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11 - Free Agreement - The Conquest of Bread · Philosophy and Faith

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  Speaker 1: Chapter eleven free agreement. Accustomed as we are by hereditary
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  Speaker 1: prejudices and absolutely unsound education and training to see government
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  Speaker 1: legislation and magistracy everywhere around, we have come to believe
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  Speaker 1: that man would tear his fellow man to pieces like
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  Speaker 1: a wild beast the day the police took his eye
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  Speaker 1: off of him, that chaos would come about if authority
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  Speaker 1: were overthrown during a revolution, And with our eyes shut
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  Speaker 1: we passed by thousands and thousands of human groupings which
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  Speaker 1: form themselves freely without any intervention of the law, and
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  Speaker 1: attain results infinitely superior to those achieved under government tutelage.
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  Speaker 1: If you open a daily paper, you find its pages
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  Speaker 1: are entirely devoted to government transactions and to political jobbery.
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  Speaker 1: A Chinaman reading it would believe that in Europe nothing
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  Speaker 1: gets done save by order of some master. You find
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  Speaker 1: nothing in them about institutions that spring up, grow up,
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  Speaker 1: and develop without ministerial prescription. Nothing or hardly nothing. Even
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  Speaker 1: when there is a heading sundry events, it is because
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  Speaker 1: they are connected with the police. A family drama and
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  Speaker 1: act of rebellion will only be mentioned if the police
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  Speaker 1: have appeared on the scene. Three hundred and fifty million
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  Speaker 1: Europeans love or hate one another, work or live on
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  Speaker 1: their incomes, but apart from literature, theater or sport, their
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  Speaker 1: lives remain ignored by newspapers if governments have not intervened
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  Speaker 1: in some way or other. It is even so with history.
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  Speaker 1: We know the least details of the life of a
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  Speaker 1: king or of a parliament. All good and bad speeches
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  Speaker 1: pronounced by the politicians have been preserved. Quote speeches that
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  Speaker 1: have never had the least influence on the vote of
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  Speaker 1: a single member. Quote, as an old parliamentarian said, Royal visits,
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  Speaker 1: good or bad humor of politicians, jokes or intrigues are
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  Speaker 1: all carefully recorded for posterity. But we have the greatest
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  Speaker 1: difficulty to reconstitute a city of the Middle Ages, to
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  Speaker 1: understand the mechanism of that immense commerce that was carried
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  Speaker 1: on between Hanseatic cities, or to know how the city
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  Speaker 1: of Ruen built its cathedral. If a scholar spends his
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  Speaker 1: life in studying these questions, his works remain unknown. In
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  Speaker 1: parliamentary histories, that is to say, the defective ones, as
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  Speaker 1: they only treat one side of social life. Multiply are
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  Speaker 1: circulated are taught in schools, and we do not even
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  Speaker 1: perceive the prodigious work accomplished every day by spontaneous groups
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  Speaker 1: of men, which constitutes the chief work of our century.
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  Speaker 1: We therefore propose to point out some of these most
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  Speaker 1: striking manifestations, and to prove that men, as soon as
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  Speaker 1: their interests do not absolutely clash, act in concert harmoniously,
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  Speaker 1: and perform collective work of a very complex nature. It
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  Speaker 1: is evident that in present society, based on individual property,
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  Speaker 1: that is to say, on plunder, and on a narrow
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  Speaker 1: minded and therefore foolish individualism, facts of this kind are
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  Speaker 1: necessarily few in number. Agreements are not always perfectly free,
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  Speaker 1: and often have a mean, if not execrable aims. But
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  Speaker 1: what concerns us is not to give examples which we
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  Speaker 1: could blindly follow, and which moreover, present society could not
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  Speaker 1: possibly give us. What we have to do is prove that,
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  Speaker 1: in spite of the authoritarian individualism which stifles us, there
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  Speaker 1: remains in our life taken as a whole, a great
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  Speaker 1: part in which we only act by free agreement, and
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  Speaker 1: that it would be much easier than we think to
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  Speaker 1: dispense with government. In support of our view, we have
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  Speaker 1: already mentioned railways, and we are about to return to them.
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  Speaker 1: We know that Europe has a system of railways one
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  Speaker 1: hundred and seventy five thousand miles long, and that on
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  Speaker 1: this network you can nowadays travel from north to south,
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  Speaker 1: from east to west, from Madrid to Petersburg, and from
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  Speaker 1: Calais to Constantinople without stoppages, without even changing carriages when
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  Speaker 1: you travel by express. More than that, a parcel thrown
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  Speaker 1: into a station will find its address see anywhere in
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  Speaker 1: Turkey or in Central Asia, without more formality needed for
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  Speaker 1: sending it than writing its destination on a bit of paper.
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  Speaker 1: This result might have been obtained in two ways. A Napoleon,
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  Speaker 1: a bit or some potentate having conquered Europe, would from Paris,
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  Speaker 1: Berlin or Rome draw a railway map and regulate the
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  Speaker 1: hours of the trains. The Russians are Nicholas the first
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  Speaker 1: dreamt of taking such action. When he was shown rough
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  Speaker 1: drafts of railways between Moscow and Petersburg. He seized a
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  Speaker 1: ruler and drew on the map of Russia a straight
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  Speaker 1: line between these two capitals, saying, here is the plan,
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  Speaker 1: and the road as was built in a straight line,
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  Speaker 1: filling in deep ravines, building bridges of a giddy height,
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  Speaker 1: which had to be abandoned a few years later, at
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  Speaker 1: a cost of about one hundred and twenty thousand to
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  Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty thousand pounds per English mile. This
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  Speaker 1: is one way, but happily things were managed differently. Railways
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  Speaker 1: were constructed piece by piece, The pieces were joined together,
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  Speaker 1: and the one hundred diverse companies to whom these pieces
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  Speaker 1: belonged came to an understanding concerning the arrival and departure
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  Speaker 1: of their trains and the running of carriages on their
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  Speaker 1: rails from all countries, without unloading merchandise as it passes
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  Speaker 1: from one network to another. All this was done by
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  Speaker 1: free agreement, by exchange of letters and proposals, by congresses
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  Speaker 1: at which delegates met to discuss certain special subjects, but
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  Speaker 1: not to make laws. After the congress, the delegates returned
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  Speaker 1: to their companies not with a law, but with the
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  Speaker 1: draft of a contract to be accepted or rejected. There
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  Speaker 1: were certainly obstinate men who would not be convinced, but
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  Speaker 1: a common interest compelled them to agree without invoking the
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  Speaker 1: help of armies against the refractory members. This immense network
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  Speaker 1: of railways connected together, and the enormous traffic it has
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  Speaker 1: given rise to, no doubt, constitutes the most striking trait
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  Speaker 1: of our century, and it is the result of free agreement.
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  Speaker 1: If a man had foreseen or predicted it fifty years ago,
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  Speaker 1: our grandfathers would have thought him idiotic or mad. They
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  Speaker 1: would have said, never will you be able to make
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  Speaker 1: the shareholders of one hundred companies listen to reason? It
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  Speaker 1: is a utopia, a fairy tale. A central government with
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  Speaker 1: an iron director can alone enforce it. And the most
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  Speaker 1: interesting thing in this organization is that there is no
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  Speaker 1: European central government of railways nothing, no Minister of Railways,
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  Speaker 1: no dictator, not even a continental parliament, not even a
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  Speaker 1: directing committee. Everything is done by contract. So we ask
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  Speaker 1: the believers in the state who pretend that we can
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  Speaker 1: never do without a central government. Were it only for
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  Speaker 1: regulating the traffic, we ask them, but how do European
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  Speaker 1: railways manage without them? How do they continue to convey
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  Speaker 1: millions of travelers and mountains of luggage across a continent.
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  Speaker 1: If companies owning railways have been able to agree, why
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  Speaker 1: should railway workers who would take possession of the railways
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  Speaker 1: not agree likewise? And if the Petersburg Warsaw Company and
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  Speaker 1: that of the Paris Belfort can act in harmony without
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  Speaker 1: giving themselves the luxury of a common commander. Why, in
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  Speaker 1: the midst of our societies, consisting of free groups of workers,
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  Speaker 1: should we need a government? End of Chapter eleven.