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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44800 ***
+
+THE LAW
+
+By Frédéric Bastiat
+
+Ludwig von Mises Institute Auburn, Alabama
+
+Cover: Prise de la Bastille ("The Storming of the Bastille"); 1789.
+Painting by Jean-Pierre Hoiiel (1735-1813). Permission was obtained from
+the Bibliothèque nationale de France for its use.
+
+Copyright © 2007 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Printed in China.
+
+Published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute
+
+518 West Magnolia Avenue, Auburn, Alabama 36832
+
+ISBN: 978-1-933550-14-5
+
+This book is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+{v}
+
+Anyone building a personal library of liberty must include in it a copy
+of Frédéric Bastiat's classic essay, "The Law." First published in 1850
+by the great French economist and journalist, it is as clear a statement
+as has ever been made of the original American ideal of government, as
+proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, that the main purpose of
+any government is the protection of the lives, liberties, and property
+of its citizens.
+
+Bastiat believed that all human beings possessed the God-given, natural
+rights of "individuality, liberty, property." "This is man," he wrote.
+These "three gifts from God precede all human legislation." But even in
+his time--writing in the late 1840s--Bastiat was alarmed over how the
+law had been "perverted" into an instrument of what he called legal
+plunder. Far from protecting individual rights, the law was increasingly
+used to deprive one group of citizens of those rights for the benefit
+of another group, and especially for the benefit of the state itself. He
+condemned the legal plunder of protectionist
+
+{vi}
+
+tariffs, government subsidies of all kinds, progressive taxation, public
+schools, government "jobs" programs, minimum wage laws, welfare, usury
+laws, and more.
+
+Bastiat's warnings of the dire effects of legal plunder are as relevant
+today as they were the day he first issued them. The system of legal
+plunder (which many now celebrate as "democracy") will erase from
+everyone's conscience, he wrote, the distinction between justice and
+injustice. The plundered classes will eventually figure out how to enter
+the political game and plunder their fellow man. Legislation will never
+be guided by any principles of justice, but only by brute political
+force.
+
+The great French champion of liberty also forecast the corruption of
+education by the state. Those who held "government-endowed teaching
+positions," he wrote, would rarely criticize legal plunder lest their
+government endowments be ended.
+
+The system of legal plunder would also greatly exaggerate the importance
+of politics in society. That would be a most unhealthy development as
+it would encourage even more citizens to seek to improve their own
+well-being not by producing goods and services for the marketplace but
+by plundering their fellow citizens through politics.
+
+Bastiat was also wise enough to anticipate what modern economists call
+"rent seeking" and "rent avoidance" behavior. These two clumsy phrases
+refer, respectively, to the phenomena of lobbying for political favors
+(legal plunder), and of engaging in political activity directed at
+protecting oneself from being the victim of plunder seekers. (For
+example, the steel manufacturing industry lobbies for high tariffs on
+steel, whereas steel-using industries, like the automobile industry, can
+be expected to lobby against high tariffs on steel).
+
+{vii}
+
+The reason why modem economists are concerned about "rent seeking" is
+the opportunity cost involved: the more time, effort and money that
+is spent by businesses on conniving to manipulate politics--merely
+transferring wealth--the less time is spent on producing goods and
+services, which increases wealth. Thus, legal plunder impoverishes
+the entire society despite the fact that a small (but politically
+influential) part of the society benefits from it.
+
+It is remarkable, in reading "The Law," how perfectly accurate Bastiat
+was in describing the statists of his day which, it turns out, were not
+much different from the statists of today or any other day. The French
+"socialists" of Bastiat's day espoused doctrines that perverted charity,
+education, and morals, for one thing. True charity does not begin
+with the robbery of taxation, he pointed out. Government schooling is
+inevitably an exercise in statist brainwashing, not genuine education;
+and it is hardly "moral" for a large gang (government) to (legally) rob
+one segment of the population, keep most of the loot, and share a little
+of it with various "needy" individuals.
+
+Socialists want "to play God," Bastiat observed, anticipating all the
+future tyrants and despots of the world who would try to remake the
+world in their image, whether that image would be communism, fascism,
+the "glorious union," or "global democracy." Bastiat also observed
+that socialists wanted forced conformity; rigid regimentation of the
+population through pervasive regulation; forced equality of wealth; and
+dictatorship. As such, they were the mortal enemies of liberty.
+
+"Dictatorship" need not involve an actual dictator. All that was needed,
+said Bastiat, was "the laws," enacted
+
+{viii}
+
+by a Congress or a Parliament, that would achieve the same effect:
+forced conformity.
+
+Bastiat was also wise to point out that the world has far too many
+"great men," "fathers of their countries," etc., who in reality are
+usually nothing but petty tyrants with a sick and compulsive desire
+to rule over others. The defenders of the free society should have a
+healthy disrespect for all such men.
+
+Bastiat admired America and pointed to the America of 1850 as being
+as close as any society in the world to his ideal of a government that
+protected individual rights to life, liberty, and property. There
+were two major exeptions, however: the twin evils of slavery and
+protectionist tariffs.
+
+Frédéric Bastiat died on Christmas Eve, 1850, and did not live to
+observe the convulsions that the America he admired so much would go
+through in the next fifteen years (and longer). It is unlikely that he
+would have considered the U.S. government's military invasion of the
+Southern states in 1861, the killing of some 300,000 citizens, and the
+bombing, burning, and plundering of the region's cities, towns, farms,
+and businesses as being consistent in any way with the protection of
+the lives, liberties and properties of those citizens as promised by the
+Declaration of Independence. Had he lived to see all of this, he most
+likely would have added "legal murder" to "legal plunder" as one of the
+two great sins of government. He would likely have viewed the post-war
+Republican Party, with its 50 percent average tariff rates, its massive
+corporate welfare schemes, and its 25-year campaign of genocide against
+the Plains Indians as first-rate plunderers and traitors to the American
+ideal.
+
+In the latter pages of "The Law" Bastiat offers the sage advice that
+what was really needed was "a science of
+
+{ix}
+
+economics" that would explain the harmony (or lack thereof) of a free
+society (as opposed to socialism). He made a major contribution to this
+end himself with the publication of his book, _Economic Harmonies_,
+which can be construed as a precursor to the modern literature of
+the Austrian School of economics. There is no substitute for a solid
+understanding of the market order (and of the realities of politics)
+when it comes to combating the kinds of destructive socialistic schemes
+that plagued Bastiat's day as well as ours. Anyone who reads this great
+essay along with other free-market classics, such as Henry Hazlitt's
+Economics in One Lesson and Murray Roth-bard's Power and Market, will
+possess enough intellectual ammunition to debunk the socialist fantasies
+of this or any other day.
+
+Thomas J. DiLorenzo May 2007
+
+Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland
+and a member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAW [1]
+
+{1}
+
+The law perverted! The law--and, in its wake, all the collective
+forces of the nation--the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper
+direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become
+the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law
+guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly,
+this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to
+call the attention of my fellow citizens.
+
+We hold from God the gift that, as far as we are concerned, contains all
+others, Life--physical, intellectual, and moral life.
+
+But life cannot support itself. He who has bestowed it, has entrusted us
+with the care of supporting it, of developing it, and of perfecting
+it. To that end, He has provided us with a collection of wonderful
+faculties; He has plunged us into the midst of a variety of elements. It
+is by
+
+{2}
+
+the application of our faculties to these elements that the phenomena of
+assimilation and of appropriation, by which life pursues the circle that
+has been assigned to it are realized.
+
+Existence, faculties, assimilation--in other words, personality,
+liberty, property--this is man.
+
+It is of these three things that it may be said, apart from all
+demagogic subtlety, that they are anterior and superior to all human
+legislation.
+
+It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and
+property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and
+property exist beforehand, that men make laws. What, then, is law? As I
+have said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual
+right to lawful defense.
+
+Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to
+defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the
+three constituent or preserving elements of life; elements, each of
+which is rendered complete by the others, and that cannot be understood
+without them. For what are our faculties, but the extension of our
+personality? and what is property, but an extension of our faculties?
+
+If every man has the right of defending, even by force, his person, his
+liberty, and his property, a number of men have the right to combine
+together to extend, to organize a common force to provide regularly for
+this defense.
+
+Collective right, then, has its principle, its reason for existing, its
+lawfulness, in individual right; and the common force cannot rationally
+have any other end, or any other mission, than that of the isolated
+forces for which it is substituted. Thus, as the force of an individual
+cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty, or the property of
+
+{3}
+
+another individual--for the same reason, the common force cannot
+lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of
+individuals or of classes.
+
+For this perversion of force would be, in one case as in the other, in
+contradiction to our premises. For who will dare to say that force has
+been given to us, not to defend our rights, but to annihilate the equal
+rights of our brethren? And if this be not true of every individual
+force, acting independently, how can it be true of the collective force,
+which is only the organized union of isolated forces?
+
+Nothing, therefore, can be more evident than this: The law is the
+organization of the natural right of lawful defense; it is the
+substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of
+acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what
+they have a right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties,
+and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over
+all.
+
+And if a people established upon this basis were to exist, it seems to
+me that order would prevail among them in their acts as well as in their
+ideas. It seems to me that such a people would have the most simple, the
+most economical, the least oppressive, the least to be felt, the most
+restrained, the most just, and, consequently, the most stable Government
+that could be imagined, whatever its political form might be.
+
+For under such an administration, everyone would feel that he possessed
+all the fullness, as well as all the responsibility of his existence. So
+long as personal safety was ensured, so long as labor was free, and the
+fruits of labor secured against all unjust attacks, no one would have
+any difficulties to contend with in the State. When
+
+{4}
+
+prosperous, we should not, it is true, have to thank the State for our
+success; but when unfortunate, we should no more think of taxing it with
+our disasters than our peasants think of attributing to it the arrival
+of hail or of frost. We should know it only by the inestimable blessing
+of Safety.
+
+It may further be affirmed, that, thanks to the nonintervention of
+the State in private affairs, our wants and their satisfactions would
+develop themselves in their natural order. We should not see poor
+families seeking for literary instruction before they were supplied
+with bread. We should not see towns peopled at the expense of rural
+districts, nor rural districts at the expense of towns. We should not
+see those great displacements of capital, of labor, and of population,
+that legislative measures occasion; displacements that render so
+uncertain and precarious the very sources of existence, and thus enlarge
+to such an extent the responsibility of Governments.
+
+Unhappily, law is by no means confined to its own sphere. Nor is it
+merely in some ambiguous and debatable views that it has left its proper
+sphere. It has done more than this. It has acted in direct opposition to
+its proper end; it has destroyed its own object; it has been employed
+in annihilating that justice which it ought to have established, in
+effacing amongst Rights, that limit which it was its true mission to
+respect; it has placed the collective force in the service of those who
+wish to traffic, without risk and without scruple, in the persons, the
+liberty, and the property of others; it has converted plunder into a
+right, that it may protect it, and lawful defense into a crime, that it
+may punish it.
+
+How has this perversion of law been accomplished? And what has resulted
+from it?
+
+{5}
+
+The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different
+causes--naked greed and misconceived philanthropy.
+
+Let us speak of the former. Self-preservation and development is the
+common aspiration of all men, in such a way that if every one enjoyed
+the free exercise of his faculties and the free disposition of their
+fruits, social progress would be incessant, uninterrupted, inevitable.
+
+But there is also another disposition which is common to them. This is
+to live and to develop, when they can, at the expense of one another.
+This is no rash imputation, emanating from a gloomy, uncharitable
+spirit. History bears witness to the truth of it, by the incessant wars,
+the migrations of races, sectarian oppressions, the universality of
+slavery, the frauds in trade, and the monopolies with which its annals
+abound. This fatal disposition has its origin in the very constitution
+of man--in that primitive, and universal, and invincible sentiment that
+urges it towards its well-being, and makes it seek to escape pain.
+
+Man can only derive life and enjoyment from a perpetual search and
+appropriation; that is, from a perpetual application of his faculties to
+objects, or from labor. This is the origin of property.
+
+But also he may live and enjoy, by seizing and appropriating the
+productions of the faculties of his fellow men. This is the origin of
+plunder.
+
+Now, labor being in itself a pain, and man being naturally inclined to
+avoid pain, it follows, and history proves it, that wherever plunder
+is less burdensome than labor, it prevails; and neither religion nor
+morality can, in this case, prevent it from prevailing.
+
+When does plunder cease, then? When it becomes more burdensome and more
+dangerous than labor. It is
+
+{6}
+
+very evident that the proper aim of law is to oppose the fatal tendency
+to plunder with the powerful obstacle of collective force; that all its
+measures should be in favor of property, and against plunder.
+
+But the law is made, generally, by one man, or by one class of men.
+And as law cannot exist without the sanction and the support of a
+preponderant force, it must finally place this force in the hands of
+those who legislate.
+
+This inevitable phenomenon, combined with the fatal tendency that, we
+have said, exists in the heart of man, explains the almost universal
+perversion of law. It is easy to conceive that, instead of being a check
+upon injustice, it becomes its most invincible instrument.
+
+It is easy to conceive that, according to the power of the legislator,
+it destroys for its own profit, and in different degrees amongst the
+rest of the community, personal independence by slavery, liberty by
+oppression, and property by plunder.
+
+It is in the nature of men to rise against the injustice of which they
+are the victims. When, therefore, plunder is organized by law, for
+the profit of those who perpetrate it, all the plundered classes tend,
+either by peaceful or revolutionary means, to enter in some way into
+the manufacturing of laws. These classes, according to the degree of
+enlightenment at which they have arrived, may propose to themselves
+two very different ends, when they thus attempt the attainment of their
+political rights; either they may wish to put an end to lawful plunder,
+or they may desire to take part in it.
+
+Woe to the nation where this latter thought prevails amongst the masses,
+at the moment when they, in their turn, seize upon the legislative
+power!
+
+{7}
+
+Up to that time, lawful plunder has been exercised by the few upon the
+many, as is the case in countries where the right of legislating is
+confined to a few hands. But now it has become universal, and the
+equilibrium is sought in universal plunder. The injustice that society
+contains, instead of being rooted out of it, is generalized. As soon as
+the injured classes have recovered their political rights, their first
+thought is not to abolish plunder (this would suppose them to possess
+enlightenment, which they cannot have), but to organize against the
+other classes, and to their own detriment, a system of reprisals--as if
+it was necessary, before the reign of justice arrives, that all should
+undergo a cruel retribution--some for their iniquity and some for their
+ignorance.
+
+It would be impossible, therefore, to introduce into society a greater
+change and a greater evil than this--the conversion of the law into an
+instrument of plunder.
+
+What would be the consequences of such a perversion? It would require
+volumes to describe them all. We must content ourselves with pointing
+out the most striking.
+
+In the first place, it would efface from everybody's conscience the
+distinction between justice and injustice. No society can exist unless
+the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to make
+them respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are
+in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel
+alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect
+for the law--two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be
+difficult to choose.
+
+It is so much in the nature of law to support justice that in the minds
+of the masses they are one and the same. There is in all of us a strong
+disposition to regard what is lawful as legitimate, so much so that many
+falsely derive
+
+{8}
+
+all justice from law. It is sufficient, then, for the law to order
+and sanction plunder, that it may appear to many consciences just and
+sacred. Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only
+in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them. If you
+suggest a doubt as to the morality of these institutions, it is said
+directly--"You are a dangerous experimenter, a utopian, a theorist,
+a despiser of the laws; you would shake the basis upon which society
+rests."
+
+If you lecture upon morality, or political economy, official bodies will
+be found to make this request to the Government:
+
+     That henceforth science be taught not only with sole
+     reference to free exchange (to liberty, property, and
+     justice), as has been the case up to the present time, but
+     also, and especially, with reference to the facts and
+     legislation (contrary to liberty, property, and justice)
+     that regulate French industry.
+
+     That, in public lecterns salaried by the treasury, the
+     professor abstain rigorously from endangering in the
+     slightest degree the respect due to the laws now in
+     force.[2]
+
+So that if a law exists that sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression
+or plunder, in any form whatever, it must not even be mentioned--for how
+can it be mentioned without damaging the respect that it inspires? Still
+further, morality and political economy must be taught in connection
+with this law--that is, under the supposition that it must be just, only
+because it is law.
+
+{9}
+
+Another effect of this deplorable perversion of the law is that it
+gives to human passions and to political struggles, and, in general, to
+politics, properly so called, an exaggerated importance.
+
+I could prove this assertion in a thousand ways. But I shall confine
+myself, by way of an illustration, to bringing it to bear upon a subject
+which has of late occupied everybody's mind: universal suffrage.
+
+Whatever may be thought of it by the adepts of the school of Rousseau,
+which professes to be very far advanced, but which I consider 20
+centuries behind, universal suffrage (taking the word in its strictest
+sense) is not one of those sacred dogmas with respect to which
+examination and doubt are crimes.
+
+Serious objections may be made to it.
+
+In the first place, the word universal conceals a gross sophism. There
+are, in France, 36,000,000 inhabitants. To make the right of suffrage
+universal, 36,000,000 electors should be reckoned. The most extended
+system reckons only 9,000,000. Three persons out of four, then, are
+excluded; and more than this, they are excluded by the fourth. Upon what
+principle is this exclusion founded? Upon the principle of incapacity.
+Universal suffrage, then, means: universal suffrage of those who are
+capable. In point of fact, who are the capable? Are age, sex, and
+judicial condemnations the only conditions to which incapacity is to be
+attached?
+
+On taking a nearer view of the subject, we may soon perceive the reason
+why the right of suffrage depends upon the presumption of incapacity;
+the most extended system differing from the most restricted in the
+conditions on which this incapacity depends, and which constitutes not a
+difference in principle, but in degree.
+
+{10}
+
+This motive is, that the elector does not stipulate for himself, but for
+everybody.
+
+If, as the republicans of the Greek and Roman tone pretend, the right of
+suffrage had fallen to the lot of every one at his birth, it would be an
+injustice to adults to prevent women and children from voting. Why are
+they prevented? Because they are presumed to be incapable. And why is
+incapacity a reason for exclusion? Because the elector does not reap
+alone the responsibility of his vote; because every vote engages and
+affects the community at large; because the community has a right to
+demand some assurances, as regards the acts upon which its well-being
+and its existence depend.
+
+I know what might be said in answer to this. I know what might be
+objected. But this is not the place to settle a controversy of this
+kind. What I wish to observe is this, that this same controversy (in
+common with the greater part of political questions) that agitates,
+excites, and unsettles the nations, would lose almost all its importance
+if the law had always been what it ought to be.
+
+In fact, if law were confined to causing all persons, all liberties, and
+all properties to be respected--if it were merely the organization of
+individual right and individual defense--if it were the obstacle, the
+check, the chastisement opposed to all oppression, to all plunder--is it
+likely that we should dispute much, as citizens, on the subject of the
+greater or lesser universality of suffrage? Is it likely that it would
+compromise that greatest of advantages, the public peace? Is it likely
+that the excluded classes would not quietly wait for their turn? Is
+it likely that the enfranchised classes would be very jealous of their
+privilege? And is it not clear, that the interest of all being one and
+the same, some would act without much inconvenience to the others?
+
+{11}
+
+But if the fatal principle should come to be introduced, that, under
+pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the
+law may take from one party in order to give to another, help itself to
+the wealth acquired by all the classes that it may increase that of one
+class, whether that of the agriculturists, the manufacturers, the ship
+owners, or artists and comedians; then certainly, in this case, there is
+no class which may not try, and with reason, to place its hand upon
+the law, that would not demand with fury its right of election and
+eligibility, and that would overturn society rather than not obtain
+it. Even beggars and vagabonds will prove to you that they have an
+incontestable title to it. They will say:
+
+     We never buy wine, tobacco, or salt, without paying the
+     tax, and a part of this tax is given by law in perquisites
+     and gratuities to men who are richer than we are. Others
+     make use of the law to create an artificial rise in the
+     price of bread, meat, iron, or cloth.
+
+     Since everybody traffics in law for his own profit, we
+     should like to do the same. We should like to make it
+     produce the right to assistance, which is the poor man's
+     plunder. To effect this, we ought to be electors and
+     legislators, that we may organize, on a large scale, alms
+     for our own class, as you have organized, on a large scale,
+     protection for yours.
+
+Don't tell us that you will take our cause upon yourselves, and throw
+to us 600,000 francs to keep us quiet, like giving us a bone to pick. We
+have other claims, and, at any rate, we wish to stipulate for ourselves,
+as other classes have stipulated for themselves!
+
+How is this argument to be answered? Yes, as long as it is admitted
+that the law may be diverted from its true mission, that it may violate
+property instead of securing it,
+
+{12}
+
+everybody will be wanting to manufacture law, either to defend himself
+against plunder, or to organize it for his own profit. The political
+question will always be prejudicial, predominant, and absorbing; in a
+word, there will be fighting around the door of the Legislative Palace.
+The struggle will be no less furious within it. To be convinced of this,
+it is hardly necessary to look at what passes in the Chambers in France
+and in England; it is enough to know how the question stands.
+
+Is there any need to prove that this odious perversion of law is a
+perpetual source of hatred and discord, that it even tends to social
+disorganization? Look at the United States. There is no country in the
+world where the law is kept more within its proper domain--which is, to
+secure to everyone his liberty and his property. Therefore, there is
+no country in the world where social order appears to rest upon a more
+solid basis. Nevertheless, even in the United States, there are two
+questions, and only two, that from the beginning have endangered
+political order. And what are these two questions? That of slavery and
+that of tariffs; that is, precisely the only two questions in which,
+contrary to the general spirit of this republic, law has taken the
+character of a plunderer. Slavery is a violation, sanctioned by law, of
+the rights of the person. Protection is a violation perpetrated by the
+law upon the rights of property; and certainly it is very remarkable
+that, in the midst of so many other debates, this double legal scourge,
+the sorrowful inheritance of the Old World, should be the only one which
+can, and perhaps will, cause the rupture of the Union. Indeed, a more
+astounding fact, in the heart of society, cannot be conceived than this:
+That law should have become an instrument of injustice. And if this fact
+occasions consequences so formidable to the United
+
+{13}
+
+States, where there is but one exception, what must it be with us in
+Europe, where it is a principle--a system?
+
+Mr. Montalembert, adopting the thought of a famous proclamation of Mr.
+Carlier, said, "We must make war against socialism." And by socialism,
+according to the definition of Mr. Charles Dupin, he meant plunder. But
+what plunder did he mean? For there are two sorts: extralegal and legal
+plunder.
+
+As to extralegal plunder, such as theft, or swindling, which is defined,
+foreseen, and punished by the penal code, I do not think it can be
+adorned by the name of socialism. It is not this that systematically
+threatens the foundations of society. Besides, the war against this
+kind of plunder has not waited for the signal of Mr. Montalembert or
+Mr. Carlier. It has gone on since the beginning of the world; France was
+carrying it on long before the revolution of February--long before the
+appearance of socialism--with all the ceremonies of magistracy, police,
+gendarmerie, prisons, dungeons, and scaffolds. It is the law itself that
+is conducting this war, and it is to be wished, in my opinion, that the
+law should always maintain this attitude with respect to plunder.
+
+But this is not the case. The law sometimes takes its own part.
+Sometimes it accomplishes it with its own hands, in order to save the
+parties benefited the shame, the danger, and the scruple. Sometimes
+it places all this ceremony of magistracy, police, gendarmerie, and
+prisons, at the service of the plunderer, and treats the plundered
+party, when he defends himself, as the criminal. In a word, there is
+a legal plunder, and it is, no doubt, this that is meant by Mr.
+Montalembert.
+
+This plunder may be only an exceptional blemish in the legislation of a
+people, and in this case, the best thing
+
+{14}
+
+that can be done is, without so many speeches and lamentations, to
+do away with it as soon as possible, notwithstanding the clamors of
+interested parties. But how is it to be distinguished? Very easily. See
+whether the law takes from some persons that which belongs to them,
+to give to others what does not belong to them. See whether the law
+performs, for the profit of one citizen, and, to the injury of others,
+an act that this citizen cannot perform without committing a crime.
+Abolish this law without delay; it is not merely an iniquity--it is a
+fertile source of iniquities, for it invites reprisals; and if you do
+not take care, the exceptional case will extend, multiply, and become
+systematic. No doubt the party benefited will exclaim loudly; he will
+assert his acquired rights. He will say that the State is bound to
+protect and encourage his industry; he will plead that it is a good
+thing for the State to be enriched, that it may spend the more, and thus
+shower down salaries upon the poor workmen. Take care not to listen to
+this sophistry, for it is just by the systematizing of these arguments
+that legal plunder becomes systematized.
+
+And this is what has taken place. The delusion of the day is to enrich
+all classes at the expense of each other; it is to generalize plunder
+under pretense of organizing it. Now, legal plunder may be exercised in
+an infinite multitude of ways. Hence come an infinite multitude of
+plans for organization; tariffs, protection, perquisites, gratuities,
+encouragements, progressive taxation, free public education, right to
+work, right to profit, right to wages, right to assistance, right to
+instruments of labor, gratuity of credit, etc., etc. And it is all these
+plans, taken as a whole, with what they have in common, legal plunder,
+that takes the name of socialism.
+
+Now socialism, thus defined, and forming a doctrinal body, what other
+war would you make against it than a
+
+{15}
+
+war of doctrine? You find this doctrine false, absurd, abominable.
+Refute it. This will be all the easier, the more false, absurd, and
+abominable it is. Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting
+out of your legislation every particle of socialism which may have crept
+into it--and this will be no light work.
+
+Mr. Montalembert has been reproached with wishing to turn brute force
+against socialism. He ought to be exonerated from this reproach, for he
+has plainly said: "The war that we must make against socialism must be
+one that is compatible with the law, honor, and justice."
+
+But how is it that Mr. Montalembert does not see that he is placing
+himself in a vicious circle? You would oppose law to socialism. But it
+is the law that socialism invokes. It aspires to legal, not extralegal
+plunder. It is of the law itself, like monopolists of all kinds, that it
+wants to make an instrument; and when once it has the law on its side,
+how will you be able to turn the law against it? How will you place it
+under the power of your tribunals, your gendarmes, and of your prisons?
+What will you do then? You wish to prevent it from taking any part in
+the making of laws. You would keep it outside the Legislative Palace.
+In this you will not succeed, I venture to prophesy, so long as legal
+plunder is the basis of the legislation within.
+
+It is absolutely necessary that this question of legal plunder should be
+determined, and there are only three solutions of it:
+
+1. When the few plunder the many.
+
+2. When everybody plunders everybody else.
+
+3. When nobody plunders anybody.
+
+Partial plunder, universal plunder, absence of plunder, amongst these we
+have to make our choice. The law can only produce one of these results.
+
+{16}
+
+Partial plunder. This is the system that prevailed so long as the
+elective privilege was partial; a system that is resorted to, to avoid
+the invasion of socialism.
+
+Universal plunder. We have been threatened by this system when the
+elective privilege has become universal; the masses having conceived
+the idea of making law, on the principle of legislators who had preceded
+them.
+
+Absence of plunder. This is the principle of justice, peace, order,
+stability, conciliation, and of good sense, which I shall proclaim with
+all the force of my lungs (which is very inadequate, alas!) till the day
+of my death.
+
+And, in all sincerity, can anything more be required at the hands of
+the law? Can the law, whose necessary sanction is force, be reasonably
+employed upon anything beyond securing to every one his right? I
+defy anyone to remove it from this circle without perverting it, and
+consequently turning force against right. And as this is the most fatal,
+the most illogical social perversion that can possibly be imagined, it
+must be admitted that the true solution, so much sought after, of the
+social problem, is contained in these simple words--LAW IS ORGANIZED
+JUSTICE.
+
+Now it is important to remark, that to organize justice by law, that is
+to say by force, excludes the idea of organizing by law, or by force any
+manifestation whatever of human activity--labor, charity, agriculture,
+commerce, industry, instruction, the fine arts, or religion; for any
+one of these organizings would inevitably destroy the essential
+organization. How, in fact, can we imagine force encroaching upon the
+liberty of citizens without infringing upon justice, and so acting
+against its proper aim?
+
+Here I am taking on the most popular prejudice of our time. It is not
+considered enough that law should be just,
+
+{17}
+
+it must be philanthropic. It is not sufficient that it should guarantee
+to every citizen the free and inoffensive exercise of his faculties,
+applied to his physical, intellectual, and moral development; it is
+required to extend well-being, instruction, and morality, directly over
+the nation. This is the fascinating side of socialism.
+
+But, I repeat it, these two missions of the law contradict each other.
+We have to choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be
+free and not free. Mr. de Lamartine wrote to me one day thus: "Your
+doctrine is only the half of my program; you have stopped at liberty, I
+go on to fraternity." I answered him: "The second part of your program
+will destroy the first." And in fact it is impossible for me to separate
+the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly conceive
+fraternity legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed,
+and justice legally trampled under foot. Legal plunder has two roots:
+one of them, as we have already seen, is in human greed; the other is in
+misconceived philanthropy.
+
+Before I proceed, I think I ought to explain myself upon the word
+plunder.
+
+I do not take it, as it often is taken, in a vague, undefined, relative,
+or metaphorical sense. I use it in its scientific acceptation, and
+as expressing the opposite idea to property. When a portion of wealth
+passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent,
+and without compensation, to him who has not created it, whether by
+force or by artifice, I say that property is violated, that plunder is
+perpetrated. I say that this is exactly what the law ought to repress
+always and everywhere. If the law itself performs the action it ought to
+repress, I say that plunder is still perpetrated, and even, in a social
+point of view, under aggravated circumstances. In this case,
+
+{18}
+
+however, he who profits from the plunder is not responsible for it;
+it is the law, the lawgiver, society itself, and this is where the
+political danger lies.
+
+It is to be regretted that there is something offensive in the word. I
+have sought in vain for another, for I would not wish at any time, and
+especially just now, to add an irritating word to our disagreements;
+therefore, whether I am believed or not, I declare that I do not mean
+to impugn the intentions nor the morality of anybody. I am attacking
+an idea that I believe to be false--a system that appears to me to
+be unjust; and this is so independent of intentions, that each of us
+profits by it without wishing it, and suffers from it without being
+aware of the cause.
+
+Any person must write under the influence of party spirit or of
+fear, who would call into question the sincerity of protectionism, of
+socialism, and even of communism, which are one and the same plant, in
+three different periods of its growth. All that can be said is, that
+plunder is more visible by its partiality in protectionism, [3] and
+by its universality in communism; whence it follows that, of the three
+systems, socialism is still the most vague, the most undefined, and
+consequently the most sincere.
+
+Be that as it may, to conclude that legal plunder has one of its roots
+in misconceived philanthropy, is evidently to put intentions out of the
+question.
+
+{19}
+
+With this understanding, let us examine the value, the origin, and
+the tendency of this popular aspiration, which pretends to realize the
+general good by general plunder.
+
+The Socialists say, since the law organizes justice, why should it not
+organize labor, instruction, and religion?
+
+Why? Because it could not organize labor, instruction, and religion,
+without disorganizing justice.
+
+For remember, that law is force, and that consequently the domain of the
+law cannot properly extend beyond the domain of force.
+
+When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose
+nothing upon him but a mere negation. They only oblige him to abstain
+from doing harm. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor
+his property. They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property
+of others. They hold themselves on the defensive; they defend the equal
+right of all. They fulfill a mission whose harmlessness is evident,
+whose utility is palpable, and whose legitimacy is not to be disputed.
+This is so true that, as a friend of mine once remarked to me, to say
+that the aim of the law is to cause justice to reign, is to use an
+expression that is not rigorously exact. It ought to be said, the aim
+of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is not
+justice that has an existence of its own, it is injustice. The one
+results from the absence of the other.
+
+But when the law, through the medium of its necessary
+agent--force--imposes a form of labor, a method or a subject of
+instruction, a creed, or a worship, it is no longer negative; it acts
+positively upon men. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their
+own will, the initiative of the legislator for their own initiative.
+They have no need to consult, to compare, or to foresee; the law does
+all that for them. The intellect is for them a useless
+
+{20}
+
+encumbrance; they cease to be men; they lose their personality, their
+liberty, their property.
+
+Try to imagine a form of labor imposed by force, that is not a violation
+of liberty; a transmission of wealth imposed by force, that is not a
+violation of property. If you cannot succeed in reconciling this, you
+are bound to conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry
+without organizing injustice.
+
+When, from the seclusion of his office, a politician takes a view of
+society, he is struck with the spectacle of inequality that presents
+itself. He mourns over the sufferings that are the lot of so many of our
+brethren, sufferings whose aspect is rendered yet more sorrowful by the
+contrast of luxury and wealth.
+
+He ought, perhaps, to ask himself whether such a social state has not
+been caused by the plunder of ancient times, exercised in the way of
+conquests; and by plunder of more recent times, effected through the
+medium of the laws? He ought to ask himself whether, granting the
+aspiration of all men to well-being and improvement, the reign of
+justice would not suffice to realize the greatest activity of progress,
+and the greatest amount of equality compatible with that individual
+responsibility that God has awarded as a just retribution of virtue and
+vice?
+
+He never gives this a thought. His mind turns towards combinations,
+arrangements, legal or factitious organizations. He seeks the remedy in
+perpetuating and exaggerating what has produced the evil.
+
+For, justice apart, which we have seen is only a negation, is there any
+one of these legal arrangements that does not contain the principle of
+plunder?
+
+You say, "There are men who have no money," and you apply to the law.
+But the law is not a self-supplied
+
+{21}
+
+fountain, whence every stream may obtain supplies independently of
+society. Nothing can enter the public treasury, in favor of one citizen
+or one class, but what other citizens and other classes have been forced
+to send to it. If everyone draws from it only the equivalent of what
+he has contributed to it, your law, it is true, is no plunderer, but it
+does nothing for men who want money--it does not promote equality. It
+can only be an instrument of equalization as far as it takes from one
+party to give to another, and then it is an instrument of plunder.
+Examine, in this light, the protection of tariffs, subsidies, right
+to profit, right to labor, right to assistance, free public education,
+progressive taxation, gratuitousness of credit, social workshops, and
+you will always find at the bottom legal plunder, organized injustice.
+
+You say, "There are men who want knowledge," and you apply to the law.
+But the law is not a torch that sheds light that originates within
+itself. It extends over a society where there are men who have
+knowledge, and others who have not; citizens who want to learn, and
+others who are disposed to teach. It can only do one of two things:
+either allow a free operation to this kind of transaction, i.e., let
+this kind of want satisfy itself freely; or else preempt the will of
+the people in the matter, and take from some of them sufficient to pay
+professors commissioned to instruct others for free. But, in this second
+case there cannot fail to be a violation of liberty and property--legal
+plunder.
+
+You say, "Here are men who are wanting in morality or religion," and
+you apply to the law; but law is force, and need I say how far it is a
+violent and absurd enterprise to introduce force in these matters?
+
+{22}
+
+As the result of its systems and of its efforts, it would seem that
+socialism, notwithstanding all its self-complacency, can scarcely
+help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do?
+It disguises it cleverly from others, and even from itself, under the
+seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, association.
+And because we do not ask so much at the hands of the law, because
+we only ask it for justice, it alleges that we reject fraternity,
+solidarity, organization, and association; and they brand us with the
+name of individualists.
+
+We can assure them that what we repudiate is not natural organization,
+but forced organization.
+
+It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would
+impose upon us.
+
+It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity.
+
+It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is
+only an unjust displacement of responsibility.
+
+Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds
+Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thing being
+done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done
+at all. We disapprove of education by the State--then we are against
+education altogether. We object to a State religion--then we would have
+no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by
+the State then we are against equality, etc., etc. They might as
+well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the
+cultivation of corn by the State.
+
+How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it
+does not contain--prosperity, in a positive sense, wealth, science,
+religion--should ever have gained ground in the political world? The
+modern politicians, particularly those of the Socialist school, found
+their different
+
+{23}
+
+theories upon one common hypothesis; and surely a more strange, a more
+presumptuous notion, could never have entered a human brain.
+
+They divide mankind into two parts. Men in general, except one, form the
+first; the politician himself forms the second, which is by far the most
+important.
+
+In fact, they begin by supposing that men are devoid of any principle of
+action, and of any means of discernment in themselves; that they have no
+initiative; that they are inert matter, passive particles, atoms without
+impulse; at best a vegetation indifferent to its own mode of existence,
+susceptible of assuming, from an exterior will and hand an infinite
+number of forms, more or less symmetrical, artistic, and perfected.
+
+Moreover, every one of these politicians does not hesitate to
+assume that he himself is, under the names of organizer, discoverer,
+legislator, institutor or founder, this will and hand, this universal
+initiative, this creative power, whose sublime mission it is to gather
+together these scattered materials, that is, men, into society.
+
+Starting from these data, as a gardener according to his caprice shapes
+his trees into pyramids, parasols, cubes, cones, vases, espaliers,
+distaffs, or fans; so the Socialist, following his chimera, shapes poor
+humanity into groups, series, circles, subcircles, honeycombs, or social
+workshops, with all kinds of variations. And as the gardener, to bring
+his trees into shape, needs hatchets, pruning hooks, saws, and shears,
+so the politician, to bring society into shape, needs the forces which
+he can only find in the laws; the law of tariffs, the law of taxation,
+the law of assistance, and the law of education.
+
+It is so true, that the Socialists look upon mankind as a subject for
+social experiments, that if, by chance, they
+
+{24}
+
+are not quite certain of the success of these experiments, they will
+request a portion of mankind, as a subject to experiment upon. It is
+well known how popular the idea of trying all systems is, and one of
+their chiefs has been known seriously to demand of the Constituent
+Assembly a parish, with all its inhabitants, upon which to make his
+experiments.
+
+It is thus that an inventor will make a small machine before he makes
+one of the regular size. Thus the chemist sacrifices some substances,
+the agriculturist some seed and a corner of his field, to make trial of
+an idea.
+
+But think of the difference between the gardener and his trees, between
+the inventor and his machine, between the chemist and his substances,
+between the agriculturist and his seed! The Socialist thinks, in
+all sincerity, that there is the same difference between himself and
+mankind.
+
+No wonder the politicians of the nineteenth century look upon society
+as an artificial production of the legislator's genius. This idea,
+the result of a classical education, has taken possession of all the
+thinkers and great writers of our country.
+
+To all these persons, the relations between mankind and the legislator
+appear to be the same as those that exist between the clay and the
+potter.
+
+Moreover, if they have consented to recognize in the heart of man a
+capability of action, and in his intellect a faculty of discernment,
+they have looked upon this gift of God as a fatal one, and thought that
+mankind, under these two impulses, tended fatally towards ruin. They
+have taken it for granted that if abandoned to their own inclinations,
+men would only occupy themselves with religion to arrive at atheism,
+with instruction to come to ignorance, and with labor and exchange to be
+extinguished in misery.
+
+{25}
+
+Happily, according to these writers, there are some men, termed
+governors and legislators, upon whom Heaven has bestowed opposite
+tendencies, not for their own sake only, but for the sake of the rest of
+the world.
+
+Whilst mankind tends to evil, they incline to good; whilst mankind is
+advancing towards darkness, they are aspiring to enlightenment; whilst
+mankind is drawn towards vice, they are attracted by virtue. And, this
+granted, they demand the assistance of force, by means of which they are
+to substitute their own tendencies for those of the human race.
+
+It is only needful to open, almost at random, a book on philosophy,
+politics, or history, to see how strongly this idea--the child of
+classical studies and the mother of socialism--is rooted in our country;
+that mankind is merely inert matter, receiving life, organization,
+morality, and wealth from power; or, rather, and still worse--that
+mankind itself tends towards degradation, and is only arrested in
+its tendency by the mysterious hand of the legislator. Classical
+conventionalism shows us everywhere, behind passive society, a
+hidden power, under the names of Law, or Legislator (or, by a mode of
+expression which refers to some person or persons of undisputed weight
+and authority, but not named), which moves, animates, enriches, and
+regenerates mankind.
+
+We will give a quotation from Bossuet:
+
+     One of the things which was the most strongly impressed
+     (by whom?) upon the mind of the Egyptians, was the love of
+     their country.... Nobody was allowed to be useless to the
+     State; the law assigned to every one his employment, which
+     descended from father to son. No one was permitted to have
+     two professions, nor to adopt another.
+
+... But there was one occupation which was
+
+{26}
+
+obliged to be common to all, this was the study of the laws and of
+wisdom; ignorance of religion and the political regulations of the
+country was excused in no condition of life. Moreover, every profession
+had a district assigned to it (by whom?).... Amongst good laws, one
+of the best things was, that everybody was taught to observe them
+(by whom?). Egypt abounded with wonderful inventions, and nothing was
+neglected which could render life comfortable and tranquil.
+
+Thus men, according to Bossuet, derive nothing from themselves;
+patriotism, wealth, inventions, husbandry, science--all come to them
+by the operation of the laws, or by kings. All they have to do is to be
+passive. It is on this ground that Bossuet takes exception when Diodorus
+accuses the Egyptians of rejecting wrestling and music. "How is that
+possible," says he, "since these arts were invented by Trismegistus?"
+
+It is the same with the Persians:
+
+     One of the first cares of the prince was to encourage
+     agriculture.... As there were posts established for the
+     regulation of the armies, so there were offices for the
+     superintending of rural works....
+
+The respect with which the Persians were inspired for royal authority
+was excessive.
+
+The Greeks, although full of mind, were no less strangers to their own
+responsibilities; so much so, that of themselves, like dogs and horses,
+they would not have ventured upon the most simple games. In a classical
+sense, it is an undisputed thing that everything comes to the people
+from without.
+
+     The Greeks, naturally full of spirit and courage, had
+     been early cultivated by kings and colonies who had come
+     from Egypt. From them they had
+
+
+{27}
+
+learned the exercises of the body, foot races, and horse and chariot
+races.... The best thing that the Egyptians had taught them was to
+become docile, and to allow themselves to be formed by the laws for the
+public good.
+
+FENELON--Reared in the study and admiration of antiquity and a witness
+of the power of Louis XIV, Fenelon naturally adopted the idea
+that mankind should be passive, and that its misfortunes and its
+prosperities, its virtues and its vices, are caused by the external
+influence that is exercised upon it by the law, or by the makers of
+the law. Thus, in his Utopia of Salentum, he brings the men, with their
+interests, their faculties, their desires, and their possessions, under
+the absolute direction of the legislator. Whatever the subject may be,
+they themselves have no voice in it--the prince judges for them. The
+nation is just a shapeless mass, of which the prince is the soul. In him
+resides the thought, the foresight, the principle of all organization,
+of all progress; on him, therefore, rests all the responsibility.
+
+In proof of this assertion, I might transcribe the whole of the tenth
+book of _Telemachus_. I refer the reader to it, and shall content myself
+with quoting some passages taken at random from this celebrated work, to
+which, in every other respect, I am the first to render justice.
+
+With the astonishing credulity that characterizes the classics, Fénelon,
+against the authority of reason and of facts, admits the general
+felicity of the Egyptians, and attributes it, not to their own wisdom,
+but to that of their kings:
+
+     We could not turn our eyes to the two shores, without
+     perceiving rich towns and country seats, agreeably situated;
+     fields that were covered every year,
+
+{28}
+
+     without intermission, with golden crops; meadows full of
+     flocks; laborers bending under the weight of fruits that the
+     earth lavished on its cultivators; and shepherds who made
+     the echoes around repeat the soft sounds of their pipes and
+     flutes. "Happy," said Mentor, "is that people who is
+     governed by a wise king."... Mentor afterwards desired me to
+     remark the happiness and abundance that was spread over all
+     the country of Egypt, where twenty-two thousand cities might
+     be counted. He admired the excellent police regulations of
+     the cities; the justice administered in favor of the poor
+     against the rich; the good education of the children, who
+     were accustomed to obedience, labor, and the love of arts
+     and letters; the exactness with which all the ceremonies of
+     religion were performed; the disinterestedness, the desire
+     of honor, the fidelity to men, and the fear of the gods,
+     with which every father inspired his children. He could not
+     sufficiently admire the prosperous state of the country.
+     "Happy" said he, "is the people whom a wise king rules in
+     such a manner."
+
+Fénelon's idyll on Crete is still more fascinating. Mentor is made to
+say:
+
+     All that you will see in this wonderful island is the
+     result of the laws of Minos. The education that the children
+     receive renders the body healthy and robust. They are
+     accustomed, from the first, to a frugal and laborious life;
+     it is supposed that all the pleasures of sense enervate the
+     body and the mind; no other pleasure is presented to them
+     but that of being invincible by virtue, that of acquiring
+     much glory... there they punish three vices that go
+     unpunished amongst other people--ingratitude, dissimulation,
+     and avarice. As to pomp and dissipation, there is no need to
+     punish these, for they are unknown in Crete.... No costly
+     furniture, no magnificent clothing, no delicious feasts, no
+     gilded palaces are allowed.
+
+{29}
+
+It is thus that Mentor prepares his scholar to mould and manipulate,
+doubtless with the most philanthropic intentions, the people of
+Ithaca, and, to confirm him in these ideas, he gives him the example of
+Salentum.
+
+So we receive our first political notions. We are taught to treat men
+very much as Oliver de Serres teaches farmers to manage and to mix the
+soil.
+
+MONTESQUIEU--
+
+     To sustain the spirit of commerce, it is necessary that
+     all the laws should favor it; that these same laws, by their
+     regulations in dividing the fortunes in proportion as
+     commerce enlarges them, should place every poor citizen in
+     sufficiently easy circumstances to enable him to work like
+     the others, and every rich citizen in such mediocrity that
+     he must work, in order to retain or to acquire.
+
+Thus the laws are to dispose of all fortunes.
+
+     Although in a democracy, real equality be the soul of the
+     State, yet it is so difficult to establish that an extreme
+     exactness in this matter would not always be desirable. It
+     is sufficient that a census be established to reduce or fix
+     the differences to a certain point, after which, it is for
+     particular laws to equalize, as it were, the inequality by
+     burdens imposed upon the rich and reliefs granted to the
+     poor.
+
+Here, again, we see the equalization of fortunes by law, that is, by
+force.
+
+     There were, in Greece, two kinds of republics. One was
+     military, as Sparta; the other commercial, as Athens. In the
+     one it was wished (by whom?) that the citizens should be
+     idle: in the other, the love of labor was encouraged.
+
+     It is worth our while to pay a little attention to the
+     extent of genius required by these legislators, that
+
+{30}
+
+     we may see how, by confounding all the virtues, they showed
+     their wisdom to the world. Lycurgus, blending theft with the
+     spirit of justice, the hardest slavery with extreme liberty,
+     the most atrocious sentiments with the greatest moderation,
+     gave stability to his city. He seemed to deprive it of all
+     its resources, arts, commerce, money, and walls; there was
+     ambition without the hope of rising; there were natural
+     sentiments where the individual was neither child, nor
+     husband, nor father. Chastity even was deprived of modesty.
+     By this road Sparta was led on to grandeur and to glory.
+
+     The phenomenon that we observe in the institutions of
+     Greece has been seen in the midst of the degeneracy and
+     corruption of our modern times. An honest legislator has
+     formed a people where probity has appeared as natural as
+     bravery among the Spartans. Mr. Penn is a true Lycurgus, and
+     although the former had peace for his object, and the latter
+     war, they resemble each other in the singular path along
+     which they have led their people, in their influence over
+     free men, in the prejudices which they have overcome, the
+     passions they have subdued.
+
+     Paraguay furnishes us with another example. Society has
+     been accused of the crime of regarding the pleasure of
+     commanding as the only good of life; but it will always be a
+     noble thing to govern men by making them happy.
+
+     Those who desire to form similar institutions will
+     establish community of property, as in the republic of
+     Plato, the same reverence as he enjoined for the gods,
+     separation from strangers for the preservation of morality,
+     and make the city and not the citizens create commerce: they
+     should give our arts without our luxury, our wants without
+     our desires.
+
+{31}
+
+Vulgar infatuation may exclaim, if it likes, "It is Montesquieu!
+magnificent! sublime!" I am not afraid to express my opinion, and to
+say:
+
+     What! You have the gall to call that fine? It is
+     frightful! It is abominable! And these extracts, which I
+     might multiply, show that according to Montesquieu, the
+     persons, the liberties, the property, mankind itself, are
+     nothing but grist for the mill of the sagacity of lawgivers.
+
+ROUSSEAU--Although this politician, the paramount authority of the
+Democrats, makes the social edifice rest upon the general will, no one
+has so completely admitted the hypothesis of the entire passiveness of
+human nature in the presence of the lawgiver:
+
+     If it is true that a great prince is a rare thing, how
+     much more so must a great lawgiver be? The former has only
+     to follow the pattern proposed to him by the latter. This
+     latter is the engineer who invents the machine; the former
+     is merely the workman who sets it in motion.
+
+And what part have men to act in all this? That of the machine, which
+is set in motion; or rather, are they not the brute matter of which the
+machine is made? Thus, between the legislator and the prince, between
+the prince and his subjects, there are the same relations as those
+that exist between the agricultural writer and the agriculturist,
+the agriculturist and the clod. At what a vast height, then, is the
+politician placed, who rules over legislators themselves and teaches
+them their trade in such imperative terms as the following:
+
+     Would you give consistency to the State? Bring the
+     extremes together as much as possible. Suffer neither
+     wealthy persons nor beggars.
+
+{32}
+
+     If the soil is poor and barren, or the country too much
+     confined for the inhabitants, turn to industry and the arts,
+     whose productions you will exchange for the provisions which
+     you require.... On a good soil, if you are short of
+     inhabitants, give all your attention to agriculture, which
+     multiplies men, and banish the arts, which only serve to
+     depopulate the country.... Pay attention to extensive and
+     convenient coasts. Cover the sea with vessels, and you will
+     have a brilliant and short existence. If your seas wash only
+     inaccessible rocks, let the people be barbarous, and eat
+     fish; they will live more quietly, perhaps better, and most
+     certainly more happily. In short, besides those maxims which
+     are common to all, every people has its own particular
+     circumstances, which demand a legislation peculiar to
+     itself.
+
+     It was thus that the Hebrews formerly, and the Arabs more
+     recently, had religion for their principal object; that of
+     the Athenians was literature; that of Carthage and Tyre,
+     commerce; of Rhodes, naval affairs; of Sparta, war; and of
+     Rome, virtue.
+
+The author of the "Spirit of Laws" has shown the art by which the
+legislator should frame his institutions towards each of these
+objects.... But if the legislator, mistaking his object, should take up
+a principle different from that which arises from the nature of things;
+if one should tend to slavery, and the other to liberty; if one to
+wealth, and the other to population; one to peace, and the other to
+conquests; the laws will insensibly become enfeebled, the Constitution
+will be impaired, and the State will be subject to incessant agitations
+until it is destroyed, or becomes changed, and invincible Nature regains
+her empire.
+
+But if Nature is sufficiently invincible to regain its empire, why does
+not Rousseau admit that it had no need of the legislator to gain its
+empire from the beginning?
+
+{33}
+
+Why does he not allow that by obeying their own impulse, men would of
+themselves apply agriculture to a fertile district, and commerce to
+extensive and commodious coasts without the interference of a Lycurgus,
+a Solon, or a Rousseau, who would undertake it at the risk of deceiving
+themselves?
+
+Be that as it may, we see with what a terrible responsibility Rousseau
+invests inventors, institutors, conductors, and manipulators of
+societies. He is, therefore, very exacting with regard to them.
+
+     He who dares to undertake the institutions of a people,
+     ought to feel that he can, as it were, transform every
+     individual, who is by himself a perfect and solitary whole,
+     receiving his life and being from a larger whole of which he
+     forms a part; he must feel that he can change the
+     constitution of man, to fortify it, and substitute a social
+     and moral existence for the physical and independent one
+     that we have all received from nature. In a word, he must
+     deprive man of his own powers, to give him others that are
+     foreign to him.
+
+Poor human nature! What would become of its dignity if it were entrusted
+to the disciples of Rousseau?
+
+RAYNAL--
+
+     The climate, that is, the air and the soil, is the first
+     element for the legislator. His resources prescribe to him
+     his duties. First, he must consult his local position. A
+     population dwelling upon maritime shores must have laws
+     fitted for navigation.... If the colony is located in an
+     inland region, a legislator must provide for the nature of
+     the soil, and for its degree of fertility....
+
+     It is more especially in the distribution of property
+     that the wisdom of legislation will appear. As a
+
+{34}
+
+     general rule, and in every country, when a new colony is
+     founded, land should be given to each man, sufficient for
+     the support of his family....
+
+     In an uncultivated island, which you are colonizing with
+     children, it will only be needful to let the germs of truth
+     expand in the developments of reason!... But when you
+     establish old people in a new country, the skill consists in
+     only allowing it those injurious opinions and customs which
+     it is impossible to cure and correct. If you wish to prevent
+     them from being perpetuated, you will act upon the rising
+     generation by a general and public education of the
+     children. A prince or legislator ought never to found a
+     colony without previously sending wise men there to instruct
+     the youth.... In a new colony, every facility is open to the
+     precautions of the legislator who desires to purify the tone
+     and the manners of the people. If he has genius and virtue,
+     the lands and the men that are at his disposal will inspire
+     his soul with a plan of society that a writer can only
+     vaguely trace, and in a way that would be subject to the
+     instability of all hypotheses, which are varied and
+     complicated by an infinity of circumstances too difficult to
+     foresee and to combine.
+
+One would think it was a professor of agriculture who was saying to his
+pupils
+
+     The climate is the only rule for the agriculturist.
+
+His resources dictate to him his duties. The first thing he has to
+consider is his local position. If he is on a clayey soil, he must do so
+and so. If he has to contend with sand, this is the way in which he must
+set about it. Every facility is open to the agriculturist who wishes to
+clear and improve his soil.
+
+If he only has the skill, the manure which he has at his disposal will
+suggest to him a plan of operation, which a professor can only vaguely
+trace, and in a way that would be subject to the uncertainty of all
+hypotheses, which vary and are complicated by an
+
+{35}
+
+infinity of circumstances too difficult to foresee and to combine.
+
+But, oh! sublime writers, deign to remember sometimes that this clay,
+this sand, this manure, of which you are disposing in so arbitrary
+a manner, are men, your equals, intelligent and free beings like
+yourselves, who have received from God, as you have, the faculty of
+seeing, of foreseeing, of thinking, and of judging for themselves!
+
+MABLY--(He is supposing the laws to be worn out by time and by the
+neglect of security, and continues thus):
+
+     Under these circumstances, we must be convinced that the
+     bonds of Government are slack. Give them a new tension (it
+     is the reader who is addressed), and the evil will be
+     remedied.... Think less of punishing the faults than of
+     encouraging the virtues that you want. By this method you
+     will bestow upon your republic the vigor of youth. Through
+     ignorance of this, a free people has lost its liberty! But
+     if the evil has made so much way that the ordinary
+     magistrates are unable to remedy it effectually, have
+     recourse to an extraordinary magistracy, whose time should
+     be short, and its power considerable. The imagination of the
+     citizens requires to be impressed.
+
+In this style he goes on through twenty volumes.
+
+There was a time when, under the influence of teaching like this, which
+is the foundation of classical education, everyone was for placing
+himself beyond and above mankind, for the sake of arranging, organizing,
+and instituting it in his own way.
+
+CONDILLAC--
+
+     Take upon yourself, my lord, the character of Lycurgus or
+     of Solon. Before you finish reading
+
+{36}
+
+     this essay, amuse yourself with giving laws to some wild
+     people in America or in Africa. Establish these roving men
+     in fixed dwellings; teach them to keep flocks.... Endeavor
+     to develop the social qualities that nature has implanted in
+     them.... Make them begin to practice the duties of
+     humanity.... Cause the pleasures of the passions to become
+     distasteful to them by punishments, and you will see these
+     barbarians, with every plan of your legislation, lose a vice
+     and gain a virtue.
+
+     All these people have had laws. But few among them have
+     been happy. Why is this? Because legislators have almost
+     always been ignorant of the object of society, which is to
+     unite families by a common interest.
+
+     Impartiality in law consists in two things, in
+     establishing equality in the fortunes and in the dignity of
+     the citizens.... In proportion to the degree of equality
+     established by the laws, the dearer will they become to
+     every citizen. How can avarice, ambition, dissipation,
+     idleness, sloth, envy, hatred, or jealousy agitate men who
+     are equal in fortune and dignity, and to whom the laws leave
+     no hope of disturbing their equality?
+
+     What has been told you of the republic of Sparta ought to
+     enlighten you on this question. No other State has had laws
+     more in accordance with the order of nature or of equality.
+
+It is not to be wondered at that the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries should have looked upon the human race as inert matter, ready
+to receive everything--form, figure, impulse, movement, and life, from a
+great prince, or a great legislator, or a great genius. These ages were
+reared in the study of antiquity; and antiquity presents everywhere--in
+Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, the
+
+{37}
+
+spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their fancy, and
+mankind to this end enslaved by force or by imposture. And what
+does this prove? That because men and society are improvable, error,
+ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition must be more prevalent
+in early times. The mistake of the writers quoted above is not that they
+have asserted this fact, but that they have proposed it as a rule for
+the admiration and imitation of future generations. Their mistake has
+been, with an inconceivable absence of discernment, and upon the
+faith of a puerile conventionalism, that they have admitted what is
+inadmissible, viz., the grandeur, dignity, morality, and well-being of
+the artificial societies of the ancient world; they have not understood
+that time produces and spreads enlightenment; and that in proportion to
+the increase of enlightenment, right ceases to be upheld by force, and
+society regains possession of herself.
+
+And, in fact, what is the political work that we are endeavoring to
+promote? It is no other than the instinctive effort of every people
+towards liberty. And what is liberty, whose name can make every heart
+beat, and which can agitate the world, but the union of all liberties,
+the liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press,
+of movement, of labor, and of exchange; in other words, the free
+exercise, for all, of all the inoffensive faculties; and again, in other
+words, the destruction of all despotisms, even of legal despotism, and
+the reduction of law to its only rational sphere, which is to regulate
+the individual right of legitimate defense, or to repress injustice?
+
+This tendency of the human race, it must be admitted, is greatly
+thwarted, particularly in our country, by the fatal disposition,
+resulting from classical teaching and common to all politicians, of
+placing themselves beyond
+
+{38}
+
+mankind, to arrange, organize, and regulate it, according to their
+fancy.
+
+For whilst society is struggling to realize liberty, the great men
+who place themselves at its head, imbued with the principles of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, think only of subjecting it to the
+philanthropic despotism of their social inventions, and making it bear
+with docility, according to the expression of Rousseau, the yoke of
+public felicity as pictured in their own imaginations.
+
+This was particularly the case in 1789. No sooner was the old system
+destroyed than society was to be submitted to other artificial
+arrangements, always with the same starting point--the omnipotence of
+the law.
+
+SAINT-JUST--
+
+     The legislator commands the future. It is for him to will
+     for the good of mankind. It is for him to make men what he
+     wishes them to be.
+
+ROBESPIERRE--
+
+     The function of Government is to direct the physical and
+     moral powers of the nation towards the object of its
+     institution.
+
+BILLAUD VARENNES--
+
+     A people who are to be restored to liberty must be formed
+     anew. Ancient prejudices must be destroyed, antiquated
+     customs changed, depraved affections corrected, inveterate
+     vices eradicated.
+
+For this, a strong force and a vehement impulse will be necessary....
+Citizens, the inflexible austerity of Lycurgus created the firm basis
+of the Spartan republic. The feeble and trusting disposition of Solon
+plunged Athens into slavery. This parallel contains the whole science of
+Government.
+
+{39}
+
+LEPELLETIER--
+
+     Considering the extent of human degradation, I am
+     convinced--of the necessity of effecting an entire
+     regeneration of the race, and, if I may so express myself,
+     of creating a new people.
+
+Men, therefore, are nothing but raw material. It is not for them to
+will their own improvement. They are not capable of it; according to
+Saint-Just, it is only the legislator who is. Men are merely to be
+what he wills that they should be. According to Robespierre, who copies
+Rousseau literally, the legislator is to begin by assigning the aim of
+the institutions of the nation. After this, the Government has only to
+direct all its physical and moral forces towards this end. All this time
+the nation itself is to remain perfectly passive; and Billaud Varennes
+would teach us that it ought to have no prejudices, affections, nor
+wants, but such as are authorized by the legislator. He even goes so
+far as to say that the inflexible austerity of a man is the basis of a
+republic.
+
+We have seen that, in cases where the evil is so great that the ordinary
+magistrates are unable to remedy it, Mably recommends a dictatorship,
+to promote virtue. "Have recourse," says he, "to an extraordinary
+magistracy, whose time shall be short, and his power considerable. The
+imagination of the people requires to be impressed." This doctrine has
+not been neglected. Listen to Robespierre:
+
+     The principle of the Republican Government is virtue, and
+     the means to be adopted, during its establishment, is
+     terror. We want to substitute, in our country, morality for
+     self-indulgence, probity for honor, principles for customs,
+     duties for decorum, the empire of reason for the tyranny of
+
+{40}
+
+     fashion, contempt of vice for contempt of misfortune, pride
+     for insolence, greatness of soul for vanity, love of glory
+     for love of money, good people for good company, merit for
+     intrigue, genius for wit, truth for glitter, the charm of
+     happiness for the weariness of pleasure, the greatness of
+     man for the littleness of the great, a magnanimous,
+     powerful, happy people, for one that is easy, frivolous,
+     degraded; that is to say, we would substitute all the
+     virtues and miracles of a republic for all the vices and
+     absurdities of monarchy.
+
+At what a vast height above the rest of mankind does Robespierre place
+himself here! And observe the arrogance with which he speaks. He is not
+content with expressing a desire for a great renovation of the human
+heart, he does not even expect such a result from a regular Government.
+No; he intends to effect it himself, and by means of terror. The
+object of the discourse from which this puerile and laborious mass of
+antithesis is extracted, was to exhibit the principles of morality that
+ought to direct a revolutionary Government. Moreover, when Robespierre
+asks for a dictatorship, it is not merely for the purpose of repelling a
+foreign enemy, or of putting down factions; it is that he may establish,
+by means of terror and as a preliminary to the operation of the
+Constitution, his own principles of morality. He pretends to nothing
+short of extirpating from the country by means of terror, self-interest,
+honor, customs, decorum, fashion, vanity, the love of money, good
+company, intrigue, wit, luxury, and misery. It is not until after he,
+Robespierre, shall have accomplished these miracles, as he rightly calls
+them, that he will allow the law to regain her empire. Truly it would be
+well if these visionaries, who think so much of themselves and so little
+of mankind, who want to
+
+{41}
+
+renew everything, would only be content with trying to reform
+themselves, the task would be arduous enough for them. In general,
+however, these gentlemen, the reformers, legislators, and politicians,
+do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over mankind. No, they
+are too moderate and too philanthropic for that. They only contend for
+the despotism, the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law. They aspire
+only to make the law.
+
+To show how universal this strange disposition has been in France, I had
+need not only to have copied the whole of the works of Mably, Raynal,
+Rousseau, Fenelon, and to have made long extracts from Bossuet and
+Montesquieu, but to have given the entire transactions of the sittings
+of the Convention. I shall do no such thing, however, but merely refer
+the reader to them.
+
+No wonder this idea suited Bonaparte so well. He embraced it with ardor,
+and put it in practice with energy. Playing the part of a chemist,
+Europe was to him the material for his experiments. But this material
+reacted against him. More than half undeceived, Bonaparte, at St.
+Helena, seemed to admit that there is an initiative in every people,
+and he became less hostile to liberty. Yet this did not prevent him
+from giving this lesson to his son in his will--"To govern is to diffuse
+morality, education, and well-being."
+
+After all this, I hardly need show, by fastidious quotations, the
+opinions of Morelly, Babeuf, Owen, Saint Simon, and Fourier. I shall
+confine myself to a few extracts from Louis Blanc's book on the
+organization of labor.
+
+"In our project, society receives the impulse of power."
+
+In what does the impulse that power gives to society consist? In
+imposing upon it the project of Mr. Louis Blanc.
+
+{42}
+
+On the other hand, society is the human race. The human race, then, is
+to receive its impulse from Mr. Louis Blanc.
+
+It is at liberty to do so or not, it will be said. Of course the human
+race is at liberty to take advice from anybody, whoever it may be. But
+this is not the way in which Mr. Louis Blanc understands the thing. He
+means that his project should be converted into law, and consequently
+forcibly imposed by power.
+
+     In our project, the State has only to give a legislation
+     to labor, by means of which the industrial movement may and
+     ought to be accomplished in all liberty. It (the State)
+     merely places society on an incline (that is all) that it
+     may descend, when once it is placed there, by the mere force
+     of things, and by the natural course of the established
+     mechanism.
+
+But what is this incline? One indicated by Mr. Louis Blanc. Does it not
+lead to an abyss? No, it leads to happiness. Why, then, does not society
+go there of itself? Because it does not know what it wants, and it
+requires an impulse. What is to give it this impulse? Power. And who
+is to give the impulse to power? The inventor of the machine, Mr. Louis
+Blanc.
+
+We shall never get out of this circle--mankind passive, and a great man
+moving it by the intervention of the law. Once on this incline, will
+society enjoy something like liberty? Without a doubt. And what is
+liberty?
+
+     Once for all: liberty consists not only in the right
+     granted, but in the power given to man to exercise, to
+     develop his faculties under the empire of justice, and under
+     the protection of the law.
+
+     And this is no vain distinction; there is a deep meaning
+     in it, and its consequences are imponderable. For
+
+{43}
+
+     when once it is admitted that man, to be truly free, must
+     have the power to exercise and develop his faculties, it
+     follows that every member of society has a claim upon it for
+     such education as shall enable his faculties to display
+     themselves, and for the tools of labor, without which human
+     activity can find no scope. Now, by whose intervention is
+     society to give to each of its members the requisite
+     education and the necessary tools of labor, unless by that
+     of the State?
+
+Thus, liberty is power. In what does this power consist? In possessing
+education and tools of labor. Who is to give education and tools of
+labor? Society, who owes them. By whose intervention is society to give
+tools of labor to those who do not possess them? By the intervention of
+the State. From whom is the State to obtain them?
+
+It is for the reader to answer this question, and to notice whither all
+this tends.
+
+One of the strangest phenomena of our time, and one that will probably
+be a matter of astonishment to our descendants, is the doctrine which
+is founded upon this triple hypothesis: the radical passiveness
+of mankind,--the omnipotence of the law,--the infallibility of the
+legislator: this is the sacred symbol of the party that proclaims itself
+exclusively democratic.
+
+It is true that it professes also to be social.
+
+So far as it is democratic, it has an unlimited faith in mankind.
+
+So far as it is social, it places mankind beneath the mud.
+
+Are political rights under discussion? Is a legislator to be chosen?
+Oh, then the people possess science by instinct: they are gifted with
+an admirable discernment; their will is always right; the general will
+cannot err. Suffrage cannot
+
+{44}
+
+be too universal. Nobody is under any responsibility to society. The
+will and the capacity to choose well are taken for granted. Can the
+people be mistaken? Are we not living in an age of enlightenment?
+What! Are the people to be forever led about by the nose? Have they not
+acquired their rights at the cost of effort and sacrifice? Have they not
+given sufficient proof of intelligence and wisdom? Are they not arrived
+at maturity? Are they not in a state to judge for themselves? Do they
+not know their own interest? Is there a man or a class who would dare
+to claim the right of putting himself in the place of the people, of
+deciding and of acting for them? No, no; the people would be free, and
+they shall be so. They wish to conduct their own affairs, and they shall
+do so.
+
+But when once the legislator is duly elected, then indeed the style of
+his speech alters. The nation is sent back into passiveness, inertness,
+nothingness, and the legislator takes possession of omnipotence. It
+is for him to invent, for him to direct, for him to impel, for him to
+organize. Mankind has nothing to do but to submit; the hour of despotism
+has struck. And we must observe that this is decisive; for the people,
+just before so enlightened, so moral, so perfect, have no inclinations
+at all, or, if they have any, these all lead them downwards towards
+degradation. And yet they ought to have a little liberty! But are we not
+assured by Mr. Considerant that liberty leads fatally to monopoly? Are
+we not told that liberty is competition? and that competition, according
+to Mr. Louis Blanc, is a system of extermination for the people, and of
+ruination for trade? For that reason people are exterminated and ruined
+in proportion as they are free--take, for example, Switzerland, Holland,
+England, and the United States? Does not Mr. Louis Blanc tell us again
+that competition
+
+{45}
+
+leads to monopoly, and that, for the same reason, cheapness leads
+to exorbitant prices? That competition tends to drain the sources of
+consumption, and diverts production to a destructive activity?
+That competition forces production to increase, and consumption to
+decrease--whence it follows that free people produce for the sake of not
+consuming; that there is nothing but oppression and madness among them;
+and that it is absolutely necessary for Mr. Louis Blanc to see to it?
+
+What sort of liberty should be allowed to men? Liberty of
+conscience?--But we should see them all profiting by the permission
+to become atheists. Liberty of education?--But parents would be paying
+professors to teach their sons immorality and error; besides, if we are
+to believe Mr. Thiers, education, if left to the national liberty, would
+cease to be national, and we should be educating our children in the
+ideas of the Turks or Hindus, instead of which, thanks to the legal
+despotism of the universities, they have the good fortune to be educated
+in the noble ideas of the Romans. Liberty of labor? But this is only
+competition, whose effect is to leave all products unconsumed, to
+exterminate the people, and to ruin the tradesmen. The liberty of
+exchange? But it is well known that the protectionists have shown, over
+and over again, that a man will inevitably be ruined when he exchanges
+freely, and that to become rich it is necessary to exchange without
+liberty. Liberty of association? But according to the socialist
+doctrine, liberty and association exclude each other, for the liberty of
+men is attacked just to force them to associate.
+
+You must see, then, that the socialist democrats cannot in conscience
+allow men any liberty, because, by their own
+
+{46}
+
+nature, they tend in every instance to all kinds of degradation and
+demoralization.
+
+We are therefore left to conjecture, in this case, upon what foundation
+universal suffrage is claimed for them with so much importunity.
+
+The pretensions of organizers suggest another question, which I have
+often asked them, and to which I am not aware that I ever received an
+answer: Since the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is
+not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the tendencies
+of organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their agents
+form a part of the human race? Do they consider that they are composed
+of different materials from the rest of mankind? They say that society,
+when left to itself, rushes to inevitable destruction, because its
+instincts are perverse. They presume to stop it in its downward course,
+and to give it a better direction. They have, therefore, received
+from heaven, intelligence and virtues that place them beyond and above
+mankind: let them show their title to this superiority. They would
+be our shepherds, and we are to be their flock. This arrangement
+presupposes in them a natural superiority, the right to which we are
+fully justified in calling upon them to prove.
+
+You must observe that I am not contending against their right to invent
+social combinations, to propagate them, to recommend them, and to try
+them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk; but I do dispute
+their right to impose them upon us through the medium of the law, that
+is, by force and by public taxes.
+
+I would not insist upon the Cabetists, the Fourierists, the
+Proudhonians, the Academics, and the Protectionists renouncing their
+own particular ideas; I would only have them renounce the idea that is
+common to them all--viz.,
+
+{47}
+
+that of subjecting us by force to their own categories and rankings
+to their social laboratories, to their ever-inflating bank, to their
+Greco-Roman morality, and to their commercial restrictions. I would
+ask them to allow us the faculty of judging of their plans, and not to
+oblige us to adopt them if we find that they hurt our interests or are
+repugnant to our consciences.
+
+To presume to have recourse to power and taxation, besides being
+oppressive and unjust, implies further, the pernicious assumption that
+the organized is infallible, and mankind incompetent.
+
+And if mankind is not competent to judge for itself, why do they talk so
+much about universal suffrage?
+
+This contradiction in ideas is unhappily to be found also in facts;
+and whilst the French nation has preceded all others in obtaining its
+rights, or rather its political claims, this has by no means prevented
+it from being more governed, and directed, and imposed upon, and
+fettered, and cheated, than any other nation. It is also the one, of
+all others, where revolutions are constantly to be dreaded, and it is
+perfectly natural that it should be so.
+
+So long as this idea is retained, which is admitted by all our
+politicians, and so energetically expressed by Mr. Louis Blanc in
+these words--"Society receives its impulse from power," so long as men
+consider themselves as capable of feeling, yet passive--incapable of
+raising themselves by their own discernment and by their own energy to
+any morality, or well-being, and while they expect everything from the
+law; in a word, while they admit that their relations with the State are
+the same as those of the flock with the shepherd, it is clear that the
+responsibility of power is immense. Fortune and misfortune, wealth and
+destitution, equality and inequality all proceed from it. It is charged
+
+{48}
+
+with everything, it undertakes everything, it does everything; therefore
+it has to answer for everything. If we are happy, it has a right to
+claim our gratitude; but if we are miserable, it alone must bear the
+blame. Are not our persons and property in fact, at its disposal? Is
+not the law omnipotent? In creating the educational monopoly, it has
+undertaken to answer the expectations of fathers of families who have
+been deprived of liberty; and if these expectations are disappointed,
+whose fault is it?
+
+In regulating industry, it has undertaken to make it prosper, otherwise
+it would have been absurd to deprive it of its liberty; and if it
+suffers, whose fault is it? In pretending to adjust the balance of
+commerce by the game of tariffs, it undertakes to make commerce prosper;
+and if, so far from prospering, it is destroyed, whose fault is it?
+In granting its protection to maritime armaments in exchange for their
+liberty, it has undertaken to render them self-sufficient; if they
+become burdensome, whose fault is it?
+
+Thus, there is not a grievance in the nation for which the Government
+does not voluntarily make itself responsible. Is it any wonder that
+every failure threatens to cause a revolution? And what is the remedy
+proposed? To extend indefinitely the dominion of the law, i.e., the
+responsibility of Government. But if the Government undertakes to raise
+and to regulate wages, and is not able to do it; if it undertakes
+to assist all those who are in want, and is not able to do it; if it
+undertakes to provide work for every laborer, and is not able to do it;
+if it undertakes to offer to all who wish to borrow, easy credit, and is
+not able to do it; if, in words that we regret should have escaped the
+pen of Mr. de Lamartine, "the State considers that its mission is to
+enlighten, to
+
+{49}
+
+develop, to enlarge, to strengthen, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the
+soul of the people"--if it fails in this, is it not obvious that after
+every disappointment, which, alas! is more than probable, there will be
+a no less inevitable revolution?
+
+I shall now resume the subject by remarking, that immediately after the
+economical part [4] of the question, and before the political part, a
+leading question presents itself. It is the following:
+
+What is law? What ought it to be? What is its domain? What are its
+limits? Where, in fact, does the prerogative of the legislator stop?
+
+I have no hesitation in answering, Law is common force organized to
+prevent injustice;--in short, Law is Justice.
+
+It is not true that the legislator has absolute power over our persons
+and property, since they pre-exist, and his work is only to secure them
+from injury.
+
+It is not true that the mission of the law is to regulate our
+consciences, our ideas, our will, our education, our sentiments, our
+works, our exchanges, our gifts, our enjoyments. Its mission is to
+prevent the rights of one from interfering with those of another, in any
+one of these things.
+
+Law, because it has force for its necessary sanction, can only have the
+domain of force, which is justice.
+
+And as every individual has a right to have recourse to force only in
+cases of lawful defense, so collective force, so which is only the union
+
+{50}
+
+of individual forces, cannot be rationally used for any other end.
+
+The law, then, is solely the organization of individual rights that
+existed before law.
+
+Law is justice.
+
+So far from being able to oppress the people, or to plunder their
+property, even for a philanthropic end, its mission is to protect the
+people, and to secure to them the possession of their property.
+
+It must not be said, either, that it may be philanthropic, so long as
+it abstains from all oppression; for this is a contradiction. The law
+cannot avoid acting upon our persons and property; if it does not secure
+them, then it violates them if it touches them.
+
+The law is justice.
+
+Nothing can be more clear and simple, more perfectly defined and
+bounded, or more visible to every eye; for justice is a given quantity,
+immutable and unchangeable, and which admits of neither increase or
+diminution.
+
+Depart from this point, make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing,
+industrial, literary, or artistic, and you will be lost in vagueness and
+uncertainty; you will be upon unknown ground, in a forced Utopia, or,
+what is worse, in the midst of a multitude of contending Utopias, each
+striving to gain possession of the law, and to impose it upon you; for
+fraternity and philanthropy have no fixed limits, as justice has. Where
+will you stop? Where is the law to stop? One person, Mr. de Saint Cricq,
+will only extend his philanthropy to some of the industrial classes, and
+will require the law to slight the consumers in favor of the producers.
+Another, like Mr. Considérant, will take up the cause of the working
+classes, and claim for them by means of the law, at a fixed rate,
+clothing, lodging, food, and
+
+{51}
+
+everything necessary for the support of life. A third, Mr. Louis Blanc,
+will say, and with reason, that this would be an incomplete fraternity,
+and that the law ought to provide them with tools of labor and
+education. A fourth will observe that such an arrangement still leaves
+room for inequality, and that the law ought to introduce into the most
+remote hamlets luxury, literature, and the arts. This is the high road
+to communism; in other words, legislation will be--as it now is--the
+battlefield for everybody's dreams and everybody's covetousness.
+
+Law is justice.
+
+In this proposition we represent to ourselves a simple, immovable
+Government. And I defy anyone to tell me whence the thought of a
+revolution, an insurrection, or a simple disturbance could arise against
+a public force confined to the repression of injustice. Under such a
+system, there would be more well-being, and this well-being would be
+more equally distributed; and as to the sufferings inseparable from
+humanity, no one would think of accusing the Government of them, for
+it would be as innocent of them as it is of the variations of the
+temperature. Have the people ever been known to rise against the
+court of appeals, or assail the justices of the peace, for the sake of
+claiming the rate of wages, free credit, tools of labor, the advantages
+of the tariff, or the social workshop? They know perfectly well that
+these matters are beyond the jurisdiction of the justices of the peace,
+and they would soon learn that they are not within the jurisdiction of
+the law quite as much.
+
+But if the law were to be made upon the principle of fraternity, if
+it were to be proclaimed that from it proceed all benefits and all
+evils--that it is responsible for every individual grievance and for
+every social inequality--then
+
+{52}
+
+you open the door to an endless succession of complaints, irritations,
+troubles, and revolutions.
+
+_Law is justice_.
+
+And it would be very strange if it could properly be anything else! Is
+not justice right? Are not rights equal? With what show of right can the
+law interfere to subject me to the social plans of Messrs. Mimerel, de
+Melun, Thiers, or Louis Blanc, rather than to subject these gentlemen
+to my plans? Is it to be supposed that Nature has not bestowed upon me
+sufficient imagination to invent a Utopia too? Is it for the law to make
+choice of one amongst so many fancies, and to make use of the public
+force in its service?
+
+_Law is justice_.
+
+And let it not be said, as it continually is, that the law, in this
+sense, would be atheistic, individual, and heartless, and that it would
+mold mankind in its own image. This is an absurd conclusion, quite
+worthy of the governmental infatuation which sees mankind in the law.
+
+What then? Does it follow that if we are free, we shall cease to act?
+Does it follow that if we do not receive an impulse from the law, we
+shall receive no impulse at all? Does it follow that if the law confines
+itself to securing to us the free exercise of our faculties, our
+faculties will be paralyzed? Does it follow, that if the law does not
+impose upon us forms of religion, modes of association, methods of
+education, rules for labor, directions for exchange, and plans for
+charity, we shall plunge headlong into atheism, isolation, ignorance,
+misery, and greed? Does it follow, that we shall no longer recognize the
+power and goodness of God; that we shall cease to associate together, to
+help each other, to love and assist our unfortunate brethren, to
+
+{53}
+
+study the secrets of nature, and to aspire after perfection in our
+existence?
+
+_Law is justice_.
+
+And it is under the law of justice, under the reign of right, under
+the influence of liberty, security, stability, and responsibility, that
+every man will attain to the fullness of his worth, to all the dignity
+of his being, and that mankind will accomplish with order and with
+calmness--slowly, it is true, but with certainty--the progress ordained
+for it.
+
+I believe that my theory is correct; for whatever be the question upon
+which I am arguing, whether it be religious, philosophical, political,
+or economical; whether it affects well-being, morality, equality, right,
+justice, progress, responsibility, property, labor, exchange, capital,
+wages, taxes, population, credit, or Government; at whatever point
+of the scientific horizon I start from, I invariably come to the same
+thing--the solution of the social problem is in liberty.
+
+And have I not experience on my side? Cast your eye over the globe.
+Which are the happiest, the most moral, and the most peaceable nations?
+Those where the law interferes the least with private activity; where
+the Government is the least felt; where individuality has the most
+scope, and public opinion the most influence; where the machinery of the
+administration is the least important and the least complicated; where
+taxation is lightest and least unequal, popular discontent the
+least excited and the least justifiable; where the responsibility of
+individuals and classes is the most active, and where, consequently, if
+morals are not in a perfect state, at any rate they tend incessantly to
+correct themselves; where transactions, meetings, and associations are
+the least fettered; where labor, capital, and production suffer the
+least from artificial
+
+{54}
+
+displacements; where mankind follows most completely its own natural
+course; where the thought of God prevails the most over the inventions
+of men; those, in short, who realize the most nearly this idea that
+within the limits of right, all should flow from the free, perfectible,
+and voluntary action of man; nothing be attempted by the law or by
+force, except the administration of universal justice.
+
+I cannot avoid coming to this conclusion--that there are too many
+great men in the world; there are too many legislators, organizers,
+institutors of society, conductors of the people, fathers of nations,
+etc., etc. Too many persons place themselves above mankind, to rule and
+patronize it; too many persons make a trade of looking after it. It will
+be answered--"You yourself are occupied upon it all this time." Very
+true. But it must be admitted that it is in another sense entirely that
+I am speaking; and if I join the reformers it is solely for the purpose
+of inducing them to relax their hold.
+
+I am not doing as Vaucauson did with his automaton, but as a
+physiologist does with the human frame; I would study and admire it.
+
+I am acting with regard to it in the spirit that animated a celebrated
+traveler. He found himself in the midst of a savage tribe. A child had
+just been born, and a crowd of soothsayers, magicians, and quacks were
+around it, armed with rings, hooks, and bandages. One said--"This
+child will never smell the perfume of a calumet, unless I stretch his
+nostrils." Another said--"He will be without the sense of hearing,
+unless I draw his ears down to his shoulders." A third said--"He will
+never see the light of the sun, unless I give his eyes an oblique
+direction." A fourth said--"He will never be upright, unless I bend his
+legs." A fifth said--"He will not be able to think, unless I press his
+
+{55}
+
+brain." "Stop!" said the traveler. "Whatever God does, is well done;
+do not pretend to know more than He; and as He has given organs to this
+frail creature, allow those organs to develop themselves, to strengthen
+themselves by exercise, use, experience, and liberty."
+
+God has implanted in mankind also all that is necessary to enable it to
+accomplish its destinies. There is a providential social physiology,
+as well as a providential human physiology. The social organs are
+constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand
+air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their
+rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with
+their artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories,
+their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their
+universities, their State religions, their inflationary or monopolizing
+banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and
+their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted
+upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to
+have begun--reject all systems, and try liberty--liberty, which is an
+act of faith in God and in His work.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+
+[Footnote 1: First published in 1850.]
+
+[Footnote 2: General Council of Manufactures, Agriculture, and Commerce,
+6th of May, 1850.]
+
+[Footnote 3: If protection were only granted in France to a single
+class, to the engineers, for instance, it would be so absurdly
+plundering, as to be unable to maintain itself. Thus we see all the
+protected trades combine, make common cause, and even recruit themselves
+in such a way as to appear to embrace the mass of the national labor.
+They feel instinctively that plunder is slurred over by being
+generalized.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Political economy precedes politics: the former has to
+discover whether human interests are harmonious or antagonistic, a fact
+which must be settled before the latter can determine the prerogatives
+of Government.]
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+   Action, human. See Individualism;
+
+   Mankind
+
+   Agriculture analogy to society, 35
+   Persian, 26
+   Antiquity. See Greece; Rome
+   Authority. See Government
+
+   Beggars, 11
+   Billaud-Varennes, Jean Nicolas, 38
+   Blanc, Louis competition, 45
+   doctrine, 42, 43
+   force of society, 47, 48
+   labor, 42
+   law, 50, 52
+   Bonaparte, Napoleon, 41
+   Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 25, 26
+
+   Cabetists, 46, 47
+   Capital displacement, 2
+   Carlier, Pierre, 13
+   Carthage, 32
+   Charity, vii, 5, 17
+       See also Wealth, equality of; Welfare
+   Classical studies, 25, 26, 36, 37, 38
+   Collectivism, 2, 3
+        See also Government
+   Communism, 18
+   Competition
+        meaning, 45
+        results, 45
+   Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 35, 38
+   Constituent Assembly, 24
+   Conventionality, 37
+   Crete, 28
+
+   Defense right of, 2, 3, 37, 49, 50
+   Democracy, vi, 43, 44
+   Democrats, 43
+   Dictatorship, vii, 39, 40
+   Disposition, fatal, 5, 37, 38
+   Distribution, 33, 34
+   Dole, 10, 11
+        See also Welfare
+   Dupin, Charles, 13
+
+   Education classical, 26, 38
+        controlled, 33
+        Greek, 26
+
+   {57}
+
+   {58}
+
+        liberty in, 44
+        free, 21, 22
+        government provided, 22, 48
+   Egypt, 25, 26, 27
+   Elections, 43, 44
+        See also Voting
+   Employment
+        assigned, 26
+        See also Labor
+   Equality of wealth, 11, 20, 29, 36
+
+   Fénelon, François de Salignac de La
+   Mothe antiquity, 27, 29
+   Telemachus, 27
+   Force common or collective, 2, 3
+        individual, 2, 3
+        motive, of society, 40, 43
+        See also Government; Law
+   Forced conformity, viii
+   Fourier, François Marie Charles, 41
+   Fourierists, 46
+   France revolutions, 47
+   Fraternity legally enforced, 16, 17, 21, 22
+   Fraud, 13, 14
+   Freedom. See Liberty
+   French Revolution, 38
+        public services, 10, 11
+        purpose of, v relaxed, 35
+        republican, 30, 39
+        responsibility and, 3, 47, 48, 51
+        results, 28
+        stability, 31
+        virtue, 39
+        See also Communism, Socialism
+
+   Greece education, 26
+        law, 26, 27
+        republic, 29, 30
+        Sparta, 32, 36, 38
+   Greed, 5
+
+   Happiness of the governed, 28
+   History, 5
+   Humanity lost, 19, 20
+
+   Imports. See Trade
+   Individualism, 3
+   Industry, protected. See Protectionism
+
+   Jobs. See Employment
+   Justice and injustice, distinction
+        between, 7
+        generalized, 7
+        immutable, 49, 50
+        intentions and, 17, 18
+        law and, 3, 6, 49
+        reigning, 19
+        General welfare, 19
+        Government
+        American ideal of, v
+        corrupting education by, vi
+        democratic, 29, 43, 44
+        education, 23, 48
+        force, 2, 3
+        function, 38
+        monopoly, 45
+        morality, 39
+        motive force, 40, 43
+        power, v, 47
+
+   Labor displaced, 4
+   Land. See Property
+   Law
+        Cretan, 28
+        defined, 2, 16
+
+   {59}
+
+        Egyptian, 25, 26, 27, 28
+        fraternity and, 17
+        functions, 16, 31, 33, 49, 50
+        Greek, 26, 28, 29
+        justice and, 3, 4, 16, 51
+        morality and, 7, 21
+        motive force, 25
+        object of, 19
+        omnipotence, 44, 49
+        Persian, 26
+        perverted, v, 1, 5
+        philanthropic, 17
+        plunder and, 5, 13
+        posterior and inferior, 2, 3
+        respect for, 7, 9
+        Rousseau's views, 31, 33, 38
+        spirit of, 32
+        study of, 25
+        United States, 12
+        See also Legislation
+        Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de,
+        fraternity, 17
+        government power, 48, 49
+        Lawgiver, 38, 43
+        Legislation conflict in, 32
+        monopoly on, 5
+        struggle for control of, 11, 12
+        universal right of, 7
+        See also Law
+        Legislator. See Lawgiver; Politicians
+        Lepéletier, Louis Michel de Saint Fargeau, 39
+        Liberty competition and, 44, 45
+        defined, 42
+        denied, 44, 45
+        described, 53
+        education and, 44, 45
+        individual, 3
+        as power, 43
+        returned to, 55
+        seeking, 38
+
+   Life, faculties of, 1
+   Louis XIV 27
+   Lycurgus government, 30, 35, 36
+        influence, 33, 40
+
+   Mably, Abbé Gabriel Bonnot de, 35, 39
+   Mankind assimilation, 2
+        concern for, 54
+        degraded, 25
+        divided, 23
+        inert, 23, 25, 26, 28, 31, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47
+        inertia, 44
+        as machine, 31
+        nature of, 33
+        violation of, 52
+
+   Melun, Armand de, 52
+   Mentor, 28, 29
+   Mimerel de Roubaix, Pierre Auguste
+   Remi, 52
+   Monopoly, 5, 45
+   Montalembert, Charles, Comte de, 13, 15
+   Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondât, Baron de, 29, 31
+   Morality law and, 21, 22
+   Morelly, 41
+
+   Napoleon, 41
+   Natural rights, v
+   Nature, gifts of, 1
+
+   Oliver de Serres, Guillaume Antoine, 29
+   Order, 3
+   Owen, Robert, 41
+   Ownership. See Property
+
+   Paraguay, 30
+   Persia, 26
+
+   {60}
+
+   Personality, 2
+   Phalansteries, 55
+   Philanthropy. See Charity
+   Plato republic, 30
+   Plunder absence of, 16
+        burdens of, 5, 6
+        defined, 17
+        general welfare and, 19
+        extralegal, 13
+        kinds, 13
+        legal, v, ix, 6, 13, 22
+        organized, 14
+        origin of, 6
+        partial, 15, 16
+        socialistic, 13
+        universal, 15, 16
+        Politicians dreams of, 36
+        genius of, 30
+        goodness of, 25
+        importance of, 22, 23
+        responsibility of, 27
+        social engineers, 22, 24, 32, 34, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45
+        superior, 46, 54
+   Politics exaggerated importance of, 8
+        and favors, vi
+        plunder through, vi
+   Poor relief. See Charity; Welfare
+   Power. See Government
+   Property man and, 2
+        origin of, 5
+   Protectionism, 18
+        United States, 12
+   Proudhonians, 46
+   Providence, 55
+   Public relief, 10, 20, 29
+
+   Raynal, Abbé Guillaume, 33, 35
+   Religion, State, 22
+   Rent seeking, vi, vii
+   Republic kinds of, 29
+        virtues of, 39
+   Revolt, 6
+   Revolution, 47
+        French, 38
+        Rhodes, 32
+   Rights individual, v, 2, 3
+   Roberspierre, Jean Jacques
+        government, 38
+        lawgiver, 40
+   Rome virtue, 32
+   Rousseau, Jean Jacques
+        disciples, 8, 9
+        on the lawgiver, 31, 33
+
+   Saint-Cricq, Barthélémy, Pierre Laurent, Comte de, 50
+   Saint-Just, Louis Antoine Léon de, 38
+   Saint-Simon, Claude Henri, Comte de doctrine, 41
+   Salentum, 27, 29
+   Security consequences, 3
+   Self-defense, 2, 37, 49, 50
+   Selfishness, 5
+   Serres, Oliver de, 29
+   Slavery,
+        United States, viii, 12
+        universality, 5
+   Socialism confused, ix, 22
+        defined, 14, 15
+        disguised, 22
+        experiments, 23, 24
+        legal plunder, 13
+        sincerely believed, 18
+        social engineers, 22, 24
+        refutation of, 15
+   Socialists, vii
+   Society enlightened, 37
+
+   {61}
+
+        experiments, 23
+        motive force, 40, 43
+        object of, 36, 37
+        parable of the traveler, 54, 55
+
+   Solon, 33, 35
+   Sparta, 32, 36
+   Spoliation. See Plunder
+   State. See Government
+   Suffrage. See Universal suffrage
+
+   Tariffs, vi, viii
+   Telemachus, 27
+   Terror as means of republican government, 39, 40
+   Theirs, Louis Adolphe
+        doctrine, 52
+        education, 45
+   Tyre, 32
+
+   United States, viii, 12
+        Declaration of Independence, v
+   Universal suffrage demand for, 9, 43, 44, 46, 47
+        importance of, 10
+        incapacity and, 9
+        objections, 9
+
+   Vaucanson, Jacques de, 54
+   Vested interests, 13, 14
+   Virtue and vice, 28, 30, 35, 36, 40
+   Voting responsibility and, 9, 10
+        right of, 10
+        See also Universal suffrage
+
+   Want satisfaction, 4
+   Wealth equality of, 11, 21, 29, 36
+        transfer of, vii
+   Welfare, 10, 20, 28
+
+
+
+   The law perverted! The law--and, in its wake, all the
+   collective forces of the nation. The law, I say, not
+   only diverted from its proper direction, but made
+   to pursue one entirely contrary! The law becomes
+   the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being
+   its check! The law guilty of that very inequity which
+   it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious
+   fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to
+   call the attention of my fellow-citizens.
+
+   --Frédéric Bastiat
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Law, by Frédéric Bastiat
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44800 ***