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The Law · The Law

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  Forward. Anyone building a personal library of liberty must include in it a copy
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  of Frederick Bastiat's classic essay The Law, first published in eighteen fifty by the
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  great French economist and journalist. It is as clear a statement as has ever
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  been made of the original American ideal of government, as proclaimed in the Declaration
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  of Independence, that the main purpose of any government is the protection of the
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  lives, liberties, and property of its citizens. Bastiat believed that all human
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  beings possessed the God given natural rights of individuality, liberty, property. This
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  is man. He wrote, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation.
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  But even in his time, writing in the late eighteen forties, Bastiat
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  was alarmed over how the law had been perverted into an instrument of what he
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  called legal plunder. Far from protecting individual rights, the law was increasingly used
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  to deprive one group of cities of those rights for the benefit of another group,
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  and especially for the benefit of the state itself. He condemned the legal
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  plunder of protectionist tariffs, government subsidies of all kinds, progressive taxation, public
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  schools, government jobs programs, minimum wage laws, welfare, usury laws,
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  and more. Bastiat's warnings of the dire effects of legal plunder are as relevant
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  today as they were the day he first issued them. The system of legal
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  plunder, which many now celebrate as democracy, will erase from everyone's conscience,
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  he wrote, the distinction between justice and injustice. The plundered classes will eventually
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  figure out how to enter the political game and plunder their fellow man. Legislation
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  will never be guided by any principles of justice, but only by brute political
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  force. The great French champion of liberty also forecast the corruption of education by
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  the state. Those who held government endowed teaching positions, he wrote, would
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  rarely criticize legal plunder lest their government endowments be ended. The system of legal
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  plunder would also greatly exaggerate the importance of politics and society. That would be
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  a most unhealthy development, as it would encourage even more citizens to seek to
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  improve their own well being, not by producing goods and services for the market
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  place, but by plundering their fellow citizens through politics. Bastiat was also wise
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  enough to anticipate what modern economists call rent seeking and rent avoidance behavior. These
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  two clumsy phrases refer, respectively, to the phenomena of lobbying for political favors
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  legal plunder, and of engaging in political activity directed at protecting one's self from
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  being the victim of plunder seekers. For example, the steel manufacturing industry lobbies
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  for high tariffs on steel, whereas steel using industries like the automobile industry can
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  be expected to lobby against high tariffs on steel. The reason why modern economists
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  are concerned about rent seeking is the opportunity cost involved. The more time,
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  effort, and money that is spent by businesses on conniving to manipulate politics merely
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  transferring wealth, the less time is spent on producing goods and services, which
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  increases wealth. Thus, legal plunder impoverishes the entire society, despite the fact
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  that a small but politically influential part of the society benefits from it. It
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  is remarkable, in reading the Law how perfectly accurate Bastiat was in describing the
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  statists of his day, which it turns out were not much different from the
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  statists of today or of any other day. The French socialists of Bastiat's day
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  espoused doctrines that perverted charity, education, and morals. For one thing,
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  true charity does not begin with the robbery of taxation. He pointed out,
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  government schooling is inevitably an exercise in statist brainwashing, not genuine education, and
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  it is hardly moral for a large gang government too legally rob one section of
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  the population, keep most of the loot and share a little of it with
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  various needy individuals. Socialists want to play god, Bastiat observed, anticipating all
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  the future tyrants and despots of the world who would try to remake the world
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  in their image, whether that image would be communism, fascism, the Glorious
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  Union, or global democracy. Bastiat also observed that socialists wanted forced conformity,
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  rigid regimentation of the population through pervasive regulation, forced equality of wealth, and
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  dictatorship. As such, they were the mortal enemies of liberty. Dictatorship need
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  not involve an actual dictator. All that was needed, said Bastiat, was
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  the laws enacted by a congress or a parliament that would achieve the same effect
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  forced conformity. Bastiat was also wise to point out that the world had far
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  too many great men, fathers of their countries, et cetera, who in
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  reality are usually nothing but petty tyrants. With a sick and compulsive desire to
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  rule over others. The defenders of the free society should have a healthy disrespect
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  for all such men. Bastiat admired America and pointed to the America of eighteen
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  fifty as being as close as any society in the world to his ideal of
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  a government that protected individual rights to life, liberty, and property. There
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  were two major exceptions, however, the twin evils of slavery and protectionist tariffs.
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  Frederic Bastiat died on Christmas Eve eighteen fifty and did not live to observe
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  the convulsions that the America he admired so much would go through in the next
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  fifteen years and longer. It is unlikely that he would have considered the U.
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  S government's military invasion of the Southern State Rates in eighteen sixty one,
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  the killing of some three hundred thousand citizens, and the bombing, burning,
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  and plundering of the region's cities, towns, farms, and businesses as being
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  consistent in any way with the protection of the lives, liberties, and properties
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  of those citizens as promised by the Declaration of Independence. Had he lived to
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  see all of this, he most likely would have added legal murder to legal
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  plunder as one of the two great sins of government. He would likely have
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  viewed the post war Republican Party, with its fifty percent average tariff rates,
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  its massive corporate welfare schemes, and its twenty five year campaign of genocide against
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  the Plains Indians as first rate plunderers and traders to the American ideal. In
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  the latter pages of the Law, Bastiat offers the sage advice that what was
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  really needed was a science of economics that would explain the harmony or lack thereof,
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  of a free society as opposed to socialism. He made a major contribution
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  to this end himself with the publication of his book Economic Harmonies, which can
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  be construed as a precursor to the modern literature of the Austrian school of economics.
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  There is no substitute for a solid understanding of the market order and of
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  the realities of politics when it comes to combating the kinds of destructive socialist schemes
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  that plagued Bastiacht's day as well as ours. Anyone who reads this great essay,
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  along with other free market classics such as Henry Hazlitt's Economics in one lesson
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  and Murray Rothbard's Power and Market will possess enough intellectual ammunition to debunk the socialist
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  fantasies of this or any other day. Thomas J. De Lorenzo May two
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  thousand seven. Thomas de Lorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland
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  and a member of the Senior Faculty of the Mice's Institute. End of section
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  zero on the law perverted the law and in its wake all the collective forces
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  of the nation. The law, I say, not only diverted from its
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  proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary. The law become the
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  tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check, the law
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  guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish. Truly,
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  this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I
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  feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens. We hold from God
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  the gift that, as far as we are concerned, contains all others life,
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  physical, intellectual and moral life. But life cannot support itself. He
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  who has bestowed it has entrusted us with the care of supporting it, of
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  developing it, and of perfecting it. To that end, he has provided
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  us with a collection of wonderful faculties. He has plunged us into the midst
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  of a variety of elements. It is by the application of our faculties to
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  these elements that the phenomena of assimilation and of appropriation by which life pursues the
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  circle that has been assigned to it are realized. Existence faculties, assimilation,
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  in other words, personality, liberty, property. This is man. It
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  is of these three things that it may be said, apart from all demagogic
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  subtlety, that they are anterior and superior to all human legislation. It is
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  not because men have made laws that personality, liberty, and a property exist.
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  On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist
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  beforehand that men make laws. What then, is law? As I have
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  said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
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  Nature, or rather, God, has bestowed upon every one of us
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  the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. Since
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  these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life, elements, each of
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  which is rendered complete by the others, and that cannot be understood without them.
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  For what are our faculties but the extension of our personality? And what
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  is property but an extension of our faculties. If every man has the right
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  of defending, even by force, his person, his liberty, and his
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  property, a number of men have the right to combine together to extend,
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  to organize a common force to provide regularly for this defense. Collective right then
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  has its principle, its reason for existing, its lawfulness in individual right.
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  And the common force cannot rationally have any other end, or any other mission,
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  than that of the isolated forces for which it is substituted. Thus,
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  as the force of an individual cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty,
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  or the property of another individual, for the same reason, the common force
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  cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property
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  of individuals or of classes. For this perversion of force would be, in
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  one case, as in the other, in contradiction to our premises. For
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  who will dare to say that force has been given to us not to defend
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  our rights, but to annihilate the equal rights of our brethren. And if
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  this be not true of every individual force acting independently, How can it be
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  true of the collective, which is only the organized union of isolated forces.
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  Nothing therefore can be more evident than this. The law is the organization of
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  the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of collective for individual
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  forces for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right
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  to act, of doing what they have a right to do, to secure
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  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 established
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  on this basis were to exist, it seems to me that order would prevail
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  among them in their acts as well as in their ideas. It seems to
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  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, the
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  most just, and consequently the most stable government that could be imagined, whatever
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  its political form might be. For under such an administration, everyone would feel
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  that he possessed all the fullness, as well as all the responsibility of his
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  existence, so long as personal safety was insured, so long as labor was
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  free, and the fruits of labor secured, against all unjust attacks, no
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  one would have any difficulties to contend within the state. When prosperous, we
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  should not, it is true, have to thank the state for our success.
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  But when unfortunate, we should no more think of taxing it with our
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  disasters than our peasants think of attributing to it the arrival of hail or of
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  frost. We should know it only by the inestimable blessing of safety. It
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  may further be affirmed that, thanks to the non intervention of the state in
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  private affairs, our wants and their satisfactions would develop themselves in their nets order.
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  We should not see poor families seeking for literary instruction before they were supplied
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  with bread. We should not see towns peopled at the expense of rural districts,
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  nor rural districts at the expense of towns. We should not see those
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  great displacements of capital, of labor, and of population that legislative measures occasion,
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  displacements that render so uncertain and precarious the various sources of existence, and
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  thus enlarged to such an extent the responsibility of governments. Unhappily, law is
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  by no means confined to its own sphere. Nor is it merely in some
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  ambiguous and debatable views, that it has left its proper sphere. It has
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  done more than this. It has acted in direct opposition to its proper end.
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  It has destroyed its own object. It has been employed in annihilating that
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  justice which it ought to have established, in effacing amongst rights that limit which
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  it was its true mission to respect. It has placed the collective force in
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  the service of those who wished to traffic without risk and without scruple in the
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  persons, the liberty and the property of others. It has converted plunder into
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  a right that it may protect it, and lawful defense into a crime that
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  it may punish it. How has this perversion of law been accomplished, and
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  what has resulted from it? The law has been perverted through the influence of
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  two very different causes, naked greed and misconceived philanthropy. Let us speak of
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  the farmer. Self preservation and development is the common aspiration of all men in
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  such a way that if everyone enjoyed the free exercise of his faculties and the
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  free disposition of their fruits, social progress would be incessant, uninterrupted, inevitable.
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  But there is also another disposition which is common to them. This is
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  to live and to develop when they can, at the expense of one another.
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  This is no rash imputation emanating from a gloomy, uncharitable spirit. History
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  bears witness to the truth of it by the incessant wars, the migrations of
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  races, sectarian oppressions, the universality of slavery, the frauds in trade,
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  and the monopolies with which the annals abound. This fatal disposition has its origin
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  in the very constitution of man, in that primitive and universal and invincible sentiment
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  that urges it towards its well being and makes it seek to escape pain.
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  Man can only derive life and enjoyment from a perpetual search and appropriation, that
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  is, from a perpetual application of his faculties to objects, or from life
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  labor. This is the origin of property. But also he may live and
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  enjoy by seizing and appropriating the productions of the faculties of his fellow men.
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  This is the origin of plunder. Now, labor being in itself a pain,
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  and man being naturally inclined to avoid pain, It follows, and history
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  proves it that wherever plunder is less burdensome than labor, it prevails, and
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  neither religion nor morality can in this case prevent it from prevailing. When does
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  plunder cease, then when it becomes more burdensome and more dangerous than labor.
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  It is very evident that the proper aim of law is to oppose the fatal
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  tendency to plunder, with the powerful obstacle of collective force. That all its
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  measures should be in favor of property and against plunder. But the law is
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  made generally by one man or by one class of men, And as law
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  cannot exist without the sanction and the support of a p ponderant 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 las law for the profit of those who perpetrate it, all the plundered
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  classes tend, either by peaceful or revolutionary means, to enter in some way
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  into the manufacturing of laws. These classes, according to the degree of enlightenment
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  at which they have arrived, may propose to themselves to very different ends when
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  they thus attempt the attainment of their political rights. Either they may wish to
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  put an end to lawful plunder, or they may desire to take part in
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  it. Woe to the nation where this latter thought prevails among the masses at
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  the moment when they, in their turn seize upon the legislative power. Up
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  to 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
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  a few hands. But now it has become universal, and the equilibrium is
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  sought in universal plunder. The injustice that society contains, instead of being rooted
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  out of it, is generalized. As soon as the injured classes have recovered
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  their political rights, their first thought is not to abolish plunder. This would
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  suppose them to possess enlightenment, which they cannot have, but to organize against
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  the other classes and to their own detriment, a system of reprisals, as
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  if it were necessary before the reign of justice arrives, that all should undergo
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  a cruel retribution, some for their iniquity and some for their ignorance. It
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  would be impossible, therefore, to introduce into society a greater change, and
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  a greater evil than this, the conversion of the law into an instrument of
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  plunder. What would be the consequences of such a perversion, It would require
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  volumes to describe them all. We must content ourselves with pointing out the most
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  striking. In the first place, it effaced from everybody's conscience, the distinction
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  between justice and injustice. No society can exist unless the laws are respected to
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  a certain degree. But the safest way to make them respected is to make
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  them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the
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  citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or
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  of losing his respect for the law, two evils of equal magnitude between which
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  it would be difficult to choose. It is so much in the nature of
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  law to support justice, that in the minds of the masses they are one
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  and the same. There is in all of us a strong disposition to regard
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  what is lawful as legitimate, so much so that many falsely derive all justice
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  from law. It is sufficient, then for the law to order and sanction
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  plunder, that it may appear to many consciences just and sacred. Protection and
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  monopoly find defenders not only in those who profit by them, but in those
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  who suffer by them. If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of
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  these institutions, it is said directly you are a dangerous experimenter, a utopian,
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  a theorist, a despiser of the laws. You would shake the basis
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  upon which society rests if you lecture upon morality or political economy. Official bodies
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  will be found to make this request to the government, that henceforth science be
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  taught not only with sole reference to free exchange, to liberty, property,
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  and justice, as has been the case up to the present time, but
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  also and especially with reference to the facts and legislation contrary to liberty, property
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  and justice that regulate French industry, that in public lecterns salaried by the Treasury.
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  The Professor abstained rigorously from dangering in the slightest degree the respect due to
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  the laws now in force, So that if a law exists that sanctioned slavery
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  or monopoly oppression are plunder in any form whatever, it must not be mentioned,
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  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 law,
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  that is, under the supposition that it must be just only because it
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  is law. End of Section one, Section two. Another effect of this
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  deplorable perversion of the law is that it gives to human passions and to political
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  struggles, and in general, to politics properly so called an exaggerated importance.
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  I could prove this assertion in a thousand ways, but I shall confine myself,
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  by way of an illustration, to bringing it to bear upon a subase
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  which has of late occupied everybody's mind. Universal suffrage, whatever may be thought
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  of it by the Adepts of the School of Rousseau, which professes to be
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  very far advanced, but which I consider twenty centuries behind. Universal suffrage.
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  Taking the word in its strictest sense is not one of those sacred dogmas with
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  respect to which examination and doubt are crimes. Serious objections may be made to
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  it. In the first place, the word universal conceals a gross sophism.
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  There are in France thirty six million inhabitants. To make the right of suffrage
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  universal, thirty six million electors should be reckoned. The most extended system reckons
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  only nine million, three persons out of four then are excluded, and more
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  than this they are excluded by the fourth upon what principle is this exclusion founded
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  upon the principle of incapacity? Universal suffrage then means universal suffrage of those who
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  are capable. In point of fact, who are the capable are age,
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  sex, and judicial condemnations, the only conditions to which incapacity is to be
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  attached. On taking a nearer view of the subject, we may soon perceive
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  the reason why the right of suffrage depends upon the presumption of incapacity. The
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  most extended system differing from the most restricted in the conditions on which this incapacity
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  depends, and which constitutes not a difference in principle, but in degree.
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  This motive is that the elector does not stipulate for himself, but for everybody.
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  If, as the republicans of the Greek and Roman tone pretend, the
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  right of suffrage has fallen to the lot of everyone at his birth, it
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  would be an injustice to adults to prevent women and children from voting. Why
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  are they prevented because they are presumed to be incapable? And why is incapacity
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  a reason for exclusion? Because the elector does not reap alone the responsibility of
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  his vote, Because every vote engages and affects the community at large, because
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  the community has a right to demand some assurances as regards the acts upon which
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  its well being and its existence depend. I know what might be said in
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  answer to this, I know what might be objected, But this is not
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  the place to settle a controversy of this kind. What I wish to observe
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  is this that this same controversy, in common with the greater part of political
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  questions, that agitates, excites, and unsettles the nations, would lose almost
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  all its importance. If the law had always been what it ought to be.
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  In fact, if law were confined to causing all persons, all liberty,
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  and all properties to be respected, if it were merely the organization of
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  individual rights and individual defense, if it were the obstacle the check the chastisement
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  opposed to all oppression, to all plunder. Is it likely that we should
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  dispute much as citizens, on the subject of greater or lesser universality of suffrage?
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  Is it likely that it would compromise that greatest of advantages the public peace.
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  Is it likely that the excluded classes would not quietly wait for their turn.
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  Is it likely that the enfranchised classes would be very jealous of their privilege?
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  And is it not clear that the interest of all being one and the
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  same, some would act without much inconvenience to the others. But if the
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  fatal principle should come to be introduced, that, under pretense of organization,
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  regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law may take from one party in
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  order to give to another, help itself to the wealth acquired by all the
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  classes, that it may increase that of one class, whether that of the
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  agriculturists, the manufacturers, the shipowners, or artists and comedians, then,
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  certainly in this case, there is no class which may not try, and
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  with reason to place its hand upon the law that would not demand with fury
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  its right of election and eligibility, and that would overturn society rather than not
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  obtain it. Even beggars and vagabonds will prove to you that they have an
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  incontestable title to it. They will say, we never buy wine, tobacco,
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  are salt without paying the tax. And a part of this tax is
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  given by law in perquisites and gratuities to men who are richer than we are.
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  Others make use of the law to create an artificial rise in the price
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  of bread, meat, iron, or cloth. Since everybody traffics in law
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  for his own profit, we should like to do the same. We should
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  like to make it produce the right to assistance, which is the poor man's
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  plunder. To affect this, we ought to be electors and legislators that we
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  may organize on a large scale alms for our own class, as you have
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  organized on a large scale protection for yours. Don't tell us that you will
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  take our cause upon yourselves and throw to us six hundred thousand francs to keep
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  us quiet, Like giving us a bone to pick. We have other claims,
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  and at any rate we wish to stipulate for ourselves as other classes have
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  stipulated for themselves. How is this argument to be answered? Yes, as
• 29:51
  long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true mission,
• 29:56
  that it may violate property instead of securing it, everybody will be wanting
• 30:00
  to manufacture law, either to defend himself against plunder or to organize it for
• 30:06
  his own profit. The political question will always be prejudicial, predominant, and
• 30:11
  absorbing. In a word, there will be fighting around the door of the
• 30:17
  legislative palace. The struggle will be no less furious within it. To be
• 30:22
  convinced of this, it is hardly necessary to look at what passes in the
• 30:26
  chambers in France and in England. It is enough to know how the question
• 30:32
  stands. Is there any need to prove that this odious perversion of law is
• 30:37
  a perpetual source of hatred and discord, that it even tends to social disorganization?
• 30:45
  Look at the United States. There is no country in the world where
• 30:48
  the law is kept more within its proper domain, which is to secure to
• 30:52
  everyone his liberty and his property. Therefore, there is no country in the
• 30:59
  world where social order appears to rest upon a more solid basis. Nevertheless,
• 31:06
  even in the United States, there are two questions, and only two,
• 31:10
  that from the beginning have endangered political order. And what are these two questions?
• 31:17
  That of slavery and that of tariffs? That is, precisely the only
• 31:22
  two questions in which, contrary to the general spirit of this republic, law
• 31:26
  has taken the character of a plunderer. Slavery is a violation sanctioned by law
• 31:33
  of the rights of the person. Protection is a violation perpetrated by the law
• 31:38
  upon the rights of property. And certainly, it is very remarkable that,
• 31:44
  in the midst of so many other debates, this double legal scourge, the
• 31:48
  sorrowful inheritance of the old world, should be the only one which can and
• 31:53
  perhaps will, cause the rupture of the Union. Indeed, a more astoundish
• 32:00
  in fact in the heart of society cannot be conceived than this, that law
• 32:05
  should have become an instrument of injustice. And if this fact occasions consequences so
• 32:12
  formidable to the United States, where there is but one exception, what must
• 32:16
  it be with us in Europe, where it is a principle a system.
• 32:22
  Mister Montalambert, adopting the thought of a famous proclamation of mister Carlier, said
• 32:28
  we must make war against socialism and by socialism. According to the definition of
• 32:34
  mister Charles de Pine, he meant plunder. But what plunder did he mean?
• 32:40
  For there are two sorts extra legal and legal plunder. As to extra
• 32:47
  legal plunder, such as theft or swindling, which is defined, foreseen and
• 32:53
  punished by the penal code, I do not think it can be adorned by
• 32:58
  the name of socialism. It is not this that systematically threatens the foundations of
• 33:02
  society. Besides, the war against this kind of plunder has not waited for
• 33:07
  the signal of mister mount Lambert or mister Carlyier. It has gone on since
• 33:14
  the beginning of the world. France was carrying it on long or before the
• 33:19
  Revolution of February, long before the appearance of socialism, with all its ceremonies
• 33:23
  of magistry, police, gendarmerie, prisons, dungeons and scaffolds. It is
• 33:30
  the law itself that is conducting this war, and it is to be wished,
• 33:35
  in my opinion, that the law should always maintain this attitude with respect
• 33:39
  to plunder. But this is not the case. The law sometimes takes its
• 33:45
  own part. Sometimes it accomplishes it with its own hands, in order to
• 33:50
  save the parties benefited, the shame, the danger, and the scruple.
• 33:54
  Sometimes it places all this ceremony of magistracy, police, gendarmerie and prisons at
• 34:01
  the service of the plunderer, and treats the plundered party when he defends himself
• 34:07
  as a criminal. In a word, there is a legal plunder, and
• 34:12
  it is no doubt this that is meant by mister Montalambert end of Section two,
• 34:21
  Section three. This plunder may be only an exceptional blemish in the legislation
• 34:29
  of a people. And in this case the best thing that can be done
• 34:32
  is, without so many speeches and lamentations, to do away with it as
• 34:37
  soon as possible, notwithstanding the clamors of interested parties. But how is it
• 34:44
  to be distinguished? Very easily? See whether the law takes from some persons
• 34:51
  that which belongs to them, to give to others what does not belong to
• 34:54
  them. See whether the law performs for the benefit of one citizen and to
• 35:00
  the injury of others, and act that this citizen cannot perform without committing a
• 35:06
  crime. Abolish this law without delay. It is not merely an iniquity.
• 35:13
  It is a fertile source of iniquities, for it invites reprisals, and if
• 35:19
  you do not take care, the exceptional case will extend multiply and become systematic.
• 35:27
  No doubt, the party benefit will exclaim loudly. He will assert his
• 35:30
  acquired rights. He will say that the state is bound to protect and encourage
• 35:36
  his industry. He will plead that it is a good thing for the state
• 35:39
  to be enriched, that it may spend the more and thus shower down salaries
• 35:45
  upon the poor workmen. Take care not to listen to this sophistry, for
• 35:51
  it is just by the systematizing of these arguments that legal plunder becomes systematized.
• 35:58
  And this is why has taken place. The delusion of the day is to
• 36:02
  enrich all classes at the expense of each other. It is to generalize plunder
• 36:09
  under pretense of organizing it. Now Leo plunder may be exercised in an infinite
• 36:16
  multitude of ways. Hence come an infinite multitude of plans for organization. Tariffs,
• 36:23
  protection, perquisites, gratuities, encouragements, progressive taxation, free public education,
• 36:31
  right to work, right to profit, right to ages, right to
• 36:36
  assistance, right to instruments of labor, gratuity of credit, et cetera,
• 36:42
  et cetera. And it is all these plans taken as a whole, with
• 36:47
  what they have in common, Leo, plunder that takes the name of socialism.
• 36:53
  Now socialism thus defined in forming a doctrinal body, what other war would
• 37:00
  you make against it than a war of doctrine. You find this doctrine false,
• 37:05
  absurd, abominable, refute it. This will be all the easier,
• 37:10
  the more false, absurd and abominable. It is, above all, if
• 37:16
  you wish to be strong, begin by routing out of your legislation every particle
• 37:22
  of socialism which may have crept into it. And this will be no light
• 37:28
  work. Mister Montalambert has been reproached with wishing to turn brute force against socialism.
• 37:36
  He ought to be exonerated from this reproach, for he has plainly said,
• 37:39
  quote the war that we must make against socialism must be one that is
• 37:45
  compatible with the law, honor and justice. Close quote. But how is
• 37:52
  it that mister Montalambert does not see that he is placing himself in efficient circle
• 38:00
  you would oppose law to socialism, But it is the law that socialism in
• 38:05
  folks, It aspires to legal, not extra legal plunder. It is of
• 38:09
  the law itself, like the monopolist of all kinds, that it wants to
• 38:14
  make an instrument. And when once it has the law on its side,
• 38:19
  how will you be able to turn the law against it? How will you
• 38:22
  place it under the power of your tribunals, your gendarmes, and your prisence.
• 38:28
  What will you do? Then, you wish to prevent it from taking
• 38:32
  any part in the making of laws, you would keep it outside the legislative
• 38:37
  palace. In this you will not succeed. I venture to prophesy. So
• 38:43
  long as legal plunder is the basis of the legislation within, it is absolutely
• 38:50
  necessary that this question of legal plunder should be determined. And there are only
• 38:55
  three solutions of it, one plunder the many, two when everybody plunders everybody
• 39:05
  else, and three when nobody plunders anybody, partial plunder, universal plunder,
• 39:13
  absence of plunder. Amongst these we have to make our choice. The law
• 39:19
  can only produce one of these results, partial plunder. This is the system
• 39:24
  that prevailed so long as the elective privilege was partial, a system that is
• 39:30
  resorted to to avoid the invasion of socialism universal plunder. We have been threatened
• 39:38
  by this system when the elective privilege has become universal, the masses having conceived
• 39:44
  the idea of making law on the principle of legislators who have preceded them absence
• 39:52
  of plunder. This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability,
• 39:58
  conciliation, and of good sin, which I shall proclaim with all the
• 40:01
  force of my lungs, which is very inadequate alas till the day of my
• 40:07
  death, and in all sincerity, can anything more be required at the hands
• 40:13
  of the law. Can the law, whose necessary sanction is forced be reasonably
• 40:19
  employed upon anything beyond securing to every one his right. I defy anyone to
• 40:25
  remove it from this circle without perverting it and consequently turning force against right.
• 40:32
  And as this is the most fatal, the most illogical, social perversion that
• 40:37
  can possibly be imagined, it must be admitted that the true solution so much
• 40:44
  sought after of the social problem is contained in these simple words. Law is
• 40:51
  organized justice. Now, it is important to remark that to organize justice by
• 40:58
  law, that is to say, by force excludes the idea of organizing by
• 41:02
  law or by force, any manifestation whatever of human activity labor, charity,
• 41:10
  agriculture, commerce, industry, instruction, the fine arts, or religion.
• 41:15
  For any one of these organizings would inevitably destroy the essential organization. How in
• 41:23
  fact, can we imagine force encroaching upon the liberty of citizens without infringing upon
• 41:30
  justice and so acting against its proper aim. Here I am taking on the
• 41:37
  most popular prejudice of our time. It is not considered enough that law should
• 41:42
  be just. It must be philanthropic. It is not sufficient that it should
• 41:47
  guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive exercise of his faculties apply to his
• 41:53
  physical, intellectual, and moral development. It is required to extend well being,
• 41:59
  instruction, and morality directly over the nation. This is a fascinating side
• 42:06
  of socialism. But I repeat it. These two missions of the law contradict
• 42:12
  each other. We have to choose between them. A citizen cannot at the
• 42:17
  same time be free and not free. Mister de Lamartine wrote to me one
• 42:23
  day thus quote, your doctrine is only the half of my program. You
• 42:30
  have stopped at liberty. I go on to fraternity close quote, I answered
• 42:37
  him, quote the second part of your program will destroy the first close quote.
• 42:44
  And in fact, it is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity
• 42:49
  from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly conceive fraternity legally enforced without liberty being
• 42:57
  legally destroyed and just legally trampled underfoot. Legal plunder has two roots. One
• 43:06
  of them, as we have already seen, is in human greed. The
• 43:09
  other is in misconceived philanthropy. Before I proceed, I think I ought to
• 43:15
  explain myself upon the word plunder. I do not take it as it often
• 43:22
  is taken, in a vague, undefined, relative or metaphorical sense. I
• 43:27
  use it in its scientific acceptation, and as expressing the opposite idea to property.
• 43:35
  When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has
• 43:38
  acquired it without his consent, and without compensation to him who has not created
• 43:45
  it, whether by force or by artifice, I say that property is violated,
• 43:52
  that plunder is perpetrated. I say that this is exactly what the law
• 43:57
  ought to repress. Always in every where, if the law itself performs the
• 44:02
  action it ought to repress, I say that plunder is still perpetrated. And
• 44:07
  even in a social point of view, under aggravated circumstances. In this case,
• 44:14
  however, he who profits from the plunder is not responsible for it.
• 44:19
  It is the law, the lawgiver, society itself, and this is where
• 44:24
  the political danger lies. It is to be regretted that there is something offensive
• 44:30
  in the word I have sought in vain for another. For I would not
• 44:35
  wish at any time, and especially just now, to add an irritating word
• 44:39
  to our disagreements. Therefore, whether I am believed or not, I declare
• 44:45
  that I do not mean to impugne the intentions nor the morality of anybody.
• 44:52
  I am attacking an idea that I believe to be false, a system that
• 44:55
  appears to me to be unjust. And this is so in independent of intentions,
• 45:00
  that each of us profits by it without wishing it, and suffers from
• 45:06
  it without being aware of the cause. Any person must write, under the
• 45:10
  influence of party spirit or of fear, who would call into question the sincerity
• 45:15
  of protectionism, of socialism, and even of communism, which are the one
• 45:22
  and the same plant in three different periods of growth. All that can be
• 45:27
  said is that plunder is more visible by its partiality in protectionism, and by
• 45:35
  its universality in communism. Whence it follows that of the three systems, socialism
• 45:43
  is still the most vague, the most undefined, and consequently the most sincere.
• 45:50
  Be that, as it may, to conclude that legal plunder has one
• 45:53
  of its roots in misconceived philanthropy, is evidently to put in tensions out of
• 46:00
  the question. End of Section three, Section four. With this understanding,
• 46:08
  let us examine the value, the origin, and the tendency of this popular
• 46:13
  aspiration which pretends to realize the general good by general plunder. The socialists say,
• 46:21
  since the law organizes justice, why should it not organize labor, instruction
• 46:25
  and religion. Why because it could not organize labor, instruction and religion without
• 46:34
  disorganizing justice. For remember that law is force, and that consequently the domain
• 46:42
  of the law cannot properly extend beyond the domain of force. When law and
• 46:49
  force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him
• 46:52
  but a mere negation. They only oblige him to abstain from doing harm.
• 47:00
  They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They only
• 47:05
  guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others. They hold themselves
• 47:10
  to be on the defensive. They defend the equal right of all. They
• 47:15
  fulfill the mission whose harmlessness is evident, whose utility is palpable, and whose
• 47:22
  legitimacy is not to be disputed. This is so true that, as a
• 47:28
  friend of mine want remarked to me. To say that the aim of the
• 47:30
  law is to cause justice to reign is to use an expression that is not
• 47:37
  rigorously exact. It ought to be said, the aim of the law is
• 47:40
  to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is not justice that has
• 47:45
  an existence of its own. It is injustice the one results from the absence
• 47:52
  of the other. But when the law, through the medium of its necessary
• 47:57
  agent force, impose a form of labor, a method or subject of instruction,
• 48:04
  a creed, or a worship, it is no longer negative. It
• 48:07
  acts positively upon men. It substitutes the will of this legislature for their own
• 48:14
  will, the initiative of the legislator for their own initiative. They have no
• 48:20
  need to consult, to compare, or to foresee. The law does all
• 48:24
  that for them. The intellect is for them a useless encumbrance. They cease
• 48:30
  to be men. They lose their personality, their liberty, and their property.
• 48:36
  Try to imagine a form of labor imposed by force that is not a
• 48:40
  violation of liberty, a transmission of will imposed by force, it is not
• 48:45
  a violation of property. If you cannot succeed in reconciling this, you are
• 48:52
  bound to conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing in just
• 49:00
  When from the seclusion of his office a politician takes the view of society,
• 49:06
  he is struck with the spectacle of inequality that presents itself. He mourns over
• 49:12
  the sufferings that are the lot of so many of our brethren, sufferings whose
• 49:15
  aspect is rendered yet more sorrowful by the contrast of luxury and wealth. He
• 49:22
  ought, perhaps to ask himself whether such a social state has not been caused
• 49:29
  by the plunder of ancient times, exercise in the way of conquests, and
• 49:34
  by plunder of more recent times effected through the medium of the laws. He
• 49:39
  ought to ask himself whether, granting the aspiration of all men to well being
• 49:45
  in improvement, the reign of justice would not suffice to realize the greatest activity
• 49:51
  of progress and the greatest amount of equality compatible with the individual responsibility that God
• 49:59
  has awarded as a just retribution of virtue and vice. He never gives this
• 50:05
  a thought. His mind turns toward combinations, arrangements, legal or factitious organizations.
• 50:13
  He seeks the remedy in perpetuating and exaggerating what has produced the evil.
• 50:19
  For justice apart which we have seen, is only a negation. Is there
• 50:24
  any one of these legal arrangements that does not contain the principle of plunder?
• 50:30
  You say, there are men who have no money, and you apply the
• 50:35
  law. But the law is not a self supplied fountain. Whence every stream
• 50:39
  may obtain supplies independently of its society. Nothing can enter the public treasury in
• 50:46
  favor of one citizen or one class. But what other citizens and other classes
• 50:52
  have been forced to send to it? If everyone draws from it only the
• 50:58
  equivalent of what he has contributed to it. Your law, it is true,
• 51:02
  is no plunderer. But it does nothing for men who want money.
• 51:07
  It does not promote equality. It can only be an instrument of equalization as
• 51:14
  far as it takes from one party to give to another, and then it
• 51:19
  is an instrument of plunder. Examine in this light the protection of tariffs,
• 51:23
  subsidies, right to profit, right to labor, right to assistance, free
• 51:29
  public education, progressive taxation, gratuitousness of credit, social workshops. And you
• 51:37
  will always find at the bottom legal plunder. Organize injustice. You say,
• 51:44
  there are men who want knowledge, and you apply to the law. But
• 51:47
  the law is not a torch that sheds light, that originates within itself.
• 51:52
  It extends over a society where there are men who have knowledge and others who
• 51:58
  have not. We want to learn, and others who are disposed to teach.
• 52:04
  It can only do one of two things. Either allow a free operation
• 52:08
  to this kind of transaction, that is, let this kind of want satisfy
• 52:14
  itself freely, or else preempt the will of the people in the matter and
• 52:19
  take from some of them sufficient to pay professors commissioned to instruct others for free.
• 52:25
  But in this second case there cannot fail to be a violation of liberty
• 52:30
  and property. Legal plunder. You say, here are men who are wanting
• 52:36
  in immorality or religion, and you apply to the law. But the law
• 52:42
  is force, and need I say, how far it is a violent and
• 52:45
  absurd enterprise to introduce force in these matters as a result of its systems and
• 52:52
  of its efforts. It would seem that socialism, notwithstanding all its self complacency,
• 52:59
  can scare help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it
• 53:05
  do. It disguises it cleverly from others and even from itself, under the
• 53:10
  seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, association. And because we do
• 53:19
  not ask so much at the hands of the law, because we only ask
• 53:22
  it for justice. It alleges that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization and
• 53:30
  association, and they brand us with the name of individualists. We can assure
• 53:36
  them that what we repudiate is not natural organization but forced organization. It is
• 53:44
  not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us.
• 53:51
  It is not spontaneous fraternity but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity
• 53:58
  but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. Socialism,
• 54:07
  like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds government and society. And
• 54:13
  so every time we object to a thing being done by government, it concludes
• 54:17
  that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by
• 54:22
  the state, then we are against education altogether. We object to a state
• 54:27
  religion, then we would have no religion at all. We object to an
• 54:31
  equality which is brought about by the state, then we are against equality,
• 54:37
  etc. Et cetera. They may as well accuse us of wishing men not
• 54:40
  to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the state.
• 54:46
  How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does
• 54:52
  not contain prosperity and a positive sense wealth, science, religion should ever have
• 54:58
  gained ground in the police world. The modern politicians, particularly those of the
• 55:04
  socialist school, found their different theories upon one common hypothesis, and surely a
• 55:09
  more strange and more presumptuous notion could never have entered a human brain. They
• 55:16
  divide mankind into two parts. Men in general, except one form the first.
• 55:23
  The politician himself forms the second, which is by far the most important.
• 55:30
  In fact, they begin by supposing that men are devoid of any principle
• 55:35
  of action and of any means of discernment in themselves, that they have no
• 55:39
  initiative, that they are inert matter, passive particles, atoms without impulse at
• 55:46
  best, a vegetation indifferent to its own mode of existence, susceptible of assuming
• 55:53
  from an exterior will and hand an infinite number of forms, more or less
• 56:00
  symmetric, artistic, and perfected. Moreover, every one of these politicians does
• 56:07
  not hesitate to assume that he himself is under the names of organizer, discoverer,
• 56:13
  legislator, institutor, or founder. This will and hand, this universal
• 56:19
  initiative, this creative power, whose sublime mission it is to gather together the
• 56:24
  scattered materials that is men, into society starting from these data, as a
• 56:31
  gardener, according to his caprice, shapes his tree into pyramids, parasols,
• 56:37
  cubes, cones, vases, espalliers, distefs, or fans. So the
• 56:42
  socialists, following his camera, shapes poor humanity into groups, series, circles,
• 56:49
  sub circles, honeycombs, or social workshops, with all kinds of variations.
• 56:55
  And as the gardener to bring his trees into shape needs hatches, pruning
• 57:00
  hooks, saws, and shears, so the politician to bring society into shape
• 57:07
  is the forces which he can only find in the laws, the law of
• 57:12
  tariffs, the law of taxation, the law of assistance, and the law
• 57:15
  of education. It is so true that the socialists look upon mankind as a
• 57:22
  subject for social experiments, that if by chance they are not quite certain of
• 57:28
  the success of these experiments, they will request a portion of mankind as a
• 57:32
  subject to experiment upon. It is well known how popular the idea of trying
• 57:38
  all systems is, and one of their chiefs has been known seriously to demand
• 57:45
  of the constituent assembly a perish with all its inhabitants upon which to make his
• 57:52
  experiments. It is thus that an inventor will make a small machine before he
• 57:58
  makes one of the regular size. Thus the chemist sacrifices some substances, the
• 58:04
  agriculturist some seed, and a corner of his field to make trial of an
• 58:09
  idea. But think of the difference between the gardener and his trees, between
• 58:15
  the inventor and his machines, between the chemists and his substances, between the
• 58:20
  agriculturists and his seed. The socialist things in all sincerity that there is the
• 58:27
  same difference between himself and mankind. No wonder the politicians of the nineteenth century
• 58:34
  look upon society as an artificial production of the legislator's genius. This idea,
• 58:42
  the result of a classical education, has taken possession of all the thinkers and
• 58:46
  great writers of our country. To all these persons, these relations between mankind
• 58:53
  and the legislator appear to be the same as those that exist between the clay
• 59:00
  in the potter. Moreover, if they have consented to recognize in the heart
• 59:05
  of man a capability of action, and in his intellect a faculty of discernment,
• 59:10
  they have looked upon this gift of God as a fatal one, and
• 59:15
  thought that mankind, under these two impulses, tended fatally toward ruin. They
• 59:22
  have taken it for granted that if abandoned to their own inclinations, men would
• 59:28
  only occupy themselves with religion to arrive at atheism, with instruction to come to
• 59:34
  ignorance, and with labor and exchange, to be extinguished in misery end of
• 59:42
  Section four, Section five. Happily, according to these writers, there are
• 59:47
  some men termed governors and legislators, upon whom Heaven has bestowed opposite tendencies,
• 59:53
  not for their own sake only, but for the sake of the rest of
• 59:57
  the world. Whilst mankind tends to evil, they inclined to good. Whilst
• 1:00:02
  mankind is advancing towards darkness, they are aspiring to enlightenment. Whilst mankind is
• 1:00:08
  drawn towards vice, they are attracted by virtue, and this granted, they
• 1:00:14
  demand the assistance of force, by means of which they are to substitute their
• 1:00:17
  own tendencies for those of the human race. It is only needful to open,
• 1:00:22
  almost at random a book on philosophy, politics, or history to see
• 1:00:27
  how strongly this idea, the child of classical studies and the mother of socialism,
• 1:00:31
  is rooted in our country. That mankind is merely inert matter, receiving
• 1:00:37
  life, organization, morality, and wealth from power, or rather, and
• 1:00:42
  still worse, that mankind itself tends towards degradation, and is only arrested in
• 1:00:46
  its tendency by the mysterious hand of the legislator. Classical conventionalism shows us everywhere,
• 1:00:53
  behind passive society a hidden power under the names of law or legislator,
• 1:01:00
  or by a mode of expression which refers to some person or persons of undisputed
• 1:01:05
  weight and authority but not named, which moves, animates, in riches,
• 1:01:09
  and regenerates mankind. We will give a quotation from Bousas quote one of the
• 1:01:17
  things which was the most strongly impressed by whom upon the mind of the Egyptians
• 1:01:22
  was the love of their country. Nobody was allowed to be useless to the
• 1:01:28
  state. The law assigned to everyone his employment, which descended from father to
• 1:01:34
  son. No one was permitted to have two professions, nor to adopt another
• 1:01:38
  end. But there was one occupation which was obliged to be common to all.
• 1:01:44
  This was the study of the laws and of wisdom. Ignorance of religion
• 1:01:47
  and the political regulations of the country was excused in no condition of life.
• 1:01:52
  Moreover, every profession had a district assigned to it, by whom, amongst
• 1:01:59
  good laws, one of the best things was that everybody was taught to observe
• 1:02:02
  them, by whom Egypt abounded with wonderful inventions, and nothing was neglected which
• 1:02:09
  could render life comfortable and tranquil. Thus, men, according to Beusuat,
• 1:02:15
  derive nothing from themselves. Patriotism, wealth, inventions, husbandry, science,
• 1:02:22
  all come to them by the operation of the laws or by kings. All
• 1:02:25
  they have to do is to be passive. It is on this ground that
• 1:02:30
  Bessuet takes exception when Diodorus accuses the Egyptians of rejecting wrestling and music. How
• 1:02:37
  is that possible says he. Since these arts were invented by Trismegistus. It
• 1:02:43
  is the same with the Persians. Quote. One of the first cares of
• 1:02:46
  the prince was to encourage agriculture. As there were posts established for the regulation
• 1:02:52
  of the armies, so there were offices for the superintending of rural works end
• 1:02:58
  quote. The respect with which the Persians were inspired for royal authority was excessive.
• 1:03:02
  The Greeks, although full of mind, were no less strangers to their
• 1:03:07
  own responsibilities, so much so that of themselves, like dogs and horses,
• 1:03:12
  they would not have ventured upon the most simple games. In a classical sense,
• 1:03:15
  it is an undisputed thing that everything comes to the people from without quote.
• 1:03:22
  The Greeks, naturally full of spirit and courage, had been early cultivated
• 1:03:27
  by kings and colonies who had come from Egypt. From them they had learned
• 1:03:30
  the exercises of the body, foot races, and horse and chariot races.
• 1:03:36
  The best thing that the Egyptians had taught them was to become docile and to
• 1:03:40
  allow themselves to be formed by the laws for the public good end quote.
• 1:03:45
  Phenelon reared in the study and admiration of antiquity and a witness of the power
• 1:03:52
  of Louis the fourteenth Fenelon naturally adopted the idea that mankind should be passive,
• 1:03:58
  and that its misfortunes and its prospers arities, its virtues, and its vices
• 1:04:01
  are caused by the external influence that is exercised upon it by the law or
• 1:04:06
  by the makers of the law. Thus, in his utopia of Cilentum,
• 1:04:12
  he brings the men, with their interests, their faculties, their desires,
• 1:04:15
  and their possessions, under the absolute direction of the legislator. Whatever the subject
• 1:04:21
  may be, They themselves have no voice in it. The Prince judges for
• 1:04:26
  them. The nation is just a shapeless mass, of which the Prince is
• 1:04:30
  the soul. In him resides the thought, the foresight, the principle of
• 1:04:34
  all organization, of all progress. On him. Therefore rests all the responsibility.
• 1:04:41
  In proof of this assertion, I might transcribe the whole of the Tenth
• 1:04:45
  Book of Telemachus. I refer the reader to it, and shall content myself
• 1:04:48
  with quoting some passages taken at random from this celebrated work, to which in
• 1:04:54
  every other respect I am the first to render justice. With the astonishing credulity
• 1:04:59
  that characterized is the classics. Phaenelon, against the authority of reason and of
• 1:05:02
  facts, admits the general felicity of the Egyptians and attributes it not to their
• 1:05:08
  own wisdom, but to that of their kings. We could not turn our
• 1:05:13
  eyes to the two shores without perceiving rich towns and country seats agreeably situated,
• 1:05:18
  fields that were covered every year without intermission, with golden crops, meadows full
• 1:05:24
  of flocks, laborers bending under the weight of fruits that the earth lavished on
• 1:05:28
  its cultivators, and shepherds who made the echoes around repeat the soft sounds of
• 1:05:32
  their pipes and flutes. Happy, said Mentor, is that people who is
• 1:05:38
  governed by a wise king. Mentor afterwards desired me to remark the happiness and
• 1:05:44
  abundance that was spread over all the country of Egypt, where twenty two thousand
• 1:05:47
  cities might be counted. He admired the excellent police regulations of the cities,
• 1:05:53
  the justice administered in favor of the poor against the rich, the good education
• 1:05:58
  of the children, who were accustomed to to obedience, labor, and the
• 1:06:00
  love of arts and letters. The exactness with which all the ceremonies of religion
• 1:06:05
  were performed the disinterestedness, the desire of honor, the fidelity to men,
• 1:06:11
  and the fear of the gods with which every father inspired his children. He
• 1:06:15
  could not sufficiently admire the prosperous state of the country. Happy, said he
• 1:06:20
  is the people whom a wise king rules in such a manner end quote Fenelon's
• 1:06:27
  idol on crete is still more fascinating mentor is made to say, quote all
• 1:06:32
  that you will see in this wonderful island is the result of the laws of
• 1:06:35
  minus. The education that the children receive renders the body healthy and robust.
• 1:06:41
  They are accustomed from the first to a frugal and laborious life. It is
• 1:06:45
  supposed that all the pleasures of sense enervate the body and the mind. No
• 1:06:50
  other pleasure is presented to them, but that of being invincible by virtue,
• 1:06:55
  that of acquiring much glory. There they punish three vices that go una punished
• 1:07:00
  amongst other people, ingratitude, dissimulation, and avarice. As to pomp and
• 1:07:05
  dissipation. There is no need to punish these, for they are unknown in
• 1:07:10
  crete. No costly furniture, no magnificent clothing, no delicious feasts. No
• 1:07:15
  gilded palaces are allowed end quote. It is thus that mentor prepares his scholar
• 1:07:21
  to mold and manipulate, doubtless with the most philanthropic intentions, the people of
• 1:07:27
  Ithaca, and to confirm him in these ideas, he gives him the example
• 1:07:31
  of silentum. So we receive our first political notions. We are taught to
• 1:07:36
  treat men very much as Oliver de Sayers teaches farmers to manage and to mix
• 1:07:41
  the soil montesquie quote. To sustain the spirit of commerce, it is necessary
• 1:07:47
  that all the laws should favor it that these same laws, by their regulations,
• 1:07:51
  in dividing the fortunes in proportion as commerce enlarges them, should place every
• 1:07:57
  poor citizen in sufficiently easy circumstances to enable him to work like the others,
• 1:08:01
  and every rich citizen in such mediocrity that he must work in order to retain
• 1:08:05
  or to acquire end quote. Thus the laws are to dispose of all fortunes
• 1:08:13
  quote. Although in a democracy real equality be the soul of the state,
• 1:08:17
  yet it is so difficult to establish that an extreme exactness in this manner would
• 1:08:21
  not always be desirable. It is sufficient that a census be established to reduce
• 1:08:28
  or fix the differences to a certain point, after which it is for particular
• 1:08:31
  laws to equalize, as it were, the inequality by burdens imposed upon the
• 1:08:35
  rich and reliefs granted to the poor end quote. Here again we see the
• 1:08:41
  equalization of fortunes by law, that is, by force. Quote. There
• 1:08:45
  were in Greece two kinds of republics. One was military, as Sparta,
• 1:08:50
  the other commercial as Athens. In the one it was wished by whom that
• 1:08:57
  the citizens should be idle. In the other, the love of labor was
• 1:09:00
  encouraged. It is worth our while to pay a little attention to the extent
• 1:09:04
  of genius required by these legislators, that we may see how by confounding all
• 1:09:09
  the virtues, they showed their wisdom to the world. Like Kurgus blending theft
• 1:09:15
  with the spirit of justice, the hardest slavery with extreme liberty, the most
• 1:09:18
  atrocious sentiments with the greatest moderation, gave stability to his city. He seemed
• 1:09:24
  to deprive it of all its resources, arts, commerce, money, and
• 1:09:28
  walls. There was ambition without the hope of rising. There were natural sentiments
• 1:09:32
  where the individual was neither child nor husband nor father. Chastity even was deprived
• 1:09:39
  of modesty. By this road, Sparta was led on to grandeur and to
• 1:09:43
  glory. The phenomenon that we observe in the institutions of Greece has been seen
• 1:09:47
  in the midst of the degeneracy and corruption of our modern times. An honest
• 1:09:53
  legislator has formed a people where probity has appeared as natural as bravery. Among
• 1:09:57
  the Spartans. Mister Penn is a true, truly Kurgus. And although the
• 1:10:00
  former had peace for his object and the latter war, they resemble each other
• 1:10:05
  in the singular path along which they have led their people, in their influence
• 1:10:10
  over free men, in the prejudices which they have overcome, the passions which
• 1:10:14
  they have subdued. Paraguay furnishes us with another example. Society has been accused
• 1:10:19
  of the crime of regarding the pleasure of commanding as the only good of life,
• 1:10:24
  But it will always be a noble thing to govern men by making them
• 1:10:27
  happy. Those who desire to form similar institutions will establish community of property,
• 1:10:32
  as in the Republic of Plato. The same reverence as he enjoined for the
• 1:10:36
  gods, separation from strangers, for the preservation of morality and make the city,
• 1:10:43
  and not the citizens create commerce. They should give our arts without our
• 1:10:46
  luxury, our wants, without our desires. En vulgar infatuation may exclaim,
• 1:10:54
  if it likes it is Montesquieu magnificent, sublime. I am not afraid to
• 1:11:00
  express my opinion and to say, quote what you have the gall to call
• 1:11:06
  that fine? It is frightful, it is abominable. And these extracts,
• 1:11:12
  which I might multiply, show that, according to Montesquieu, the persons,
• 1:11:15
  the liberties, the property mankind itself are nothing but grist for the mill of
• 1:11:20
  the sagacity of lawgivers. End quote end of section five, Section six Rousseau.
• 1:11:31
  Although this politician, the paramount authority of the Democrats, makes the social
• 1:11:36
  edifice rest upon the general will, no one has so completely admitted the hypothesis
• 1:11:43
  of the entire passiveness of human nature in the presence of the lawgiver. If
• 1:11:49
  it is true that a great prince is a rare thing, how much more
• 1:11:54
  so must a great lawgiver be. The former has only to follow the pattern
• 1:12:00
  opposed to him by the latter. This latter is the engineer who invents the
• 1:12:03
  machine. The former is merely the workman who sets it in motion. And
• 1:12:11
  what part have men to act in all this? That of the machine which
• 1:12:15
  is set in motion? Or rather, are they not the brute matter of
• 1:12:20
  which the machine is made. Thus, between the legislator and the prince,
• 1:12:25
  between the prince and his subjects, there are the same relations as those that
• 1:12:30
  exist between the agricultural writer and the agriculturist, the agriculturist and the cloud.
• 1:12:38
  At what a vast height, then, is the politician placed who rules over
• 1:12:44
  legislators themselves and teaches them their trade in such imperative terms as the following.
• 1:12:51
  Would you give consistency to the state. Bring the extremes together as much as
• 1:12:57
  possible, suffer. Neither will healthy persons nor beggars. If the soil is
• 1:13:02
  poor and barren, or the country too much confined for the inhabitants, turn
• 1:13:08
  to industry and the arts which productions you will exchange for the provisions which you
• 1:13:14
  require on a good soil. If you are short of inhabitants, give all
• 1:13:18
  your attention to agriculture, which multiplies men, and banish the arts which only
• 1:13:25
  serve to depopulate the country. Pay attention to extensive and convenient coasts. Cover
• 1:13:32
  the sea with vessels, and you will have a brilliant and short experience.
• 1:13:39
  If your seas wash only inaccessible rocks. Let the people be barbarous and eat
• 1:13:45
  fish. They will live more quietly, perhaps better, and most certainly more
• 1:13:49
  happily. In short, besides those maxims which are common to all, every
• 1:13:56
  people has its own particular circumstances which demand a legislation peculiar to itself. It
• 1:14:03
  was thus that the Hebrews formerly and the Arabs more recently, had religion for
• 1:14:10
  their principal object. That of the Athenians was literature, that of Carthage,
• 1:14:15
  entire commerce, of roades, naval affairs, of Sparta war, and of
• 1:14:21
  Rome virtue. The author of the Spirit of laws has shown the art by
• 1:14:29
  which the legislator should frame his institutions toward each of these objects. But if
• 1:14:34
  the legislator, mistaking his object, should take up a principle different from that
• 1:14:41
  which arises from the nature of things, If one should tend to slavery and
• 1:14:45
  the other to liberty, if one to wealth and the other to population,
• 1:14:50
  one to peace and the other to conquests, the laws will insensibly become enfeebled.
• 1:14:58
  The constitution will be impaired, and the state will be subject to incessant
• 1:15:02
  agitations until it is destroyed or becomes changed and invincible nature regains her empire.
• 1:15:12
  But if nature is sufficiently invincible to regain its empire, why does not Rousseau
• 1:15:16
  admit that it has no need of the legislature to gain its empire from the
• 1:15:21
  beginning? Why does he not allow that, by obeying their own impulse,
• 1:15:29
  men would of themselves apply agriculture to a fertile district and commerce to extensive and
• 1:15:35
  commodious coasts without the interference of a the surgis, a Solon or a Rousseau,
• 1:15:42
  who would undertake it at the risk of deceiving themselves. Be that as
• 1:15:46
  it may, we see with what a terrible responsibility Rousseau invests inventors, institutors,
• 1:15:56
  conductors, and manipulators of societies. He is therefore very exacting with regard
• 1:16:02
  to them. He who dares to undertake the institutions of a people ought to
• 1:16:08
  feel that he can, as it were, transform every individual who is by
• 1:16:13
  himself a perfect and solitary whole, receive in his life and being from a
• 1:16:17
  larger whole of which he forms a part, he must feel that he can
• 1:16:21
  change the constitution of man, to fortify it and substitute a social and moral
• 1:16:28
  existence for the physical and independent one that we have all received from nature.
• 1:16:34
  In a word, he must deprive men of his own powers to give him
• 1:16:40
  others that are foreign to him. Poor human nature, what would become of
• 1:16:45
  its dignity if it were entrusted to the disciples of rosseau Raynal. The climate,
• 1:16:54
  that is, the air in the soil, is the first element for
• 1:16:57
  the legislator. His resources prescribe him his duties. First, he must console
• 1:17:02
  his local position. A population dwelling upon maritime shores must have laws fitted for
• 1:17:10
  navigation. If the colony is located in an inland region, a legislator must
• 1:17:15
  provide for the nature of the soil and for its degree of fertility. It
• 1:17:20
  is more especially in the distribution of property that the wisdom of legislation will appear
• 1:17:28
  as a general rule. And in every country. When a new colony is
• 1:17:31
  founded, land should be given to each man sufficient for the support of his
• 1:17:36
  family. In an uncultivated island which you are colonizing with children, it will
• 1:17:44
  only be needful to let the germs of truth expand in the development of reason.
• 1:17:49
  But when you establish old people in a new country, the skill consists
• 1:17:55
  in only allowing it those injurious opinions and customs which it is impossible to cure
• 1:18:00
  and correct. If you wish to prevent them from being perpetuated, you will
• 1:18:05
  act upon the rising generation by a general and public education of the children.
• 1:18:13
  A prince or a legislator ought never to found a colony without previously sending wise
• 1:18:18
  men there to instruct the youth. In a new colony, every facility is
• 1:18:24
  open to the precautions of the legislator who desires to purify the tone and manners
• 1:18:30
  of the people. If he has genius and virtue, the lands and the
• 1:18:34
  men that are at his disposal will inspire his soul with a plan of society
• 1:18:40
  that a writer can only vaguely trace, and in a way that would be
• 1:18:45
  subject to the instability of all hypotheses, which are varied and complicated by an
• 1:18:50
  infinity of circumstances too difficult to foresee and to combine. One would think it
• 1:18:58
  was a professor of agriculture who was saying to his pupils, the climate is
• 1:19:03
  the only rule for the agriculturist. His resources dictate to him his duties.
• 1:19:10
  The first thing he has to consider is his local position. If he is
• 1:19:15
  on a clayey soil, he must do so, and so if he has
• 1:19:19
  to contend with sand, this is the way in which he must set about
• 1:19:24
  it. Every facility is open to the agriculturist who wishes to clear and improve
• 1:19:30
  his soil, if he only has the skill. The manure which he has
• 1:19:35
  at his disposal will suggest to him a plan of operation which professor can only
• 1:19:42
  vaguely trace, and in a way that would be subject to the uncertainty of
• 1:19:46
  all hypotheses, which vary and are complicated by an infinity of circumstances too difficult
• 1:19:54
  to foresee and too combined. But oh sublime writers to remember sometimes that this
• 1:20:01
  clay, this said, this manure of which you are disposing in so arbitrary
• 1:20:06
  a manner, are men your equals, intelligent and free beings like yourselves,
• 1:20:14
  who have received from God, as you have, the faculty of seeing,
• 1:20:17
  of foreseeing, of thinking, and of judging for themselves. Maybly he is
• 1:20:26
  supposing the laws to be worn out by time and by the neglect of security,
• 1:20:31
  and continues thus under these circumstances we must be convinced that the bonds of
• 1:20:38
  government are slack, give them a new tension. It is the reader who
• 1:20:43
  is addressed, and the evil will be remedied. Think less of punishing the
• 1:20:47
  faults than of encouraging the virtues that you want. By this method, you
• 1:20:53
  will bestow upon your republic the vigor of youth. Through ignorance of this,
• 1:20:59
  a free people has lost its liberty. But if the evil has made so
• 1:21:03
  much way that the ordinary magistrates are unable to remedy, it effectually have recourse
• 1:21:10
  to an extraordinary magistracy, whose time should be short and its power considerable.
• 1:21:17
  The imagination of the citizens requires to be impressed in this style. He goes
• 1:21:24
  on through twenty volumes. There was a time when, under the influence of
• 1:21:29
  teaching like this, which is a foundation of classical education, everyone was for
• 1:21:34
  placing himself beyond an above mankind, for the sake of arranging, organizing,
• 1:21:41
  and instituting it in his own way. Condilect take upon yourself, my lord,
• 1:21:49
  the character of Lycurgus, or so long before you finish reading this essay,
• 1:21:56
  amuse yourself with giving laws to some wild people in America or in Africa.
• 1:22:01
  Establish those roving men in fixed dwellings. Teach them to keep flocks,
• 1:22:08
  endeavor to develop the social qualities that nature has implanted in them, Make them
• 1:22:14
  begin to practice the duties of humanity. Cause the pleasures of the passions to
• 1:22:18
  become distasteful to them by punishments. And you will see these barbarians, with
• 1:22:25
  every plan of your legislation, lose advice and gain a virtue. All these
• 1:22:31
  people have had laws, but few among them have been happy. Why is
• 1:22:36
  this because the legisleaders have almost always been ignorant of the object of society,
• 1:22:43
  which is to unite families by a common interest. Impartiality in law consists in
• 1:22:49
  two things, in establishing equality in the fortunes and in the dignity of the
• 1:22:55
  citizens. In proportion to the degree of equality as established by the laws,
• 1:23:00
  the dear will they become to every citizen. How can avarice, ambition,
• 1:23:05
  dissipation, idleness, sloth, in the hatred or jealousy agitate men who are
• 1:23:13
  equal in fortune and dignity, and to whom the laws leave new hope of
• 1:23:17
  disturbing their equality. What has been told to you of the Republic of Sparta
• 1:23:24
  are to enlighten you on this question. No other state has had laws more
• 1:23:29
  in accordance with the order of nature or of equality. It is not to
• 1:23:33
  be wondered at that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should have looked upon the human
• 1:23:40
  race as inert matter, ready to receive everything, form, figure, impulse,
• 1:23:45
  movement in life from a great prince, or a great legislator, or
• 1:23:49
  a great genius. These ages were rearly in the study of antiquity, and
• 1:23:55
  antiquity presents everywhere in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Pece, in Rome the
• 1:24:00
  spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their fancy, and men kind
• 1:24:05
  to this end enslaved by force or by imposture. And what does this prove
• 1:24:13
  that, because men in society are improvable, error, ignorance, despotism,
• 1:24:18
  slavery, and superstition must be more prevalent in early times. The mistake of
• 1:24:25
  the writers quoted above is not that they have asserted this fact, but that
• 1:24:30
  they have proposed it as a rule for the admiration and imitation of future generations.
• 1:24:36
  Their mistake has been with an inconceivable absence of discernment, and upon the
• 1:24:43
  faith of a puerile conventionalism that they have admitted what is inadmissible visualized the grandeur,
• 1:24:50
  dignity, morality, and well being of the artificial societies of the ancient
• 1:24:56
  world. They have not understood that time produces and spreads enlightenment, and that
• 1:25:02
  in proportion to the increase of enlightenment, right ceases to be upheld by force,
• 1:25:08
  and society regains possession of her self. And in fact, what is
• 1:25:15
  the political work that we are endeavoring to promote. It is no other than
• 1:25:19
  the instinctive effort of every people towards liberty. And what is liberty whose name
• 1:25:27
  can make every heartbeat, and which can agitate the world, But the union
• 1:25:31
  of all liberties, the liberty of conscience, of education, of association,
• 1:25:38
  of the press, of movement, of labor, and of exchange, in
• 1:25:42
  other words, the free exercise for all of all the inoffensive faculties. And
• 1:25:48
  again, in other words, the destruction of all despotisms, even of legal
• 1:25:55
  despotism, and the reduction of law to its only rational sphere, which is
• 1:26:00
  to regulate the individual right of legitimate defense or to repress injustice. This tendency
• 1:26:09
  of the human race, it must be admitted, is greatly thwarted, particularly
• 1:26:14
  in our country by the fatal disposition resulting from classical teaching, and common to
• 1:26:19
  all politicians, of placing themselves beyond mankind to arrange, organize, and regulate
• 1:26:27
  it according to their fancy. For whilst society is struggling to realize liberty,
• 1:26:34
  the great men who place themselves at its head, imbued with the principles of
• 1:26:41
  the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, think only of subjecting it to the philanthropic despotism
• 1:26:47
  of their social inventions, and making it bearwith facility. According to the expression
• 1:26:55
  of Rousseau, the yoke of public felicity is pictured in their own imaginations.
• 1:27:01
  This was particularly the case in seventeen eighty nine. No sooner was the old
• 1:27:08
  system destroyed than society was to be submitted to other artificial arrangements, always with
• 1:27:15
  the same starting point, the omnipotence of the law. End of Section six,
• 1:27:23
  Section seven, Saint just the legislator commands the future, and as for
• 1:27:30
  him to will for the good of mankind, it is for him to make
• 1:27:34
  men what he wishes them to be. Perhaps Pierre, the function of government
• 1:27:42
  is to direct the physical and moral powers of the nation towards the object of
• 1:27:46
  its institution. Bilow varens. A people who are to be restored to liberty
• 1:27:54
  must be formed anew Ancient prejudices must be destroyed, antiquated customs changed, depraved
• 1:28:01
  affections corrected, and venerate vices eradicated. For this, a strong force and
• 1:28:09
  a vehement impulse will be necessary citizens. The inflexible austerity of Lycurgus created the
• 1:28:16
  firm basis of the Spartan republic. The feeble and trusting disposition of Salon plunged
• 1:28:24
  Athens into slavery. This parallel contains the whole science of government. Le Pelletier,
• 1:28:31
  considering the extent of human degradation, I am convinced of the necessity of
• 1:28:36
  affecting an entire regeneration of the race, and if I may so express myself,
• 1:28:43
  of creating a new people. Men therefore, are nothing but raw material.
• 1:28:49
  It is not for them to will their own improvement. They are not
• 1:28:53
  capable of it. According to Saint just it is only the legislator, who
• 1:28:58
  is merely to be what he wills, that they should be. According to
• 1:29:03
  Robespierre, who copies for Soau, literally, the legislature is to begin by
• 1:29:08
  assigning the aim of the institutions of the nation. After this, the government
• 1:29:13
  has only to direct all its physical and moral forces towards this end. All
• 1:29:18
  this time, the nation itself is to remain perfectly passive, and Billo Vain
• 1:29:25
  would teach us that it ought to have no prejudices, affections, nor wants,
• 1:29:30
  but such as are authorized by the legislator. He even goes so far
• 1:29:34
  as to say that the inflexible austerity of a man is the basis of a
• 1:29:40
  republic. We have seen that in cases where the evil is so great that
• 1:29:45
  the ordinary magistrates are unable to remedy, it maybly recommends a dictatorship to promote
• 1:29:51
  virtue. Havevery course, says he, to an extraordinary magistracy, whose time
• 1:29:59
  should be short and is power considerable. The imagination of the people requires to
• 1:30:05
  be impressed. This doctrine has not been neglected. Listened to Robespierre, the
• 1:30:13
  principle of the republican government is a virtue, and the means to be adopted
• 1:30:17
  during its establishment as terror. We want to substitute in our country morality for
• 1:30:25
  self indulgence, probity for honor, principles for customs, duties for decorum,
• 1:30:31
  the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, contempt of vice for contempt
• 1:30:38
  of misfortune, Pride for insolence, greatness of soul for vanity, love of
• 1:30:44
  glory for love of money, good people for good company, merit for intrigue,
• 1:30:50
  genius for wit, truth for glitter, the charm of happiness for the
• 1:30:55
  weariness of pleasure, the greatness of man for the littleness of the great,
• 1:31:00
  A magnanimous, powerful, happy people for one that is easy, frivolous,
• 1:31:06
  degraded. That is to say, we would substitute all the virtues and miracles
• 1:31:12
  of a republic for all the vices and absurdities of monarchy. At what a
• 1:31:16
  vast height above the rest of mankind? Does Robespierre place himself here? And
• 1:31:23
  observe the arrogance with which he speaks. He is not content with expressing a
• 1:31:28
  desire for a great renovation of the human heart. He does not even expect
• 1:31:32
  such a result from a regular government. No, he intends to affect it
• 1:31:38
  himself, and by means of terror. The object of the discourse from which
• 1:31:44
  this puerile and laborious mass of antithesis is extracted was to exhibit the principles of
• 1:31:49
  morality that ought to direct a revolutionary government Moreover, when Robespierre asks for a
• 1:31:57
  dictatorship, is not merely for the purpose of repelling a foreign enemy or of
• 1:32:01
  putting down factions, and is that he may establish, by means of terror,
• 1:32:06
  and as a preliminary to the operation of the Constitution, his own principles
• 1:32:13
  of morality. He pretends to nothing short of extirpating from the country by means
• 1:32:17
  of terror, self interest, honor, customs, decorum, fashion, vanity,
• 1:32:26
  the love of money, good company, intrigue, wit, luxury,
• 1:32:32
  and misery. It is not until after he rose Pierre shall have accomplished these
• 1:32:39
  miracles, as he rightly calls them, that he will allow the law to
• 1:32:43
  regain her empire. Truly, it would be well if these visionaries, who
• 1:32:47
  think so much of themselves and so little of mankind, who want to renew
• 1:32:53
  everything, would only be content with trying to reform themselves. The task would
• 1:32:59
  be arduous enough for them. In general. However, these gentlemen, the
• 1:33:03
  reformers, legislators and politicians, do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over
• 1:33:11
  mankind. No, they are too moderate and too philanthropic for that. They
• 1:33:16
  only contend for the despotism the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law. They
• 1:33:23
  aspire only to make the law. To show how universal this strange disposition has
• 1:33:30
  been in France, I had need not only to have copied the whole of
• 1:33:34
  the works of Maybli, ray nall Rousseau Fenelon, and to have made long
• 1:33:41
  extracts from Beaussuays and Montesquieu, but to have given the entire transactions of the
• 1:33:46
  sittings of the Convention. I shall do no such thing, however, but
• 1:33:51
  merely refer the reader to them. No wonder. This idea suited Buonaparte so
• 1:33:59
  well. He embraced it with ardor and put it in practice with energy,
• 1:34:04
  playing the part of a chemist. Europe was to him the material for his
• 1:34:09
  experiments, but this material reacted against him more than half undeceived. Bonaparte at
• 1:34:16
  Saint Helena seemed to admit that there is an initiative in every people, and
• 1:34:21
  he became less hostile to liberty. Yet this did not prevent him from giving
• 1:34:28
  this lesson to his son. In his will to govern is to diffuse morality,
• 1:34:32
  education, and well being. After all this I highly need show by
• 1:34:41
  Festudi's quotations, the opinions of Morelli, babeuf Owen, Saint Simon, and
• 1:34:46
  Fourier. I shall confine myself to a few extracts from Louis Blanc's book on
• 1:34:54
  the Organization of Labor. In our project, society received the impulse of power.
• 1:35:02
  In what does the impulse that power gives to society consist in imposing upon
• 1:35:09
  it? The project of mister Louis Blanc. On the other hand, society
• 1:35:14
  is the human race. The human race, then, is to receive its
• 1:35:17
  impulse from mister Louis Blanc. It is at liberty to do so or not.
• 1:35:25
  It will be said, of course, the human race is at liberty
• 1:35:29
  to take advice from anybody, whoever it may be. But this is not
• 1:35:32
  the way in which mister Louis Blanc understands a thing. He means that his
• 1:35:38
  project should be converted into law and consequently forcibly imposed by power. In our
• 1:35:46
  project, the state has only to give a legislation to labor, by means
• 1:35:51
  of which the industrial movement may and ought to be accomplished. In all liberty
• 1:35:57
  it the state merely plays society on an incline, that is all that it
• 1:36:02
  may descend when once it is placed there by the mere force of things and
• 1:36:10
  by the natural course of the established mechanism. But what is this incline one
• 1:36:16
  indicated by mister Louis Blanc. Does it not lead to an abyss? No,
• 1:36:23
  it leads to happiness. Why then does not society go there of itself?
• 1:36:29
  Because it does not know what it wants, and it requires an impulse.
• 1:36:33
  What is to give it this impulse power? And who is to give
• 1:36:39
  the impulse to power? The inventor of the machine, mister Louis Blanc,
• 1:36:45
  We shall never get out of the circle mankind passive and a great man moving
• 1:36:50
  it by the intervention of the law. Once on this incline will society enjoy
• 1:36:57
  something like liberty without a debt? And what is liberty? Once? For
• 1:37:02
  all? Liberty consists not only in the right granted, but in the power
• 1:37:08
  given to man to exercise, to develop his faculties under the empire of justice
• 1:37:14
  and under the protection of the law. And this is no vain distinction.
• 1:37:19
  There is a deep meaning in it, and its consequences are imponderable. For
• 1:37:26
  when once it is admitted that man to be truly free must have the power
• 1:37:30
  to exercise and develop his faculties, it follows that every member of society has
• 1:37:36
  a claim upon it for such education as shall enable his faculties to display themselves,
• 1:37:43
  and for the tools of labor, without which human activity can find no
• 1:37:47
  scope. Now, by whose intervention is society to give to each of its
• 1:37:54
  members the requisite education and the necessary tools of labour, unless by that of
• 1:38:00
  the state. Thus liberty is power. In what does this power consist in
• 1:38:08
  possessing education and tools of labor? Who is to give education and tools of
• 1:38:14
  labor society who owes them? By whose intervention is society to give tools of
• 1:38:20
  labor to those who do not possess them by the intervention of the state.
• 1:38:26
  From whom is a state to obtain them? It is for the reader to
• 1:38:30
  answer this question and to notice whither all this tends. End of Section seven,
• 1:38:39
  Section eight. One of the strangest phenomena of our time, and one
• 1:38:45
  that will probably be a matter of astonishment to our descendants, is the doctrine
• 1:38:49
  which is founded upon this triple hypothesis, the radical passiveness of mankind, the
• 1:38:56
  omnipotence of the law, the infallibility of the legislature. This is the sacred
• 1:39:01
  symbol of the party that proclaims itself exclusively democratic. It is true that it
• 1:39:08
  professes also to be social. So far as it is democratic, it has
• 1:39:12
  an unlimited faith in mankind. So far as it is social, it places
• 1:39:16
  mankind beneath the mud our political rights under discussion. Is a legislator to be
• 1:39:24
  chosen? Oh? Then, the people possess science by instinct. They are
• 1:39:29
  gifted with an admirable discernment. Their will is always right. The general will
• 1:39:33
  cannot err Suffrage cannot be too universal. Nobody is under any responsibility to society.
• 1:39:42
  The will and the capacity to choose well are taken for granted. Can
• 1:39:46
  the people be mistaken? Are we not living in an age of enlightenment?
• 1:39:50
  What are the people to be forever led about by the nose? Have they
• 1:39:56
  not acquired their rights at the cost of effort and sacrifice? Have they not
• 1:40:00
  given sufficient proof of intelligence and wisdom? Are they not arrived at maturity?
• 1:40:05
  Are they not in a state to judge for themselves? Do they not know
• 1:40:10
  their own interest? Is there a man or a class who would dare to
• 1:40:15
  claim the right of putting himself in the place of the people, of deciding
• 1:40:18
  and of acting for them. No? No, the people would be free,
• 1:40:24
  and they shall be so. They wish to conduct their own affairs,
• 1:40:28
  and they shall do so. But when once the legislator is duly elected,
• 1:40:33
  then indeed the style of his speech alters. The nation is sent back into
• 1:40:40
  passiveness, inertness, nothingness, and the legislator takes possession of omnipotence. It
• 1:40:45
  is for him to invent, for him to direct, for him to impel,
• 1:40:50
  for him to organize. Mankind has nothing to do but to submit.
• 1:40:55
  The hour of despotism has struck, and we must observe that this is decisive
• 1:41:00
  for the people. Just before, so enlightened, so moral, so perfect,
• 1:41:04
  have no inclinations at all, or if they have any, these all
• 1:41:09
  lead them downwards towards degradation. And yet they ought to have a little liberty.
• 1:41:15
  But are we not assured by mister Considerate that liberty leads fatally to monopoly.
• 1:41:20
  Are we not told that liberty is competition, and that competition, according
• 1:41:25
  to mister Louis Blanc, is a system of extermination for the people and of
• 1:41:30
  ruination for trade. For that reason, people are exterminated and ruined in proportion
• 1:41:35
  as they are free. Take for example, Switzerland, Holland, England,
• 1:41:41
  and the United States does not. Mister Louis Blanc tell us again that competition
• 1:41:45
  leads to monopoly, and that for the same reason, cheapness leads to exorbitant
• 1:41:50
  prices, that competition tends to drain the sources of consumption and diverts production to
• 1:41:57
  a destructive activity. That competition forces production to increase and consumption to decrease.
• 1:42:04
  Whence it follows that free people produce for the sake of not consuming, that
• 1:42:10
  there is nothing but oppression and madness among them, and that it is absolutely
• 1:42:14
  necessary for mister Louis Blanc to see to it what sort of liberty should be
• 1:42:19
  allowed to men. Liberty of conscience, but we should see them all profiting
• 1:42:26
  by the permission to become atheists. Liberty of education, but parents would be
• 1:42:30
  paying professors to teach their sons immorality and error. Besides, if we are
• 1:42:36
  to believe mister Thier's education, if left to the national liberty would cease to
• 1:42:43
  be national, and we should be educating our children in the ideas of the
• 1:42:46
  Turks are the Hindus, instead of which, thanks to the legal despotism of
• 1:42:50
  the universities, they have the good fortune to be educated in the noble ideas
• 1:42:56
  of the Romans liberty of labor. But this is only competition, whose effect
• 1:43:01
  is to leave all products unconsumed, to exterminate the people, and to ruin
• 1:43:08
  the tradesmen. The liberty of exchange. Ah, but it is well known
• 1:43:13
  that the protectionists have shown over and over again that a man will inevitably be
• 1:43:17
  ruined when he exchanges freely, and that to become rich it is necessary to
• 1:43:21
  exchange without liberty liberty of association. But according to the socialist doctrine, liberty
• 1:43:30
  and association exclude each other, for the liberty of men is attacked just to
• 1:43:35
  force them to associate. You must see, then, that the socialist democrats
• 1:43:42
  cannot in conscience allow men any liberty, because by their own nature they tend
• 1:43:47
  in every instance to all kinds of degradation and demoralization. We are therefore left
• 1:43:54
  to conjecture in this case upon what foundation a universal suffrage is claimed for them
• 1:44:00
  with so much importunity. The pretensions of organizers suggest another question, which I
• 1:44:06
  have often asked them, and to which I am not aware that I ever
• 1:44:10
  received an answer. Since the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it
• 1:44:15
  is not safe to allow them liberty. How comes it to pass that the
• 1:44:20
  tendencies of organizers are always good? Do not legislators and their agents form a
• 1:44:27
  part of the human race. Do they consider that they are composed of different
• 1:44:31
  materials from the rest of mankind. They say that society, when loved to
• 1:44:36
  itself, rushes to inevitable destruction because its instincts are perverse. They presume to
• 1:44:43
  stop it in its downward course, and to give it a better direction.
• 1:44:47
  They have therefore received from Heaven intelligence and virtues that place them beyond and above
• 1:44:54
  mankind. Let them show their title to this superiority. They would be our
• 1:45:00
  shepherds, and we are to be their flock. This arrangement presupposes in them
• 1:45:04
  a natural superiority, the right to which we are fully justified in calling upon
• 1:45:10
  them to prove you must observe that I am not contending against their right to
• 1:45:15
  invent social combinations, to propagate them, to recommend them, and to try
• 1:45:20
  them upon themselves at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their
• 1:45:26
  right to impose them upon us through the medium of the law, that is,
• 1:45:30
  by force and by public taxes. I would not insist upon the cabitists
• 1:45:35
  the Foiariists, the Prudonians, the academics, and the protectionists renouncing their own
• 1:45:42
  particular ideas, I would only have them renounce the idea that is common to
• 1:45:47
  them all, viz. That of subjecting us by force to their own categories
• 1:45:51
  and rankings, to their social laboratories, to their ever inflating bank, to
• 1:45:58
  their Greco Roman morality, and to their commercial restrictions. I would ask them
• 1:46:03
  to allow us the faculty of judging of their plans, and not to oblige
• 1:46:08
  us to adopt them if we find that they hurt our interests or are repugnant
• 1:46:13
  to our consciences. To presume to have recourse to power and taxation, besides
• 1:46:19
  being oppressive and unjust, implies further the pernicious assumption that the organized is infallible
• 1:46:27
  and mankind incompetent. And if mankind is not competent to judge for itself,
• 1:46:33
  why do they talk so much about universal suffrage. This contradiction in ideas is
• 1:46:39
  unhappily to be found also in facts. And whilst the French nation has preceded
• 1:46:45
  all others in obtaining its rights, or rather its political claims, this has
• 1:46:49
  by no means prevented it from being more governed and directed, and imposed upon,
• 1:46:55
  and fettered and cheated than any other nation. It is all so the
• 1:47:00
  one of all others, where revolutions are constantly to be dreaded, And it
• 1:47:04
  is perfectly natural that it should be so, so long as this idea is
• 1:47:10
  retained, which is admitted by all our politicians, and so energetically expressed by
• 1:47:15
  Monsieur Leuis Blanc in these words, society receives its impulse from power so long
• 1:47:21
  as men consider themselves as capable of feeling, yet passive, incapable of raising
• 1:47:28
  themselves by their own discernment and by their own energy, to any morality or
• 1:47:32
  well being. And while they expect everything from the law, in a word,
• 1:47:39
  while they admit that their relations with the state are the same as those
• 1:47:43
  of the flock with the shepherd. It is clear that the responsibility of power
• 1:47:46
  is immense. Fortune and misfortune, wealth and destitution, equality and inequality all
• 1:47:54
  proceed from it. It is charged with everything, It undertakes, everything,
• 1:48:00
  it does everything. Therefore, it has to answer for everything. If we
• 1:48:04
  are happy, it has a right to claim our gratitude. But if we
• 1:48:09
  are miserable, it alone must bear the blame. Are not our persons and
• 1:48:13
  property. In fact, at its disposal, is not the law omnipotent.
• 1:48:18
  In creating the educational monopoly, it has undertaken to answer the expectations of fathers
• 1:48:24
  of families who have been deprived of liberty. And if these expectations are disappointed,
• 1:48:30
  whose fault is it? In regulating industry it has undertaken to make it
• 1:48:35
  prosper, Otherwise it would have been absurd to deprive it of its liberty.
• 1:48:40
  And if it suffers, whose fault is it? In pretending to adjust the
• 1:48:44
  balance of commerce by the game of tariffs it undertakes to make commerce prosper.
• 1:48:49
  And if so far from prospering it is destroyed, whose fault is it?
• 1:48:55
  In granting its protection to maritime armaments in exchange for their liberty it is undertaken
• 1:49:00
  to render themselves sufficient. If they become burdensome, whose fault is it?
• 1:49:06
  Thus, there is not a grievance in the nation for which the government does
• 1:49:11
  not voluntarily make itself responsible. Is it any wonder that every failure threatens to
• 1:49:16
  cause a revolution? And what is the remedy proposed to extend indefinitely the dominion
• 1:49:24
  of the law i e. The responsibility of government. But if the government
• 1:49:30
  undertakes to raise and to regulate wages and is not able to do it.
• 1:49:34
  If it undertakes to assist all those who are in want and is not able
• 1:49:39
  to do it. If it undertakes to provide work for every labor and is
• 1:49:43
  not able to do it. If it undertakes to offer to all who wish
• 1:49:47
  to borrow easy credit and is not able to do it. If in words
• 1:49:53
  that we regret should have escaped the pen of Monsieur de la Martine quote,
• 1:49:58
  the state considers that its mission is to enlighten, to develop, to enlarge,
• 1:50:03
  to strengthen, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people.
• 1:50:10
  End quote. If it fails in this, is it not obvious that
• 1:50:15
  after every disappointment, which alas is more than probable, there will be a
• 1:50:18
  no less inevitable revolution. End of Section eight. Section nine. I shall
• 1:50:30
  now resume the subject by remarking that immediately after the economical part of the question
• 1:50:35
  and before the political part, a leading question presents itself. It is the
• 1:50:41
  following, What is law? What ought it to be? What is its
• 1:50:45
  domain? What are its limits? Where? In fact, does the prerogative
• 1:50:49
  of the legislators stop. I have no hesitation in answering. Law is common
• 1:50:57
  force organized to prevent injustice. In short, law is justice. It is
• 1:51:02
  not true that the legislator has absolute power over our persons and property, since
• 1:51:09
  they pre exist and his work is only to secure them from injury. It
• 1:51:15
  is not true that the mission of the law is to regulate our consciences,
• 1:51:17
  our ideas, our will, our education, our sentiments, our works,
• 1:51:24
  our exchanges, our gifts, our enjoyments. Its mission is to prevent the
• 1:51:29
  rights of one from interfering with those of another in any one of these things.
• 1:51:34
  Law, because it has force for its necessary sanction, can only have
• 1:51:39
  the domain of force, which is justice. And as every individual has a
• 1:51:44
  right to the recourse to force only in case of lawful defense, so collective
• 1:51:49
  force, which is only the union of individual forces, cannot be rationally used
• 1:51:55
  for any other end. The law, then, is solely the organization of
• 1:52:00
  individual rights that existed before law. Law is justice, so far from being
• 1:52:08
  able to oppress the people or to plunder their property, even for a philanthropic
• 1:52:13
  end, its mission is to protect the people and to secure to them the
• 1:52:16
  possession of their property. It must not be said either, that it may
• 1:52:21
  be philanthropic so long as it abstains from all oppression, for this is a
• 1:52:26
  contradition. The law cannot avoid acting upon our persons and property. If it
• 1:52:31
  does not secure them, then it violates them if it touches them. The
• 1:52:36
  law is justice. Nothing can be more clear and simple, more perfectly defined
• 1:52:43
  and bounded, or more visible to every eye. For justice is a given
• 1:52:47
  quantity, immutable and unchangeable, and which admits of neither increase nor diminution.
• 1:52:55
  Depart from this point make the law religious, fraternal, equal life, industrial,
• 1:53:00
  literary or artistic, and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty.
• 1:53:06
  You will be upon unknown ground, in a forced utopia, or what is
• 1:53:12
  worse, in the midst of a multitude of contending utopias, each striving to
• 1:53:15
  gain possession of the law and to impose it upon you. For fraternity and
• 1:53:21
  philanthropy have no fixed limits, as justice has. Where will you stop?
• 1:53:28
  Where is the law to stop? One person, mister de Saint Crique,
• 1:53:32
  will only extend his philanthropy to some of the industrial classes, and will require
• 1:53:36
  the law to slight the consumers in favor of the producers. Another like mister
• 1:53:43
  Considerant, will take up the cause of the working classes and claim for them,
• 1:53:47
  by means of the law, at a fixed strate, clothing, lodging,
• 1:53:50
  food, and everything necessary for the support of life. A third,
• 1:53:56
  mister Louis Blanc, will say, and with reason, that this would be
• 1:54:00
  an incomplete fraternity, and that the law ought to provide them with tools of
• 1:54:03
  labor and education. A fourth will observe that such an arrangement still leaves room
• 1:54:10
  for inequality, and that the law ought to introduce into the most remote hamlets
• 1:54:15
  luxury, literature and arts. This is the high road to communism. In
• 1:54:19
  other words, legislation will be, as it now is, the battlefield for
• 1:54:25
  everybody's dreams and everybody's covetousness. Law is justice. In this proposition, we
• 1:54:32
  represent to ourselves a simple, immovable government. And I defy anyone to tell
• 1:54:38
  me whence the thought of a revolution and insurrection are a simple disturbance could arise
• 1:54:44
  against a public force confined to the repression of injustice. Under such a system,
• 1:54:49
  there would be more well being, and this well being would be more
• 1:54:54
  equally distributed. And as to the sufferings inseparable from humanity, no one would
• 1:54:59
  think of accusing the government of them, for it would be as innocent of
• 1:55:02
  them as it is of the variations of the temperature. Have the people ever
• 1:55:09
  been known to rise against the Court of Appeals or assail the justices of the
• 1:55:13
  peace for the sake of claiming the rate of wages, free credit, tools
• 1:55:17
  of labor, the advantages of the tariff, or the social workshop. They
• 1:55:23
  know perfectly well that these matters are beyond the jurisdiction of the justices of the
• 1:55:27
  peace, and they would soon learn that they are not within the jurisdiction of
• 1:55:30
  the law quite as much. But if the law were to be made upon
• 1:55:36
  the principle of fraternity, if it were to be proclaimed that from it precedes
• 1:55:42
  all benefits and all evils, that it is responsible for every individual grievance and
• 1:55:47
  for every social inequality, then you open the door to an endless succession of
• 1:55:53
  complaints, irritations, troubles, and revolutions. Law is justice, and it
• 1:55:59
  would be very strange if it could properly be anything else is not justice?
• 1:56:03
  Right are not rights equal? With what show of right? Can the law
• 1:56:09
  interfere to subject me to the social plans of Mensieur's memorial de Meloune Thierres or
• 1:56:15
  Louis Blanc, rather than to subject these gentlemen to my plans. Is it
• 1:56:19
  to be supposed that nature has not bestowed upon me sufficient imagination to invent a
• 1:56:25
  utopia? Too? Is it for the law to make choice of one amongst
• 1:56:29
  so many fancies and to make use of the public force in its service?
• 1:56:34
  Law is justice? And let it not be said, as it continually is,
• 1:56:41
  that the law in this sense would be a theistic individual and heartless,
• 1:56:45
  and that it would mold mankind in its own image. This is an absurd
• 1:56:49
  conclusion, quite worthy of the governmental infatuation which sees mankind in the law.
• 1:56:57
  What, then, does it follow that if we are free, we shall
• 1:57:00
  cease to act. Does it follow that if we do not receive an impulse
• 1:57:04
  from the law, we shall receive no impulse at all. Does it follow
• 1:57:10
  that if the law confines itself to securing to us the free exercise of our
• 1:57:15
  faculties, our faculties will be paralyzed. Does it follow that if the law
• 1:57:19
  does not impose upon us forms of religion, modes of association, methods of
• 1:57:26
  education, rules for labor, directions for exchange, and plans for charity,
• 1:57:31
  we shall plunge headlong into atheism, isolation, ignorance, misery, and greed.
• 1:57:38
  Does it follow that we shall no longer recognize the power and goodness of
• 1:57:42
  God, that we shall cease to associate together, to help each other,
• 1:57:46
  to love and assist our unfortunate brethren, to study the secrets of nature,
• 1:57:51
  and to aspire after perfection In our existence. Law is justice, And it
• 1:57:58
  is under the law of justice, under the reign of right, under the
• 1:58:01
  influence of liberty, security, stability, and responsibility, that every man will
• 1:58:06
  attain to the fullness of his worth, to all the dignity of his being,
• 1:58:12
  and that mankind will accomplish with order and with calmness. Slowly, it
• 1:58:16
  is true, but with certainty the progress ordained for it. I believe that
• 1:58:21
  my theory is correct. For whatever be the question upon which I am arguing,
• 1:58:27
  whether it be religious, philosophical, political, or economical, whether it
• 1:58:31
  affects well being, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility,
• 1:58:39
  property, labor, exchange, capital, wages, taxes, population,
• 1:58:44
  credit, or government. At whatever point of the scientific horizon I start from,
• 1:58:49
  I invariably come to the same thing. The solution of the social problem
• 1:58:55
  is in liberty, And have I not experienced on my cast your eye over
• 1:59:01
  the globe. Which are the happiest, the most moral, and the most
• 1:59:05
  peaceable nations. Those where the law interferes the least with private activity, Where
• 1:59:12
  the government is the least felt, Where individuality has the most scope and public
• 1:59:17
  opinion the most influence, Where the machinery of the administration is the least important
• 1:59:24
  and the least complicated, Where taxation is lightest and least unequal, popular discontent
• 1:59:30
  the least excited and least justifiable. Where the responsibility of individuals and classes is
• 1:59:36
  the most active, and where consequently, if morals are not in a perfect
• 1:59:42
  state at any rate, they tend incessantly to correct themselves. Where transactions,
• 1:59:46
  meetings, and associations are the least fettered, Where labor, capital, and
• 1:59:51
  production suffer the least from artificial displacements, Where mankind follows most completely its own
• 1:59:59
  natural core, Where the thought of God prevails the most over the inventions of
• 2:00:03
  men. Those in short, who realize the most nearly this idea, that
• 2:00:09
  within the limits of right, all should flow from the free, perfectible,
• 2:00:14
  and voluntary action of man, nothing to be attempted by the law or by
• 2:00:17
  force, except the administration of universal justice. I cannot avoid coming to this
• 2:00:25
  conclusion that there are too many great men in the world. There are too
• 2:00:29
  many legislators, organizers, institutors of society, conductors of the people, fathers
• 2:00:34
  of nations, et cetera, et cetera. Too many persons place themselves above
• 2:00:40
  mankind to rule and patronize it. Too many persons make a trade of looking
• 2:00:45
  after it. It will be answered, you yourself are occupied upon it all
• 2:00:49
  this time. Very true, But it must be admitted that it is in
• 2:00:55
  another sense entirely that I am speaking. And if I join the reformers,
• 2:00:59
  it is so for the purpose of inducing them to relax their hold. I
• 2:01:03
  am not doing as Vaucauson did with his automation, but as a physiologist does
• 2:01:10
  with the human frame. I would study and admire it. I am acting
• 2:01:14
  with regard to it. In the spirit that animated a celebrated traveler. He
• 2:01:18
  found himself in the midst of a savage tribe. A child had just been
• 2:01:23
  born, and a crowd of soothsayers, magicians, and quacks were around it,
• 2:01:28
  armed with rings, hooks, and bandages. One said, this child
• 2:01:31
  will never smell the perfume of a calumet unless I stretch his nostrils. Another
• 2:01:36
  said he will be without the sense of hearing unless I draw his ears down
• 2:01:42
  to his shoulders. A third said he will never see the light of the
• 2:01:45
  sun unless I give his eyes an oblique direction. A fourth said he will
• 2:01:50
  never be upright unless I bend his legs. A fifth said he will not
• 2:01:56
  be able to think unless I press his brain stuck up, said the traveler.
• 2:02:00
  Whatever God does is well done. Do not pretend to know more than
• 2:02:05
  he. And as He has given organs to this frail creature, allow those
• 2:02:10
  organs to develop themselves, to strengthen themselves by exercise, use, experience,
• 2:02:15
  and liberty. God has implanted in mankind also all that is necessary to enable
• 2:02:23
  it to accomplish its destinies. There is a providential social physiology as well as
• 2:02:29
  a providential human physiology. The social organs are constituted so as to enable them
• 2:02:35
  to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away then with quacks and
• 2:02:41
  organizers, Away with their rings and their chains, and their hooks and their
• 2:02:45
  pinchers, Away with their artificial methods, Away with their social laboratories, their
• 2:02:51
  governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their state religions,
• 2:02:58
  their inflationary they are monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their
• 2:03:04
  moralizations, and their equalization by taxation. And now, after having vainly inflicted
• 2:03:13
  upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to
• 2:03:16
  have begun. Reject all systems, and try liberty. Liberty which is an
• 2:03:24
  act of faith in God and in his work. End of section nine.
• 2:03:31
  And this is the end of the law. By Frederic Bastia