government, at least for a time; but with the whole of Eastern Europe in danger of degenerating into warfare and chaos, the reduction of the number of infantry battalions in the British Army from 50 to 40 has not, I would think, greatly increased Europe's stability. I accept that no country can afford to spend too much on armaments; Communist Russia made this mistake, and look, their state has ceased to exist. But in the present political climate, I cannot help thinking that money is well spent, not on employing ever more social workers to understand and be supportive to the dropouts of society, nor in paying lawyers ever bigger fees to pursue a more esoteric justice in criminal trials, it is in making sure that our gun barrels are oiled and submarine hatches watertight. The first, and paramount, duty of any government is to protect the state from external enemies.
The second duty is to protect the state from internal enemies. This includes a duty on the part of government to contain evil, so far as it can. You will never eliminate crime; the best you can hope for is to contain it. But you must not lose the battle on the home front. If thuggery ever got the upper hand, it would be almost impossible in a democracy to displace it. In the rough days of the eighteenth century the standard penalty for serious crime was death. The Victorians, with enlightened imagination, substituted imprisonment for the death penalty for virtually every crime. For a time it worked well; in the nineteen thirties there was far less crime than in Victorian England; though nowadays the value of custodial sentences is increasingly called in question. However we are embarking on a similar venture of replacing custodial sentences with community sentences for many quite serious crimes. Let us hope that the venture is a success; though not everyone is sanguine about it. We are not evolving towards a better world, on the home front any more than we are on the foreign front. To think that we are, is to indulge in the myth of the perfectibility of man…