Violence as a phenomenon is not presented to us chiefly in our own societies. Where we recognise its sway to be most general and most rigorous, is in Nature herself, and all [p99] life outside human communities. The life of the jungle, the life of the prairie, the life of the ocean, in all these departments of life, Violence reigns supreme. Indeed we are so familiar with its existence there that we should be astonished if we failed to find it. We open the stomach of a shot leopard and we find in it the mangled remains of some other animal or bird. When we kill a bird and inspect its viscera, we discover the remains of insects, small quadrupeds, or smaller birds. Life outside human societies is little less than a process of preying and mutual suppression and incorporation. Every species behaves as if it alone had the right to prevail, and it endeavours by every means in its power--self-preservation, propagation, rapine and parisitism--to make its own kind predominate on earth. We ourselves are guilty of violence towards the lower animals, and there are few people who, upon dying a sudden death, would not betray this violence by the contents of their stomachs or intestines. Violence, therefore, constitutes no novelty to the human being. He knows of it in Nature and he knows he is guilty of it towards those lower animals which he consumes as food. At a first glance then it would appear that violence of a sort is an essential factor in all life, even in human life. The kind of violence, however, that the Socialist and Communist wish to eliminate from human society is not the violence which men perpetrate against the lower animals; though there are certainly some Socialists who would wish to eliminate that also; but chiefly the violence between man and man, [p100] man and woman, adult and child, or child and child: violence by means of which some man, woman, or child is made the instrument or the tool or the chattel of some other man, woman, or child. This you may protest is what all societies since Moses, and even before him, have tried their utmost to suppress. To some extent this is true. Murder and assault have been prohibited by most moral codes. The kind of violence, however, that the Socialist and Communist wish to suppress is the violence that is at present tolerated by law, that receives its sanction from society at large, and that men now perpetrate with clean consciences. How does this violence chiefly arise?