Baltimore Evening Sun (8 January 1913): 6.

Rising to a question of personal privilege, and wearing a sweet smile of conscious rectitude, I desire to say that I have granted a reprieve of 10 days to that suffragette who lately sent me a scurrilous letter.

Scaling yesterday the dazzling peaks of jurisprudence, breathing the rarified air and drinking in the hot sunlight of the sublime science, we saw why it is that society is justified in passing laws forbidding John Smith to murder William Brown, to wit: (a) because William objects to being murdered, and (b) because the death of William would cost us a useful shoemaker. or author, or bartender.

In the same way, there is excuse, if not always clear justification, for passing laws forbidding various other so-called crimes. In return for William’s obedience and industry, society agrees to protect him against more than one of the sportive enterprises of John. For instance, burglary. For instance, highway robbery. For instance, assault and battery. For instance, arson. William objects to all of these things when performed upon his own person and property, and we sustain his objection. Sometimes we do so because we don’t want to see his efficiency decreased, or its just rewards taken from him, and sometimes we do so merely because he asks it. It does not appreciably decrease his value as a shoemaker or author or bartender to have his nose pulled or his eye blacked, but nevertheless he objects to it so violently, and makes such a cacophonous din objecting, that we go to his aid in common humanity and for the sake of peace.

So far the law is justified in reason. No sane man argues that there should be free trade in murder. Murder in itself, true enough, is not forbidden by the moral code of Christendom, but if you want to slay morally you must first go through a somewhat elaborate process of initiation rigorously managed by the State. That is to say, you must either enlist in the army, or study medicine, or have yourself elected Sheriff. And even after you have done one or another of these things you must slay only such persons as have been duly chosen for the sacrifice by society. A soldier who kills his own colonel is hanged just as certainly as a civilian would be for the same offense. A sheriff must do his killing at a certain time and in a certain fixed manner, or take the consequences. And a physician must confine his homicidal activities to his own patients and must observe an elaborate ettquette in killing them. If he neglects that etiquette, or starts killing persons miscellaneously, he is himself murdered for his fawks pass.

Such is law, that affecting branch of knowledge. Its purpose, to put it briefly, is to prevent one man invading the clear rights of any other man, and particularly his rights to his life, his liberty, his property and a sound hide. The essential thing about a tort--i. e., an invasion of such a right--is that it shall be objectionable to the victim. If you take my property with my free and intelligent consent, it is no crime. If you take my liberty with my free consent--for example, by shipping me on an ocean vessel, or by admitting me to a cloistered order, or by confining me to a sanatorium--it is no crime. Even if you take my life with my consent--for example, by selling me local option whisky, or by taking me for a ride in an airship, or by hauling out my liver in mistake for my vermiform appendix--it is usually considered no crime.

But the law, growing drunk with power, and being inspired and influenced, in the main, by men who are not only rogues, but also asses, has shown a constant tendency to exceed those just bounds. That is to say, it has sought to interfere between persons who are agreed and at peace, and what is worse, it has sought to interfere with the private acts of the solo individual. The result, in ancient days, was a body of so-called sumptuary legislation, prescribing the garb that a citizen should wear and the victuals he should eat at dinner. And in our own day we have a corresponding body of so-called moral legislation, the aim and purport of which is to make each citizen live, not as he likes to live and wants to live, but as some self-elected posse of specialists in conduct think that he ought to live.

Is there any obligation upon a free citizen to obey such laws? In part, yes. In part, no. It is his duty to obey them, I believe, whenever they carry cruel and excessive punishments, certain to be inflicted, and particularly whenever those punishments are visited, by an emotional process surviving from savagery, upon the violator’s family as well as upon himself. But beyond this point the citizen’s duty is clearly in the other direction. That is to say, he is bound to resist such laws to the full extent of his courage and ingenuity, so long as the chances of success remain in his favor. He is not bound to resist them when the cards are stacked against him, but he is bound to do so when the game is fair. And even in the former case, it is his manifest duty to protest against the unfairness, and to obliterate it by any means that come to hand, even including equal unfairness.

In brief, the decent citizen has to protect himself against legislative snouting and tyranny, for it is only by protecting himself that he can protect civilization. The law, when it falls into the hands of moral maniacs, becomes itself a desperate criminal. It seeks to interfere intolerably between peaceful citizens; worse still, it seeks to punish the individual for acts that invade no man’s liberty, and offer no offense to the public peace, and are in themselves wholly harmless. In brief, it essays proceedings as unjustifiable, as obnoxious and as dangerous to civilized security as arson, mayhem or robbery on the highway, and that citizen who sits still and lets it perform is a citizen who neglects supinely the highest duty of his estate.

There is always, of course, a specious excuse for such indecent and despotic interferences. It is argued, for instance, that the mere exercise of liberty by one man is dangerous to the liberty of other men. Thus the so-called Lord’s Day Alliance denounces the persons who drink a few bottles of beer at Back River on Sundays on the ground that their act invades the rights of certain bilious old maids at Towson and Catonsville. And thus the Anti-Saloon League denounces the moderate use of alcohol by sane and intelligent men on the ground that hogs and numbskulls use it to excess. But such arguments all go to pieces on reasonable inspection. They are grounded upon a fallacy so absurd that a mere statement of it must be sufficient to dispose of it. If I keep my health and my job for two or three days longer, I shall try to tell you just what that fallacy is.