‘You are not sufficiently democratic,’
answered the policeman, but you were right when you said just now that our
ordinary treatment of the poor animal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you
I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a
war upon the ignorant and the desperate.
We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the
dangerous criminals. We remember the
Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We
say that the dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher.
Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart
goes out to them. They accept the essential idea of man; they merely seek it
wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become
their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers
dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal
possession.
Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly
ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise
marriage as marriage. Murderers respect
human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in
themselves by the sacrifice of what seem to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own
as much as other peoples.
Quotation from The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, 1908
