"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 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-made 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.