No Treason, no. 1 - Lysander Spooner - Mises Daily

No Treason, no. 1 - Lysander Spooner - Mises Daily

1. That two men have no more natural right to exercise any kind of authority over one than one has to exercise the same authority over two. A man's natural rights are his own against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime whether committed by one man or by millions; whether committed by one man calling himself a robber (or by any other name indicating his true character) or by millions calling themselves a government.

2. It would be absurd for the most numerous party to talk of establishing a government over the less numerous party, unless the former were also the strongest as well as the most numerous: for it is not to be supposed that the strongest party would ever submit to the rule of the weaker party, merely because the latter were the most numerous.

   And as matter of fact, it is perhaps never that governments are established by the most numerous party. They are usually, if not always, established by the less numerous party — their superior strength consisting in their superior wealth, intelligence, and ability to act in concert.

3. Our Constitution does not profess to have been established simply by the majority, but by "the people" — the minority as much as the majority.

4. If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation — for they were in a small minority as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them.

5. Majorities, as such, afford no guarantees for justice. They are men of the same nature as minorities. They have the same passions for fame, power, and money as minorities and are liable and likely to be equally — perhaps more than equally, because more boldly — rapacious, tyrannical, and unprincipled, if entrusted with power.

   There is no more reason, then, why a man should either sustain or submit to the rule of a majority than of a minority. Majorities and minorities cannot rightfully be taken at all into account in deciding questions of justice. And all talk about them in matters of government is mere absurdity.

   Men are dunces for uniting to sustain any government or any laws except those in which they are all agreed. And nothing but force and fraud compel men to sustain any other. To say that majorities, as such, have a right to rule minorities, is equivalent to saying that minorities have, and ought to have, no rights except such as majorities please to allow them.

6. It is not improbable that many or most of the worst of governments — although established by force, and by a few, in the first place — come, in time, to be supported by a majority. But if they do, this majority is composed in large part of the most ignorant, superstitious, timid, dependent, servile, and corrupt portions of the people; of those who have been overawed by the power, intelligence, wealth, and arrogance; of those who have been deceived by the frauds; and of those who have been corrupted by the inducements of the few who really constitute the government.

   Such majorities, very likely, could be found in half, perhaps in nine-tenths, of all the countries on the globe. What do they prove? Nothing but the tyranny and corruption of the very governments that have reduced such large portions of the people to their present ignorance, servility, degradation, and corruption — an ignorance, servility, degradation, and corruption that are best illustrated in the simple fact that they do sustain the governments that have so oppressed, degraded, and corrupted them.

   They do nothing toward proving that the governments themselves are legitimate, or that they ought to be sustained, or even endured, by those who understand their true character. The mere fact, therefore, that a government chances to be sustained by a majority, of itself proves nothing that is necessary to be proved in order to know whether such government should be sustained or not.

7. The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters and which of them slaves: a contest, that — however bloody — can never, in the nature of things, be finally closed so long as man refuses to be a slave.