Practically the whole army of officials, with its wastefulness, its extravagance and its endless peculation, is supported and kept in worse than idleness for the purpose of ruling men through violence and force. Even in so-called democracies the civil law, with its ponderous and costly machinery, serves the same purpose as in monarchical states. It is easy to understand that when the decrees of a ruler are absolute it can matter little whether these decrees are issued to an army and carried out by force of the bayonet and gun, or whether they are crystallized into law and carried out by the orders of courts to be enforced by consigning troublesome and rebellious subjects to the prison or the block. In either event the will of the sovereign is law, and the law is made for the benefit of the ruler, not the ruled. In democracies, the form is somewhat changed, but the results are not unlike. Every democracy begins with a great mass of regulations inherited from the autocratic powers that have gone before. These laws and customs are originally the same decrees that have gone forth from the absolute rulers of the earth, and every change in forms and institutions is based upon the old notions of property and rights that were made to serve the ruler and enslave the world. Then, too, authority has the same effect on human nature whether in an absolute monarchy or a democracy, and the tendency of authority is ever to enlarge its bounds and to encroach upon the natural rights of those who have no power to protect themselves. The possession of authority and arbitrary power ever tends to tyranny, and when autocratic orders may be enforced by violence, liberty and life depend upon sufferance alone. A close community of interest naturally springs up between those circumstanced alike. The man who possesses one sort of power, as, for instance, political privilege, is very friendly to the class who possess another sort, as, for instance, wealth, and this community of interest naturally and invariably arrays all the privileged classes against the weak. The laws and regulations of a democracy tend no more to equality than those of a monarchy. Under a democratic government inequality of possession, of opportunity, of power, is quite as great as under absolute monarchies. Given the right to use force of man over man and the strongest force will succeed. You may forbid it in one direction, it will but find a new method to accomplish the same result, like the pent-up torrent that will find its outlet, in however circuitous a route it is obliged to move. The legislators who make laws come either from the ruling class or draw their honors, rewards, and emoluments from this class; and the statutes of the most democratic state are not unlike the dictates of the absolute monarch, and the decrees of both alike may be enforced by all the power and violence of the state. But laws do not execute themselves, and every official appointed or self-chosen to