, and subjected to
suitable treatment as long as seemed, in the judgment of competent
professional men, advisable in the interest of the public safety.
Professional men in the above sense, however, were not the justices of the
peace, who merely had to decide _whether_ the accused individual should
undergo the reforming treatment, but medical men specially chosen for this
purpose. The man who was under surveillance or in custody had the right of
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