特拉华的奇特乌托邦

​​Delaware’s Odd, Beautiful, Contentious, Private Utopia

特拉华州奇特、美丽、富有争议的私人乌托邦

Arden is a suburb, an artist’s colony, and a radical political experiment.

雅顿地处郊区，是艺术家们的聚居地，是激进的政治试验场

雅顿小溪。属于雅顿工艺品商店博物馆。

They held a town pageant in Arden, Delaware, on September 5, 1910: a medieval procession with performers dressed as knights, troubadours, pages, and squires. One Ardenite, an anarchist shoemaker named George Brown, played a beggar. This annoyed some of the other players, because no such role had actually been written. But Brown decided to add it to the program anyway, so he dressed in rags, caked himself with mud, and invaded the proceedings, taunting the other characters and demanding alms from the audience. Many “onlookers needed assurance,” The Single Tax Review reported, that Brown “was only ‘part of the show.’”

1910年9月5日，一群人在特拉华州的雅顿搞了个游行：表演者们身着中世纪风格的服装，扮成骑士、游吟诗人、侍候和侍从。一位雅顿人，无政府主义的鞋匠乔治·布朗，扮演了一位乞丐。这让一些参与者不快，因为计划里并没有这样一个角色。不过布朗还是决定给节目增加这一角色，所以他穿着破布，抹上泥，冲进游行的队伍，戏弄其他的演员并向观众乞讨。《单一税评论》报说，许多观众“需要知道布朗只是秀的一部分。”

This was a pattern: Brown liked to talk, and not everyone liked to listen to him. According to the novelist Upton Sinclair, who lived at the time in a littleArden house that his neighbors had dubbed the Jungalow, Brown insisted on”discussing sex questions” at the Arden Economic Club. When the club asked him to cut it out, Brown declared his free-speech right to continue and kept talking until he’d broken up the meeting. He broke up the next meeting too, and finally, Sinclair wrote, “declared it his intention to break up all future meetings.”

这曾是雅顿常有的事：布朗喜欢交谈，但不是每个人都喜欢听他讲。小说家Upton Sinclair当时在雅顿的住所被他的邻居称作丛林小木屋，据他讲，布朗坚持在雅顿经济俱乐部里“讨论性”。当俱乐部要求他停下时，布朗声明其言论自由的权利并继续谈论，直到会议因他而暂停。他也破坏了接下来的会议，最后，Sinclair写道，“（布朗）宣布他打算破坏未来所有的会议。”

At this point some of the locals wanted to have him arrested for disturbing the peace. But that required outside help, because the town of Arden did not have a police force.

当时，一些居民希望布朗因扰乱小镇的平静而遭到逮捕。但这需要来自外界的帮助，因为雅顿小镇并没有警察。

In fact, the town of Arden didn’t have a government at all. Not, at least, in the usual sense of the word.

事实上，雅顿镇根本没有政府。至少没有通常意义上的政府。

I should back up and explain a few things. Arden’s origins go back to the Delaware Invasion of 1895 and ‘96, when the Single Tax movement tried to take over the state. TheSingle Taxers were followers of Henry George, a 19th century economist who argued that government should be financed solely by a tax on land values. No income tax, no sales tax, no tax on the improvements to a property—just one tax on land. The campaigners crisscrossed the state in armbands, knapsacks, andUnion Army uniforms, delivering street corner speeches and singing Single Tax songs (“Get the landlords off your backs/With our little Single Tax/And there’s lots of fun ahead for Delaware!”). More than a few got tossed in jail for their efforts.

我得再补充点背景知识。雅顿的起源要追溯到1895~1896年的“特拉华入侵”，当时“单一税运动”试图接管整个州。单一税运动的支持者追随19世纪一位名叫亨利·乔治的经济学家，他认为政府的收入应该只来自基于土地价值的单一税。没有所得税，没有营业税，没有增值税——只有土地税。身着臂章、背包和联邦军制服的运动的支持者发表街头演说，高唱“单一税之歌”（“从地主的压迫中解脱出来/我们的单一税将给特拉华带来一片欢愉”），把运动推向整个州。相当一部分人因此而被投入监狱。

The invasion was a flop. A disaster, really. Not only did their gubernatorial candidate get only 2.4 percent of the vote, but within a year the movement’s foes would insert a provision into the state constitution that made a George-style tax impossible.

入侵运动惨遭失败，灾难性的失败。他们的州长竞选人仅仅得到2.4%的选票，而且不到一年，运动的反对者便在州宪章中加入条款，让乔治式的税彻底成为泡影。

Unable to achieve their ideas at the ballot box, a group of Georgists decided to take another approach. In 1900 they acquired some farmland outside Wilmington, created what amounted to a community land trust, leased out plots to anyone who wanted to move in, levied rents based on the value of the unimproved land, and used the rent money to pay for public goods. In other words, they set up a private town and enacted the Single Tax program contractually. And with that double experiment in communalism and privatization, Arden was born.

无法通过选举实现理想，一群乔治主义者转而决定另谋他途。1900年，他们在威明顿市外获得了一些农田，创立了一个社区土地信托，向所有愿意搬进来的人出租地块，并以尚未开发的土地价值向他们征收租金，并用这笔钱来购买公共服务。换句话说，他们创建了一个私人小镇并以契约合意的方式践行单一税。作为社区自治和私有化双重实验的结果，雅顿诞生了。

I just calledArden a “town,” but for its first few years it was essentially a summer resort. (Or a summer camp—many of the part-time residents slept intents.) But by the end of the decade, particularly after the founders made some tweaks to the lease agreement in 1908, a year-round community had formed. It was a largely lower-middle-class crowd, with a high number of artists and craftsmen; it attracted not just Georgists but other sorts of nonconformists, from socialists to vegetarians. And anarchists, like our sexually explicit friend George Brown, who kept a cottage there with his common-law wife.

我一直称雅顿是一个“镇”，但在其最初的几年，它其实只算一个夏季的旅游地。（或者叫夏季露营地——许多兼职居民都睡帐篷。）但在十年之后，尤其是在创立者于1908年对租约做了大幅改动后，一个全年的社区终于形成了。其成员基本上为中产偏下，艺术家和手艺人占了很高比例，小镇不仅吸引了乔治主义者，还有各种非国教者，包括社会主义者和素食主义者。也包括无政府主义者，比如我们要“直抒性臆”的朋友乔治·布朗，他同他的普通法妻子住在雅顿的一个小村舍中。

The Arden folk had institutions—the trustees who set the rents had a certain degree of power, and there were regular town meetings too—but they weren’t a municipality and they didn’t have any police. So in July 1911, aggravated by the shoemaker’s antics, a group left the town limits, found the appropriate authorities, and swore out a warrant for Brown’s arrest.

雅顿居民有议事机构——设立租金的信托基金创立人有一定权利，镇上也会定期开会——但他们不是市政当局，也没有警察。所以在1911年7月，被鞋匠的闹剧刺激，一群人不顾小镇的规矩，找来合适的政府部门，给布朗签发了一张逮捕令。

Not everyone in the colony liked this idea. “They did not want any ‘laws or lawing inArden,’” The New York Times reported, because “once the pernicious things came in there would be no getting rid of them.” But the warrant was issued, and Brown ended up spending five days in the workhouse.

不是聚居地的每个人都喜欢这个主意。“他们不希望雅顿有任何法律或诉讼，”《纽约时报》报道，因为“一旦坏事开了头，就甩不掉了。”不过逮捕令还是签发了，布朗最终在教养所呆了5天。

He soon got his revenge. While incarcerated, Brown claimed, he had an epiphany that “theLaw is supreme and must be obeyed.” And so he swore out a warrant of his own against Sinclair and 10 other Ardenites for violating Delaware’s blue laws. The Arden 11 wound up serving 18 hours behind bars for the crime of playing baseball, playing tennis, and selling ice cream on a Sunday.

他很快就复仇了。布朗申称他在关禁闭的时候获得顿悟“法律是至高无上的，必须被遵守。”然后他自己发了一张对Sinclair和其他10位雅顿居民的逮捕令，理由是违反特拉华的蓝色法案【指美国各州都有但不同的，旨在约束人们行为的宗教法案。比如星期天不得售酒。译注】。雅顿的这11位居民因此在牢里呆了18个小时，理由是在星期天玩棒球、网球并出售冰淇淋。

After the prisoners’ sentences were completed, the town celebrated with a circus. The performance included an arrest of its own: A clown dressed as a cop entered the audience, grabbed a surprised Sinclair, and marched him away from the show.

当他们服刑结束，小镇用一场马戏表演来庆祝。表演就包括一出逮捕的桥段：一个打扮成警察的小丑冲进观众席，把惊慌失措的Sinclair从表演中抓走。

Zen Suburbs

禅意的郊外

“I’ve spent more time debating things in the grocery store than I did buying that house,” says Denise Nordheimer. “It was an impulse buy.”

“我在杂货店里跟人辩论的时间比我买房子的时间还长”，Denise Nordheimer如是说。“这是个冲动消费。”

We’re sitting in the Buzz Ware Village Center, where the Arden Community Planning Committee has been mulling such matters as a community garden and a bridge. The year is 2017, and everyone involved in the George Brown caper of 1911 is long dead. Yet Ardenis still here, a little shire surrounded by an otherwise ordinary suburban landscape. It’s a maze of narrow roads, abundant forests, and houses that look nothing like each other, some of them sporting engagingly unusual pieces of art in their yards. The place did eventually acquire a municipal government, but it took until 1967 for that to happen, and the change didn’t represent a major shift in how the town was run so much as a convenient shell when dealing with the state and county authorities.

我们坐在巴兹村民中心，雅顿社区规划委员会一直打算把这里打造成社区花园和一座桥。现在是2017年，卷入1911年乔治·布朗事件的人都早已过世。雅顿仍在这里，被一篇寻常的乡村景色所包围。狭窄的小路蜿蜒成迷宫，郁郁葱葱的森林，绝不雷同的房屋——有些矗立在庭院里就像与众不同的艺术品。这地方在1967年终于有了市政府，不过一改变并不意味着小镇的运作方式有了大的变化，市府只是方便与州郡当局打交道的壳子。

The place has even spawned two spin offs, the neighboring villages of Ardentown and Ardencroft. Both are run on the same general principles. The three communities, known collectively as The Ardens, have a combined population of about 1,000 people. Nordheimer, an attorney, has been one of them for about a decade now.

这里甚至发展出两处附庸村子——临近的雅顿囤和雅顿克若夫特。两个村子皆奉行相同的大原则。三个社区被合称为雅顿村落，加起来有1000居民。律师Nordheimer，在其中生活已有10年之久。

In 2007 she and her family owned a home in Wilmington. Life was perfect, she says—”everything was just the way I wanted it”—except they lived on a busy street and her 7-year-old daughter was too nervous to ride a bike. “We just realized that she needed more physical independence and she was never going to get it at that house,” says Nordheimer. “We always needed to supervise her.”

2007年时，她和她的家庭在威明顿市有个家。生活可谓完美，她说——“一切都是我们想要的样子”——除了他们所在的街道十分繁忙而她7岁的女儿不敢在这骑自行车。“我们意识到她需要更多自由活动的空间，而在那所房子里她永远得不到。” Nordheimer说，“在那，我们不敢让她离开我们的视线。”

“We have to move,” she told her husband. “She’s not learning to ride her bicycle.”

“我们必须搬家，”她告诉她的丈夫。“在这她学不会骑车。”

“I’ll move,” he replied, “but I want more Zen.”

“我会搬家的，”他回答说，“但我希望新环境有更多禅意。”

Nordheimer quickly found that you couldn’t do a real estate search for “Zen,” so she did the next best thing, which was to poke around semi-randomly online for houses in their price range. She had never heard of Arden, but she found a photo of a home there that looked like it had “Zen off the charts,” so they went to check it out.

Nordheimer很快发现你无法用“禅意”搜到真正的房产，所以她做了次优的选择，在他们可以接受的价格区间半随机地乱点。她从没有听过雅顿，但她找到一张那里的图片，看起来禅意得不行，所以他们决定去看一眼。

“You have to buy that house,” her daughter said when they got home.

“你们得买下那所房子，”她的女儿在回家后说。

“Oh, you liked it?” said Nordheimer.

“噢，你喜欢那？” Nordheimer说。

“No,” the girl replied, “but I made a friend on the playground right in front of it and I told her I’d be back.”

“不，”女孩回答，“但我在门前玩时交了一个朋友，而且我告诉她我会回来的。”

I asked a lot of people how they ended up in The Ardens. Nordheimer’s story may have had more serendipity than the others, but it’s typical in that it wasn’t Arden’s founding ideas that drew her there. Some people live in Arden because their parents did. Others just needed to be somewhere near Wilmington and happened to settle in the community. Some already knew the town for one reason or another—they had friends here, or came in to see plays—but weren’t aware of its distinctive history. Ron Meick had been working in investments up in NewHampshire and decided he could live anywhere near an airport; he “zeroed in somehow on Wilmington” and bought a house in Arden. Eleven years later, he has retired from his old line of work and devotes his time to art and beekeeping.

我问过许多人为何最后会选择雅顿村落。Nordheimer的故事也许最出人意料，但有一点很典型，那就是并不是雅顿的初创理念吸引了她。一些人生活在雅顿是因为他们的父母生活在那。另一些人只是为了住在威明顿市附近，碰巧选择了这个社区。一些人对小镇有所耳闻——他们有朋友住在这里，或是曾到这来玩过——但他们对小镇的独特历史一无所知。Ron Meick一直在新罕布什尔州从事投资，他觉得自己可以生活在任何一处靠近机场的地方；他在威明顿市“一无所获”然后在雅顿买了房子。11年后，他从原来的职业中退休并投身到艺术与养蜂中。

What I didn’t encounter was anyone who came here because he was deeply interested in the ideas of Henry George. I asked Barbara Macklem, a volunteer at the Arden CraftShop Museum, how many bona fide Single Taxers live in The Ardens these days. “I would say there’s a couple of dozen,” she replied.

我从没遇到一个人是因为对亨利·乔治的理念深深着迷而来到这里。我问过Barbara Macklem，雅顿工艺品商店博物馆的志愿者，现在雅顿有多少人是单一税的虔诚信徒。“我想有几十个吧，”她回答说。

Yet Arden maintains its character. Its funds still come, with just a few minor exceptions, from the ground rent; its system of governance still rests on a mix of direct democracy and volunteerism. Nordheimer didn’t move to Arden because she wanted to get involved in an alternative form of politics. Yet here she was in a committee meeting: six people sitting on a sofa and some comfy chairs, discussing ways they might spend money that someone has left to the community.

然而雅顿仍保留其特色。她的资金仍来自土地租金，除了几个小小的例外；她的治理体系仍根植于直接民主和志愿精神。Nordheimer没有搬来雅顿，因为她希望接触到不同形式的政治中。但她仍在一个委员会中：六个人，坐在沙发或舒服的椅子上，讨论怎么花掉其他人留给社区的钱。

Arden is run by a collection of these committees: a Safety Committee, a Forest Committee, aPlayground Committee, and so on. Four times a year there are New England–style town meetings, presided over by a town chair elected to a one-year term. (The current chair is Jeffrey Politis, a 46-year-old stay-at-home dad who has lived in The Ardens since 1999.) None of the posts are paid. Many people don’t participate, but everyone is encouraged to, and the encouragement starts as soon as you move in. “Oh, they’re like vampires,” Nordheimer tells me. “They bite you the first day.”

雅顿由一群委员会运营：安全委员会，森林委员会，操场委员会，等等。每四年还有一次新英格兰风格的大会，由民选出的任期一年的镇主席主持。（目前的镇主席是Jeffrey Politis，46岁的家庭主男，从1999年一直生活在雅顿。）所有的职位都没有薪水。许多人并不参与，但每个人都被鼓励参与进来，而且从你搬进来起，就已经涉身其中。“噢，他们就像吸血鬼，”Nordheimer告诉我，“你来的第一天就会被咬。”

Utopia, Limited

有限责任乌托邦

Arden’s founding fathers were Frank Stephens, a sculptor, and Will Price, an architect. They bought the farmland that became the town with a loan from Joseph Fels, a wealthy Georgist in the soap business; Price planned the fledgling village’s unique layout but didn’t actually live there, settling instead in the nearby arts-and-crafts community of Rose Valley, Pennsylvania. (The arts-and-crafts movement, which exalted traditional craftsmanship and denounced centralized industrial production, was a heavy influence on Arden in the early days too.)

雅顿的开镇元老是雕塑家Frank Stephens，和建筑师Will Price。他们贷款从肥皂业的乔治主义者Joseph Fels那里买下这片日后成为小镇的农田；Price规划了小镇最初的独特雏形但并没有住在那里，而是选择在临近的宾夕法尼亚玫瑰山谷——一个“艺术与工艺”的社区生活。（艺术与工艺运动赞美传统的技艺，谴责中心化的工业生产，在早期对雅顿产生了重大影响。）

Arden wasn’t the country’s only Single Tax colony. The Alabama town of Fairhope had been established on the same land-trust model in 1894, and several similar experiments were launched in the first few decades of the 20th century—enough for the Single Tax settlements to have their own baseball championship, whichArden won in 1923. But most were small projects that eventually faded away; only Fairhope, The Ardens, and an unincorporated New Jersey village called FreeAcres survive today.

雅顿不是美国唯一一个单一税社区。阿拉巴马的费尔霍普于1894年建立，遵循了相同的土地信托方式并在20世纪头几十年开展了相似的社会试验——其规模足以让单一税开拓者拥有他们自己的棒球比赛，雅顿正是在1923年夺得的冠军。但大多数社区都凋零了；硕果仅存的只有费尔霍普、雅顿和新泽西州的非法人村镇“自由英亩”。

Homeowners inArden purchased 99-year transferable leases to plots of land, and they were free to build pretty much anything they wanted there. (One early Ardenite decided to put his sleeping quarters in a tree house.) Banks were initially reluctant to loan money to the colonists because of the village’s unusual system of land tenure, so some townspeople created a building and loan association to finance their homes. (The B&L stayed active until the 1990s, when it dissolved on the grounds that no one needed it anymore.) Other necessities were provided by independent organizations. Some leaseholders created a club of volunteer firefighters, for example; others formed a private business to supply the town with water.

雅顿的居民买下拥有99年可交易产权的土地，任意规划，他们基本上可以在上面建造任何他们想建的东西。（一位雅顿早期居民决定把他的卧室搬到树上。）由于小镇不同寻常的土地所有制，银行最初并不情愿借贷给这些社区，于是一些居民创设了一个建造与贷款协会来为他们的家园筹措资金。（该协会一直运作到1990年代，当时已经没有人再需要它了。）其他的必需品则由独立的组织提供。比如，一些地契的拥有者创设了一个由自愿者组成的消防员俱乐部；另一些人则成立了一个私企为小镇供水。

The trust also maintained roads and open space—even today, nearly half the town consists of forests and greens—and it balanced its laissezfaire attitudes about people’s houses and general behavior with strict restrictions on catching fish, shooting birds, and chopping trees. And it did its best to balance the books. Writing in The Libertarian, FlorenceGarvin greeted Arden’s 25th fiscal year by noting with satisfaction that the town was now “without a public debt, except a $400 balance on the original land mortgage, which will be paid off the coming year.”

信托基金仍然在维护道路与公共空间——时至今日，小镇近一半的面积仍为森林和植被覆盖——并且在人们对房屋的放任态度与公共行为之间需求平衡。基金制定了严格的限制，约束人们抓鱼、打鸟和伐树的行为。而且基金在财务上也竭尽全力。Florence Garvin在其书《自由意志主义者》中盛赞雅顿第25财年令人满意的表现——“除了最初土地贷款的400美元将在明年得到结清，没有公共债务。”

The settlers established a rich and sometimes contentious cultural and political life. The cultural side was reflected by the town’s networks of guilds—a Musicians’ Gild, an Athletic Gild, a Gardeners’ Gild, and so on—which sponsored sports, concerts, communal dinners, regular productions of Shakespeare’s plays, and much else. On the political side were the town meetings, where women were voting years before that was allowed in the rest ofDelaware. Indeed, Arden initially extended the franchise to everyone, even children.

定居者们建立了一个丰富的，有时也是富有争议的文化和政治生活。小镇诸多的协会反应了其文化的一面——音乐人协会、运动员协会、园丁协会等等——这些协会赞助体育活动、音乐会、集体宴会和莎士比亚戏剧表演，以及许多其他活动。而政治的一面则体现在镇会议上，在特拉华州允许妇女投票前许多年，雅顿的妇女们就开始投票了。是的，雅顿一开始就把公民权扩大到了每个人，甚至包括儿童。

The colony’s political battles could be raucous, particularly when the trustees and the town meetings found themselves at odds. Residents who grew tired of the fights—or who thought even Arden’s live-and-let-live rules were too restrictive—got an escape hatch in 1922 when Stephens and some others set up another land trust next door. This became Ardentown.

社区的政治争斗有时十分激烈，尤其是当受托人和镇会议发现自己正负债时。厌倦了争斗的居民，或是那些觉得雅顿“待人宽, 人亦待己宽”的规矩仍旧太过严格的人们在1922年迎来了出逃的机会——当时Stephens和一帮人在隔壁设立了新的土地信托。这就是后来的雅顿屯（Ardentown,一个与雅顿（Arden）相邻的小镇）。

Ardentown is still thriving, but not all of Arden’s spin offs succeeded. One resident owned some land on the Choptank River in Maryland, and he tried to set up a Single Tax community there in 1927. The result was the tiny settlement of Gilpin Point, with about a dozen residents. Almost all of them came from Arden, and many, perhaps most, treated Gilpin Point as a vacation home rather than a primary residence; the colony dissolved after a decade. And then there was the originalArdencroft, not to be confused with the current town of that name. In 1930 a group led by Stephens set it up near Arden as a homestead community, with the idea that “until the present Depression blows over, they intend to raise their own food.” They planted vegetables, issued their own currency, got in a fight with the mother village about whether Arden would chip in to help build a bridge, and fell apart after two years.

雅顿屯仍然兴兴向荣，但不是所有脱胎于雅顿的小镇都活下来了。一位居民在马里兰州的查普坦河畔拥有一些土地，他在1927年试着在那建立一个单一税的社区。成果便是拥有十几位居民的定居地“Gilpin Point”。他们中的绝大多数都来自雅顿，而且许多人，也许是所有人都把Gilpin Point当作旅行目的地而不是永久居住地；该社区在十年后解散。之后便是最初的雅顿可若夫（Ardencroft），请不要同现在这个雅顿克若夫混淆了。1930年，Stephens带领的一帮人在雅顿旁边建立了一个居住社区，其理念为“在大萧条过去之前，他们试着自给自足。”他们种植蔬菜，发行货币，并同他们的母镇就是否应该让雅顿帮助其修建一座桥梁干了一架。两年后这个小镇解散了。

The state and county authorities mostly butted out. The only major change in the Ardenfolk’s relationship with the government in those early days came in 1924, when the locals voted to establish their own school district. This was controversial among the Single Taxers, since it meant they’d be paying a new levy that wasn’t based on Georgist principles; many of them preferred to educate their children privately or at home. (The line between “privately” and “at home” could be blurry—several Arden women operated their own home-based kindergartens for the community.) On the other hand, the new eight-grade ArdenSchool meant that public-school students could be educated in an institution that reflected the community’s culture.

州郡当局几乎完全没有介入。早期，雅顿人与政府的关系仅仅在1924年发生过一次重大改变，当时本地人投票决定建立他们自己的学区。这与单一税支持者的想法颇为冲突，因为这意味着他们要新缴纳一项与乔治主义精神不符的税款；他们中的大多数都更喜欢自己或在家教育子女。（“自己教育”与“在家教育”之间的界限是模糊的——一些雅顿妇女为社区运营以家庭为中心的幼儿园。）另一方面，新的八年级雅顿学校意味着公立学校的学生会在一座反应了雅顿文化的机构接受教育。

At one point, reflecting that culture meant defying state law. The modern Ardencroft, organized as a nonprofit corporation rather than as a trust, was founded in 1950 to foster a more racially integrated community. Arden had always been open to everyone, but in practice the place was white; Ardencroft aimed to actively recruit residents of other races. The Ardens thus became one of the first desegregated school districts in any Jim Crow state, with the Arden School admitting its first black students at a time when the Delaware state constitution still mandated segregated public education. No one stopped them.

反应了雅顿文化就意味着否定州法。作为非盈利组织而不是信托基金的现代雅顿克若夫于1950年建立，旨在培育一个种族上更多元的社区。雅顿一直向所有人开放，但实际上居民都为白人；雅顿克若夫致力于积极招募其他种族的居民。以雅顿为中心的数个小镇最终成为实行吉姆·克劳法（【译注：】美国1876~1965年间实行的种族隔离法案）的州中最早破除种族隔离的地方。当特拉华的宪章仍强制实行种族隔离教育时，雅顿的学校迎来了他们的第一位黑人学生。没人阻止他们。

But the government was still there, and sometimes Ardenites would use it as a weapon in one internecine struggle or another. Usually this involved some petty dispute, as with George Brown’s sex talk in 1911 or, five decades later, when some townspeople petitioned the county zoning board to prevent a gas station from being built on an Arden lot. Sometimes the issue was larger, as with a pair of lawsuits that pit a bunch of townspeople against the trustees in 1935 and 1942. In the first suit, the town’s elected assessors tried to reduce rents, the trustees blocked the idea, and the government sided with the assessors, changing the balance of power within the village. In the second, a vacancy opened among the trustees, the town was deadlocked on whom to appoint, and the struggle got dragged into the courtroom.

但政府仍有存在感，有时雅顿人也会把政府当做斗争的武器。通常这会涉及不小的纷争，比如1911年约翰·布朗的“即性演说”，或是50年后一些小镇居民向郡社区划分委员会请愿，以阻止在雅顿的地盘上修建一加油站。有时问题会更严重些，比如1935年和1942年两场诉讼中，小镇居民挑战了信托基金的受托人。第一次，小镇选出的顾问试图削减地租，基金受托人否决了这个想法，而政府站在了顾问这一边，改变了小镇中的权利平衡。第二次，受托人的位置出现一个空缺，小镇无法就指派谁达成一致，这次纷争最后诉诸法庭。

During the latter battle, one of Frank Stephens’ sons bemoaned the fact that their “communal problems” were now a matter for the courts, comparing the conflict to what he called the “futile madness” of World War II. The judge, for his part, got fed up with listening to what sounded to him like abstract ideological debates and decided to appoint the new trustee himself. As the man he tapped, one Phillip Cohen, left his chambers, the judge called after him:“Cohen, keep them out of my court!”

在后一次争斗中，弗兰克·史蒂芬的一位儿子哀叹他们社区的问题现在也闹上了法庭，并把这次冲突同二战“毫无意义的疯狂”（他本人语）相提并论。受理的法官受够了他们的争论，对他而言，这些争论好似抽象的意识形态辩论，最终法官决定自行指定受托人。当菲利普走出法庭，这位法官在他身后大叫：“科恩，让他们离我的法庭远点！”

Roadz

道路

But the most notable change in the community’s relationship with the outside authorities came when it incorporated. An enclave that once had bordered on anarchism established a formally recognized government, and in the process it acquired a small but distinctly un-Georgist source of funds that did not come from anything like a land tax. The chief reasons for this change revolved around the roads.

不过社区同政府关系最显著的变化还是来自它企业化时。当一块理念靠近无政府主义的飞地建立起一个正式的政府，在这个过程中它需要一个不大但是显著区别于乔治主义的资金来源，这一来源不能是土地税之类的东西。这一改变的首要原因涉及道路。

It wasn’t that the place lacked roads. The community had been maintaining its own private network of streets and footpaths since the beginning of the century. (To preserve those avenues’ private status, the townspeople were required to close them off for a day once every seven years.) Incorporating made Arden eligible for state street aid, a fact that the advocates of incorporation were happy to tout. Still, the town certainly could have continued without the subsidy.

不是说这块地缺乏道路。从世纪初开始，社区便一直在维护起私有的道路网络。（为了保持道路私有，小镇的居民需要每七年关闭道路一天。）企业化使得雅顿可以合法获得道路补贴——企业化的鼓吹者总是乐于兜售这一好处。不过，小镇即便没有补贴也一定可以继续运转。

But amid those private paths there was Harvey Road, running straight through The Ardens. This was owned by the government, and the State Highway Commission had plans to widen it and to build an Interstate interchange. The locals strongly opposed this, and incorporating gave them a way to stop it: A municipality could claim exclusive powers of condemnation, then block any higher levels of government from taking property for the road.

但在这些私有的道路中间还有一条名为Harvey的路属于政府，这条路从雅顿直直穿过。国家公路局打算拓宽它并修建一条州际公路。小镇居民强烈反对，而企业化给了他们一种阻止的途径：自治区可以享有征用的特权从而阻止上级政府拥有道路的产权。

And there was one more street problem. In the U.S., private associations generally have more flexibility than public authorities in setting their own rules. But thanks to a peculiar court decision in 1961, Arden suddenly found its hands tied when it came to enforcing its rules of the road. After a man ran a stop sign, JudgeRobert Wahl decreed that the driver was free to do so because the state’s motor vehicle laws had been written for public roads, not private ones. Arden had the power to kick a trespasser off its avenues, but that was it.

关于道路还有个问题。在美国，私人协会通常在设定自己的规矩方面比官方享有更多灵活性。但是由于1961年法庭做出的一项特殊决定，雅顿突然发现在施行关于道路的规矩上，自己被束缚住了。当时一个人在停车线处没有停下来，法官Robert Wahl裁定司机可以这么做，因为州机动车法律适用于公共道路而不是私人道路。雅顿有权把一个闯入者赶出自己的道路，但也仅能如此。

Not surprisingly, incorporation was highly controversial. When an early draft of the proposed town charter circulated, some residents warned that they could be erecting a mini-tyranny—an unaccountable body that lays sidewalks without a referendum, levies fines with no right of appeal, and drags offenders to the New CastleCounty Correctional Institution. The change was also opposed, interestingly, by at least some members of Delaware’s political establishment. One of the local papers editorialized against incorporation on the grounds that it would create”just one more local government to be meshed into the whole when the time comes for giving this area the metropolitan government it needs.” (A few years later, that same consolidationist spirit would shutter the Arden School.)

企业化意料之中地充满争议。当一份初期的小镇宪章草案发布时，一些居民警告说他们这是在创造一个迷你的暴政——一个不经投票便修建人行道的不负责任的机构——任意地开设罚单，把反对者都投入少管所。有趣的是，这一草案也遭到了特拉华州一些建制派政治力量的反对。一份当地报纸的社论批评土地的企业化当地的一份报纸发表社论反对企业化，理由是这只会“创造又一个屈从于体制的地方政府，当大都会区政府需要这块地时，它就会满足其要求。”（一些年后，同样的大政府主张【consolidationist spirit，指主张一个强大的联邦政府。译注】会让雅顿学校关门。）

But the town voted to incorporate, and at the beginning of 1967 the Village of Arden became a municipality in the eyes of the law. Shortly afterward, the trustees transferred ownership of the roads to the town government. In 1973, they transferred the forests and greens as well, thus exempting the property from county taxation.

但是小镇最终投票通过了企业化的决定，于是在1967年初，雅顿村在法律意义上成为了一个自治区。之后不久，基金受托人将道路的所有权转给当地市政府。1937年，他们将森林与绿地也转交了，这样便可以免除州郡对其的税赋。

Ardentown andArdencroft soon followed Arden’s lead and transformed themselves into municipalities too.

雅顿屯和雅顿克若夫不久也照做了。

The land trust continued as a private institution, albeit one intertwined closely with the local government. The trust collects rent from the town’s leaseholders and, as the sole property owner, it pays everyone’s county and school taxes. The rest of the rent goes to the municipal government. That bundle of money makes up the vast majority of the Arden budget—usually about 90 percent of it—though the town has a few additional sources of income, such as the rent for the antenna on the water tower (and, yes, the state’s street aid). The county provides some services, and the rest are done either internally, as with the volunteers who run the local library, or by companies that contract with the village, as with the business that collects the trash. The big decisions are made in town meetings.

土地信托继续作为私人机构存在，但是与当地政府纠缠更深。基金从各个出租房子的房东那里收取租金，同时作为产权的唯一所有人，替每个人缴纳地产税和教育税（county and schooltaxes）。剩下的租金则交给自治政府。这笔钱便构成了雅顿预算的绝大部分——通长是90%——尽管小镇还有其他一些收入来源，比如对水塔上天线收取的租金和州道路补贴。郡府会提供一些服务，剩下的则通过内部消化，比如运营当地图书馆的志愿者们，或是由与小镇签有合同的公司提供，比如收垃圾的企业。重要的决定有镇会议做出。

Outside the formal government there is a densely organized civic life. Much of this takes place under the aegis of the Arden Club, which serves as an umbrella for the town’s guilds. Not all of today’s guilds date back to Arden’s early days, and not every guild from Arden’s early days is still around. But one institution with deep roots is the Dinner Gild, a modern-day descendant of the communal meals theArdenites enjoyed when the place was little more than a summer camp. EverySaturday night from October through May, one local group or another—maybe the Shakespeare Gild, maybe the Ivy Gables retirement home, maybe just a group of families that like to cook—prepares a big meal for anyone who wants to buy a ticket and come. Around 80–130 people show up for the supper, where they can enjoy their neighbors’ company in an environment more convivial than a town meeting.

在官方政府之外，小镇有着丰富而密集的公民生活。大多数公民生活都由雅顿俱乐部赞助，后者充当了小镇向导的庇护者。今天雅顿的导游项目并非全部来自创立之初，当初的项目也未全部保留至今。但有一个项目深深植根于雅顿，那就是宴会——一个社区聚餐的当代版本——当这个地方还是夏日营地时，雅顿人就热衷于此。从十月到次年三月，每一个星球六晚上，当地的一个小组——或许是莎士比亚小组，或许是常青藤老年之家，或仅仅是喜欢烹饪的一组家庭——为所有愿意买票入场的人准备一顿大餐。晚宴开始后，大约80至130人纷至沓来，享受邻居们的陪伴和比镇会议更轻松愉快的氛围。

Dog Wars

狗战

“You know how every community has a wingnut or two?” Ken Rosenberg tells me as he sets up some audio equipment. “We have several.”

“你知道每个社区都有一两个政治偏激犯（wingnut）吧？”Ken Rosenberg告诉我他架设了一些广播装置。“我们这里有不止一个。”

I’m back in the Buzz Ware Village Center, where Ardencroft is holding its May town meeting. I’d been warned about Ardencroft politics. Every small town has its fights, but in this one, I was told, the battles had gotten unusually nasty lately.

我走回到巴斯小镇中心，雅顿克若夫正在这里举行镇会议。我已经被告知对该镇的政治要有心理准备。每个小镇都会有斗争，但有人告诉我这一个的最近变得非同寻常的激烈。

Pat Morrison, a retired doula, had regaled me the day before with some stories about the sniping. “We had some dog problems,” she had said. “One person in town was convincing these other people that they didn’t have to leash their dogs.” Some pit bulls started scaring kids and hurting other dogs,” and I happened to be on the Safety Committee at this point. I thought we were supposed to try to get them to stop unleashing their dogs. But there was this counter group that wanted freedom: ‘Dogs should have freedom.’ It became huge. It blew up over three or four years to threats against people’s lives.”

Pat Morrison，一位退休了的育儿嫂前一天给我讲了很多其中的明争暗斗。“关于宠物狗，我们存在分歧，”她说道，“镇上一个家伙说服其他人不必拴狗。“一些斗牛犬开始向小孩子大叫并且咬伤其他狗。 ”而我恰好站在安全委员会一边。我认为我们应该试着阻止他们不栓狗的行为。但对立的一派想要自由：‘狗狗也应该享有自由。’问题越搞越大。三四年后开始威胁到人们的生命。”

That struggle mixed with other conflicts, and the 2015 election for town chair was bitterly contested, complete with accusations of vote fraud. The new chair—Ken Morrison, Pat’s husband—hired a parliamentarian to bring some order to the town meetings. He paid a couple of county cops to be on hand too, just in case things got violent.

这场斗争同其他冲突搅在一起，小镇2015年的主席竞选活动变得残酷，在选举舞弊的指责声中落幕。新的主席——Ken Morrison, 也是Pat的老公——雇了一位国会议员来加强镇会议的秩序。他还花钱请了几位郡警，以防事态变得暴力。

Things seem to have wound down a bit in the last two years, though. Neither the parliamentarian nor the police are here tonight. Turnout in general is pretty sparse, and tensions are mostly limited to some passive-aggressive comments from a woman who, I eventually learn, was one of the losing candidates for chair in 2015.

不过过去两年事情似乎平息了一些。国会议员和郡警都已离开。最终没有弄出什么名堂，紧张气氛几乎都来自一位消极抵抗的妇女的言论，后来我发现，此人正是2015年败选的竞选者。

The closest things come to boiling over is when the talk turns to signage. I won’t bore you with all the details, but the upshot is that there’s a spot in Ardencroft where it isn’t entirely clear which house number goes with which house. At the last meeting the town voted to improve the appropriate signs, so that there won’t be delays when someone has to respond to an emergency. But now the Safety Committee has looked into the issue and come to a different conclusion. If there’s a problem, they say, it’s not the signage. It’s the fact that three different houses close to each other are all numbered 1502, each for a different street. Amy Pollock—the woman who lost the election two years ago—won’t have any of it:She wants new signs. No one hurls any insults, but more than one voice starts to drip with contempt.

最接近白热化的争吵来自对门牌的讨论。我就不详细剧透了，不过可以告诉你，在雅顿克若夫有一个地方，门牌号该沿着哪栋房子排不是很清楚。最终小镇投票决定使用更合适的门牌，这样在紧急状况下就不会因此出现延误了。不过现在安全委员会深入研究了这个问题，得到了不同的结论。他们说，如果这里存在问题，那问题不在于门牌。事实是三所相邻的房子都编号1502，只是位于不同的街道上。Amy Pollock——两年前败选的那位女士——可不接受：她想要全新的门牌。没人出言不逊，但是好几个声音开始流露出轻蔑。

And then it’s onto other business. Ardencroft has six town meetings a year, while Arden andArdentown each have four; there’s a proposal afoot to reduce the Ardencroft meetings to four as well. One citizen stands to object: “If you want to live in Arden, move to Arden!”

然后讨论其他的事情。雅顿克若夫一年举办6次镇会议，而雅顿和雅顿屯一年4次；一个酝酿中的提议旨在把雅顿克若夫的会议也减少到4次。有人站出来反对：“你要是想住在雅顿，那搬走啊！”

The Master-PlannedFree-for-All

自由生长的接触规划

The stereotypical suburb is a comprehensibly planned place whose rules foster uniformity. But not every settlement surrounding a city fits that model. In 1978 the geographerRoger Barnett identified a type of community he called the “libertarian suburb”: subdivisions where, due to various hiccups in the history of the local land market, lots were developed individually, in an improvisatory manner, rather than en masse by a single developer. The result is a landscape of dramatically different houses, irregular lot sizes, and diverse yards:“a patio with exotic plants and garden furniture; a vegetable plot; livestock raising, including the rearing of sheep and horses; overflow storage from the house; auto repairing; auto dismantling.”

刻板印象中的城郊往往被详细规划，一致性从各种规定中涌现。但不是每一个城市旁的定居点都像这个样子。1978年，地理学家Roger Barnett辨识出一种他称之为“自由意志主义城郊”的社区——诞生于土地交易市场中的小混乱，由居民各自为政地开发，即兴地生长，不由某个开发者统一规划。结果就是一片土地上充满各式各样的房子，不规则的地块和风格迥异的庭院：“一块装饰着异域植物和庭院家具的露台；一块菜地；养牲口（包括羊和马）的地儿；溢出的仓库；汽车维修店；汽车拆卸厂。应有尽有。”

There is one political issue in such places that is “guaranteed to provoke concerted reaction,” Barnett says: “Incorporation means submitting to minimum standards and paying for improvements required by municipal regulation. Who needs sewers, wide streets, sidewalks, and a code that renders ‘home improvements’ subject to visits and approval from building inspectors?”

在这样的地方，有个政治问题是避免不了的，那就是“总会激起一致的反应，” Barnett 说道：“企业化意味着满足最低的标准并为市政规定要求的改进买单。谁需要通下水道、宽阔的街道、人行道？由于建筑检查，谁又需要家庭设施升级的规范？”

Barnett focused on certain suburbs of Stockton, California, but another academic, Jacob Wegmann, has described a similar pattern in some working-class communities near L.A. — places whose residents “found plots that they could afford to buy, living on them cheaply in tents, shacks made of boxes or tar paper, or trailers, while gradually building their houses, sometimes over many years, without debt.” They worked for wages when they had to and for themselves to the extent that they could; many of them fended off annexation by incorporating “municipal governments so small that they governed territories closer in scale to neighborhoods than to typical small cities.” Most of those micro-town governments’ functions were then contracted out.

Barnett关注的是加州斯托克顿附近的城郊小镇，但另一位学者，Jacob Wegmann则为我描述了洛杉矶附近一些相似的工人阶级社区。在这些社区的居民“找到一些他们能买下的土地，在上面用纸盒、油毡或是拖车建起帐篷和棚户，因为生活成本低，他们就此安营扎寨，并逐渐建起房子，这个过程有时会持续许多年，而且不依靠贷款。”他们尽可能地为自己打工；许多这样的社区通过企业化而抵御住了被合并的命运，他们的自治政府管辖的范围很小，从面积上讲，更像是邻里社区而不是典型的小城市。大部分这类微型政府的功能都外包了。

That’s a radically different form of suburban living than you’d find in those master-planned developments. Yet Arden somehow manages to echo both models at the same time.

这与由开发者顶层设计出的城郊相比，可谓有天壤之别。不过雅顿可算是二者兼而有之。

Will Price designed Arden comprehensively, aiming to emulate the English planner Ebenezer Howard’s utopian ideas about “garden cities.” Yet within the highly planned framework of Price’s landscape, the town allowed an enormous degree of unplanned freedom. Self-built homes were common. People developed their own lots with little standardization, and not always with respect for the county codes. The late Wilmington News-Journal columnist Bill Frank once described Arden architecture as “a strange collection of homes, ranging from fine buildings to shacks, from comfortable old English-type structures to expanded chicken coops.” The town is a master-planned free-for-all.

Will Price 从总体上设计了雅顿，力图模仿英国规划家Ebenezer Howard”田园城市“的乌托邦设想。但在Price总体设计的框架内，小镇又在许多维度上自由生长。自建的房子随处可见。人们枉顾标准化，自由开发自己的一亩三分地，而且往往并未遵守郡里的规范。已故的《威明顿新闻周刊》专栏作家Bill Frank曾这样描述雅顿的建筑：“一组房子的奇怪集合，从良好的建筑到破烂的棚户，从舒适的老英格兰风格房子到放大版的鸡笼。”小镇可谓为在规划下自由生长的结果。

Arden isn’t just reluctant to impose its own land-use rules. It has wrangled official exemptions from a number of county regulations too. New Castle County restricts how high your grass can grow, but those rules aren’t enforced in Arden, where several of the locals keep natural gardens. When the county adopted “instant ticketing” for property code violations, Arden opted out. Ardenites are also allowed to ignore several rules restricting home-based businesses, and as a result there are a number of studios, workshops, and other enterprises in the village.

雅顿不仅仅在施行其自己的土地使用规划上犹豫不决。对郡里的诸多规定，它也并未遵守。新堡郡（New Castle County）对庭院中草的高度有要求，但这些规定在雅顿并未得到执行，雅顿好几处庭院还保持了天然的状态。当郡里开始对违反产权条例的行为“立即处罚”时，雅顿决定不予理睬。雅顿人还被允许无视若干条针对家庭产业的禁令，结果便是镇上的一堆工作室、工坊和其他企业。

Not every business blossoms in Arden. There’s a dearth of shops in the town—”That is our major downfall,” Macklem the museum volunteer says with regret—and while various inns and eateries have existed there in the past, today any Ardenites who want to go out to dinner have to exit the village limits. But if you want to open a restaurant in Arden, you’re allowed to try.

并不是所有的生意都在雅顿开花结果。雅顿也缺一些商户——“这是我们最大的退步，”博物馆的志愿者Macklem带着遗憾告诉我——尽管过去这里有各式各样的旅店和小馆子，但今天，想打牙祭的雅顿居民不得不先走出镇界。不过你要是想在雅顿开个餐馆也是被允许的。

Those looser legal rules reflect a looser culture. InArden, unattended kids roam the roads and forests freely, a fact that wouldn’t have seemed unusual in my 1970s childhood but can be jarring to outsiders today. Macklem once was giving a tour of the town to a group of students fromTemple University when they ran into a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old coming home from a basketball game. The children said hello and Macklem said hello, and they chatted a while before everyone moved on. The visiting students seemed nonplussed by the exchange. “The kids are out without adults,” they said. “They talked to you.”

这些松散的法规反应了松散的文化。在雅顿，无人照看的小孩在路上和森林里到处乱跑，在我小的时候，也就是1970年代，这算是常见，但在今天，对许多非雅顿人来说则显得难以容忍。Macklen曾带着一对Temple大学的学生参观小镇，路上碰见一个10岁和一个12岁的小孩打完篮球回家。他们相互打了招呼并聊了一会。大学生们似乎对此感到迷惑。“这些小孩在外面而没有大人陪同，”他们说，“他们还跟你说话。”

“The idea that children could be out without a parent hovering was just completely unknown to them,” Macklem recalls. “And the fact that the kids talked to someone who they obviously knew but who was not a parent.”

“孩子们可以在没有大人监护的情况下出门在外，这对他们来说闻所未闻，”Macklem回忆到。“小孩们同不是家长的陌生大人说话，而且彼此明显相熟，这对他们来说也很陌生。”

Jollity Farm

欢宴农场

Such differences don’t always endear Arden to outsiders. The place has always attracted strange rumors—there were tales in the early days that it was a nudist colony, and more recently there have been conspiracy theories that paint the town as a Satanic haven for the Illuminati. Macklem sometimes encounters less outré forms of resentment. “Our reputation is of being different,” she says,“which can be a condemnation from people. ‘People in Arden get their own way.’ ‘People in Arden do whatever they want.’ ‘People in Arden are just really kind of strange.’” As I was working on this article, I asked a friend fromWilmington what sort of reputation the town had when he was growing up. “Pretentious and weird,” he replied.

对外来者来说，这些不同并不总是让人舒服。小镇总是吸引一些奇怪的流浪汉——曾经有传言说这里是个裸体主义者聚集地，最近又有阴谋论说要把小镇粉刷成光明会的圣地。Macklem有时也会听到不那么离谱的愤懑说法。“我们的名声就是不与人同，”她说，“这可能变成一种骂名。‘雅顿人我行我素’、‘雅顿人想怎样就怎样。’‘雅顿人都有点怪。’”在我撰写这篇文章时，我问我一个威明顿的朋友，他小时候听到人们如何评价雅顿。“自以为是，奇奇怪怪。”他回答道。

But the place also has far more admirers than your average small suburb. People come from all over the area for concerts at the Gild Hall, for plays on the Village Green, for the annual Arden Fair. Many of those visitors like what they see. Some like it so much that they move there. The town’s slogan is “You are welcome hither,” and there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of people willing to take the offer.

但这个地方比起那些平常的城郊拥有多得多的粉丝。人们为了在Gild大厅举办的音乐会，为了在格林农舍举行的游园，为了一年一度的雅顿节，从四面八方赶来。许许多多的游客喜爱他们在这里的所见所闻。有些人如此深爱这里而干脆搬来住下。小镇的格言是“欢迎你的到来”，似乎总有人愿意接受这份邀请。

In Radical Innocent, his biography of UptonSinclair, Anthony Arthur compares the George Brown affair of 1911 to the events of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” in which Puritan authorities invade a free-spirited settlement to suppress its festivities. Arthur gets the chronology of the Brown tale wrong, making the parallels a little less striking than he supposes. But he may have been onto something anyway. There really was a freewheeling little outpost in early Massachusetts called Merrymount. The people there defied the Puritans’ economic rules by selling rum and guns to the Indians, and they defied the Puritans’ moral rules by restoring the traditional May Day revels. “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire,” Hawthorne wrote, and Merrymount was the capital of jollity.

在为厄普顿·辛克莱撰写的传记《激进的纯真（Radical Innocent）》中，Anthony Arthur把1911年乔治·布朗事件同Nathaniel Hawthorne的故事“欢乐岭的五朔节花柱”相提并论，故事讲述了清教徒当局为了阻止自由民过节而入侵他们的领地。Arther把布朗事件的年代弄错了，不然两期同时期的故事会更有冲击力。但他确实也抓住了一些东西。麻塞诸塞州早期确实有一个放任自由的边区村落叫欢乐岭。那里的人们不承认清教徒的经济规定，卖朗姆酒和枪给印第安人。他们也否认清教徒的道德律令，重新复活了旧欧洲的五月花狂欢节。“欢宴和阴霾相互竞争，”Hawthorne写到，而欢乐岭就是这欢宴的中心。

After the Arden 11 did their time for those illicit acts of baseball and ice cream, Sinclair claimed that the constable who dragged them to the pen kept saying “that we were just the jolliest, jolliest bunch of convicts he had ever, ever put in jail.” More than a century later, Arden is more gentrified and more governed than it was in those anarchic early days. But something jolly is still alive there.

在雅顿11人因为在星期天玩棒球和卖冰淇淋而遭逮捕后，Sinclair（文章开头的那位小说家，也是11人之一）说那位执法的警官当时一直念叨“我们是他见过的最欢快的人，他逮捕过的最欢脱的一群罪犯。”在一个世纪之后，雅顿比起当时无政府主义的时光，要更绅士和规范了。但一些欢快的精神仍旧鲜活。