If we can wander, without fear, not only in the streets of Paris,
which bristle with police, but especially in rustic walks where you
rarely meet passers by, is it to the police that we owe this security?
or rather to the absence of people who care to rob or murder us? I am
evidently not speaking of the one who carries millions about him. That
one-a recent trial tells us-is soon robbed, by preference in places
where there are as many policemen as lamp posts. No, I speak of the man
who fears for his life and not for his purse filled with ill-gotten
sovereigns. Are his fears real?
Besides, has not experience demonstrated quite recently that Jack the
Ripper performed hie exploits under the eye of the London police-a most
active force-and that he only left off killing when the population of
Whitechapel itself began to give chase to him?
And in our every-day relations with our fellow-citizens, do you think
that it is really judges, gaolers, and police that hinder anti-social
acts from multiplying? The judge, ever ferocious, because he is a maniac
of law, the accuser, the informer, the police spy, all those
interlopers that live from hand to mouth around the Law Courts, do they
not scatter demoralization far and wide into society? Read the trials,
glance behind the scenes, push your analysis further than the exterior
facade of law courts, and you will come out sickened.
Have not prisons-which kill all will and force of character in man,
which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any
other spot of the globe-always been universities of crime? Is not the
court of a tribunal a school of ferocity? And so on.
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