The Humanisphere

by Brian Stableford

  I was content enough, if not with the institutions—or, rather, the lack of them—at least with the man who had just give proof of justice, and I thought that there might be some proof in the aphorism that was once cited by such various parties, that the poorest institutions are viable, when applied by certain individuals. I nevertheless said to Graymalkin that in the matter of men, those whom chance had just brought together in the audience had habits and promptitudes as singular as they were unfortunate. He replied with simplicity that all lawsuits terminated like mine, with insults addressed to the judge, a general brawl and the use of a revolver.

  “It’s for that reason,” he added, “that we elect as judges men who are energetic, and above all vigorous. That renders the intervention of gendarmes unnecessary.”

  “They would not, however, be out of place at those solemnities.”

  “Their presence would afflict people’s noble and proud sentiments of independence.”

  “I’d prefer their spines to be afflicted. So judges are elected here?”

  “In this great country,” he replied, proudly, “all administrative functions, military or judicial, are up for election, and revocable from the first day.”

  “I understand! That’s why the tribunal is surrounded by such high consideration. Such an origin, combined with that guarantee of duration, would necessarily lead to that.”

  “The electors designate to judge them the man in whom they have the most confidence. It’s great, great.”

  “And those who haven’t voted for him despise or fear him, and mistrust his verdicts. And they aren’t mistaken, for what he has most in view when rendering them is his reelection; then, as a local man, he’s necessarily subject to a thousand immediate influences. Well, that’s insane; it’s necessary that a judge not be appointed by those he’ll be called upon to judge; it’s necessary that he be appointed by the entire people—which is to say, by the delegation of the people, by the power; then he has independence and authority; he isn’t chosen with a view to a paltry and temporary objective, under the influence of an impression of variable rationality. A judge is a social instrument who collaborates in safeguarding one of the great social interest; the locality of a case and his humor ought to be irrelevant; it is a matter of justice…but let’s pass on. Anyone can be elected? No preliminary studies, or examinations? It’s the same as in medicine, isn’t it?”

  “All functions are free.” As he spoke those words he handed Minos a wallet; it contained fifty thousand francs that he had promised him if he pronounced in my favor.

  “And the functionaries are paid liberally, from what I see?” I replied.

  “Oh,” said Graymalkin, “you disapprove of my recompensing that worthy magistrate! Justice is gratuitous, and, and it follows that it receives no salary; would it be just for him to work for nothing?”

  “Why isn’t he paid?”

  “What! Why? For the same reason that I, who never go to church, ought not to pay taxes to build or maintain that church; those expenses are incumbent on the faithful alone. It’s the same for justice; I, who never bring lawsuits, ought not to pay contributions to nourish those who judge them. It’s up to the plaintiff to maintain the magistrate. That’s evident, evident.”

  “Yes. Now let’s generalize: only merchants ought to maintain the navy that protects them; only travelers ought to subsidize the bridges and highways, etc. It’s the destruction of all social bonds; are the French juxtaposed, or a community? And that overt venality is tolerated?

  “It’s not venality. He renders his judgment in the independence of his soul, and the person who has triumphed compensates him for his labor. Now, in hard cash, as you, this suit might have caused you to lose a hundred thousand francs thanks to him, you only lost fifty. In any case, I was free not to promise him anything...”

  “And to lose. But what do the poor do?”

  “Bah! The poor, the poor! They’re wretches.”

  “Certainly. Well, to your magistracy, who can be bought by money or the promise of a vote, I prefer qualified lawyers, paid from the budget and unmovable. Alas, in my time, their services were poorly recompensed; I would have liked the most junior, in the era of which I speak, to have an annual income of twelve thousand francs. But people were enraged then against ‘high salaries’—which are, however, a guarantee of incorruptibility. That was the opinion in England in 1868, and magistrates whose functions were approximately comparable to President of the Imperial Court of the Seine and President of the Civil Tribunal of the Seine had salaries of 200,000 francs and 175,000 francs; Presidents de Chambre received 125,000 francs. It’s true that our magistrates had no need to seek elsewhere than in the elevation and dignity of their sentiments and principles a support against temptation; they were courageous, disinterested and proud.”

  Chapter X

  “Now,” said Graymalkin, “let’s go to the Slapping Box.”

  That name made me smile. “What’s the Slapping Box?”

  “It’s what you would call the Chambre des Députés.”

  “By the way, how are you governed here?”

  “We aren’t; we govern ourselves.”

  “Bravo! Are you governed well? What is the Constitution?”

  “It has a grandiose simplicity. The people have absolute sovereignty. They pass all the laws themselves, by the majority of universal suffrage; all administrative measures are taken and all functionaries are appointed in the same fashion. The vote takes place without scrutiny, in the public square, by acclamation; it is not necessarily preceded by a discussion, but only by the reading of the motion that is the object of the vote. That’s the whole Constitution. I can’t be any more precise about the dispositions, because outside of those bases, which are a matter of fact and usage, and not written, everything is left to Liberty. Because of those very bases, everything floats incessantly under its vivifying breath; only they are fixed; the rest changes constantly; one never knows what the law will be tomorrow, who will be a Maire or judge in twenty-four hours. All reforms take place suddenly, under the immediate impression of sentiments, needs and the crisis of the moment. I must say, however, that in general, before reforms pass into the domain of accomplished facts, they’re submitted to a certain elaboration in the clubs, which absorb a good part of the life of our fellow citizens.”

  “The clubs take the place of the Conseil d’État?”

  “Precisely. Alongside those essential principles there are others that have been maintained for quite a long time. The most important are these:

  “1. Only towns, especially large cities, enjoy electoral rights; small villages and rural areas are deemed blind and incapable.

  “2. In towns, the votes of workers count double.

  “Now, there is still a Chambre, two ministers and a Head of State; but the Chambre doesn’t have a very regular existence; it’s only when it pleases the people to appoint delegates charged with resolving a question that the assembly is constituted. The Ministers, elected by the people, are the Minister of Finance, and the Minister of the Army and Navy, a simple guardian of State military materiel, since, thank God, we do not have in times of peace a single soldier under arms, nor a single ship at sea.

  “As for the Head of State, his only functions consist of rendering himself, in case of war, to the army, to preside over the council of generals and execute its decisions. Outside of that, he’s a completely unnecessary mechanism. We keep him anyway—it’s the only ancient institution we’ve respected—out of recognition for the great dynasty of which he’s the offspring. Oddly enough, we, who have expelled and harassed intensively everything that smacks of sentiment, the cult of the past, etc., everything that isn’t utilitarian, persistently maintain that family at our head. We even do insane things for them, such as allowing them a civil list; we testify ridiculous regards to our leader, like making way for him in the street and even nodding our heads to him. To tell the truth, these Napoléons—they’re also the only ones who have a name instead of a
number—are worthy fellows; thus, Napoléon VII spends his life, as an individual of course, since he hasn’t even the shadow of power, rendering services to individuals; his house is an advice bureau—and, take my word for it, he gives good advice, and assistance. Outside of that, Napoléon isn’t very utilitarian. He thinks, he reads old books, he studies—but no one’s perfect!”

  “These Napoléons might save you once again.”

  “Save? From what?”

  “From the abject state in which…never mind.”

  “I’ll continue my explanation. As regards administration, every city nominates al the functionaries, tax collectors, judges and policemen for its region, when it pleases them to have any. There are no more départements. The municipalities are as free as individuals—even a little too free, and taxes aren’t always forwarded very well, because this is what happens: the collector puts in his pocket all that he can abstract from State funds, and then, with the greater part of what remains, he buys the silence of those who might denounce him—often, the elected individual is only the representative of a group of individuals who have banded together to get him in and who share in the benefits of the election. He buys the judge if he is pursued; and if he’s convicted, there’s no restitution; that would be entirely opposed to the ideas of the thousand individuals ambitions to replace the concessionary and do as he does.

  “Furthermore, it often happens that a city refuses to pay the tax; in that case, as the country is not represented by a central power possessed of any force, the dispute always concludes with a transaction that defrauds the State of a substantial fraction of its due. It has even become a habit among the cities to provoke these conflicts in order to arrive at that solution. Thus, the idea was raised some time ago of investing the leader with the power to compel the communes that don’t pay, but it would be necessary for that to organize a national public force, because one can’t in this instance have recourse to the municipal militias. Anyway, we shall see.

  “In consequence, although we pay enormous taxes, because of the financial organization I’ve just described, the State only requires very little, given that it undertakes very little. It doesn’t pay any clergy, magistrates, diplomats, consuls, functionaries of an administrative order, educational bodies, soldiers, artists, police agents, jailers or engineers. A few employees of the central administration of finances and a few munitions guards in the arsenals are all the personnel maintained at State expense.”

  “The National Debt must be minimal.”

  “We don’t have one at present; we’ve just gone bankrupt.”

  “How casually you tell me that.”

  “Oh, it often happens.”

  “That’s honest.”

  “There’s nothing dishonest about it; the lenders expect it and fix interest rates in consequence. Besides which, nothing forces them to believe in the engagements we contract with them: that’s Liberty.”

  “Continue your explanation.”

  “Certain innovators are of the opinion that the regime ought to be modified. They claim that ignorance is profound, that mores are lax, the public money is dilapidated, and that justice is venal. They say that it’s scandalous that the old libraries and museums have been left undefended for so long against the spiders and rats, and that the establishments of public instruction have ceased to centralize in order to diffuse intellectual enlightenment everywhere. They claim that works of common interest ought to be executed collectively by the State and not by local stumps.

  “They think it would be advantageous if we had a general police force, which, they believe, would succeed in seizing some of the innumerable malefactors who threaten our security and our lives with impunity. Finally, imbued like you with old ideas, they sustain that the only truly independent, respectable and respected functionary is one appointed and paid by the State. They demand the political equality of town and country, that of workers and other citizens, votes that are more regular and les tumultuous, less mutable laws—what do I know?

  “They sustain that we ought to have agents abroad that would keep watch on our neighbors and protect those of our nationals who have left their homeland, that armies of volunteers hastily improvised are worthless in the face of a good army fashioned over time by discipline and penetrated by a military spirit, etc.

  “These people want to turn the world upside down, for, even though they’re supported here and there by just criticisms, what they’re pursuing is, after all, nothing but the complete ruination of individual strength, liberty and justice. Only to pay for what one consumes oneself, that’s the limit within which social bonds ought to exist. Now the only things that serve everyone without exception are the Ministry of Finance and that of the Army. To govern oneself at the whim of one’s caprice, that’s liberty. To protect oneself, that’s virility. But these innovators are gaining ground every day, and one truly doesn’t know where it will end.”

  As he spoke these words, we had to stop our smashall, a lateral street that we were about to cross being obstructed by a crowd of men who were filing slowly in tightly-packed ranks. They were on foot, all holding on to one another by the flaps of their coats. On their trousers, their arms, their hats and banners that a few of them carried, these words were legible:

  HONESTY!!!

  THE ONLY NEWSPAPER WORTH READING

  400 FRANCS A YEAR

  PLUS A STUNNING BONUS

  FOR THE FIRST THOUSAND SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

  TO WIT:

  AN EVENING AND NIGHT

  AT THE GRAND HOTEL-THEATER

  Those human advertisements, who numbered five hundred, occupied the causeway for an hour and were the cause of an indescribable traffic jam, but that was the object of their procession: forcibly stopping people and making them read their announcement was the best means at the disposal of the publicists of a city whose inhabitants were too hurried to dart even a passing glance at the walls.

  That incident led me naturally to talk to Graymalkin about the press. After having defended it against the reproach of immorality that I addressed to him with regard to the singular incentive that Honesty was promising so publicly, he said: “Newspapers are as free as books; no more censorship or stamp duty, no authorization, no precaution, no stamp, no special laws for the press. It’s simple. One detail: when a newspaper commits an offence against common law, it doesn’t go before a judge, but before the jury that exists here in criminal matters.”

  “So, if you or I commit a crime against common law, we go before a judge, but if a citizen journalist commits an identical crime, he goes before a jury? That’s a privilege as iniquitous as it is absurd. Why, in any case, is it established in favor of one profession rather than another? Why to the profit of journalists rather than physicians? And you call this country a land of equality! Another reason that renders the intervention of the jury deplorable is that one set of jurors enthusiastically acquits the same accused that tomorrow’s jury would have condemned harshly, justice and its verdicts being no more then than a matter of names drawn from a hat. Go on.”

  “A newspaper is a trumpet. It has to make a noise, in order that those who have something to trumpet will employ it. It trumpets anything that one wants it to. That, in brief, is the condition of the newspaper. I’ll add that the public knows full well what it is, and doesn’t seek conviction in newspapers, but only the arguments that one political party or some merchant of hair-lotion wants to put forward. No one is deceived. In any case, it would require a strong dose of naivety to be taken in, for there isn’t a single newspaper that doesn’t pass from black to white overnight for a reasonable price. Every sheet is for sale, and when in the service of one party, it has harmed another, if that one outbids its adversary, the paper will belong to that one. The politics of newspaper proprietors consists of attacking furiously those they’re paid to attack, with the result that they serve those who pay them and have the chance of tiring the enemy and being bought more dearly by him. It’s be making those evolutions that they be
come rich, and in order to be free in their maneuvers they only sign engagements in these terms: ‘We promise to insert in exchange for the sum of…whatever might seem good to citizen 1, until the day when an offer superior to that sum causes us to do so for someone else.’ All that is perfectly legitimate; it’s the liberty of transactions.”

  “There are things that can’t be the object of a transaction; there are things that one doesn’t sell and doesn’t hire out: one’s word and one’s pen. In my time, too, there was a distant country where the press was beginning to be organized in that spirit and in those conditions.

  “Oh, I can glimpse what a newspaper is. It’s nothing but a tissue of vile flatteries. Yes, I see that. In the first column, one celebrates the high value of a simpleton, the services rendered by someone incapable, the virtues of a malefactor; in the second one treats a man of great intelligence as an idiot, one accuses a benefactor of humanity of theft. It’s true that the following day, the same rag, via the pens of the same men—who, signatures no longer being obligatory, can hide their ignominy under anonymity, and behave all the more ignobly for being personally unknown—might render justice to the good and attack vice, if the generosity of one has ceased to prevail over the munificence of the other.”

  “In order to be bought by a public that is, after all, rather indifferent, to make oneself known, to attract people who will buy their services, and in order to make sure that their advertisements and commercial and political announcements are read, the newspapers are marvelously ingenious. First of all, they have ambulant advertisements, as you have just seen, and the promise of incentives. They have incentives that will seduce you on behalf of your domicile in all forms: objects of luxury, fabrics, comestibles, etc., and which the tempter can vary in accordance with individuals. Then the paper lays siege to you from all directions, invades you, and, like it or not, one knows the title, and very nearly the contents.