Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

From his prison memoirs, The Subterranean Brotherhood, by Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel.

No man is qualified to exercise absolute power; no man is justified in accepting it; but we bestow it upon every chance political appointee, and what he does with it puts us to shame, whether or not we can as yet realize it.

The peril of Armageddon lies in the fact that evil never fights fair, but ever masks itself in the armor of good. Not only so, but good may be changed into evil by hasty and misdirected application, and do more harm – because unsuspected – than premeditated evil itself. Public endowment of chosen persons with power is good and necessary in our form of civilization, and the chosen ones may accept it in good faith. But in a community where everybody has business of his own to mind, and is put to it so to conduct it as to keep off the poor rates, deputed powers, designed to be limited, always tend to become absolute. It is heady wine, too, and intoxicates those who partake of it. And it is only a seeming paradox that absolute and irresponsible power is more apt to develop in a democracy than under any other form of human association. Holders of it, moreover, instead of fighting for supremacy among themselves, and thus annulling their own mischievousness, as would at a first glance seem likely, soon learn the expediency of agreeing together; each keeps to his own area of despotism, cooperating, not interfering with the rest. But the system inevitably takes the form of rings within rings, each interior one possessing progressively superior dominion. At last we come to a central and small group of men who are truly absolute, and are supported and defended in their stronghold by the self-interested loyalty of the rest. But they do not proclaim their supremacy; on the contrary, they hide it under clever interpretations of law, and, at need, by securing the enactment of other laws fitted to the exigency of the occasion. If there is remonstrance or revolt among their subjects, they subdue it partly by pointing out that it is the law, and not themselves, that is responsible; and partly by employing other legal forms to put down the resistance. You cannot catch them; they vanish under your grasp as principles, not men. Their voice is never heard saying, “I will!” but always, “The law requires.” And these autocrats – this oligarchy – are only men like ourselves, with like passions, limitations and sinful inheritance. They were not born to the purple – they just happened to get to it. But being possessed of it – and apart of course from any crude and obvious malfeasance in office – they cannot be “legally” dislodged; and if they step aside, it is only to let alter egos take their place. The King of England – the Emperor of Germany – can be deposed by the people, and his head cut off; but the free and independent -but law-abiding – citizens of the United States cannot throw off this subtle tyranny, because it is identified with legal provisions which we have insensibly allowed to creep into the inmost and most personal fibers of our lives. As for modifying or abolishing the law itself – that would be anarchy!