Government justifies its official executioner, and partly because
they would themselves be assassinated if they betrayed him:
another method learnt from the official government. Given a
tribunal, employing a slayer who has no personal quarrel with the
slain; and there is clearly no moral difference between official
and unofficial killing.

In short, all men are anarchists with regard to laws which are
against their consciences, either in the preamble or in the
penalty. In London our worst anarchists are the magistrates,
because many of them are so old and ignorant that when they are
called upon to administer any law that is based on ideas or
knowledge less than half a century old, they disagree with it,
and being mere ordinary homebred private Englishmen without any
respect for law in the abstract, naively set the example of
violating it. In this instance the man lags behind the law; but
when the law lags behind the man, he becomes equally an
anarchist. When some huge change in social conditions, such as
the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, throws our legal and industrial institutions out
of date, Anarchism becomes almost a religion. The whole force of
the most energetic geniuses of the time in philosophy, economics,
and art, concentrates itself on demonstrations and reminders that
morality and law are only conventions, fallible and continually
obsolescing. Tragedies in which the heroes are bandits, and
comedies in which law-abiding and conventionally moral folk are
compelled to satirize themselves by outraging the conscience of
the spectators every time they do their duty, appear
simultaneously with economic treatises entitled "What is
Property? Theft!" and with histories of "The Conflict between