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01 - The Law - Frederic Bastiat · The Philosophy Insights Collection

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  Section one. The law perverted, the law, and in its wake all
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  the collective forces of the nation. The law, I say, not only
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  diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary. The
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  law become the tool of every kind of avarice. Instead of being its check,
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  the law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish.
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  Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one
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  to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens. We
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  hold from God the gift that, as far as we are concerned, contains
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  all others life, physical, intellectual and moral life. But life cannot support
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  itself. He who has bestowed it has entrusted us with the care of supporting
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  it, of developing it, and of perfecting it. To that end,
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  he has provided us with a collection of wonderful faculties. He has plunged us
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  into the midst of a variety of elements. It is by the application of
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  our faculties to these elements that the phenomena of assimilation and of appropriation by which
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  life pursues the circle that has been assigned to it are realized. Existence.
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  Faculties assimilation. In other words, personality, liberty, property, This is
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  man. It is of these three things that it may be said, apart
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  from all demagogic subtlety, that they are anterior and superior to all human legislation.
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  It is not because men have made laws that personality, liberty, and
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  a property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty,
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  and property exist before and that men make laws. What then is law?
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  As I have said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual right
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  to lawful defense. Nature, or rather, God, has bestowed upon every
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  one of us, the right to defend his person, his liberty, and
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  his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life,
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  elements each of which is rendered complete by the others, and that cannot be
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  understood without them. For what are our faculties but the extension of our personality?
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  And what is property but an extension of our faculties. If every man
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  has the right of defending, even by force, his person, his liberty,
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  and his property, a number of men have the right to combine together
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  to extend, to organize a common force to provide regularly for this defense.
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  Collective right then has its principle, its reason for existing, its lawfulness in
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  individual right. And the common force cannot rationally have any other end or any
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  other mission, than that of the isolated forces for which it is substituted.
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  Thus, as the force of an individual cannot lawfully touch the person, the
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  liberty, or the property of another individual, for the same reason, the
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  common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or
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  the property of individuals or of classes. For this perversion of force would be,
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  in one case, as in the other, in contradiction to our premises.
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  For who will dare to say that force has been given to us not
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  to defend our rights, but to annihilate the equal rights of our brethren.
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  And if this be not true of every individual force acting independently, how can
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  it be true of the collective force, which is only the organized union of
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  isolated forces. Nothing therefore, can be more evident than this. The law
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  is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution
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  of collective for individual forces for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which
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  they have a right to act, of doing what they have a right to
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  do to secure persons liberties and properties, and to maintain each in its right,
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  so as to cause justice to reign over all. And if a people
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  established on this basis were to exist, it seems to me that order would
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  prevail among them in their acts as well as in their ideas. It seems
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  to me that such a people would have the most simple, the most economical,
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  the least oppressive, the least to be felt, the most restrained,
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  the most just, and consequently the most stable government that could be imagined,
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  whatever its political form might be. For under such an administration, every one
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  would feel that he possessed all the fullness, as well as all the responsibility
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  of his existence. So long as personal safety was insured, so long as
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  labor was free, and the fruits of labor secured against all unjust attacks,
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  no one would have any difficulties to contend within the state. When prosperous,
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  we should not, it is true, have to thank the state for our
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  success. But when unfortunate, we should no more think of taxing it with
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  our disasters than our peasants think of attributing to it the arrival of hail or
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  of frost. We should know it only by the inestimable blessing of safety.
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  It may further be affirmed that, thanks to the non intervention of the state
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  in private affairs, our wants and their satisfactions would develop themselves in their natural
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  order. We should not see poor families seeking for literary instruction before they were
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  supplied with bread. We should not see towns peopled at the expense of rural
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  districts, nor rural districts at the expense of towns. We should not see
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  those great displacements of capital, of labor, and of population that legislative measures
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  occasion, displacements that render so uncertain and precarious the various sources of existence,
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  and thus enlarged to such an extent the responsibility of governments. Unhappily, law
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  is by no means confined to its own sphere. Nor is it merely,
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  in some ambiguous and debatable views, that it has left its proper sphere.
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  It has done more than this. It has acted in direct opposition to its
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  proper end. It has destroyed its own object. It has been employed in
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  annihilating that justice which it ought to have establish, in effacing amongst rights that
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  limit which it was its true mission to respect. It has placed the collective
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  force in the service of those who wished to traffic without risk and without scruple
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  in the persons, the liberty and the property of others. It has converted
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  plunder into a right that it may protect it, and lawful defense into a
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  crime that it may punish it. How has this perversion of law been accomplished,
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  and what has resulted from it? The law has been perverted through the
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  influence of two very different causes, naked greed and misconceived philanthropy. Let us
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  speak of the farmer self. Preservation and development is the common aspiration of all
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  men, in such a way that if everyone enjoyed the free exercise of his
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  faculties and the free disposition of their fruits, social progress would be incessant,
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  interrupted, inevitable. But there is also another disposition which is common to them.
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  This is to live and to develop when they can, at the expense
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  of one another. This is no rash imputation emanating from a gloomy, uncharitable
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  spirit. History bears witness to the truth of it by the incessant wars,
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  the migrations of races, sectarian oppressions, the universality of slavery, the frauds
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  in trade, and the monopolies with which the annals abound. This fatal disposition
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  has its origin in the very constitution of man, in that primitive and universal
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  and invincible sentiment that urges it towards its well being and makes it seek to
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  escape pain. Man can only derive life and enjoyment from a perpetual search and
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  appropriation, that is, from a perpetual application of his faculties to objects,
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  or from labor. This is the origin of property. But also he may
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  live and enjoy by seizing and appropriating the productions of the faculties of his fellow
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  men. This is the origin of plunder. Now, labor being in itself
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  a pain, and man being naturally inclined to avoid pain. It follows,
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  and history proves it that wherever plunder is less burdensome than labor, it prevails,
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  and neither religion nor morality can in this case prevent it from prevailing.
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  When does plunder cease, then when it becomes more burdensome and more dangerous than
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  labor. It is very evident that the proper aim of law is to oppose
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  the fatal tendency to plunder with the powerful obstacle of collective force, that all
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  its measures should be in favor of property and against plunder. But the law
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  is made generally by one man or by one class of men, And as
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  law cannot exist without the sanction and the support of a preponderant force, it
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  must finally place this force in the hands of those who legislate. This inevitable
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  phenomenon, combined with the fatal tendency that we have said exists in the heart
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  of man, explains the almost universal perversion of law. It is easy to
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  conceive that, instead of being a check upon injustice, it becomes its most
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  invincible instrument. It is easy to conceive that, according to the power of
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  the legislator, it destroys for its own profit, and in different degrees,
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  amongst the rest of the community, personal independence by slavery, liberty by oppression,
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  and property by plunder. It is in the nature of man to rise
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  against the injustice of which they are the victims. When therefore plunder is organized
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  by law for the profit of those who perpetrate it. All the plundered classes
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  tend, either by peaceful or revolutionary means, to enter in some way into
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  the manufacturing of laws. These classes, according to the degree of enlightenment at
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  which they have arrived may propose to themselves to very different ends when they thus
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  attempt the attainment of their political rights. Either they may wish to put an
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  end to lawful plunder, or they may desire to take part in it.
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  Woe to the nation where this latter thought prevails among the masses at the moment
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  when they, in their turn, seize upon the legislative power. Up to
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  that time, lawful plunder has been exercised by the few upon the many,
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  as in the case in countries where the right of legislating is confined to a
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  few hands. But now it has become universal, and the equilibrium is sought
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  in universal plunder the ject justice that society contains, instead of being rooted out
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  of it, is generalized. As soon as the injured classes have recovered their
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  political rights, their first thought is not to abolish plunder. This would suppose
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  them to possess enlightenment, which they cannot have, but to organize against the
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  other classes and to their own detriment, a system of reprisals, as if
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  it were necessary before the reign of justice arrives, that all should undergo a
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  cruel retribution, some for their iniquity and some for their ignorance. It would
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  be impossible, therefore, to introduce into society a greater change and a greater
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  evil than this, the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
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  What would be the consequences of such a perversion. It would require volumes to
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  describe them all. We must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking.
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  In the first place, it would efface from everybody's conscience the distinction between justice
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  and injustice. No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain
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  degree. But the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable.
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  When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds
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  himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or of losing his
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  respect for the law, two evils of equal magnitude between which it would be
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  difficult to choose. It is so much in the nature of law to support
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  justice that in the minds of the masses they are one and the same.
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  There is in all of us a strong disposition to regard what is lawful as
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  legitimate, so much so that many falsely derive all justice from law. It
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  is sufficient, then for the law to order and sanction plunder, that it
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  may appear to many consciences just and sacred. Slavery, protection and monopoly find
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  defenders not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer
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  by them. If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of these institutions,
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  it is said directly you are a dangerous experimenter, a utopian, a
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  theorist, a despiser of the laws. You would shake the basis upon which
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  society rests if you lecture upon morality or political economy. Official bodies will be
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  found to make this request to the government, that henceforth science be taught not
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  only with sole reference to free exchange, to liberty, property and justice,
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  as has been the case up to the present time, but also, and
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  especially with reference to the facts and legislation contrary to liberty, property and justice
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  that regulate French industry, that in public lecturns salaried by the Treasury. The
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  professor abstained rigorously from endangering, in the slightest degree the respect due to the
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  laws now in force, so that if a law exists that sanctioned slavery or
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  monopoly, oppression or plunder, in any form whatever, it must not be
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  mentioned for how can it be mentioned without damaging the respect that it inspires.
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  Still, further, morality and political economy must be taught in connection with this
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  law, that is, under the supposition that it must be just only because
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  it is law. End of Section one