Dora Marsden and The Egoist: "Our War Is With Words"

Published the ¡stand i 5th of each month. The egoist AN INDIVIDUALIST REVIEW. Formerly the NEW FREEWOMAN. No. Vol. I. THURSDAY, JANUARY ist, 1914. Sixpence. ir RICHARD ALDINOTON. gdttors : i LEONARD A. COMPTO N-RICKETT. Edster â– DORA MARSDEN. B.A. Liberty, Law, and Democ- i racy. Views and Comments. 3 France To-Day : A Group of 6 Thinkers. By Edgar A. Mowrer. The Cubist Room. By Wynd- 8 ham Lewis. CONTENTS. Petulance, By Ferrex oÃ-. F err ex. Books, Drawings, & Papers. By Richard Aldington Serial Story.— The Horses of Diomedhs. By Remy de Gourmont. (Ch. 18). The Juggler Poems. By F. S. Flint. On Interférence with the Environment. By Steven T. Byington. Women Who Did and Who Do Yet By G W. Violet Hunt. By Richard Aldington. Le Theatre du Vieux Colombier . By H. S. C. Correspondence. Paus IS LIBERTY, LAW, AND DEMOCRACY. THE concepts with which one age will picoccupy itself, and ¡n which it will ¡mest Us surplus emotional heat ha\e shown themselves to be so essential)} casual as to be now a matter for mirth rather than wonder with its successors. The subject of an age's Master Passion round which its interest rages will be anything accidental and contingent which will sene : stand the heat, that is, and last out until enthusiasm tires The amount of genuine enthusiasm winch Athanasius, Arm«, and their followers were able to cull from the numci ical pioblems in the concept of the Trinity was—incredible though it may seem—equal to that which this age culls from the figures of the football scorch lhe Crusadeis who were so concerned about the possession of the Tomb of Christ looked forward to finding as much diversion and profit as a Home Ruler expects to get from the possession of a Parliament on Dublin Green. It is only from a distance that these dead dogs look so determinedly dead Nearer to, one would sw ear the body had stirred ; and w e who are so near to an age when lhe mere mention of " Universal Law " would produce lyrical intoxication, " All's love, All's law," a very swoon of security, do not purpose here to break in upon the belated obsequies of that dead or dying concept. As the sport of the ribald and the mockers " Universal law " is the perquisite of the youth of 1950, not of 1915. And we will not here trespass on the future The reference in the title of this article ¡s limited to statutory law, a prosaic and earth-bound branch which not even Apollo himself could have strung to the lyrical note, and it must be allowed that however excellent a run " Universal Law" as a symbol and idealised concept mai h «ι ν ν been accorded b> a genei .itiuu now settled in obcüj , its society representative , so to speak, with uhu.li we .tre heic concerned, has nc\ei been held in am too high esteem The macase in Us bulk .nul scope of application, which oddlv enough, grows iapidh alongside something called the " Libertj of the people"' ha\e ptoved m.itK'i s fo> complexity cv on w hen thej have not created Indignation and alarm. \ isions of those not the least penetrating, h.ut scci m the Meady advance of the statutoiv law a devastating plague m which the parchment of the politicias has seemed as capable of devouring the spirit of the people as a swarm of locusts devouung green grass Pioudhon writing in 1850 on the subject sajs " Laws and ordinances fall like hail on the poor populace After a while the political soil will be covered with a la}er of paper, and all the geologists will have to do will be to list it, under the name of papyraceous formatwn, among the epochs of the earth's historj The Convention, in three years one month and four days, issued eleven thousand six hundred lav. s and deciees, the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies had pioduced hardly less; the empire and the latei governments have wrought as indusluously At piesent the 'Bulletin des Lois' contains, they say, more than fifty thousand, if our representatives did their duty this...