r lodged in the hands of those who govern . . . the stakes for which men played would be so terribly great that they would shrink from no means to keep power out of the hands of their opponents” (The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State).
With similar prescience, Spencer wrote in 1891: “The fanatical adherents of a social theory are capable of taking any measures, no matter how extreme, for carrying out their views: holding, like the merciless priesthoods of past times, that the end justifies the means. And when a general socialistic organization has been established, the vast, ramified, and consolidated body of those who direct its activities, using without check whatever coercion seems to them needful . . . [will exercise] a tyranny more gigantic and more terrible than any which the world has seen” (The Man versus the State).
It is a historic tragedy that all these warnings fell on deaf ears. Will they be heeded by those pressing for world government in the 21st century?