What is Government For?

Tired of the inefficiency of absolute monarchy and the tax burden for supporting useless and effete aristocrats, ignorant priests, and a bungling civil service, the French middle classes declared their representatives a parliament. They went on, supported by the urban mob to overthrow the monarchy, declare a republic and to promulgate a document of human rights.

Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were a heady mixture of ideas. These escaped, as from a Pandora’s box that, once opened, could not be closed again. The French had let loose, on an astonished Europe, a host of thoughts which gave rise to revolutions, to counter-revolutions and to wars on a grand scale. The idea of Freedom gave rise to some of the worst tyrannies of the modern era. The idea of equality has tended to force everyone down to the cultural level of garden gnomes and the idea of brotherly kindness has led to a century of war and cruelty, of repression and fear and of betrayal of all human feelings on a grand scale.

Intoxicated with the idea of freedom and the, illusion of the unity of the nation, they decided that all must be free, and set about putting the idea into effect. People who did not want to be “free” were judged, before revolutionary tribunals, as “aristocrats” and were strung up to the lampposts or carted off to public execution by means of the curious machine invented by the ingenious Dr. Guillotine.

Of course to be “free” actually meant to support the republic, enthusiastically singing the Marseillaise and cheering as the blade of the guillotine fell on another aristocratic neck. To show less than wild support for these “patriotic” activities as to be labeled a traitor and an aristocrat, with painful and, usually terminal, results. Meanwhile revolutionary armies carried their brand of freedom, mostly death, rape and pillage across the rest of the continent.

After a few years of disorder, a succession of increasingly radical and extremist governments, Napoleon, with a “whiff of grapeshot, made himself Emperor and led France on the road of war against every other major state in Europe and beyond. There followed wars, nationalistic movements and revolutions and other disorders on a smaller scale all over Europe, also involving its overseas possessions.

Just over a hundred years after the allied forces of Europe disposed of the French emperor, another violent upsurge of unrest led to similar but worse changes in Russia. The ineffectual and decadent monarchy there, bogged down by its corrupt and inefficient civil service, collapsed under the additional strains imposed upon it by the First World War. There was massive disillusionment and discontent among the ranks of its peasant soldiers and the vast numbers who had flocked to the cities for work in the factories. People voted with their feet. Soldiers simply walked off home, some kept their guns, some, depending on their temperament, threw them away. Officers, who tried to stop the mass walk out from the war, were simply killed or, if they were sensible, joined their troops.