»since there is no rich class to breed
enemies against the state by means of the injustice of the state?«
    Said I: »I thought that I understood from something that fell from you a
little while ago that you had abolished civil law. Is that so, literally?«
    »It abolished itself, my friend,« said he. »As I said before, the civil
law-courts were upheld for the defence of private property; for nobody ever
pretended that it was possible to make people act fairly to each other by means
of brute force. Well, private property being abolished, all the laws and all the
legal crimes which it had manufactured of course came to an end. Thou shalt not
steal, had to be translated into, Thou shalt work in order to live happily. Is
there any need to enforce that commandment by violence?«
    »Well,« said I, »that is understood, and I agree with it; but how about the
crimes of violence? would not their occurrence (and you admit that they occur)
make criminal law necessary?«
    Said he: »In your sense of the word, we have no criminal law either. Let us
look at the matter closer, and see whence crimes of violence spring. By far the
greater part of these in past days were the result of the laws of private
property, which forbade the satisfaction of their natural desires to all but a
privileged few, and of the general visible coercion which came of those laws.
All that cause of violent crime is gone. Again, many violent acts came from the
artificial perversion of the sexual passions, which caused overweening jealousy
and the like miseries. Now, when you look carefully into these, you will find
that what lay at the bottom of them was mostly the idea (a law- idea) of the
woman being the property of the man, whether he were husband, father, brother,
or what not. That idea has of course vanished with private property, as well as
certain follies about the ruin of women for following their natural desires in
an illegal way, which of course was a convention caused by the laws of private
property.
    Another cognate cause of crimes of violence was the family tyranny, which
was the subject of so many novels and stories of the past, and which once more
was the result of private property. Of course that is all ended, since families
are held together by no bond of coercion, legal or social, but by mutual liking
and affection, and everybody is free to come or go as he or