XVII. PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SERVICES
‹Services› are exchanged for ‹services›.
The ‹equivalence› of ‹services› results from voluntary exchange, and the free bargaining and discussion which precede it.
In other words, each ‹service› rendered to society is ‹worth› as much as any other service of which it constitutes the equivalent, provided ‹supply› and ‹demand› are in all respects perfectly ‹free›.
It is in vain to carp and refine upon it; it is impossible to conceive the idea of value without associating with it the idea of liberty.
When the equivalence of services is not impaired by violence, restriction, or fraud, we may pronounce that ‹justice› prevails.
I do not mean to say that the human race will then have reached the extreme limit of improvement, for liberty does not exclude the errors of individual appreciations—man is frequently the dupe of his judgments and passions, nor are his desires always arranged in the most rational order. We have seen that the value of a service may be appreciated without there being any reasonable proportion between its value and its utility; and this arises from our giving certain desires precedence over others It is the progress of intelligence, of good sense, and of manners, which establishes this fair and just proportion by putting each service, if I may so express myself, in its right moral place. A frivolous object, a puerile show, an immoral pleasure, may have much value in one country, and may be despised or repudiated in another. The equivalence of services, then, is a different thing from a just appreciation of their utility. But still, as regards this, it is liberty and the sense of responsibility which correct and improve our tastes, our desires, our satisfactions, and our appreciations.
In all countries of the world, there exists one class of services, which, as regards the manner in which they are distributed and [p426] remunerated, accomplishes an evolution quite different from that of private or free services. I allude to ‹public services›.
When a want assumes a character so universal and so uniform that one can describe it as a ‹public want›, it may be convenient for those people who form part of the same agglomeration (be it district, province, or country) to provide for the satisfaction of that want by collective action, or a collective delegation of power. In that case, they name functionaries whose duty it is to render to the community, and distribute among them, the service in question, and whose remuneration they provide for by a contribution which is, at least in principle, proportionate to the means of each member of the society.
In reality, the primordial elements of the social economy are not necessarily impaired or set aside by this peculiar form of exchange,—above all, when the consent of all parties is assumed. It still resolves itself into a transmission of efforts, a transmission of services. These functionaries labour to satisfy the wants of the taxpayers, and the taxpayers labour to satisfy the wants of the functionaries. The relative value of their reciprocal services is determined by a method which we shall have afterwards to examine; but the essential principles of the exchange, speaking in the abstract at least, remain intact.
Those authors, then, are wrong, who, influenced by their dislike of unjust and oppressive taxes, regard as ‹lost› all values devoted to the public service.[94] This unqualified condemnation will not bear examination. In so far as ‹loss› or ‹gain› is concerned, the public service, scientifically considered, differs in nothing from ‹private service›. Whether I protect my field myself, or pay a man for protecting it or pay the State for causing it to be protected, there is always a sacrifice with a corresponding benefit. In both ways, no doubt, I lose this amount of labour, but I gain security. It is not a loss, but an exchange.
Will it be said that I give a material object, and receive in return a thing without body or form? This is just to fall back upon the erroneous theory of value. As long as we attribute value to matter, not to services, we must regard every public service as being without value, or lost. Afterwards, when we begin to shift [p427] about between what is true and what is false, on the subject of value, we shift about between what is true and what is false on the subject of taxation.
If taxation is not necessarily a loss, still less is it necessarily spoliation.[95] No doubt, in modern societies, spoliation by means of taxation is perpetrated on a great scale. We shall afterwards see that it is one of the most active of those causes which disturb the equivalence of services and the harmony of interests. But the best way of combating and eradicating the abuses of taxation, is to steer clear of that exaggeration which would represent all taxation as being ‹essentially›, and ‹in itself›, spoliation.
Thus, considered in themselves, in their own nature, in their normal state, and apart from abuses, ‹public services›, like ‹private services›, resolve themselves into pure exchanges.
But the modes in which, in these two forms of exchange, services are compared, bargained for, and transmitted, the modes in which they are brought to an equilibrium or equivalence, and in which their relative value is manifested, are so different in themselves, and in their effects, that the reader will bear with me if I dwell at some length on this difficult subject, one of the most interesting which can be presented to the consideration of the economist and the statesman. It is here, in truth, that we have the connecting link between politics and social economy. It is here that we discover the origin and tendency of the most fatal error which has ever infected the science, the error of confounding society with Government; society being the grand ‹whole›, which includes both private and public services, and Government, the fraction which includes public services alone.
Unfortunately, when, by following the teaching of Rousseau, and his apt scholars the French republicans, we employ indifferently the words Government and Society, we pronounce, implicitly, beforehand, and without examination, that the State can and ought to absorb private exertion altogether, along with individual liberty and responsibility. We conclude that all private services ought to be converted into public services. We conclude that the social order is a conventional and contingent fact which owes its existence to the law. We pronounce the lawgiver [p428] omnipotent, and mankind powerless, as having forfeited their rights.
In fact, we see public services, or governmental action, extended or restrained according to circumstances of time and place, from the Communism of Sparta, or the Missions of Paraguay, to the individualism of the United States, and the centralization of France.
The question which presents itself on the threshold of Politics, as a science, then, is this:—
What are the services which should remain in the domain of private activity? And what are the services which should fall within that of public or collective activity?
The problem, then, is this:—
In the great circle called ‹society›, to trace accurately the inscribed circle called ‹government›.
It is evident that this problem belongs to Political Economy, since it implies the comparative examination of two very different forms of exchange.
This problem once solved, there remains another, namely, what is the best organization of public services? This last belongs to pure Politics, and we shall not enter upon it.
Let us examine, then, first of all, the essential differences by which public and private services are characterized, which is a preliminary inquiry necessary to enable us to fix accurately the line which should divide them.
The whole of the preceding portion of this work has been devoted to exhibit the evolution of ‹private services›. We have had a glimpse of it in this formal or tacit proposition: ‹Do this for me, and I shall do that for you›; which implies, whether as regards what we give away or what we receive, a double and reciprocal consent. We can form no correct notion, then, of barter, exchange, appreciation, value, apart from the consideration of ‹liberty›, nor of liberty apart from ‹responsibility›. In having recourse to exchange, each party consults, on his own responsibility, his wants, his tastes, his desires, his faculties, his affections, his convenience, his entire situation; and we have nowhere denied that to the exercise of free will is attached the possibility of error, the possibility of a foolish and irrational choice. The error belongs not to exchange, but to human imperfection; and the remedy can only reside in responsibility itself (that is to say, in liberty), seeing that liberty is the source of all experience. To establish restraint in the business of exchange, to destroy free will under the pretext that man may err, would be no improvement, unless it were [p429] first proved to us that the agent who organizes the restraint does not himself participate in the imperfection of our nature, and is subject neither to the passions nor to the errors of other men. On the contrary, is it not evident that this would be, not only to displace responsibility, but to annihilate it, at least as regards all that is valuable in its remunerative, retributive, experimental, corrective, and, consequently, progressive character? Again, we have seen that free exchanges, or services voluntarily rendered and received, are, under the action of competition, continually extending the co-operation of gratuitous forces, as compared with that of onerous forces, the domain of community as compared with the domain of property, and thus we have come to recognise in liberty that power which promotes progressive equality, or social harmony.
We have no need to describe the form which exchanges assume when thus left free. Restraint takes a thousand shapes; liberty has but one. I repeat once more, that the free and voluntary transmission of private services is defined by the simple words: “Give me this, and I will give you that; do this for me, and I shall do that for you”—‹Do ut des; facio ut facias›.[96]
The same thing does not hold with reference to the exchange of ‹public services›. Here ‹constraint› is to a certain extent inevitable, and we encounter an infinite number of different forms, from absolute despotism, down to the universal and direct intervention of all the citizens.
Although this ideal order of things has never been anywhere actually realized, and perhaps may never be so, except in a very elusory shape, we may nevertheless assume its existence. What is the object of our inquiry? We are seeking to discover the modifications which ‹services› undergo when they enter the public domain; and for the purposes of science we must discard the consideration of individual and local acts of violence, and regard the public service simply as such, and as existing under the most legitimate circumstances. In a word, we must investigate the transformation which it undergoes from the single circumstance of its having become public, apart from the causes which have made it so, and of the abuses which may mingle with the means of execution.
The process is this:—
The citizens name mandatories. These mandatories meet, and decide, by a majority, that a certain class of wants—the want of education, for example—can no longer be supplied by free exertions [p430] and free exchanges made by the citizens themselves, and they decree that education shall be provided by functionaries specially delegated and intrusted with the work of instruction. So much for the service ‹rendered›. As regards the services ‹received›, as the State has secured the time and abilities of these new functionaries for the benefit of the citizens, it must also take from the citizens a part of their means for the benefit of the functionaries. This is effected by an assessment or general contribution.
In all civilized communities such contributions are paid in money. It is scarcely necessary to say that behind this money there is labour. In reality, it is a payment in kind. In reality, the citizens work for the functionaries, and the functionaries work for the citizens, just as, in free and private transactions, the citizens work for one another.
We set down this observation here, in order to elude a very widely-spread sophism which springs from the consideration of money. We hear it frequently said that money received by public functionaries falls back like refreshing rain on the citizens. And we are led to infer that this rain is a second benefit added to that which results from the service. Reasoning in this way, people have come to justify the existence of functions the most parasitical. They do not consider that if this service had remained in the domain of private activity, the money (which, in place of going to the treasury, and from the treasury to the functionaries) would have gone directly to men who voluntarily undertook the duty, and in the same way would have fallen back like rain upon the masses. This sophism will not stand examination, when we extend our regards beyond the mere circulation of money, and see that at the bottom it is labour exchanged for labour, services for services. In public life, it may happen that functionaries receive services without rendering any in return; and then there is a loss entailed on the taxpayer, however we may delude ourselves with reference to this circulation of specie.
Be this as it may, let us resume our analysis:—
We have here, then, an exchange under a new form. Exchange includes two terms—‹to give›, and ‹to receive›. Let us inquire then how this transaction, which from being private has become public, is affected in the double point of view of services ‹rendered› and services ‹received›.
In the first place, it is proved beyond doubt that public services always, or nearly always, extinguish, in law or in fact, private services of the same nature. The State, when it undertakes a service, generally takes care to decree that no other body shall render it, [p431] more especially if one of its objects be to derive a revenue from it. Witness the cases of postage, tobacco, gunpowder, etc. Did the State not take this precaution, the result would be the same. What manufacturer would engage to render to the public a service which the State renders for nothing? We scarcely meet with any one who seeks a livelihood by teaching law or medicine privately, by the formation of high-roads, by rearing thoroughbred horses, by founding schools of arts and design, by clearing lands in Algeria, by establishing museums, etc. And the reason is this, that the public will not go to purchase what the State gives it for nothing. As M. de Cormenin has said, the trade of the shoemakers would soon be put an end to, even were it declared inviolable by the first article of the constitution, if Government took it into its head to furnish shoes to everybody gratuitously.
In truth, in the word ‹gratuitous›, as applied to public services, there lurks the grossest and most puerile of sophisms.
For my own part, I wonder at the extreme gullibility of the public in allowing itself to be taken in with this word. What! it is said, do you not wish gratuitous education? gratuitous studs?
Certainly I wish them, and I should also wish to have gratuitous food and gratuitous lodging—if it were possible.
But there is nothing really gratuitous but what costs nothing to any one. Now public services cost something to everybody; and it is just because everybody has paid for them beforehand that they no longer cost anything to the man who receives the benefit. The man who has paid his share of the general contribution will take good care not to pay for the service a second time by calling in the aid of private industry.
Public service is thus substituted for private service. It adds nothing either to the general labour of the nation or to its wealth. It accomplishes by means of functionaries, what would have been effected by private industry. The question, then, is, Which of these arrangements entails the greatest amount of inconvenience? and the solution of that question is the object of the present chapter.
The moment the satisfaction of a want becomes the subject of a public service, it is withdrawn, to a great extent, from the domain of individual liberty and responsibility. The individual is no longer free to procure that satisfaction in his own way, to purchase what he chooses and when he chooses, consulting only his own situation and resources, his means, and his moral appreciations; nor can he any longer exercise his discretion in regard to the order in which he may judge it reasonable to provide for [p432] his various wants. Whether he will or not, his wants are now supplied by the public, and he obtains from society, not that measure of service which he judges useful, as he did in the case of private services, but the amount of service which the Government thinks it proper to furnish, whatever be its quantity and quality. Perhaps he is in want of bread to satisfy his hunger, and part of the bread of which he has such urgent need is withheld from him, in order to furnish him with education, or with theatrical entertainments, which he does not want. He ceases to exercise free control over the satisfaction of his own wants, and having no longer any feeling of responsibility, he no longer exerts his intelligence. Foresight has become as useless to him as experience. He is less his own master; he is deprived, to some extent, of free will, he is less progressive, he is less a man. Not only does he no longer judge for himself in a particular case; he has got out of the habit of judging for himself in any case. The moral torpor which thus gains upon him, gains, for the same reason, on all his fellow-citizens, and in this way we have seen whole nations abandon themselves to a fatal inaction.[97]
As long as a certain class of wants and of corresponding satisfactions remains in the domain of liberty, each, in so far as this class is concerned, lays down a rule for himself, which he can modify at pleasure. This would seem to be both natural and fair, seeing that no two men find themselves in exactly the same situation; nor is there any one man whose circumstances do not vary from day to day. In this way, all the human faculties remain in exercise, comparison, judgment, foresight. In this way, too, every good and judicious resolution brings its recompense and every error its chastisement; and experience, that rude [p433] substitute for foresight, so far at least fulfils its mission that society goes on improving.
But when the service becomes public, all individual rules of conduct and action disappear, and are mixed up and generalized in a written, coercive, and inflexible law, which is the same for all, which makes no allowance for particular situations, and strikes the noblest faculties of human nature with numbness and torpor.
If State intervention deprive us of all self-government with reference to the services we receive from the public, it deprives us in a still more marked degree of all control with reference to the services which we render in return. This counterpart, this supplementary element in the exchange, is likewise a deduction from our liberty, and is regulated by uniform inflexible rules, by a law passed beforehand, made operative by force, and of which we cannot get rid. In a word, as the services which the State renders us are imposed upon us, those which it demands in return are also imposed upon us, and in all languages take the name of ‹imposts›.
And here a multitude of theoretical difficulties and inconveniences present themselves; for practically the State surmounts all obstacles by means of an armed force, which is the necessary sequence of every law. But, to confine ourselves to the theory, the transformation of a private into a public service gives rise to these grave questions:—
Will the State under all circumstances demand from each citizen an amount of taxation ‹equivalent› to the services rendered? This were but fair; and this ‹equivalence› is exactly the result which we almost infallibly obtain from free and voluntary transactions, and the bargaining which precedes them. If the design of the State, then, is to realize this ‹equivalence› (which is only justice), it is not worth while taking this class of services out of the domain of private activity. But equivalence is never thought of, nor can it be. We do not stand higgling and chaffering with public functionaries. The law proceeds on general rules, and cannot make conditions applicable to each individual case. At the utmost, and when it is conceived in a spirit of justice, it aims at a sort of average equivalence, an approximate equivalence, between the two services exchanged. Two principles—namely, the proportionality and the progression of taxation—have appeared in many respects to carry this approximation to its utmost limit. But the slightest reflection will convince us that proportional taxation cannot, any more than progressive taxation, realize the exact equivalence of services exchanged. Public services, after having forcibly deprived the citizens of their liberty, as regards services [p434] both rendered and received, have, then, this farther fault of unsettling the value of these services.
Another, and not less grave, inconvenience is, that they destroy, or at least displace, responsibility. To man responsibility is all-important. It is his mover and teacher, his rewarder and avenger. Without it man is no longer a free agent, he is no longer perfectible, no longer a moral being, he learns nothing, he is nothing. He abandons himself to inaction, and becomes a mere unit of the herd.
If it be a misfortune that the sense of responsibility should be extinguished in the individual, it is no less a misfortune that it should be developed in the State in an exaggerated form. Man, however degraded, has always as much light left him as to see the quarter from whence good or evil comes to him; and when the State assumes the charge of all, it becomes responsible for all. Under the dominion of such artificial arrangements, a people which suffers can only lay the blame on its Government, and its only remedy, its only policy, is to overturn it. Hence an inevitable succession of revolutions. I say inevitable, for under such a ‹régime› the people must necessarily suffer; and the reason of it is that public services, besides disturbing and unsettling values, which is injustice, lead also to the destruction of wealth, which is ruin; ruin and injustice, suffering and discontent—four fatal causes of effervescence in society, which, combined with the displacement of responsibility, cannot fail to bring about political convulsions like those from which we have been suffering for more than half a century.
Without desiring to indulge in digressions, I cannot help remarking, that when things are organized in this fashion, when Government has assumed gigantic proportions by the successive transformation of free and voluntary transactions into public services, it is to be feared that revolutions, which constitute in themselves so great an evil, have not even the advantage of being a remedy, unless the remedy is forced upon us by experience. The displacement of responsibility has perverted public opinion. The people, accustomed to expect everything from the State, never accuse Government of doing too much, but of not doing enough. They overturn it, and replace it by another, to which they do not say, “Do less,” but “Do more;” so that, having fallen into one ditch, they set to work to dig another.
At length the moment comes when their eyes are opened, and it is felt to be necessary to curtail the prerogatives and responsibilities of Government. Here we are stopped by difficulties of another kind. Functionaries alleging ‹vested rights› rise up and [p435] coalesce, and we are averse to bear hard on numerous interests to which we have given an artificial existence. On the other hand, the people have forgotten how to act for themselves. At the moment they have succeeded in reconquering the liberty of which they were in quest, they are afraid of it, and repudiate it. Offer them a free and voluntary system of education:[98] they believe that all science is about to be extinguished. Offer them religious liberty: they believe that atheism is about to invade us,—so often has it been dinned into their ears that all religion, all wisdom, all science, all learning, all morality, resides in the State or flows from it.
But we shall find a place for such reflections elsewhere, and must now return to the argument.
We set ourselves to discover the true part which competition plays in the development of wealth, and we found that it consisted in giving an advantage in the first instance to the producer; then turning this advantage to the profit of the community; and constantly enlarging the domain of the gratuitous, and consequently the domain of equality.
But when private services become public services, they escape competition, and this fine harmony is suspended. In fact, the functionary is divested of that stimulant which urges on to progress, and how can progress turn to the public advantage when it no longer exists? A public functionary does not act under the spur of self-interest, but under the influence of the law. The law says to him, “You will render to the public such or such a determinate service, and you will receive from it in return a determinate recompense.” A little more or a little less zeal has no effect in changing these two fixed terms. On the contrary, private interest whispers in the ear of the free labourer, “The more you do for others, the more others will do for you.” In this case, the recompense depends entirely on the efforts of the workman being more or less intense, and more or less skilful. No doubt ‹esprit de corps›, the desire for advancement, devotion to duty, may prove active stimulants with the functionary; but they never can supply the place of the irresistible incitement of personal interest. All experience confirms this reasoning. Everything which has fallen within the domain of Government routine has remained almost stationary. It is doubtful whether our system of education now is better than it was in the reign of Francis the First; and no one would think of comparing the activity of a government office with the activity of a manufactory. [p436]
In proportion, then, as private services enter into the class of public services, they become, at least to a certain extent, sterile and motionless, not to the injury of those who render these services (their salaries are fixed), but to the detriment of the public at large.
Along with these inconveniences, which are immense, not only in a moral and political, but in an economical point of view—inconveniences which, trusting to the sagacity of the reader, I have only sketched—there is sometimes an advantage in substituting collective for individual action. In some kinds of services, the chief merit is regularity and uniformity. It may happen that, under certain circumstances, such a substitution gives rise to economy, and saves, in relation to a given satisfaction, a certain amount of exertion to the community. The question to be resolved, then, is this: What services should remain in the domain of private exertion? What services should pertain to collective or public exertion? The inquiry, which we have just finished, into the essential differences which characterize these two kinds of services, will facilitate the solution of this important problem.
And, first of all, it may be asked, is there any principle to enable us to distinguish what may legitimately enter the circle of collective action, and what should remain in the circle of private action?
I begin by intimating that what I denominate here ‹public action› is that great organization which has for rule the ‹law›, and for means of execution, ‹force›; in other words, ‹the Government›. Let it not be said that free and voluntary associations display likewise ‹collective exertion›. Let it not be supposed that I use the term private action as synonymous with ‹isolated action›. What I say is, that free and voluntary association belongs still to the domain of private action, for it is one of the forms of exchange, and the most powerful form of all. It does not impair the equivalence of services, it does not affect the appreciation of values, it does not displace responsibilities, it does not exclude free will, it does not destroy competition nor its effects; in a word, it has not ‹constraint› for its principle.
But the action of Government is made general by ‹constraint›. It necessarily proceeds on the ‹compelle intrare›. It acts in form of ‹law›, and every one must submit to it, because a law implies a ‹sanction›. No one, I think, will dispute these premises; which are supported by the best of all authorities, the testimony of universal fact. On all sides we have laws, and force to restrain the refractory. [p437]
Hence, no doubt, has come the saying that “men, in uniting in society, have sacrificed part of their liberty in order to preserve the remainder,”—a saying in great vogue with those who, confounding ‹government› with ‹society›, conclude that the latter is artificial and conventional like the former.
It is evident that this saying does not hold true in the region of free and voluntary transactions. Let two men, determined by the prospect of greater profit and advantage, exchange their services, or unite their efforts, in place of continuing their isolated exertions—is there in this any sacrifice of liberty? Is it to sacrifice liberty to make a better use of it?
The most that can be said is this, that men sacrifice part of their liberty to preserve the remainder, not when they unite in society, but when they subject themselves to a Government, since the necessary mode of action of every Government is force.
Now, even with this modification, the pretended principle is erroneous, as long as Government confines itself to its legitimate functions.
But what are these functions?
It is precisely this special character of having force for their necessary auxiliary which marks out to us their extent and their limits. I affirm that as ‹Government acts only by the intervention of force, its action is legitimate only where the intervention of force is itself legitimate›.
Now, where force interposes legitimately, it is not to sacrifice liberty, but to make it more respected. So that this pretended axiom, which has been represented as the basis of political science, and which has been shown to be false as far as society is concerned, is equally false as regards Government. It is always gratifying to me to see these melancholy theoretical discordances disappear before a closer and more searching examination.
In what cases is the employment of force legitimate? In one case, and, I believe, in only one—‹the case of legitimate defence›. If this be so, the foundation of Government is fully established, as well as its legitimate limits.[99]
What is individual right?
The right which an individual possesses to enter freely and voluntarily into bargains and transactions with his fellow-citizens, which give rise, as far as they are concerned, to a reciprocal right. When is this right violated? When one of the parties encroaches [p438] on the liberty of the other. In that case, it is incorrect to say, as is frequently done, “There is an excess, an abuse of liberty.” We should say, “There is a want, a destruction of liberty.” An excess of liberty, no doubt, if we regard only the aggressor, but a destruction of liberty, if we regard the victim, or even if we regard the phenomenon as a whole, as we ought to do.
The right of the man whose liberty is attacked, or, which comes to the same thing, whose property, faculties, or labour is attacked, is to defend them ‹even by force›; and this is in fact what men do everywhere, and always, when they can.
Hence may be deduced the right of a number of men of any sort to take counsel together, and associate, in order to defend, ‹even by their joint force›, individual liberty and property.
But an individual has no right to employ force for any other purpose. I cannot legitimately ‹force› my neighbours to be industrious, sober, economical, generous, learned, devout; but I can legitimately force them to be just.
For the same reason the collective force cannot be legitimately applied to develop the love of industry, of sobriety, of economy, of generosity, of science, of religious belief; but it may be legitimately applied to ensure the predominance of justice, and vindicate each man’s right.
For where can we seek for the origin of collective right but in individual right?
The deplorable mania of our times is the desire to give an independent existence to pure abstractions, to imagine a city without citizens, a human nature without human beings, a whole without parts, an aggregate without the individuals who compose it. They might as well say, “Here is a man, suppose him without members, viscera, organs, body, soul, or any of the elements of which he is composed—still here is a man.”
If a right does not exist in any of the individuals of what for brevity’s sake we call a nation, how should it exist in the nation itself? How, above all, should it exist in that fraction of a nation which exercises delegated rights of government? How could individuals delegate rights which they do not themselves possess?
We must, then, regard as a fundamental principle in politics, this incontestable truth, that between individuals the intervention of force is legitimate only in the case of legitimate defence; and that a collective body of men cannot have recourse to force legally, but within the same limit.
Now, it is of the very essence of Government to act upon [p439] individuals by way of constraint. Then it can have no other rational functions than the legitimate defence of individual rights, it can have no delegated authority except to secure respect to the lives and property of all.
Observe that when a Government goes beyond these bounds, it enters on an illimited career, and cannot escape this consequence, not only that it goes beyond its mission, but annihilates it, which constitutes the most monstrous of contradictions.
In truth, when the State has caused to be respected this fixed and invariable line which separates the rights of the citizens, when it has maintained among them justice, what could it do more without itself breaking through that barrier, the guardianship of which has been intrusted to it—in other words, without destroying with its own hands, and by force, that very liberty and property which had been placed under its safeguard? Beyond the administration and enforcement of justice, I defy you to imagine an intervention of Government which is not an injustice. Allege, as long as you choose, acts inspired by the purest philanthropy, encouragements held out to virtue and to industry, premiums, favour, and direct protection, gifts said to be gratuitous, initiatives styled generous; behind all these fair appearances, or, if you will, these fair realities, I will show you other realities less gratifying; the rights of some persons violated for the benefit of others, liberties sacrificed, rights of property usurped, faculties limited, spoliations consummated. And can the people possibly behold a spectacle more melancholy, more painful, than that of the collective force employed in perpetrating crimes which it is its special duty to repress?
In principle, it is enough that the Government has at its disposal, as a necessary instrument, ‹force›, in order to enable us to discover what the private services are which can legitimately be converted into ‹public services›. They are those which have for their object the maintenance of liberty, property, and individual right, the prevention of crime—in a word, everything which involves the ‹public security›.
Governments have yet another mission.
There are in all countries a certain amount of common property, enjoyed by the citizens jointly—rivers, forests, roads. On the other hand, unfortunately, there are also debts. It is the duty of Government to administer this active and passive portion of the public domain.
In fine, from these two functions there flows another,—that of levying the contributions which are necessary for the ‹public service›. [p440]
Thus:
To watch over the public security.
To administer common property.
To levy taxes.
Such I believe to be the legitimate circle within which Government functions ought to be circumscribed, and to which they should be brought back if they have gone beyond it.
This opinion, I know, runs counter to received opinions. “What!” it will be said, “you wish to reduce Government to play the part of a judge and a police-officer! You would take away from it all initiative! You would restrain it from giving a lively impulse to learning, to arts, to commerce, to navigation, to agriculture, to moral and religious ideas; you would despoil it of its fairest attribute, that of opening to the people the road of progress!”
To people who talk in this way, I should like to put a few questions.
Where has God placed the motive spring of human conduct, and the aspiration after progress? Is it in all men? or is it exclusively in those among them who have received, or usurped, the delegated authority of a legislator, or the patent of a placeman? Does every one of us not carry in his organization, in his whole being, that boundless, restless principle of action called ‹desire›? When our first and most urgent wants are supplied, are there not formed within us concentric and expansive circles of desires of an order more and more elevated? Does the love of arts, of letters, of science, of moral and religious truth, does a thirst for the solution of those problems which concern our present and future existence, descend from collective bodies of men to individuals, from abstractions to realities, from mere words to living and sentient beings?
If you set out with this assumption—absurd upon the face of it—that moral energy resides in the State, and that the nation is passive, do you not place morals, doctrines, opinions, wealth, all which constitutes individual life, at the mercy of men in power?
Then, in order to enable it to discharge the formidable duty which you would intrust to it, has the State any resources of its own? Is it not obliged to take everything of which it disposes, down to the last penny, from the citizens themselves? If it be from individuals that it demands the means of execution, individuals have realized these means. It is a contradiction, then, to pretend that individuality is passive and inert. And why have individuals created these resources? To minister to their own [p441] satisfactions. What does the State do when it seizes on these resources? It does not bring satisfactions into existence, it ‹displaces› them. It deprives the man who earned them in order to endow a man who has no right to them. Charged to chastise injustice, it perpetrates it.
Will it be said that in displacing satisfactions it purifies them, and renders them more moral?—that the wealth which individuals had devoted to gross and sensual wants the State has devoted to moral purposes? Who dare affirm that it is advantageous to invert violently, ‹by force›, by means of spoliation, the natural order according to which the wants and desires of men are developed?—that it is moral to take a morsel of bread from the hungry peasant, in order to bring within the reach of the inhabitants of our large towns the doubtful morality of theatrical entertainments?
And then it must be remembered, that you cannot displace wealth without displacing labour and population. Any arrangement you can make must be artificial and precarious when it is thus substituted for a solid and regular order of things reposing on the immutable laws of nature.
There are people who believe that by circumscribing the province of Government you enfeeble it. Numerous functions and numerous agents, they think, give the State the solidity of a broader basis. But this is pure illusion. If the State cannot overstep the limits of its proper and determinate functions without becoming an instrument of injustice, of ruin, and of spoliation—without unsettling the natural distribution of labour, of enjoyments, of capital, and of population—without creating commercial stoppages, industrial crises, and pauperism—without enlarging the proportion of crimes and offences—without recurring to more and more energetic means of repression—without exciting discontent and disaffection,—how is it possible to discover a guarantee for stability in these accumulated elements of disorder?
You complain of the revolutionary tendencies of men, but without sufficient reflection. When in a great country we see private services invaded and converted into public services, the Government laying hold of one-third of the wealth produced by the citizens, the law converted into an engine of spoliation by the citizens themselves, thus impairing, under pretence of establishing, the equivalence of services—when we see population and labour displaced by legislation, a deeper and deeper gulf interposed between wealth and poverty, capital, which should give employment to an increasing population, prevented from accumulating, [p442] entire classes ground down by the hardest privations—when we see Governments taking to themselves credit for any prosperity which may be observable, proclaiming themselves the movers and originators of everything, and thus accepting responsibility for all the evils which afflict society,—we are only astonished that revolutions do not occur more frequently, and we admire the sacrifices which are made by the people to the cause of public order and tranquillity.
But if laws and the Governments which enact laws confined themselves within the limits I have indicated, how could revolutions occur? If each citizen were free, he would doubtless be less exposed to suffering; and if, at the same time, the feeling of responsibility were brought to bear on him from all sides, how should he ever take it into his head to attribute his sufferings to a law, to a Government which concerned itself no farther with him than to repress his acts of injustice and protect him from the injustice of others? Do we ever find a village rising against the authority of the local magistrate?
The influence of liberty on the cause of order is sensibly felt in the United States. There, all, save the administration of justice and of public property, is left to the free and voluntary transactions of the citizens; and there, accordingly, we find fewer of the elements and chances of revolution than in any other country of the world. What semblance of interest, could the citizens of such a country have in changing the established order of things by violence, when, on the one hand, this order of things clashes with no man’s interests, and, on the other, may be legally and readily modified if necessary?
But I am wrong. There are two active causes of revolution at work in the United States—slavery and commercial restriction. It is notorious that these two questions are constantly placing in jeopardy the public peace and the federal union. Now, is it possible to conceive a more decisive argument in support of the thesis I am now maintaining? Have we not here an instance of the law acting in direct antagonism to what ought to be the design and aim of all laws? Is not this a case of law and public force sanctioning, strengthening, perpetuating, systematizing, and protecting oppression and spoliation, in place of fulfilling its legitimate mission of protecting liberty and property? As regards slavery, the law says, “I shall create a force, at the expense of the citizens, not to maintain each in his rights, but to annihilate altogether the rights of a portion of the inhabitants.” As regards tariffs, the law says, “I shall create a force, at the expense of the citizens, not to ensure the freedom of their bargains and transactions, but to [p443] destroy that freedom, to impair the equivalence of services, to give to one citizen the liberty of two, and to deprive another of liberty altogether. My function is to commit injustice, which I nevertheless visit with the severest punishment when committed by the citizens themselves without my interposition.”
It is not, then, because we have few laws and few functionaries, or, in other words, because we have few public services, that revolutions are to be feared; but, on the contrary, because we have many laws, many functionaries, and many public services. Public services, the law which regulates them, the force which establishes them, are from their nature never neutral. They may be enlarged without danger, on the contrary with advantage, when they are necessary to the vigorous enforcement of justice; but carried beyond this point they are so many instruments of legal oppression and spoliation, so many causes of disorder and revolutionary ferment.
Shall I venture to describe the poisonous immorality which is infused into all the veins of the body politic, when the law thus sets itself, upon principle, to indulge the plundering propensities of the citizens? Attend a meeting of the national representatives when the question happens to turn on bounties, encouragements, favours, or restrictions. See with what shameless rapacity all endeavour to secure a share of the spoil,—spoil which, as individuals, they would blush to touch. The very man who would regard himself as a highway robber, if, meeting me on the frontier and clapping a pistol to my head, he prevented me from concluding a bargain which was for my advantage, makes no scruple whatever in proposing and voting a law which substitutes the public force for his own, and subjects me to the very same restriction at my own expense. In this respect, what a melancholy spectacle France presents at this very moment! All classes are suffering, and in place of demanding the abolition for ever of all legal spoliation, each turns to the law, and says, “You who can do everything, you who have the public force at your disposal, you who can bring good out of evil, be pleased to rob and plunder all other classes, to put money in my pocket. Force them to come to my shop, or pay me bounties and premiums, give my family gratuitous education, lend me money without interest,” etc.
It is in this way that the law becomes a source of demoralization, and if anything ought to surprise us, it is that the propensity to individual plunder does not make more progress, when the moral sense of the nation is thus perverted by legislation itself.
The deplorable thing is, that spoliation, when thus sanctioned by [p444] law, and opposed by no individual scruple, ends by becoming quite a learned theory with an attendant train of professors, journals, doctors, legislators, sophisms, and subtleties. Among the traditional quibbles which are brought forward in its support we may remark this one, namely, that, ‹cæteris paribus›, an enlargement of ‹demand› is of advantage to those by whom labour is supplied, seeing that the new relation between a more active demand and a supply which is stationary is what increases the ‹value› of the service. From these premises the conclusion follows that spoliation is of advantage to everybody: to the plundering class, which it enriches directly; to the plundered class, by its reflex influence. The plundering class having become richer finds itself in a situation to enlarge the circle of its enjoyments, and this it cannot do without creating a larger ‹demand› for the ‹services› of the class which has been robbed. Now, as regards each service, an enlargement of demand is an increase of value. The classes, then, who are legally plundered are too happy to be robbed, since the profit arising from the theft thus redounds to them, and helps to find them employment.
As long as the law confined itself to robbing the many for the benefit of the few, this quibble appeared specious, and was never invoked but with success. “Let us hand over to the rich,” it was said, “the taxes levied from the poor, and we shall thus augment the capital of the wealthy classes. The rich will indulge in luxury, and luxury will give employment to the poor.” And all, poor included, regarded this recipe as infallible; and for having exposed its hollowness, I have been long regarded, and am still regarded, as an enemy of the working classes.
But since the revolution of February the poor have had a voice in the making of our laws. Have they required that the law should cease to sanction spoliation? Not at all. The sophism of the rebound, of the reflex influence, has got too firmly into their heads. What is it they have asked for? That the law should become impartial, and consent to rob all classes in their turn. They have asked for gratis education, gratis advances of capital, friendly societies founded by the State, progressive taxation, etc. And then the rich have set themselves to cry out, “How scandalous! All is over with us! New barbarians threaten society with an irruption!” To the pretensions of the poor they have opposed a desperate resistance, first with the bayonet and then with the ballot-box. But for all this, have the rich given up spoliation? They have not even dreamt of that; and the argument of the rebound still serves as the pretext. [p445]
Were this system of spoliation carried on by them directly, and without the intervention of the law, the sophism would become transparent. Were you to take from the pocket of the workman a franc to pay your ticket to the theatre, would you have the face to say to him, “My good friend, this franc will circulate and give employment to you and others of your class?” Or if you did, would he not be justified in answering, “The franc will circulate just as well if you do not steal it from me. It will go to the baker instead of the scene-painter. It will procure me bread in place of procuring you amusement.”
We may remark, also, that the sophism of the rebound may be invoked by the poor in their turn. They may say in their turn to the rich, “Let the law assist us in robbing you. We shall consume more cloth, and that will benefit your manufactures; more meat, and that will benefit your land estates; more sugar, and that will benefit your shipping.”
Unhappy, thrice unhappy, nation in which such questions are raised, in which no one thinks of making the law the rule of equity, but an instrument of plunder to fill his own pockets, and applies the whole power of his intellect to try to find excuses among the more remote and complicated effects of spoliation. In support of these reflections it may not be out of place to add here an extract from the debate which took place at a meeting of the ‹Conseil général des Manufactures, de l’Agriculture, et du Commerce›, on Saturday the 27th April 1850.[100] [p446]
XVIII. DISTURBING CAUSES
In what state would human society have been, had the transactions of mankind never been in any shape infected with force or fraud, oppression or deceit?
Would Justice and Liberty have given rise inevitably to Inequality and Monopoly?
To find an answer to these questions it would seem to me to be necessary to study the nature of human transactions in their essence, in their origin, in their consequences, and in the consequences of these consequences, down to the final result; and this apart from the consideration of contingent disturbances which might engender injustice; for it will be readily granted that injustice is not of the essence of free and voluntary transactions.
That the entry of Injustice into the world was inevitable, and that society cannot get rid of it, may be argued plausibly, and I think even conclusively, if we take man as he exists, with his passions, his egotism, his ignorance, and his original improvidence. We must also, therefore, direct our attention to the origin and effects of Injustice.
But it is not the less true that economical science must set out by explaining the theory of human transactions, assuming them to be free and voluntary, just as physiology explains the nature and relations of our organs, apart from the consideration of the disturbing causes which modify these relations.
Services, as we have seen, are exchanged for services, and the great ‹desideratum› is the equivalence of the services thus exchanged.
The best chance, it would seem, of arriving at this equivalence, is that it should be produced under the influence of Liberty, and that every man should be allowed to judge for himself. [p447]
We know that men may be mistaken; but we know also that they have the power given them of rectifying their mistakes; and the longer, as it appears to us, that error is persisted in, the nearer we approximate to its rectification.
Everything which restrains liberty would seem to disturb the equivalence of services, and everything which disturbs the equivalence of services engenders inequality in an exaggerated degree, endowing some with unmerited opulence, entailing on others poverty equally unmerited, together with the destruction of national wealth, and an attendant train of evils, heartburnings, disturbances, convulsions, and revolutions.
We shall not go the length of saying that Liberty—or the equivalence of services—produces absolute equality; for we believe in nothing absolute in what concerns man. But we think that Liberty tends to make men approximate towards a common level, which is movable and always rising.
We think also that the inequality which may still remain under a free ‹régime› is either the result of accidental circumstances, or the chastisement of faults and vices, or the compensation of other advantages set opposite to those of wealth; and, consequently, that this inequality ought not to introduce among men any feeling of irritation.
In a word, we believe that ‹Liberty is Harmony›. . . . .
But in order to discover whether this harmony exists in reality, or only in our own imagination, whether it be in us a perception or only an aspiration, we must subject free transactions to the test of scientific inquiry; we must study facts, with their relations and consequences.
This is what we have endeavoured to do.
We have seen that although countless obstacles are interposed between the wants of man and his satisfactions, so that in a state of isolation he could not exist—yet by the union of forces, the separation of occupations, in a word, by exchange, his faculties are developed to such an extent as to enable him gradually to overcome the first obstacles, to encounter the second and overcome them also, and so on in a progression as much more rapid as exchange is rendered more easy by the increasing density of population.
We have seen that his intelligence places at his disposal means of action more and more numerous, energetic, and perfect, that in proportion as capital increases, his absolute share in the produce increases, and his relative share diminishes, while both the absolute and relative share falling to the labourer goes on [p448] constantly increasing. This is the primary and most powerful cause of equality.
We have seen that that admirable instrument of production called land, that marvellous laboratory in which are prepared all things necessary for the food, clothing, and shelter of man, has been given him gratuitously by the Creator; that although the land is nominally appropriated, its productive action cannot be so, but remains gratuitous throughout the whole range of human transactions.
We have seen that Property has not only this negative effect of not encroaching on community; but that it works directly and constantly in enlarging its domain; and this is a second cause of equality, seeing that the more abundant the common fund becomes, the more is the inequality of property effaced.
We have seen that under the influence of liberty services tend to acquire their normal value, that is to say, a value proportionate to the labour. This is a third cause of equality.
For these reasons we conclude that there is a tendency to the establishment among men of a natural level, not by bringing them back to a retrograde position, or allowing them to remain stationary, but urging them on to a state which is constantly progressive.
In fine, we have seen that it is not the tendency of the laws of Value, of Interest, of Rent, of Population, or any other great natural law, to introduce dissonance into the beautiful order of society, as crude science has endeavoured to persuade us, but, on the contrary, that all these laws lead to harmony.
Having reached this point, I think I hear the reader cry out, “The Economists are optimists with a vengeance! It is in vain that suffering, poverty, inadequate wages, pauperism, the desertion of children, starvation, crime, rebellion, inequality, are before their eyes; they chant complacently the harmony of the social laws, and turn away from a hideous spectacle which mars their enjoyment of the theory in which they are wrapt up. They shun the region of realities, in order to take refuge, like the Utopian dreamers whom they blame, in a region of chimeras. More illogical than the Socialists or the Communists themselves—who confess the existence of suffering, feel it, describe it, abhor it, and only commit the error of prescribing ineffectual, impracticable, and empirical remedies—the Economists either deny the existence of suffering, or are insensible to it, if, indeed, they do not engender it, calling out to diseased and distempered society, ‘‹Laissez faire, laissez passer›; all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’” [p449]
In the name of science, I repel, I repudiate with all my might, such reproaches and such interpretations of our words. We see the existence of suffering as clearly as our opponents. Like them, we deplore it, like them we endeavour to discover its causes, like them we are ready to combat them. But we state the question differently. “Society,” say they, “such as liberty of labour and commercial transactions (that is to say, the free play of natural laws) has made it, is detestable. Break, then, the wheels of this ill-going machine, liberty (which they take care to nickname competition, or oftener anarchical competition), and substitute for them, by force, new wheels of our invention.” No sooner said than done. Millions of inventions are paraded; and this we might naturally expect, for to imaginary space there are no limits.
As for us, after having studied the natural and providential laws of society, we affirm that these laws are harmonious. These laws admit the existence of evil, for they are brought into play by men,—by beings subject to error and to suffering. But in this mechanism evil has itself a function to perform, which is to circumscribe more and more its own limits, and ultimately to check its own action, by preparing for man warnings, corrections, experience, knowledge; all things which are comprehended and summed up in the word, Improvement.
We add that it is not true that liberty prevails among men, nor is it true that the providential laws exert all their action. If they do act, at least, it is to repair slowly and painfully the disturbing action of ignorance and error. Don’t arraign us, then, for using the words ‹laissez faire›, ‹let alone›; for we do not mean by that, let man alone when he is doing wrong. What we mean is this: Study the providential laws, admire them, and ‹allow them to operate›. Remove the obstacles which they encounter from abuses arising from force and fraud, and you will see accomplished in human society this double manifestation of progress—equalization in amelioration.
For, in short, of two things one: either the interests of men are, in their own nature, concordant, or they are in their nature discordant. When we talk of one’s Interest, we talk of a thing towards which a man gravitates necessarily, unavoidably; otherwise it would cease to be called interest. If men gravitated towards something else, that other thing would be termed their interest. If men’s interests, then, are concordant, all that is necessary in order to the realization of harmony and happiness is that these interests should be understood, since men naturally [p450] pursue their interest. This is all we contend for; and this is the reason why we say, ‹Eclairez et laissez faire›, Enlighten men, and let them alone. If men’s interests are in their nature and essence discordant, then you are right, and there is no other way of producing harmony, but by forcing, thwarting, and running counter to these interests. A whimsical harmony, truly, which can result only from an external and despotic action directed against the interests of all! For you can easily understand that men will not tamely allow themselves to be thwarted; and in order to obtain their acquiescence in your inventions, you must either begin by being stronger than the whole human family, or else you must be able to succeed in deceiving them with reference to their true interests. In short, on the hypothesis that men’s interests are naturally discordant, the best thing which could happen would be their being all deceived in this respect.
Force and imposture, these are your sole resources. I defy you to find another, unless you admit that men’s interests are harmonious,—and if you grant that, you are with us, and will say, as we say, Allow the providential laws to act.
Now, this you will not do; and therefore. I must repeat that your starting-point is the antagonism of interests. This is the reason why you will not allow these interests to come to a mutual arrangement and understanding freely and voluntarily; this is the reason why you advocate arbitrary measures, and repudiate liberty; and you are consistent.
But take care. The struggle which is approaching will not be exclusively between you and society. Such a struggle you lay your account with, the thwarting of men’s interests being the very object you have in view. The battle will also rage among you, the inventors and organizers of artificial societies, yourselves; for there are thousands of you, and there will soon be tens of thousands, all entertaining and advocating different views. What will you do? I see very clearly what you will do,—you will endeavour to get possession of the Government. That is the only force capable of overcoming all resistance. Will some one among you succeed? While he is engaged in thwarting and opposing the Government, he will find himself set upon by all the other inventors, equally desirous to seize upon the Government; and their chances of success will be so much the greater, seeing that they will be aided by that public disaffection which has been stirred up by the previous opposition to their interests. Here, then, we are launched into a stormy sea of eternal revolutions, and with no other object than the solution of this question: [p451] How, and by whom, can the interests of mankind be most effectually thwarted?
Let me not be accused of exaggeration. All this is forced upon us if men’s interests are naturally discordant, for on this hypothesis you never can get out of the dilemma, that either these interests will be left to themselves, and then disorder will follow, or some one must be strong enough to run counter to them, and in that case we shall still have disorder.
It is true that there is a third course, as I have already indicated. It consists in deceiving men with reference to their true interests; and this course being above the power of a mere mortal, the shortest way is for the ‹organisateur› to erect himself into an oracle. This is a part which these Utopian dreamers, when they dare, never fail to play, until they become Ministers of State. They fill their writings with mystical cant; and it is with these paper kites that they find out how the wind sits, and make their first experiments on public credulity. But, unfortunately for them, success in such experiments is not very easily achieved in the nineteenth century.
We confess, then, frankly that, in order to get rid of these inextricable difficulties, it is much to be desired that, having studied human interests, we should find them harmonious. The duty of writers and that of governments become in that case rational and easy.
As mankind frequently mistake their true interests, our duty as writers ought to be to explain these interests, to describe them, to make them understood, for we may be quite certain that if men once see their interest, they will follow it. As a man who is mistaken with reference to his own interests injures those of the public (this results from their harmony), the duty of Government will be to bring back the small body of dissentients and violators of the providential laws into the path of justice, which is identical with that of utility. In other words, the single mission of Government will be to establish the dominion of justice; and it will no longer have to embarrass itself with the painful endeavour to produce, at great cost, and by encroaching on individual liberty, a Harmony which is self-created, and which Government action never fails to destroy.
After what has been said, we shall not be regarded as such fanatical advocates of social harmony as to deny that it may be, and frequently is, disturbed. I will even add that, in my opinion, the disturbances of the social order, which are caused by blind passions, ignorance, and error, are infinitely greater and more pro [p452] longed than are generally supposed; and it is these disturbing causes which we are about to make the subject of our inquiry.
* * * * *
Man comes into the world having implanted in him ineradicably the desire of happiness and aversion from pain. Seeing that he acts in obedience to this impulse, we cannot deny that personal interest is the moving spring of the individual, of all individuals, and, consequently, of society. And seeing that personal interest, in the economic sphere, is the motive of human actions and the mainspring of society, Evil must proceed from it as well as Good; and it is in this motive power that we must seek to discover harmony and the causes by which that harmony is disturbed.
The constant aspiration of self-interest is to silence want, or, to speak more generally, desire, by satisfaction.
Between these two terms, which are essentially personal and intransmissible, want and satisfaction, there is interposed a mean term which is transmissible and exchangeable,—effort.
Over all this mechanism we have placed the faculty of comparing, of judging—mind, intelligence. But human intelligence is fallible. We may be mistaken. That is beyond dispute; for were any one to assert that man cannot err, we should at once conclude that it was unnecessary to hold any farther argument with him.
We may be mistaken in many ways. We may, for instance, form a wrong appreciation of the relative importance of our wants. In this case, were we living in a state of isolation, we should give to our efforts a direction not in accordance with our true interests. In a state of society, and under the operation of the law of exchange, the effect would be the same; for then we should direct demand and remuneration to services of a kind either frivolous or hurtful, and so give a wrong direction to labour.
We may also err, from being ignorant that a satisfaction which we ardently seek for can only remove a suffering by becoming the source of still greater sufferings. There is scarcely any effect which may not in its turn become a cause. Foresight has been given us to enable us to observe the concatenation of effects, so that we may not sacrifice the future to the present; but we are frequently deficient in foresight.
Here, then, is the first source of evil, error arising from the feebleness of our judgment or the force of our passions; and it belongs principally to the domain of morals. In this case, as the error and the passion are individual, the resulting evil must, to a [p453] certain extent, be individual also; and reflection, experience, and the feeling of responsibility are its proper correctives.
Errors of this class, however, may assume a social character, and, when erected into a system, may give rise to widespread suffering. There are countries, for example, in which the governing power is strongly convinced that the prosperity of nations is measured, not by the amount of wants which are satisfied, but by the amount of efforts, whatever may be their results. The division of labour assists powerfully this illusion. When we observe that each profession sets itself to overcome a certain species of obstacle, we imagine that the existence of that obstacle is the source of wealth. In such countries, when vanity, frivolity, or a false love of glory are predominant passions, and provoke corresponding desires, and determine a portion of the national industry in that direction, Governments believe that all will be over with them if their subjects come to be reformed and rendered more moral. What will become now, they say, of milliners, cooks, grooms, embroiderers, dancers, lace-manufactures, etc.? They do not reflect that the human heart is always large enough to contain enough of honest, reasonable, and legitimate desires to afford employment and support to labour; that the business is not to suppress desires, but to rectify and purify them; and that labour, consequently, following the same evolution, may have its direction changed and still be carried on to the same extent as before. In countries where these melancholy doctrines prevail, we hear it frequently said, “It is unfortunate that morals and industry cannot march side by side. We should desire, indeed, that the citizens should be moral, but we cannot allow them to become idle and poor. This is the reason why we must continue to make laws which are favourable to luxury. If necessary, we impose taxes on the people; and for the sake of the people, and to ensure them employment, we charge Kings, Presidents, Ambassadors, Ministers, with the duty of ‹representing› them.” All this is said and done in the best possible faith; and the people themselves acquiesce in it with a good grace. It is very clear that when luxury and frivolity thus become a legislative affair, regulated, decreed, imposed, systematized, by public force, the law of Responsibility loses all its moral power.[101] . . . . . [p454]
XIX. WAR
Of all the circumstances which contribute to impart to nations their distinctive character and aspect, and to form and modify their genius, their moral condition, their customs, and their laws, the one which exerts a far more powerful influence than all the rest, because it includes all the rest, is the manner in which they provide for their subsistence. For this observation we are indebted to Charles Comte, and we have reason to be surprised that it has not had a more prominent place given to it in the moral and political sciences.
This circumstance, in fact, acts upon the human race in two ways, and with equal power in both,—by its continuity, and by its universality. To subsist, to better one’s condition, to bring up a family, are not affairs of time, or place, or taste, or opinion, or choice; they are the daily, constant, and unavoidable concern of all men, at all times, and in all countries.
Everywhere, the greater part of their moral, intellectual, and physical force is devoted directly or indirectly to create and replace the means of subsistence. The hunter, the fisher, the shepherd, the agriculturist, the manufacturer, the merchant, the labourer, the artisan, the capitalist,—all think first of all how they are to live (prosaic as the avowal may seem), and then how to live better and better, if they can. The proof of it is that it is only for this end that they are hunters, fishers, manufacturers, agriculturists, etc. In the same way, the public functionary, the soldier, the magistrate, enter upon their careers in order to ensure the supply of their wants. We do not necessarily charge a man with want of devotion or disinterestedness when we quote the proverb, ‹The priest lives by the altar›, for before he belonged to the priesthood he belonged to humanity; and if at this moment he sits down to write a book against this vulgar view of human nature, the sale of his book will demolish his argument. [p455]
God forbid that I should seek to deny the existence of self-denial and disinterestedness. But it must be granted that they are exceptional, and it is because they are so that they merit and call forth our admiration. If we consider human nature in its entirety, without having made a previous covenant with the demon of sentimentalism, we must allow that disinterested efforts bear no comparison, as respects their number, with those which are called forth by the hard necessities of our condition. And it is because those efforts, which constitute the aggregate of our employments, engross so large a portion of each man’s life, that they cannot fail to exert a powerful influence on national character.
M. Saint-Marc Girardin says somewhere or other that he has been led to acknowledge the relative insignificance of political forms in comparison with those great general laws which their employments and their wants impose upon nations. “Do you desire to know the condition of a people?” says he, “ask not how they are governed, but how they are employed.”
As a general view, this is just; but the author hastens to falsify it by converting it into a system. The importance of political forms has been exaggerated; and what does he do? He denies their importance altogether, or acknowledges it only to laugh at it. Forms of government, he says, do not interest us but on the day of an election, or when we are reading the newspapers. Monarchy or Republic, Aristocracy or Democracy, what matters it? And what conclusion does he arrive at? In maintaining that ‹infant› nations resemble each other, whatever their political constitution happens to be, he assimilates the United States to ancient Egypt, because in both countries gigantic works have been executed. Americans clear lands, dig canals, construct railways, and they do all this for themselves, because they are a democracy, and their own masters. The Egyptians raised temples, pyramids, obelisks, and palaces for their kings and their priests, because they were slaves. And yet we are told that the difference is a mere affair of form, not worth regarding, or which we should regard merely to laugh at. Alas! how the contagion of classical lore corrupts and misleads its superstitious votaries!
M. Saint-Marc Girardin, still proceeding on his general proposition that the prevailing occupations of a nation determine its genius, soon after remarks that formerly we were occupied with war and religion, but nowadays with commerce and manufactures. This is the reason why former generations bore a warlike and religious impress. [p456]
Rousseau had long before remarked that the care for subsistence was the prevailing occupation only of some nations, and those the most prosaic; and that other nations, more worthy of the name, had devoted themselves to nobler exertions.
Now, in this have not both M. Saint-Marc Girardin and Rousseau been the dupes of an historical illusion? Have they not mistaken the amusements, the diversions, or the pretexts and instruments of despotism, which give employment to some of the people, for the occupations of all? And has the illusion not arisen from this, that historians are always telling us about the class which does not work, never about the class which does; and in this way we come to regard the first of these classes as the entire nation.
I cannot help thinking that among the Greeks, among the Romans, among the people of the Middle Ages, men just did what they do now, and were subject to wants so pressing and so constantly recurring, that they were obliged to provide for them under pain of death. Hence I cannot help concluding that such employments then, as at present, formed the principal and absorbing occupation of the great bulk of the human race.
This much is certain, that very few people succeeded in living without work, on the labour of the subject masses. The small number of idlers who did so caused their slaves to construct for them sumptuous palaces, magnificent castles, and sombre fortresses. They loved to surround themselves with all the sensual enjoyments of life, and with all the monuments of art. They amused themselves by descanting on philosophy and cosmogony; and, above all, they cultivated assiduously the two sciences to which they owed their supremacy and their enjoyments,—the science of force, and the science of fraud.
Although below this aristocracy there existed countless multitudes engaged in creating for themselves the means of sustaining life, and for their oppressors the means of revelling in pleasures, yet as historians have never made the slightest allusion to those multitudes, we have come to forget their existence, and never taken them into account. Our regards are exclusively fixed on the aristocracy. To it we give the name of ‹Old or Feudal Families›; and we imagine that the men of those times maintained themselves without having recourse to commerce, to manufactures, to labour, to vulgar occupations. We admire their disinterestedness, their generosity, their taste for the arts, their spirituality, their disdain of servile employments, their [p457] elevation of mind and sentiment, and, in high-sounding language, we assert that at one epoch nations cared only for military glory, at another for the arts, at another for philosophy, at another for religion, at another for virtue. We sincerely lament our own condition, and give utterance to all sorts of sarcastic observations, to the effect that, in spite of these sublime models, we are unable to attain the same elevation, but are reduced to assign to labour and its vulgar merits a prominent place in the system of modern life.
Let us console ourselves with the reflection that it occupied a no less important place among the ancients. Only, the drudgery of labour, from which a limited number of people had succeeded in freeing themselves, fell with redoubled weight upon the enslaved masses, to the great detriment of justice, of liberty, of property, of wealth, of equality, and of progress. This is the first of those disturbing causes to which I propose to solicit the attention of the reader.
The means, then, to which men have recourse in order to obtain the means of subsistence cannot fail to exert a powerful influence on their condition, physical, moral, intellectual, economical, and political. Who can doubt that if we were in a situation to observe different tribes of men, one of which had devoted itself exclusively to the chase, another to fishing, a third to agriculture, a fourth to navigation, we should discover very considerable differences in their ideas, in their opinions, in their habits, their manners, their customs, their laws, and their religion? No doubt we should find human nature everywhere essentially the same; these various laws, customs, and religions would have many points in common; and such points we designate as the general laws of human society.
Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that in our great modern societies we find at work all, or nearly all, the various means of providing subsistence,—fisheries, agriculture, manufactures, commerce, arts, and sciences, although in different proportions in different countries. This is the reason why we do not discover among nations so situated such marked and striking differences as would be apparent if each devoted itself to one of these occupations exclusively.
But if the nature of the occupations in which a people is engaged exercises a powerful influence on its morality, its desires, and its tastes,—its morality in its turn exercises a great influence upon its occupations, at least upon the proportion which obtains between these occupations. But I shall not dwell on this observation, [p458] which I have presented in another part of this work,[102] but hasten to the principal subject of the present chapter.
* * * * *
A man (and the same thing may be said of a people) may procure the means of existence in two ways,—by creating them, or by stealing them.
Each of these two great sources of acquisition presents a variety of methods.
We may ‹create› the means of existence by the chase, by fishing, by agriculture, etc.
We may ‹steal› them by breach of trust, by violence, by force, fraud, war, etc.
If, confining ourselves to the circle of one or other of these two categories, we find that the predominance of one of these methods establishes so marked a difference in the character of nations, how much greater must the difference be between a nation which lives by production, and a nation which lives by spoliation?
For it is not one of our faculties only, but all of them, which the necessity of providing for our subsistence brings into exercise; and what can be more fitted to modify the social condition of nations than what thus modifies all the human faculties?
This consideration, important as it is, has been so little regarded, that I must dwell upon it for an instant.
The realization of an enjoyment or satisfaction presupposes labour; whence it follows that spoliation, far from excluding production, presupposes it and takes it for granted.
This consideration, it seems to me, ought to modify the partiality which historians, poets, and novel-writers have displayed for those heroic epochs which were not distinguished by what they sneer at under the epithet of ‹industrialism›. In these days, as in our own, men lived, subsisted; and labour must have done its office then as now. Only there was this difference, that nations, classes, and individuals succeeded in laying their share of the labour and toil on the shoulders of other nations, other classes, and other individuals.
The characteristic of production is to bring out of nothing, if I may so speak, the satisfactions and enjoyments which sustain and embellish life; so that a man, or a nation, may multiply ‹ad infinitum› these enjoyments, without inflicting privation on any other man, or any other nation. So much is this the case, that a profound study of the economic mechanism shows us that the success [p459] of one man’s labour opens up a field for the success of another’s exertions.
The characteristic of spoliation, on the contrary, is this, that it cannot confer a satisfaction on one without inflicting a corresponding privation on another; for spoliation creates nothing, but displaces what labour has created. It entails an absolute loss of the exertions of both parties. So far, then, from adding to the enjoyments of mankind, it diminishes these enjoyments, and confers them, moreover, on those who have not merited them.
In order to produce, man must direct all his powers and faculties to obtain the mastery over natural laws; for it is by this means that he accomplishes his object. Hence, iron converted into a ploughshare is the emblem of production.
To steal, on the other hand, man must direct all his powers and faculties to obtain the mastery over his fellow-man; for it is by this means that he attains his end. Hence, iron converted into a sword is the emblem of spoliation.
Between the ploughshare, which brings plenty, and the sword, which brings destruction and death, there is no greater difference than between a nation of industrious workmen and a nation of spoliators. They have, and can have, nothing whatever in common. They have neither the same ideas, nor the same rules of appreciation, nor the same tastes, manners, character, laws, morals, or religion.
No more melancholy spectacle can present itself to the eye of philanthropy than to see an industrial age putting forth all its efforts, in the way of education, to get inoculated with the ideas, the sentiments, the errors, the prejudices, the vices, of an era of spoliation. Our own era is frequently accused of wanting consistency, of displaying little accordance between the judgments that are formed and the conduct that is pursued; and I believe that this arises principally from the cause which I have just pointed out.
Spoliation, in the shape of War—that is to say, pure, simple, barefaced spoliation—has its root deep in the human heart, in the organization of man, in the universal motives which actuate the social world, namely, desire of happiness and repugnance to pain,—in short, in that principle of our nature called self-interest.
I am not sorry to find myself arraigning that principle, for I have been accused of devoting to it an idolatrous worship, of representing its effects as productive only of happiness to mankind, and even of elevating it above the principle of sympathy, of disinterestedness, and of self-sacrifice. In truth, I have not so esteemed it; I have only proved beyond the possibility of doubt [p460] its existence and its omnipotence. I should ill appreciate that omnipotence, and I should do violence to my own convictions, in representing personal interest as the universal actuating motive of the human race, did I fail now to point out the disturbing causes to which it gives rise, just as I formerly pointed out the harmonious laws of the social order which spring from it.
Man, as we have already said, has an invincible desire to support himself, to improve his condition, and to attain happiness, or what he conceives to be happiness, at least to approximate towards it. For the same reason he shuns pain and toil.
Now labour, or the exertion we make in order to cause nature to co-operate in production, is in itself toil or fatigue. For this reason, it is repugnant to man, and he does not submit to it, except for the sake of avoiding a still greater evil.
Some have maintained philosophically that labour is not an evil but a good, and they are right, if we take into account its results. It is a comparative good; or if it be an evil, it is an evil which saves us from greater evils. This is precisely the reason why men have so great a tendency to shun labour when they think that, without having recourse to it, they may be able to reap its results.
Others maintain that labour is ‹in itself› a good; and that, independently of its productive results, it elevates, strengthens, and purifies man’s character, and is to him a source of health and enjoyment. All this is strictly true; and it is an additional evidence to us of the marvellous fertility of those final intentions which the Creator has displayed in all parts of His works. Apart altogether from the productions which are its direct results, labour promises to man, as a supplementary recompense, a sound mind in a sound body; and it is not more true that idleness is the parent of every vice than that labour is the parent of many virtues.
But this does not at all interfere with the natural and unconquerable inclinations of the human heart, or with that feeling which prompts us not to desire labour for its own sake, but to compare it constantly with its results; not to desire to expend a great effort on what can be accomplished with a smaller effort; not of two efforts to choose the more severe. Nor is our endeavour to diminish the relation which the effort bears to the result inconsistent with our desire, when we have once acquired some leisure, to devote that leisure to new labours suited to our tastes, with the prospect of thus securing a new and additional recompense.
With reference to all this, universal facts are decisive. At all times, and everywhere, we find man regarding labour as [p461] undesirable, and satisfaction as the thing in his condition which makes him compensation for his labour. At all times, and everywhere, we find him endeavouring to lighten his toil by calling in the aid, whenever he can obtain it, of animals, of the wind, of water-power, of steam, of natural forces, or, alas! of his fellow-creature, when he succeeds in enslaving him. In this last case,—I repeat, for it is too apt to be forgotten,—labour is not diminished, but displaced.[103]
Man, being thus placed between two evils, want or labour, and urged on by self-interest, seeks to discover whether, by some means or other, he cannot get rid of both. It is then that spoliation presents itself to him as a solution of the problem.
He says to himself: “I have not, it is true, any means of procuring the things necessary for my subsistence and enjoyments—food, clothing, and lodging—unless these things are previously produced by labour. But it is by no means indispensable that this should be ‹my own› labour. It is enough that they should be produced by the labour of ‹some one›, provided I can get the mastery.”
Such is the origin of war.
I shall not dwell upon its consequences.
When things come to this, that one man, or one nation, devotes itself to labour, and another man, or another nation, waits on till that labour is accomplished, in order to devote itself to rapine, we can see at a glance how much human power is thrown away.
On the one hand, the spoliator has not succeeded as he desired in getting quit of every kind of labour. Armed robbery exacts efforts, and sometimes very severe efforts. While the producer devotes his time to the creation of products fitted to yield satisfactions, the spoliator employs his time in devising the means of robbing him. But when the work of violence has been accomplished, or attempted, the objects calculated to yield satisfaction are neither more nor less abundant than before. They may minister to the wants of a different set of people, but not of more wants. Thus all the exertions which the spoliator has made with a view to spoliation, and the exertions also which he has failed to make with a view to production, are entirely lost, if not for him, at least for society.
Nor is this all. In most cases an analogous loss takes place on the side of the producer. It is not likely that he will wait for the violence with which he is menaced without taking some [p462] precaution for his own protection; and all precautions of this kind—arms, fortifications, munitions, drill—are labour, and labour lost for ever, not to him who expects security from this labour, but to mankind at large.
But should the producer, after undergoing this double labour, not esteem himself able to resist the threatened violence, it is still worse for society, and power is thrown away on a much greater scale; for, in that case labour will be given up altogether, no one being disposed to produce in order to be plundered.
If we regard the manner in which the human faculties are affected on both sides, the moral consequences of spoliation will be seen to be no less disastrous.
Providence has designed that man should devote himself to pacific combats with natural agents, and should reap directly from nature the fruits of his victory. When he obtains this mastery over natural agents only by obtaining a mastery over his fellow-creatures, his mission is changed, and quite another direction is given to his faculties. It is seen how great the difference is between the producer and the spoliator, as regards ‹foresight›—foresight which becomes assimilated in some degree to ‹providence›, for to ‹foresee› is also to ‹provide against› [‹prévoir› c’est aussi ‹pourvoir›].
The producer sets himself to learn the relation between cause and effect. For this purpose, he studies the laws of the physical world, and seeks to make them more and more useful auxiliaries. If he turns his regards on his fellow-men, it is to foresee their wants, and to provide for them, on condition of reciprocity.
The spoliator does not study nature. If he turns his regards on his fellow-men, it is to watch them as the eagle watches his prey, for the purpose of enfeebling and surprising them.
The same differences are observable in the other faculties, and extend to men’s ideas.[104] . . . . . .
Spoliation by means of war is not an accidental, isolated, and transient fact; it is a fact so general and so constant as not to give place, as regards permanence, to labour itself.
Point me out any country of the world where of two races, conquerors and conquered, the one does not domineer over the other. Show me in Europe, in Asia, or among the islands of the sea, a favoured spot still occupied by the primitive inhabitants. If migrations of population have spared no country, war has been equally widespread.
Its traces are universal. Apart from rapine and bloodshed, [p463] public opinion outraged, and faculties and talents perverted, war has everywhere left other traces behind it, among which we must reckon slavery and aristocracy. . . . . .
Not only has the march of spoliation kept pace with the creation of wealth, but the spoliators have seized upon accumulated riches, upon capital in all its forms; and, in particular, they have fixed their regards upon capital in the shape of landed property. The last step was taking possession of man himself. For human powers and faculties being the instruments of labour, they found it a shorter method to lay hold of these powers and faculties, than to seize upon their products. . . . . . .
It is impossible to calculate to what extent these great events have acted as disturbing causes, and as trammels on the natural progress of the human race. If we take into account the sacrifice of industrial power which war occasions, and the extent to which the diminished results of that power are concentrated in the hands of a limited number of conquerors, we may form to ourselves an idea of the causes of the destitution of the masses,—a destitution which in our days it is impossible to explain on the hypothesis of liberty. . . . . . .
‹How the warlike spirit is propagated.›
Aggressive nations are subject to reprisals. They often attack others; sometimes they defend themselves. When they act on the defensive, they have on their side the feeling of justice, and the sacredness of the cause in which they are engaged. They may then exult in their courage, devotion, and patriotism. But, alas! they carry these same sentiments into their offensive wars—and where is their patriotism then? . . . . . .
When two races, the one victorious and idle, the other vanquished and humiliated, occupy the same territory, everything calculated to awaken desire or arouse popular sympathies falls to the lot of the conquerors. Theirs are leisure, fêtes, taste for the arts, wealth, military parade, tournaments, grace, elegance, literature, poetry. For the conquered race, nothing remains but ruined huts, squalid garments, the hard hand of labour, or the cold hand of charity. . . . . . .
The consequence is that the ideas and prejudices of the dominant race, always associated with military force, come to constitute public opinion. Men, women, and children, all unite in extolling the soldier’s life in preference to that of the labourer, in preferring war to industry, and spoliation to production. The vanquished race shares the same sentiments, and when, at periods of transition, it succeeds in getting the better of its oppressors, it shows [p464] itself disposed to imitate them. What is this imitation but madness? . . . . . .
‹How war ends.›
Spoliation, like Production, having its source in the human heart, the laws of the social world would not be harmonious, even to the limited extent for which I contend, if the latter did not succeed in the long-run in overcoming the former. . . . . [p465]
XX. RESPONSIBILITY
There is a leading idea which runs through the whole of this work, which pervades and animates every page and every line of it; and that idea is embodied in the opening words of the Christian Creed,—«I believe in God».
Yes, if this work differs from those of some other Economists, it is in this, that the latter appear to say, “We have but little faith in Providence, for we see that the natural laws lead to an abyss. And yet we say ‹laissez faire!› merely because we have still less faith in ourselves, and because we see clearly that all human efforts designed to arrest the action of these natural laws tend only to hasten the catastrophe.”
Again, if this work differs from the writings of the Socialists, it is in this, that the latter say, “We pretend to believe in God, but in reality we believe only in ourselves; seeing that we have no faith in the maxim, ‹laissez faire›, and that we all give forth our social nostrums as infinitely superior to the plans of Providence.”
For my part, I say, ‹laissez faire›; in other words, respect liberty, and the human initiative,[105] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [p466] . . . . . ‹Responsibility›, ‹solidarity›; mysterious laws, of which, apart from Revelation, it is impossible to appreciate the cause, but the effects and infallible action of which, on the progress of society, it is given us to appreciate—laws which, for the very reason that man is sociable, are linked together and act together, although they appear sometimes to run counter to each other; and which would require to be viewed in their ‹ensemble›, and in their common action, if science, with its feeble optics and uncertain steps, were not reduced to method—that melancholy crutch which constitutes its strength whilst it reveals its weakness.
* * * * *
‹Nosce te ipsum›—know thyself: this, according to the oracle, is [p467] the beginning, the middle, and the end of the moral and political sciences.
As we have elsewhere remarked, in what concerns man or human society, Harmony can never mean Perfection, but only Improvement. Now improvement or perfectibility implies always, to a certain extent, imperfection in the future as well as in the past. If man could ever find his way into the promised land of ‹absolute Good›, he would no longer have occasion to use his understanding and his senses—he would be no longer man.
Evil exists. It is inherent in human infirmity. It manifests itself in the moral as in the material world; in the masses, as in the individual; in the whole as in the part. But because the eye may suffer and be lost, does the physiologist overlook the harmonious mechanism of that admirable organ? Does he deny the ingenious structure of the human body, because that body is subject to pain, to disease, and to death—to such extremity of suffering as caused Job, in the depth of his despair, “to say to corruption, Thou art my father; and to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister”? In the same way, because the social order will never bring mankind to the fancied haven of absolute good, is the economist to refuse to recognise all that is marvellous in the organization of the social order—an organization prepared with a view to the constantly-increasing diffusion of knowledge, of morality, and of happiness?
* * * * *
Strange! that we should deny to economic science the same right to admire the natural order of things which we concede to physiology. For, after all, what difference is there between the individual and the collective being, as regards the harmony displayed by final causes? The individual, no doubt, comes into existence, grows and is developed, educates and improves himself as life advances, until the time comes when his light and life are to be communicated to others. At that moment everything about him is clothed in the hues of beauty; all breathes grace and joy; all is expansion, affection, benevolence, love, and harmony. For a while, his intelligence continues to be enlarged and confirmed, as if to qualify him to be the guide of those whom he has just called to tread the crooked paths of human existence. But soon his beauty fades, his grace disappears, his senses are blunted, his body becomes feeble, his memory clouded, his thoughts less bright; his affections even (except in the case of some choice spirits) get clogged with egotism, and lose that charm, that freshness, that sincerity and simplicity, that depth and disinterestedness, which distinguished his [p468] earlier days;—the poetry of life has fled. In spite of all the ingenious precautions which nature has taken to retard his dissolution—precautions which physiology sums up in the phrase ‹vis medicatrix›—he treads back the path of improvement, and loses, one after another, all his acquisitions by the way; he goes on from privation to privation, until he reaches that which is the greatest of all, because it includes all. The genius of optimism itself can discover nothing consolatory, nothing harmonious in this slow but unavoidable decadence—in seeing that being once so proud and so beautiful descending sadly into the tomb. . . . . . The tomb! . . . . . But is not that the door of another habitation? . . . . . It is thus, when science stops short, that religion[106] renews, even for the individual, in another region, the concordant harmonies which have been interrupted here.[107]
Despite this fatal ‹dénoûment›, does physiology cease to see in the human body the most perfect masterpiece which ever proceeded from its Creator’s hands?
But if the social body is liable to suffering, if it may suffer even to death, it is not for that reason finally condemned. Let men say what they will, it has not, in perspective, after having been elevated to its apogee, an inevitable decline. The crash of empires even is not the retrogradation of humanity, and the ancient models of civilisation have only been dissolved in order to make room for a civilisation still more advanced. Dynasties may be extinguished; the forms of government may be changed; yet the progress of the human race may not the less be continued. The fall of States is like the fall of leaves in autumn. It fertilizes the soil; contributes to the return of spring; and promises to future generations a richer vegetation, and more abundant harvests. Nay, even in a purely national point of view, this theory of necessary decadence is as false as it is antiquated. In the life of no people can we possibly perceive any cause of inevitable decline. The analogy which has so frequently given rise to a comparison between a nation and an individual, and led men to attribute to the one as to the other an infancy and an old age, is nothing better than a false metaphor. A community is being incessantly renewed. Let its institutions be elastic and flexible, so that in place of coming in collision with [p469] those new powers to which the human mind gives birth, they shall be so organized as to admit of this expansion of intellectual energy and accommodate themselves to it; and we see no reason why such institutions should not flourish in eternal youth. But whatever may be thought of the fragility and fall of empires, it must never be forgotten that society, which in its aggregate represents the human race, is constituted upon more solid bases. The more we study it, the more we shall be convinced that it too, like the human body, is provided with a ‹curative force›, a ‹vis medicatrix›, which delivers it from the evils which afflict it; and that it carries in its bosom, moreover, a ‹progressive force›; and is by the latter urged on to improvements to which we can assign no limits.
If individual evil, then, does not weaken or invalidate physiological harmony, still less does collective evil weaken or invalidate social harmony.
But how are we to reconcile the existence of evil with the infinite goodness of God? I cannot explain what I do not understand.
All I shall say is, that this solution can no more be exacted from Political Economy than from Anatomy. These sciences, which are alike sciences of observation, study man as he is, without asking the Creator to reveal His impenetrable secrets.
Thus, I again repeat, harmony does not correspond with the idea of absolute perfection, but with that of indefinite improvement. It has pleased God to attach suffering to our nature, seeing that He has designed that in us feebleness should be anterior to force, ignorance to science, want to satisfaction, effort to result, acquisition to possession, destitution to wealth, error to truth, experience to foresight. I submit without murmuring to this ordinance, being able, moreover, to imagine no other combination. But if, by a mechanism as simple as it is ingenious, He has provided ‹that all men should approximate to a common level, which is continually rising›, if He assures them—by the very action of what we denominate evil—both of the duration and the diffusion of progress, then am I not only content to bow myself under His bountiful and almighty hand,—I bless that hand, I worship it, I adore it.
* * * * *
We have seen certain schools arise which have taken advantage of the insolubility (humanly speaking) of this question to embroil all others, as if it were given to our finite intelligence to [p470] comprehend and reconcile things which are infinite. Placing over the portal of social science this sentence, ‹God cannot desire evil›, they arrive at the following series of conclusions: “Evil exists in society; then society is not organized according to the designs of God. Let us change, and change again, and change continually this organization. Let us try about, and make experiments, until we have effaced all trace of suffering from the world. By that sign we shall know that the kingdom of God has come.”
Nor is this all. These schools have been led to exclude from their social plans liberty as well as suffering, for liberty implies the possibility of error, and consequently the possibility of evil. Addressing their fellow-men, they say, “Allow us to organize you—don’t you interfere—cease to compare, to judge, to decide anything by yourselves and for yourselves. We abhor the ‹laissez faire›; but we ask you to let things alone, and to let us alone. If we succeed in conducting you to perfect happiness, the infinite goodness of God will be vindicated.”
Contradiction, inconsistency, presumption,—we ask which is most apparent in such language?
One sect among others, not very philosophical, but very noisy, promises to mankind unmixed felicity. Only deliver over to that sect the government of the human race, and in virtue of certain formulas, it makes bold to rid men of every painful sensation.
But if you do not accord a blind faith to the promises of that sect, then, bringing forward that formidable and insoluble problem which has vexed philosophy since the beginning of the world, they summon you to reconcile the existence of evil with the infinite goodness of God. Do you hesitate? they accuse you of impiety.
Fourier rings the changes on this theme till he exhausts all its combinations.
“‹Either God has not been able› to give us a social code of attraction, of justice, of truth, and of unity; in which case He has been unjust in giving us wants without the means of satisfying them.”
“‹Or He has not desired to give it us›; and in that case He has deliberately persecuted us by creating designedly wants which it is impossible to satisfy:”
“‹Or He is able, and has not desired›; in which case the principle of good would rival the principle of evil, having the power to establish good, and preferring to establish evil:” [p471]
“‹Or He has desired and has not been able›; in which case He is incapable of governing us, acknowledging and desiring good, but not having the power to establish it:”
“‹Or He has been neither able nor willing›; in which case the principle of good is below the principle of evil, etc.:”
“‹Or He has been both able and willing›; in which case the code exists, and it is for us to promulgate it, etc.”
And Fourier is the prophet of this new revelation. Let us deliver ourselves up to him and to his disciples: Providence will then be justified, sensibility will change its nature, and suffering will disappear from the earth.
But how, I would ask, do these apostles of absolute good, these hardy logicians, who exclaim continually that “God being perfect, His work must be perfect also;” and who accuse us of impiety because we resign ourselves to human imperfection,—how, I say, do these men not perceive that, on the most favourable hypothesis, they are as impious as we are? I should like, indeed, that, under the reign of Messieurs Considérant, Hennequin, etc., no one in the world should ever lose his mother, or suffer from the toothache,—in which case he also might chant the litany, ‹Either God has not been able or has not been willing›; I should like much that evil were to take flight to the infernal regions, retreating before the broad daylight of the Socialist revelation—that one of their plans, ‹phalanstère›, ‹crédit gratuit›, ‹anarchie›, ‹triade›, ‹atelier social›,[108] and so forth, had the power to rid us of all future evils. But would it annihilate suffering in the past? The infinite, observe, has no limits; and if there has existed on the earth since the beginning of the world a single sufferer, that is enough to render the problem of the infinite goodness of God insoluble in their point of view.
Let us beware, then, of linking the science of the finite to the mysteries of the infinite. Let us apply to the one reason and observation, and leave the other in the domain of revelation and of faith.
In all respects, and in every aspect, man is imperfect. In this world, at least, he encounters limits in all directions, and touches the finite at every point. His force, his intelligence, his affections, his life, have in them nothing absolute, and belong to a material mechanism which is subject to fatigue, to decay, and to death.
Not only is this so, but our imperfection is so great that we cannot even imagine perfection as existing either in ourselves or in the external world. Our minds are so much out of proportion to this idea of perfection that all our efforts to seize it are vain. The oftener we try to grasp it, the oftener it escapes us, and is lost in [p472] inextricable contradictions. Show me a perfect man, and you will show me a man who is exempt from suffering, and who has consequently neither wants, nor desires, nor sensations, nor sensibility, nor nerves, nor muscles; who can be ignorant of nothing, and consequently has neither the faculty of attention, nor judgment, nor reasoning, nor memory, nor imagination, nor brains; in short, you will show me a being who does not exist.
Thus, in whatever aspect we regard man, we must regard him as being subject to suffering. We must admit that evil has entered as one spring of action into the providential plan; and in place of seeking by chimerical means to annihilate it, our business is to study the part which it has to play, and the mission on which it is sent.
When it pleased God to create a being made up of wants, and of faculties to supply these wants, it was at the same time decreed that this being should be subject to suffering; for, apart from suffering, we could form no idea of wants, and, apart from wants, we could form no idea of utility, or of the use and object of any of our faculties. All that constitutes our greatness has its root in what constitutes our weakness.
Urged on by innumerable impulses, and indued with an intelligence which enlightens our exertions, and enables us to appreciate their results, we have ‹free will› to guide and direct us.
But free will implies error as possible, and error in its turn implies suffering as its inevitable effect. I defy any one to tell me what it is to ‹choose freely›, if it be not to run the risk of making a bad choice, and what it is to make a bad choice if it be not to prepare the way for suffering.
And this is, no doubt, the reason why those schools who are content with nothing less than absolute good are all materialist and fatalist. They are unable to admit free will. They see that liberty of acting proceeds from liberty of choosing; that liberty of choosing supposes the possibility of error; and that the possibility of error is the possibility of evil. Now, in an artificial society, such as our ‹organisateurs› invent, evil cannot make its appearance. For that reason, men must be exempted from the possibility of error; and the surest means to accomplish that is to deprive them of the faculty of acting and choosing—in other words, of free will. It has been truly said that Socialism is despotism incarnate.
In presence of these fooleries, it may be asked, By what right does the organizer of artificial systems venture to think, act, and choose, not only for himself, but for every one else? for, after all [p473] he belongs to the human race, and in that respect is fallible; and he is so much the more fallible in proportion as he pretends to extend the range of his science and his will.
No doubt the ‹organisateur› finds this objection radically unfounded, inasmuch as it confounds him with the rest of mankind. But he who professes to discover the defects of the Divine workmanship, and has undertaken to recast it, is more than a man; he is an oracle, and more than an oracle. . . . .
Socialism has two elements: the frenzy of contradiction, and the madness of pride!
But when free will, which is the foundation of the whole argument, is denied, is not this the proper place to demonstrate its existence? I shall take good care not to enter upon any such demonstration. Every one feels that his will is free, and that is enough. I feel this, not vaguely, but a hundred times more intensely than if it had been demonstrated to me by Aristotle or by Euclid. I feel it with conscious joy when I have made a choice which does me honour; with remorse, when I have made a choice which degrades me. I find, moreover, that all men by their conduct affirm their belief in free will, although some deny it in their writings.[109] All men compare motives, deliberate, determine, retract, try to foresee; all give advice, are indignant at injustice, admire acts of devotion. Then all acknowledge in themselves and in others the existence of free will, without which, choice, advice, foresight, morality, virtue, are impossible. Let us take care how we seek to demonstrate what is admitted by universal practice. Absolute fatalists are no more to be found, even at Constantinople, than absolute sceptics are to be met with at Alexandria. Those who proclaim themselves such may be fools enough to try to persuade others, but they are powerless to convince themselves. They prove with much subtlety that they have no will of their own; but when we see that they act as if they had it, we need not dispute with them.
* * * * *
Here, then, we are placed in the midst of nature and of our fellow-men—urged on by impulses, wants, appetites, desires—provided with various faculties enabling us to operate on man and on [p474] things—determined to action by our free will—indued with intelligence, which is perfectible and therefore imperfect, and which, if it enlightens us, may also deceive us with reference to the consequences of our actions.
Every human action—giving rise to a series of good or bad consequences, of which some fall back on the agent, and others affect his family, his neighbours, his fellow-citizens, and sometimes mankind at large—every such action causes the vibration of two chords, the sounds of which are oracular utterances—Responsibility and Solidarity.
As regards the man who acts, Responsibility is the natural link which exists between the act and its consequences. It is a complete system of ‹inevitable› Rewards and Punishments which no man has invented, which acts with all the regularity of the great natural laws, and which may, consequently, be regarded as of Divine institution. The evident object of Responsibility is to restrain the number of hurtful actions, and increase the number of such as are useful.
This mechanism, which is at once corrective and progressive, remunerative and retributive, is so simple, so near us, so identified with our whole being, so perpetually in action, that not only can we not ignore it, but we see that, like Evil, it is one of those phenomena without which our whole life would be to us unintelligible.
The book of Genesis tells us that, the first man having been driven from the terrestrial paradise, because he had learned to distinguish between good and evil, ‹sciens bonum et malum›, God pronounced this sentence on him: ‹In laboribus comedes ex terrâ cunctis diebus vitæ tuæ. Spinas et tribulos germinabit tibi. In sudore vultûs tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de quâ sumptus es: quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.›[110]
Here, then, we have good and evil—or human nature. Here we have acts and habits producing good or bad consequences—or human nature. Here we have labour, sweat, thorns, tribulation, and death—or human nature.
Human nature, I say; for to choose, to be mistaken, to suffer, to rectify our errors—in a word, all the elements which make up the idea of Responsibility—are so inherent in our sensitive, rational, and free nature, they are so much of the essence of that nature [p475] itself, that I defy the most fertile imagination to conceive for man another mode of existence.
That man might have lived in an Eden, ‹in paradiso voluptatis›, ignorant of good and evil, we can indeed believe, but we cannot comprehend it, so profoundly has our nature been transformed.
We find it impossible to separate the idea of ‹life› from that of sensibility; that of sensibility from that of ‹pleasure› and ‹pain›; that of pleasure and pain from that of ‹reward› and ‹punishment›; that of ‹intelligence› from that of ‹liberty› and ‹choice›, and all these ideas from the idea of Responsibility; for it is the aggregate of all these ideas which gives us the idea of Being or Existence, so that when we think upon God, our reason, which tells us that He is incapable of suffering, remains confounded—so inseparable are our notions of sensibility and ‹existence›.
It is this undoubtedly which renders ‹Faith› the necessary complement of our destinies. It is the only bond which is possible between the creature and the Creator, seeing that God is, and always will be, to our reason, incomprehensible, ‹Deus absconditus›.
In order to be convinced how hard Responsibility presses us, and shuts us in on every side, we have only to attend to the most simple facts.
Fire burns us; the collision of bodies bruises us. If we were not indued with sensibility, or if our sensibility were not painfully affected by the approach of fire, and by rude contact with other bodies, we should be exposed to death every moment.
From earliest infancy to extreme old age, our life is only a long apprenticeship. By frequently falling, we learn to walk. By rude and reiterated experiments, we are taught to avoid heat, cold, hunger, thirst, excess. Do not let us complain of the roughness of this experience. If it were not so, it would teach us nothing.
The same thing holds in the social order. From the unhappy consequences of cruelty, of injustice, of fear, of violence, of deceit, of idleness, we learn to be gentle, just, brave, moderate, truthful, and industrious. Experience is protracted; it will never come to an end; but it will never cease to be efficacious.
Man being so constituted, it is impossible that we should not recognise in responsibility the mainspring to which social progress is specially confided. It is the crucible in which experience is elaborated. They, then, who believe in the superiority of times past, like those who despair of the future, fall into the most manifest contradiction. Without being aware of it, they extol error, and calumniate knowledge. It is as if they said, “The more I have learnt, the less I know. The more clearly I discern what is [p476] hurtful, the more I shall be exposed to it.” Were humanity constituted on such a basis as this, it would in a short time cease to exist.
Man’s starting-point is ignorance and inexperience. The farther we trace back the chain of time, the more destitute we find men of that knowledge which is fitted to direct their choice,—of knowledge which can be acquired only in one of two ways: by reflection or by experience.
Now it so happens that man’s every action includes, not one consequence only, but a series of consequences. Sometimes the first is good, and the others bad; sometimes the first is bad, and the others good. From one of our determinations there may proceed good and bad consequences, combined in variable proportions. We may venture to term ‹vicious› those actions which produce more bad than good effects, and ‹virtuous› those which produce a greater amount of good than of evil.
When one of our actions produces a first consequence which we approve, followed by many other consequences which are hurtful, so that the aggregate of bad predominates over the aggregate of good, such an action tends to limit and restrain itself, and to be abandoned in proportion as we acquire more foresight.
Men naturally perceive the immediate consequences of their actions before they perceive those consequences which are more remote. Whence it follows that what we have denominated vicious acts are more multiplied in times of ignorance. Now the repetition of the same acts constitutes habit. Ages of ignorance, then, are ages of bad habits.
Consequently, they are ages of bad laws, for acts which are repeated, habits which are general, constitute manners, upon which laws are modelled, and of which, so to speak, they are the official expression.
How is this ignorance to be put an end to? How can men be taught to know the second, the third, and all the subsequent consequences of their acts and their habits?
The first means is the exercise of that faculty of discerning and reasoning which Providence has vouchsafed them.
But there is another still more sure and efficacious,—experience. When the act is once done, the consequences follow inevitably. The first effect is good; for it is precisely to obtain that result that the act is done. But the second may inflict suffering, the third still greater suffering, and so on.
Then men’s eyes are opened, and light begins to appear. That action is not repeated; we sacrifice the good produced by the first [p477] and immediate consequence, for fear of the still greater evil which the subsequent consequences entail. If the act has become a habit, and if we have not power to give it up, we at least give way to it with hesitation and repugnance, and after an inward conflict. We do not recommend it; on the contrary, we blame it, and persuade our children against it; and we are certainly on the road of progress.
If, on the other hand, the act is one which is useful, but from which we refrain, because its first, and only known, consequence is painful, and we are ignorant of the favourable ulterior consequences, experience teaches us the effects of abstaining from it. A savage, for instance, has had enough to eat. He does not foresee that he will be hungry to-morrow. Why should he labour to-day? To work is present pain—no need of foresight to know that. He therefore continues idle. But the day passes, another succeeds, and as it brings hunger, he must then work under the spur of necessity. This is a lesson which, frequently repeated, cannot fail to develop foresight. By degrees idleness is regarded in its true light. We brand it; we warn the young against it. Public opinion is now on the side of industry.
But in order that experience should afford us this lesson, in order that it should fulfil its mission, develop foresight, explain the series of consequences which flow from our actions, pave the way to good habits, and restrain bad ones—in a word, in order that experience should become an effective instrument of progress and moral improvement—the law of Responsibility must come into operation. The bad consequences must make themselves felt, and ‹evil› must for the moment chastise us.
Undoubtedly it would be better that evil had no existence; and it might perhaps be so if man was constituted differently from what he is. But taking man as he is, with his wants, his desires, his sensibility, his free will, his power of choosing and erring, his faculty of bringing into play a cause which necessarily entails consequences which it is not in our power to elude as long as the cause exists; in such circumstances, the only way of removing the cause is to enlighten the will, rectify the choice, abandon the vicious act or the vicious habit; and nothing can effect this but the law of Responsibility.
We may affirm, then, that man being constituted as he is, evil is not only necessary but useful. It has a mission, and enters into the universal harmony. Its mission is to destroy its own cause, to limit its own operation, to concur in the realization of good, and to stimulate progress. [p478]
We may elucidate this by some examples which the subject which now engages us—Political Economy—presents.
‹Frugality.› ‹Prodigality.› ‹Monopolies.› ‹Population.›[111] . . . .
Responsibility guards itself by three sanctions:—
‹1st›, ‹The natural sanction›; which is that of which I have just been speaking—the necessary suffering or recompense which certain acts and habits entail.
‹2d›, ‹The religious sanction›; or the punishments and rewards of another life, which are annexed to acts and habits, according as they are vicious or virtuous.
‹3d›, ‹The legal sanction›; or the punishments and rewards decreed beforehand by society.
Of these three sanctions, I confess that the one which appears to me fundamental is the first. In saying this I cannot fail to run counter to sentiments which I respect; but I must be permitted to declare my opinion.
Is an act vicious because a revelation from above has declared it to be so? Or has revelation declared it vicious because it produces consequences which are bad? These questions will probably always form a subject of controversy between the philosophical and the religious mind.
I believe that Christianity can range itself on the side of those who answer the last of these two questions in the affirmative. Christianity itself tells us that it has not come to oppose the natural law, but to confirm it.[112] We can scarcely admit that God, who is the supreme principle of order, should have made an arbitrary classification of human actions, that He should have denounced punishment on some, and promised reward to others, and this without any regard to the effects of these actions, that is to say, to their discordance, or concordance, in the universal harmony. [p479]
When He said, “Thou shalt not kill—thou shalt not steal,” no doubt He had in view to prohibit certain acts because they were hurtful to man and to society, which are His work.
Regard to consequences is so powerful a consideration with man that if he belonged to a religion that forbade acts which universal experience proved to be useful, or that sanctioned the observance of habits palpably hurtful, I believe that such a religion could not be maintained, but that it would at length give way before the progress of knowledge. Men could not long suppose that the deliberate design of God was to cause evil and to interdict good.
The question which I broach here has perhaps no very important bearing on Christianity, since it ordains only what is good in itself, and forbids only what is bad.
But the question I am now examining is this, whether in principle the religious sanction goes to confirm the natural sanction, or whether the natural sanction goes for nothing in presence of the religious sanction, and should give way to the latter when they come into collision.
Now, if I am not mistaken, the tendency of ministers of religion is to pay little attention to the natural sanction. For this they have an unanswerable reason: “God has ordained this; God has forbidden that.” There is no longer any room left for reasoning, for God is infallible and omnipotent. Although the act should lead to the destruction of the world, we must march on like blind men, just as we would do if God addressed us personally, and showed us heaven and hell.
It may happen, even in the true religion, that actions in themselves innocent are forbidden by Divine authority. To exact interest for money, for example, has been pronounced sinful. Had mankind given obedience to that prohibition, the race would long since have disappeared from the face of the earth. For without interest the accumulation of capital is impossible; without capital there can be no co-operation of anterior and present labour; without this co-operation there can be no society; and without society man cannot exist.
On the other hand, on examining the subject of interest more nearly, we are convinced that not only is it useful in its general effects, but that there is in it nothing contrary to charity and truth—certainly not more than there is in the stipend of a minister of religion, and less than in certain perquisites belonging to his office.
Thus, all the power of the Church has not been able for an [p480] instant to supersede, in this respect, the nature of things. The most which has been accomplished is to cause to be disguised one of the forms, and that the least usual form, of exacting interest, in a number of very trifling transactions.
In the same way, as regards precepts; when the Gospel says, “Unto him who smiteth thee on the one cheek, offer also the other,” it gives a precept which, if taken literally, would destroy the right of legitimate defence in the individual, and consequently in society. Now, without this right, the existence of the human race is impossible.
And what has happened? For eighteen hundred years this saying has been repeated as a mere conventionalism.
But there is a still graver consideration. There are false religions in the world. These necessarily admit precepts and prohibitions which are in antagonism with the natural sanctions attached to certain acts. Now, of all the means which have been given us to distinguish, in a matter so important, the true from the false, that which emanates from God from that which proceeds from imposture, none is more certain, more decisive, than an examination of the good or bad consequences which a doctrine is calculated to have on the advancement and progress of mankind—‹a fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos›.
‹Legal sanction.›—Nature having prepared a system of punishments and rewards, in the shape of the effects which necessarily proceed from each act and from each habit, what is the province of human law? There are only three courses it can take—to allow Responsibility to act, to chime in with it, or to oppose it.
It seems to me beyond doubt that when a legal sanction is brought into play, it ought only to be to give more force, regularity, certainty, and efficacy to the natural sanction. These two powers should co-operate, and not run counter to each other.
For example, if fraud is in the first instance profitable to him who has recourse to it, in the long-run it is more frequently fatal to him; for it injures his credit, his honour, and his reputation. It creates around him distrust and suspicion. It is, besides, always hurtful to the man who is the victim of it. Finally, it alarms society, and obliges it to employ part of its force in expensive precautions. The sum of evil, then, far exceeds the sum of good. This is what constitutes natural Responsibility, which acts constantly as a preventive and repressive check. We can understand, however, that the community does not choose to depend altogether on the slow action of necessary responsibility, and judges it fit to add a legal sanction to the natural sanction. In [p481] that case, we may say that the legal sanction is only the natural sanction organized and reduced to rule. It renders punishment more immediate and more certain; it gives more publicity and authenticity to facts; it surrounds the suspected party with guarantees, and affords him a regular opportunity to exculpate himself if there be room for it; it rectifies the errors of public opinion, and calms down individual vengeance by substituting for it public retribution. In fine—and this perhaps is the essential thing—it does not destroy the lessons of experience.
We cannot, then, say that the legal sanction is illogical in principle, when it advances alongside the natural sanction and concurs in the same result. It does not follow, however, that the legal sanction ought in every case to be substituted for the natural sanction, and that human law is justified by the consideration alone that it acts in the sense of Responsibility.
* * * * *
The artificial distribution of punishments and rewards includes in itself, and at the expense of the community, an amount of inconvenience which it is necessary to take into account. The machinery of the legal sanction comes from men, is worked by men, and is costly.
Before submitting an action or a habit to organized repression, there is always this question to be asked:—
Does the excess of good which is obtained by the addition of legal repression to natural repression compensate the evil which is inherent in the repressive machinery?
In other words, is the evil of artificial repression greater or less than the evil of impunity?
In the case of theft, of murder, of the greater part of crimes and delicts, the question admits of no doubt. Every nation of the earth represses these crimes by public force.
But when we have to do with a habit which it is difficult to account for, and which may spring from moral causes of delicate appreciation, the question is different, and it may very well be that, although this habit is universally esteemed hurtful and vicious, the law should remain neuter, and hand it over to natural responsibility.
In the first place, this is the course which the law ought to take in the case of an action or a habit which is doubtful, which one part of the population thinks good and another part bad. You think me wrong in following the Catholic ritual; I think you wrong in adopting the Lutheran faith. Let God judge of that. Why should I aim a blow at you, or why should you aim a blow [p482] at me? If it is not right that we should strike at each other, how can it be right that we should delegate a third party, the depositary of the public force, to chastise one of us for the satisfaction of the other?
You allege that I am wrong in teaching my child the moral and natural sciences; I believe that you are wrong in teaching your child Greek and Latin exclusively. Let us act on both sides according to our feeling of what is right. Let our families be acted on by the law of Responsibility. That law will punish the one who is wrong. Do not invoke human law, which may punish the one who is right.
You assert that I would do better to pursue such or such a career, to work according to your process, to employ an iron in place of a wooden plough, to sow thin in place of sowing thick, to purchase in the East rather than in the West. I maintain just the contrary. I have made all my calculations; and surely I am more interested than you in not falling into any mistake in matters upon the right ordering of which my welfare, my existence, and the happiness of my family depend, while in your case they interest only your ‹amour-propre› and the credit of your systems. Give me as much advice as you please, but constrain me to nothing. I decide upon ‹my own proper risk and peril›, and surely that is enough without the tyrannical intervention of law.
We see that, in almost all the important actions of life, it is necessary to respect free will, to rely on the individual judgment of men, on that inward light which God has given them for their guidance, and after that to leave Responsibility to do its own work.
The intervention of law in analogous cases, over and above the very great inconvenience of opening the way equally to error and to truth, has the still greater inconvenience of paralyzing intelligence itself, of extinguishing that light which is the inheritance of humanity and the pledge of progress.
But even when an action, a habit, a practice is acknowledged by public good sense to be bad, vicious, and immoral, when it is so beyond doubt; when those who give themselves up to it are the first to blame themselves,—that is not enough to justify the intervention of law. As I have already said, it is necessary also to know if, in adding to the bad consequences of this vice the bad consequences inherent in all legal repression, we do not produce, in the long-run, a sum of evil which exceeds the good which the legal sanction adds to the natural sanction.
We might examine, for instance, the evils which would result [p483] from the application of the legal sanction to the repression of idleness, prodigality, avarice, egotism, cupidity, ambition.
Let us take the case of idleness.
This is a very natural inclination, and there are not wanting men who join the chorus of the Italians when they celebrate the ‹dolce far niente›, and of Rousseau, when he says, ‹Je suis paresscux avec délices›. We cannot doubt, then, that idleness is attended with a certain amount of enjoyment. Were it not so, in fact, there would be no idleness in the world.
And yet there flows from this inclination a host of evils, so much so that the wisdom of nations has embodied itself in the proverb that ‹Idleness is the parent of every vice›.
The evils of idleness infinitely surpass the good; and it is necessary that the law of Responsibility should act in this matter with some energy, either as a lesson or as a spur, seeing that it is in fact by labour that the world has reached the state of civilisation which it has now attained.
Now, considered either as a lesson or as a spur to action, what would a legal sanction add to the providential sanction? Suppose we had a law to punish idleness. In what precise degree would such a law quicken the national activity?
If we could find this out, we should have an exact measure of the benefit resulting from the law. I confess I can form no idea of this part of the problem. But we must ask, at what price would this benefit, whatever it were, be purchased; and surely little reflection is needed in order to see that the certain inconveniences of legal repression would far exceed its problematical advantages.
In the first place, there are in France thirty-six millions of inhabitants. It would be necessary to exercise over them all a rigorous ‹surveillance›, to follow them into their fields, their workshops, to their domestic circles. Think of the number of functionaries, the increase of taxes, etc., which would be the result.
Then, those who are now industrious—and the number, thank God, is great—would be, no less than the idle, subjected to this intolerable inquisition. It is surely an immense inconvenience to subject a hundred innocent people to degrading measures, in order to punish one guilty person whom nature has herself taken it in hand to chastise.
And then, when does idleness begin? In the case of each man brought to justice, the most minute and delicate inquiries would be necessary. Was the accused really idle, or did he merely take [p484] necessary repose? Was he sick, or was he meditating, or was he saying his prayers, etc.? How could we appreciate all those shades of difference? Did he work harder and longer in the morning in order to have a little more time at his disposal in the evening? How many witnesses, judges, juries, policemen, would be needed, how much resistance, espionage, and hatred would be engendered! . . . . .
Next we should have the chapter of judicial blunders. How great an amount of idleness would escape! and, in return, how many industrious people would go to redeem in prison the inactivity of a day by the inactivity of a month!
With these consequences and many others before our eyes, we say, Let natural Responsibility do its own work. And we do well in saying so.
The Socialists, who never decline to have recourse to despotism in order to accomplish their ends—for the end is everything with them—have branded Responsibility under the name of ‹individualism›,—and have then tried to annihilate it, and absorb it in the sphere of action of a ‹solidarity› extended beyond all natural bounds.
The consequences of this perversion of the two great springs of human perfectibility are fatal. There is no longer any dignity, any liberty, for man. For, from the moment that the man who acts is not personally answerable for the good or bad consequences of his actions, his right to act singly and individually no longer exists. If each movement of the individual is to reflect back the series of its effects on society at large, the initiative of each such movement can no longer be left to the individual—it belongs to society. The community alone must decide all, and regulate all,—education, food, wages, amusements, locomotion, affections, families, etc. Now, the law is the voice of Society; the law is the legislator. Here, then, we have a flock and a shepherd,—less than that even, inert matter, and a workman. We see, then, to what point the suppression of Responsibility and of individualism would lead us.
To conceal this frightful design from the eyes of the vulgar, it was necessary to flatter their selfish passions by declaiming against egotism. To the suffering classes Socialism says, “Do not trouble yourselves to examine whether your sufferings are to be ascribed to the law of Responsibility. There are fortunate people in the world, and in virtue of the law of Solidarity they ought to share their prosperity with you.” And for the purpose of paving the way to the degrading level of a factitious, official, legal, con [p485] strained, and unnatural Solidarity, they erect spoliation into a system, they twist all our notions of justice, and they exalt that individualist sentiment, which they were thought to have proscribed, up to the highest point of power and perversity. Their whole system is thus of a piece,—negation of the harmonies which spring from liberty in the principle,—despotism and slavery in the result,—immorality in the means.
* * * * *
Every effort to divert the natural course of responsibility is a blow aimed at justice, at liberty, at order, at civilisation, and at progress.
‹At justice.› An act or a habit being assumed to exist, its good or bad consequences must follow necessarily. Were it possible, indeed, to suppress these consequences, there would doubtless be some advantage in suspending the action of the natural law of responsibility. But the only result to which a written law could lead would be that the good effects of a bad action would be reaped by the author of that action, and that its bad effects would fall back on a third party, or upon the community; which has certainly the special aspect of injustice.
Thus, modern societies are constituted on the principle that the father of a family should rear and educate his children. And it is this principle which restrains within just limits the increase and distribution of population; each man acting under a sense of responsibility. Men are not all indued with the same amount of foresight; and[113] in large towns improvidence is allied with immorality. We have nowadays a regular budget, and an administration, for the purpose of collecting children abandoned by their parents; no inquiry discourages this shameful desertion, and a constantly increasing number of destitute children inundates our poorer districts.
Here, then, we have a peasant who marries late in life, in order not to be overburdened with a family, obliged to bring up the children of others. He will not inculcate foresight on his son. Another lives in continence, and we see him taxed to bring up a set of bastards. In a religious point of view, his conscience is tranquil, but in a human point of view he must call himself a fool. . . . . .
We do not pretend here to enter on the grave question of public [p486] charity, we wish only to make this essential observation, that the more a State is centralized, the more that it turns natural responsibility into factitious solidarity, the more it takes away from consequences (which thenceforth affect those who have no connexion with their cause) their providential character of justice, chastisement, and preventive restraint.
When Government cannot avoid charging itself with a service which ought to remain within the domain of private activity, it ought at least to allow the responsibility to rest as nearly as possible where it would naturally fall. Thus, in the question of foundling hospitals, the principle being that the father and mother should bring up the child, the law should exhaust every means of endeavouring to enforce this. Failing the parents, this burden should fall on the commune; and failing the commune, on the department. Do you desire to multiply foundlings ‹ad infinitum›? Declare that the State will take charge of them. It would be still worse if France should undertake to maintain the children of the Chinese, and ‹vice versa›. . . . . .
It is, in truth, a singular thing that we should be always endeavouring to make laws to check the evils of responsibility! Will it never be understood that we do not annihilate these evils—we only turn them into a new channel? The result is one injustice the more, and one lesson the less. . . . . .
How is the world to be improved if it be not by every man learning to discharge his duty better? And will each man not discharge his duties better in proportion as he has more to suffer by neglecting or violating them? If social action is to be mixed up in the work of responsibility, it ought to be in order to second it, not to thwart it, to concentrate its effects, not to abandon them to chance.
It has been said that opinion is the mistress of the world. Assuredly, in order that opinion should have its proper sway it is necessary that it should be enlightened; and opinion is so much more enlightened in proportion as each man who contributes to form it perceives more clearly the connexion of causes and effects. Now nothing leads us to perceive this connexion better than experience, and experience, as we know, is personal, and the fruit of responsibility.
In the natural play, then, of this great law of responsibility we have a system of valuable teaching with which it is very imprudent to tamper.
If, by ill-considered combinations, you relieve men from responsibility for their actions, they may still be taught by theory—but [p487] no longer by experience. And I doubt if instruction which has never been sanctioned and confirmed by experience is not more dangerous than ignorance itself. . . . . .
The ‹sense of responsibility› is eminently capable of improvement.
This is one of the most beautiful moral phenomena. There is nothing which we admire more in a man, in a class, in a nation, than the feeling of responsibility. It indicates superior moral culture, and an exquisite sensibility to the awards of public opinion. It may be, however, that the sense of responsibility is highly developed in one thing and very little in another. In France, among the educated classes, one would die of shame to be caught cheating at play or addicting oneself to solitary drinking. These things are laughed at among the peasants. But to traffic in political rights, to make merchandise of his vote, to be guilty of inconsistency, to cry out by turns ‹Vive le Roi! Vive la Ligue!› as the interest of the moment may prompt, these are things which our manners do not brand with shame.
The development of the sense of responsibility may be much aided by female intervention. . . . . .
Females are themselves extremely sensible of the feeling of responsibility. . . . . . It rests with them to create this ‹force moralisatrice› among the other sex; for it is their province to distribute praise and blame effectively. Why, then, do they not do so? because they are not sufficiently acquainted with the connexion between causes and effects in the moral world. . . . . .
The science of morals is the science of all, but especially of the female sex, for they form the manners of a nation. . . . . . [p488]
XXI. SOLIDARITY
If man were perfect, if he were infallible, society would present a very different harmony from that which is the subject of our inquiries. Ours is not the society of Fourier. It does not exclude evil; it admits dissonances; only we assert that it does not cease to be harmony if these dissonances pave the way to concord, and bring us back to it.
Our point of departure is that man is fallible, and that God has given him free will; and with the faculty of choosing, that of erring, of mistaking what is false for what is true, of sacrificing the future to the present, of giving way to unreasonable desires, etc. . . . .
Man errs. But every act, every habit has its consequences.
By means of Responsibility, as we have seen, these consequences fall back on the author of the act. A natural concatenation of rewards or punishments, then, attracts him towards good, or repels him from evil.
Had man been destined to a solitary life, and to solitary labour, Responsibility would have been his only law.
But he is differently placed; he is sociable ‹by destination›. It is not true, as Rousseau has said, that man is naturally a ‹perfect and solitary whole›, and that the will of the lawgiver has transformed him into a fraction of a greater ‹whole›. The family, the province, the nation, the human race, are aggregates with which man has ‹necessary› relations. Hence it follows that the actions and the habits of the individual produce, besides the consequences which fall back upon himself, other good or bad consequences which extend themselves to his fellow-men. This is what we term the law of ‹Solidarity›, which is a sort of ‹collective Responsibility›.
This idea of Rousseau that the legislator has invented society—an idea false in itself—has been injurious in this respect, that it has led men to think that Solidarity is of legislative creation, and we [p489] shall immediately see that modern legislators have based upon this doctrine their efforts to subject society to an ‹artificial solidarity›, acting in an inverse sense to ‹natural solidarity›. In everything, the principle of these great manipulators of the human race is to set up their own work in room of the work of God, which they disown.
* * * * *
Our first task is to prove undeniably the natural existence of the law of ‹Solidarity›.
In the eighteenth century they did not believe in it. They adhered to the doctrine of the personality of faults. The philosophers of the last century, engaged above all in the reaction against Catholicism, would have feared, by admitting the principle of Solidarity, to open a door to the doctrine of ‹original sin›. Every time Voltaire found in the Scriptures a man bearing the punishment of another, he said ironically, “This is frightful, but the justice of God is not that of man.”
We are not concerned here to discuss ‹original sin›. But what Voltaire laughed at is nevertheless a fact, which is not less incontestable than it is mysterious. The law of Solidarity makes its appearance so frequently and so strikingly, in the individual and in the masses, in details and in the aggregate, in particular and in general facts, that to fail to recognise it implies either the blindness of sectarianism or the zeal of embittered controversy.
The first rule of all human justice is to concentrate the punishment of an action on its author, in virtue of the principle that faults are personal. But this law, sacred as regards individuals, is not the law of God, or even the law of society.
Why is this man rich? Because his father was active, honest, industrious, and economical. The father practised virtue; the son reaps the rewards.
Why is this other man always suffering, sick, feeble, timorous, and wretched? Because his father, endowed with a powerful constitution, abused it by debauchery and excess. To the guilty fall the agreeable consequences of vice, to the innocent fall its fatal consequences.
There exists not a man upon this earth whose condition has not been determined by thousands of millions of facts in which his own determinations have had no part. What I complain of to-day was perhaps caused by the caprice of my great-grandfather, etc.
Solidarity manifests itself on a greater scale still, and at distances which are still more inexplicable, when we consider the [p490] relations of divers nations, or of different generations of the same people.
Is it not strange that the eighteenth century was so occupied with intellectual or material works of which we are now enjoying the benefit? Is it not marvellous that we ourselves should make such efforts to cover the country with railways, on which none of us perhaps will ever travel? Who can fail to recognise the profound influence of our old revolutions on the events of our own time? Who can foresee what an inheritance of peace or of discord our present discussions may bequeath to our children?
Look at the public loans. We make war,—we obey savage passions,—we throw away by these means valuable power; and we find means of laying the scourge of all this destruction on our children, who may haply hold war in abhorrence, and be unable to understand our passions and hatreds.
Cast your eyes upon Europe; contemplate the events which agitate France, Germany, Italy, and Poland, and say if the law of ‹Solidarity› is a chimerical law.
There is no need to carry this enumeration farther. In order to prove undeniably the existence of the law, it is enough that the action of one man, of one people, of one generation, exerts a certain influence upon another man, another people, or another generation. Society at large is only an aggregate of solidarities which cross and overlap one another. This results from the communicable nature of human intelligence. Conversation, literature, discoveries, sciences, morals, etc., are all examples of this. All these unperceived currents by which one mind corresponds with another, all these efforts without visible connexion, the resulting force of which nevertheless pushes on the human race towards an equilibrium, towards an average level which is always rising—all that vast treasury of utilities and of acquired knowledge which each may draw upon without diminishing it, or augment without being aware of it,—all this interchange of thoughts, of productions, of services, and of labour, of good and evil, of virtue and vice, which makes the human family one grand whole, and imparts to thousands of millions of ephemeral existences a common, a universal, a continuous life,—all this is ‹Solidarity›.
Naturally, then, and to a certain extent, there is an incontestable Solidarity among men. In other words, Responsibility is not exclusively personal, but is shared and divided. Action emanates from individuality; consequences are spread over the community.
We must remark that it is in the nature of every man ‹to desire [p491] to be happy›. You may say that I am extolling egotism if you will; I extol nothing; I show, I prove undeniably, the existence of an innate universal sentiment, which can never cease to exist,—personal interest, the desire for happiness, and the repugnance to pain.
Hence it follows that the individual is led so to order his conduct that the good consequences of his actions accrue to himself, while the bad effects fall upon others. He endeavours to spread these bad consequences over the greatest possible number of men, in order that they may be less perceived, and call forth less reaction.
But opinion, ‹that mistress of the world›, the daughter of solidarity, brings together all those scattered grievances, and collects all aggrieved interests into a formidable resisting mass. When a man’s habits become injurious to those who live around him, they call forth a feeling of repulsion. We judge such habits severely. We denounce them, we brand them; and the man who gives himself up to them becomes an object of distrust, of contempt, and of abhorrence. If he reap some advantages, they are soon far more than compensated by the sufferings which public aversion accumulates on his head. To the troublesome consequences which a bad habit always entails in virtue of the law of ‹Responsibility›, there come to be added other consequences still more grievous in virtue of the law of ‹Solidarity›.
Our contempt for the man soon extends to the habit, to the vice; and as the want of consideration is one of our most powerful springs of action, it is clear that solidarity, by the reaction which it brings to bear against vicious acts, tends to restrain and to prevent them.
Solidarity, then, like Responsibility, is a ‹progressive force›; and we see that, in relation to the author of the act, it resolves itself, if I may so speak, into ‹repercussive or reflected responsibility›; that it is still a system of reciprocal rewards and punishments, admirably fitted to circumscribe evil, to extend good, and to urge on mankind on the road of progress.
But in order that it should operate in this way,—in order that those who benefit or suffer from an action which is not their own should react upon its author by approbation or disapprobation, by gratitude or resistance, by esteem, affection, praise, or blame, hatred or vengeance,—one condition is indispensable; and that condition is, that the connecting link between the act and all its effects should be known and appreciated.
When the public is mistaken in this respect, the law fails in its design. [p492]
An act is hurtful to the masses; but the masses are convinced that this act is advantageous to them. What is the consequence? The consequence is, that instead of reacting against it, in place of condemning it, and by that means restraining it, the public exalt it, honour it, extol it, and repeat it.
Nothing is more frequent, and here is the reason of it:
An act produces on the masses not only an effect, but a series of effects. Now it frequently happens that the primary effect is a local good, visible and tangible, whilst the ulterior effects set a-filtering through the body politic evils which are difficult to discover or to connect with their cause.
War is an example of this. In the infancy of society, we do not perceive all the consequences of war. And, to say truth, in a state of civilisation in which there is a less amount of anterior labour (capital) exposed to destruction, less science and money devoted to the machinery of war, etc., these consequences are less prejudicial than they afterwards become. We see only the first campaign, the booty which follows victory, the intoxication of triumph. At that stage, war and warriors are very popular. Then we see the enemy, having become conqueror in his turn, burning down houses and harvests, levying contributions, and imposing laws. In these alternations of success and misfortune, we see generations of men annihilated, agriculture crushed, and two nations impoverished. We see the most important portion of the people contemning the arts of peace, turning their arms against the institutions of their country, serving as the tools of despotism, employing their restless energy in sedition and civil discord, and creating barbarism and solitude at home, as they had formerly done among their neighbours. Do we then pronounce war to be plunder upon a great scale? . . . No; we see its effects without desiring to understand its cause; and when this people, in a state of decadence, shall be invaded in its turn by a swarm of conquerors, centuries after the catastrophe, grave historians will relate that the nation fell because the people had become enervated by peace, because they had forgotten the art of war and the austere virtues of their ancestors.
I could point out the same illusions in connexion with the system of slavery. . . . .
The same thing is true of religious errors. . . . .
In our own day, the ‹régime› of prohibition gives rise to the same fallacy. . . . .
To bring back public opinion, by the diffusion of knowledge and the profound appreciation of causes and effects, into that [p493] intelligent state in which bad tendencies come to be branded, and prejudicial measures opposed, is to render a great service to one’s country. When public opinion, deceived and misled, honours what is worthy of contempt, contemns what is honourable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is hurtful and discourages what is useful, applauds a lie and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back upon progress, and can only be reclaimed by terrible lessons and catastrophes.
We have indicated elsewhere the gross misuse which certain Socialist schools have made of the word Solidarity. . . . .
Let us now see in what spirit human laws should be framed.
It seems to me that here there can be no room for doubt. Human law should coincide with the natural law. It should facilitate and ensure the just retribution of men’s acts; in other words, it should circumscribe solidarity, and organize reaction in order to enforce responsibility. The law can have no other object than to restrain vicious actions and to multiply virtuous ones, and for that purpose it should favour the just distribution of rewards and punishments, so that the bad effects of an act should be concentrated as much as possible on the person who commits it. . . . .
In acting thus, the law conforms itself to the nature of things; solidarity induces a reaction against a vicious act, and the law only regulates that reaction. . . . .
* * * * *
The law thus contributes to progress: The more rapidly it brings back the bad effect of the act upon the agent, the more surely it restrains the act itself.
To give an example: Violence is attended with pernicious consequences. Among savages the repression of violence is left to the natural course of things; and what happens? It provokes a terrible reaction. When a man has committed an act of violence against another man, an inextinguishable desire of vengeance is lighted up in the family of the injured party, and is transmitted from generation to generation. The law interferes; and what ought it to do? Should it limit itself to stifle the desire for vengeance, to repress it, to punish it? It is clear that this would be to encourage violence, by sheltering it from reprisals. This is not, then, what the law should do. It ought to substitute itself, so to speak, for the spirit of vengeance, by organizing in its place a reaction against the violence. It should say to the injured family, “I charge myself with the repression of the act you complain of.” When the whole tribe considers itself as injured and menaced, the [p494] law inquires into the grievance, interrogates the guilty party, makes sure that there is no error as to the fact and as to the person, and thus represses with regularity and certainty an act which would have been punished irregularly.[114] . [p495]
XXII. SOCIAL MOTIVE FORCE
It belongs to no human science to assign the ultimate reason of things.
Man suffers; society suffers. We ask why? This is to ask why God has been pleased to indue man with sensibility and free will. As regards this, no one knows more than the revelation in which he has faith has taught him.
But whatever may have been the designs of God, what human science can take as its point of departure is a positive fact, namely, that man has been created ‹free› and indued with ‹feeling›.
This is so true that I defy those who are astonished at it to conceive a living, thinking, acting being indued with volition and affections—such a being, in short, as man—yet destitute of sensibility and free will.
Could God have ordered things otherwise? Reason undoubtedly answers ‹yes›, but imagination says eternally ‹no›, so radically impossible is it for us to separate in thought humanity from this double attribute. Now, to be indued with ‹feeling› is to be capable of experiencing sensations which are agreeable or painful. Hence comfort or uneasiness. From the moment, then, that God gave existence to sensibility, He permitted evil, or the possibility of evil.
In giving us free will, He has indued us with the faculty, at least in a certain measure, of shunning evil and seeking after good. Free will supposes and accompanies intelligence—what would the faculty of choosing signify if it were not allied with the faculty of examining, of comparing, of judging? Thus, every man who comes into the world brings with him ‹mind› and a ‹motive force›.
The motive force is that personal irresistible impulse, the essence of all our forces, which leads us to shun Evil and seek [p496] after Good. We term it the instinct of preservation, personal or private interest.
This sentiment has been sometimes decried, sometimes misunderstood, but as regards its existence there can be no doubt. Irresistibly we seek after all which, according to our notions, can ameliorate our destiny, and we avoid all which is likely to deteriorate it. This is at least as certain as it is that every material molecule possesses centripetal and centrifugal force. And just as the double movement of attraction and repulsion is the grand spring of the physical world, we may affirm that the double force of human attraction towards happiness and human repulsion from pain is the mainspring of the social mechanism.
But it is not enough that man is irresistibly led to prefer good to evil; he must also be able to discern what is good and what is evil. This is what God has provided for in giving him that marvellous and complex mechanism called intelligence. To fix his attention, to compare, judge, reason, connect effects with causes, to remember, to foresee; such are—if I may use the expression—the wheels of that admirable machine.
The impulsive force which is possessed by each of us moves under the direction of our intelligence. But our intelligence is imperfect. It is liable to error. We compare, we judge, we act in consequence; but we may err, we may make a bad choice, we may tend towards evil, mistaking it for good, or we may shun good, mistaking it for evil. This is the first source of social ‹dissonances›; and it is inevitable, for this reason, that the great motive spring of humanity—personal interest—is not, like material attraction, a blind force, but a force guided by an imperfect intelligence. Let us be very sure, then, that we shall not see Harmony except under this restriction. God has not seen proper to found social order or Harmony upon perfection, but upon human perfectibility, our capacity for improvement. If our intelligence is imperfect, it is improvable. It develops, enlarges, and rectifies itself. It begins of new and verifies its operations. Experience at each moment puts us right, and Responsibility suspends over our heads a complete system of punishments and rewards. Every step that we take on the road of error plunges us into increased suffering, and in such a way that the warning cannot fail to be heard, and the rectification of our determinations, and consequently of our actions, follows, sooner or later, with infallible certainty.
Under the impulse which urges him on, ardent to pursue happiness, prompt to seize it, man may be seeking his own good in the misery of others. This is a second and an abundant source of [p497] discordant social combinations. But the limit of such disturbances is marked; and they find their inevitable doom in the law of Solidarity. Individual force thus misapplied calls forth opposition from all the analogous forces, which, antagonistic to evil by their nature, repel injustice and chastise it.
It is thus that progress is realized, and it is not the less progress from being dearly bought. It springs from a native impulse, which is universal and inherent in our nature, directed by an intelligence which is frequently misled, and subjected to a will which is frequently depraved. Arrested on its march by Error and Injustice, it receives the all-powerful assistance of Responsibility and Solidarity to enable it to surmount these obstacles, and it cannot fail to receive that assistance since it springs from these obstacles themselves.
This internal, universal, and imperishable motive power, which resides in each individual and constitutes him an active being, this tendency of every man to pursue happiness and shun misery, this product, this effect, this necessary complement of sensibility, without which sensibility would be only an inexplicable scourge, this primordial phenomenon which is at the bottom of all human actions, this attractive and repulsive force which we have denominated the mainspring of the social mechanism, has had for detractors the greater part of our publicists; and this is one of the strangest aberrations which the annals of science present.
It is true that self-interest is the cause of all the evils, as it is of all the good, incident to man. It cannot fail to be so, since it determines all our acts. Seeing this, some publicists can imagine no better means of eradicating evil than by stifling ‹self-interest›. But as by this means they would destroy the very spring and motive of our activity, they have thought proper to endow us with a different motive force, namely, ‹devotion›, ‹self-sacrifice›. They hope that henceforth all transactions and social combinations will take place at their bidding, upon the principle of self-abandonment. We are no longer to pursue our own happiness, but the happiness of others; the warnings of sensibility are to go for nothing, like the rewards and punishments of Responsibility. All the laws of our nature are to be reversed; the spirit of sacrifice is to be substituted for the instinct of preservation; in a word, no one is to think longer on his own personality, but for the purpose of hastening to sacrifice it to the public good. It is from such a universal transformation of the human heart that certain publicists, who think themselves very religious, expect to realize perfect social harmony. They [p498] have forgotten to tell us how they hope to effect this indispensable preliminary, the transformation of the human heart.
If they are foolish enough to undertake this, they will find that they want the power to accomplish it. Do they desire the proof of what I say? Let them try the experiment on themselves; let them endeavour to stifle in their own hearts all feeling of self-interest, so that it shall no longer make its appearance in the most ordinary actions of life. They will not be long in finding out their powerlessness. Why, then, pretend to impose upon all men, without exception, a doctrine to which they themselves cannot submit?
I confess myself unable to see anything religious, unless it be in intention and appearance, in these affected theories, in these impracticable maxims which they affect so earnestly to preach, while they continue to act just as the vulgar act. Is it, I would ask, true and genuine religion which inspires these catholic economists with the presumptuous thought that God has done His work ill, and that it is their mission to repair it? Bossuet did not think so when he said, “Man aspires to happiness, and he cannot help aspiring to it.”
Declamations against personal interest never can have much scientific significance; for self-interest is part of man’s indestructible nature—at least, we cannot destroy it without destroying man himself. All that religion, morals, and political economy can do is to give an enlightened direction to this impulsive force—to point out not only the primary, but the ulterior consequences of those acts to which it urges us. A superior and progressive satisfaction consequent on a transient suffering, long continued and constantly increased suffering following on a momentary gratification; such, after all, are moral good and evil. That which determines the choice of men towards virtue is an elevated and enlightened interest, but it is always primarily a personal interest.
If it is strange that personal interest should be decried, when considered not with reference to its immoral abuse, but as the providential moving spring of all human activity, it is still stranger that it should have been put aside altogether, and that men should have imagined themselves in a situation to frame a system of social science without taking it into account.
It is an inexplicable instance of folly that publicists in general should regard themselves as the depositaries and the arbiters of this motive spring. Each starts from this point of departure: Assuming that mankind are a flock, and that I am the shepherd, [p499] how am I to manage in order to make mankind happy? Or this: Given on the one hand a certain quantity of clay, and on the other a potter, what should the potter do in order to turn that clay to the best account?
Our publicists may differ when the question comes to be which is the best potter, who forms and moulds the clay most advantageously; but they are all at one upon this, that their function is to knead the human clay, and what the clay has to do is simply to be kneaded by them. Under the title of legislators they establish between themselves and the human race relations analogous to those of guardian and ward. The idea never occurs to them that the human race is a living sentient body, indued with volition, and acting according to laws which it is not their business to invent, since they already exist, nor to impose, but to study; that humanity is an aggregate of beings in all respects like themselves, and in no way inferior or subordinate; endowed both with an impulse to act, and with intelligence to choose; which feels on all sides the stimulus of Responsibility and Solidarity; and that, in short, from all these phenomena there results an aggregate of self-existing relations, which it is not the business of science to create, as they imagine, but to observe.
Rousseau, I think, is the publicist who has most naïvely exhumed from antiquity this omnipotence of the resuscitated legislator of the Greeks. Convinced that the social order is a human invention, he compares it to a machine; men are the wheels of that machine, the ruler sets it in motion; the lawgiver invents it, under the impulse given him by the publicist, who thus finds himself definitively the mainspring and regulator of the human species. This is the reason why the publicist never fails to address himself to the legislator in the imperative style; he decrees him to decree: “Found your society upon such or such a principle; give it good manners and customs; bend it to the yoke of religion; direct its aims and energies towards arms, or commerce, or agriculture, or virtue,” etc. Others more modest speak in this way: “Idlers will not be tolerated in the republic; you will distribute the population conveniently between the towns and the country; you will take order that there shall be neither rich nor poor,” etc.
These formulas attest the unmeasured presumption of those who employ them. They imply a doctrine which does not leave one atom of dignity to the human race.
I know not whether they are more false in theory or pernicious in practice. In both views, they lead to deplorable results.
They would lead us to believe that the social economy is an [p500] artificial arrangement coined in the brain of an inventor. Hence every publicist constitutes himself an inventor. His greatest desire is to find acceptance for his mechanism; his greatest care is to create abhorrence of all others, and principally of that which springs spontaneously from the organization of man and from the nature of things. The books conceived and written on this plan are, and can only be, prolix declamations against Society.
This false science does not study the concatenation of effects and causes. It does not inquire into the good and evil produced by men’s actions, and trust afterwards to the motive force of Society in choosing the road it is to follow. No; it enjoins, it constrains, it imposes, or, if it cannot do that, it counsels; like a natural philosopher who should say to the stone, “Thou art not supported; I order thee to fall, or at least I advise it.” It is upon this footing that M. Droz has said that “the design of political economy is to render easy circumstances as general as possible,”—a definition which has been welcomed with great favour by the Socialists, because it opens a door to every Utopia, and leads to artificial regulation. What should we say if M. Arago were to open his course in this way, “The object of astronomy is to render gravitation as general as possible?” It is true that men are animated beings, indued with volition, and acting under the influence of free will. But there also resides in them an internal force, a sort of gravitation; and the question is to know towards what they gravitate. If it be fatally, inevitably, towards evil, there is no remedy, and assuredly the remedy will not come to us from a publicist subject like other men to the common tendency. If it be towards good, here we have the motive force already found; science has no need to substitute for it constraint or advice. Its part is to enlighten our free will, to display effects as flowing from causes, well assured that, under the influence of truth, “ease and material prosperity tend to become as general as possible.”
Practically, the doctrine which would place the motive force of society, not in mankind at large, nor in their peculiar organization, but in legislators and governments, is attended with consequences still more deplorable. It tends to draw down upon Governments a crushing responsibility, from which they never recover. If there are sufferings, it is the fault of Government; if there are poor, it is the fault of Government. Is not Government the prime mover? If the mainspring is bad or inoperative, break it, and choose another. Or else they lay the blame on science itself; and in our days we have it repeated ‹ad nauseam› that “all social sufferings are [p501] imputable to Political Economy.”[115] Why not, when Political Economy presents herself as having for design to realize the happiness of men without their co-operation? When such notions prevail, the last thing men take it into their heads to do is to turn their regards upon themselves, and inquire whether the true cause of their sufferings is not their own ignorance and injustice; their ignorance which brings them under the discipline of Responsibility, and their injustice which draws down upon them the reaction of Solidarity. How should mankind ever dream of seeking in their errors the cause of their sufferings when the human race is persuaded that it is inert by nature, and that the principle of all activity, consequently of all responsibility, is external, and resides in the will of the lawgiver and the governing power?
Were I called upon to mark the feature which distinguishes Socialism from Political Economy, I should find it here. Socialism boasts of a vast number of sects. Each sect has its Utopia, and so far are they from any mutual understanding, that they declare against each other war to the knife. The ‹atelier social organisé› of M. Blanc, and the ‹an-archie› of M. Proudhon,—the ‹association› of Fourier, and the ‹communisme› of M. Cabet,—are as different from each other as night is from day. Why do these sectarian leaders, then, range themselves under the common denomination of ‹Socialists›, and what is the bond which unites them against natural or providential society? They have no other bond than this, ‹they all repudiate natural society›. What they wish is an artificial society springing ready made from the brain of the inventor. No doubt, each of them wishes to be the Jupiter of this Minerva—no doubt each of them hugs his own contrivance, and dreams of his own social order. But they have this in common, that they recognise in humanity neither the motive force, which urges mankind on to good, nor the ‹curative› force, which delivers them from evil. They fight among themselves as to what form they are to mould the human clay into, but they are all agreed that humanity is clay to be moulded. Humanity is not in their eyes a living harmonious being, that God himself has provided with progressive and self-sustaining forces, but rather a mass of inert matter which has been waiting for them to impart to it sentiment and life; it is not a subject to be studied, but a subject to be experimented on.
Political Economy, on the other hand, after having clearly shown [p502] that there are in each man forces of impulse and repulsion, the aggregate of which constitutes the social impellent, and after being convinced that this motive force tends towards good, never dreams of annihilating it in order to substitute another of its own creation, but studies the varied and complicated social phenomena to which it gives birth.
Is this to say that Political Economy is as much a stranger to social progress, as astronomy is to the motion of the heavenly bodies? Certainly not. Political Economy has to do with beings which are intelligent and free,—and, as such, let us never forget, subject to error. Their tendency is towards good; but they may err. Science, then, interferes usefully, not to create causes and effects, not to change the tendencies of man, not to subject him to organizations, to injunctions, or even to advice, but to point out to him the good and the evil which result from his determinations.
Political Economy is thus quite a science of observation and exposition. She does not say to men, “I enjoin you, I counsel you, not to go too near the fire;” she does not say, “I have invented a social organization; the gods have taught me institutions which will keep you at a respectful distance from the fire.” No, Political Economy only shows men clearly that fire will burn them, proclaims it, proves it, and does the same thing as regards all other social or moral phenomena, convinced that this is enough. The repugnance to die by fire is considered as a primordial pre-existent fact, which Political Economy has not created, and which she cannot alter or change.
Economists cannot be always at one; but it is easy to see that their differences are quite of another kind from those which divide the Socialists. Two men who devote their whole attention to observe one and the same phenomenon and its effects—rent, for example, exchange, competition—may not arrive at the same conclusion, and this proves nothing more than that one of the two has observed the phenomenon inaccurately or imperfectly. It is an operation to be repeated. With the aid of other observers, the probability is that truth in the end will be discovered. It is for this reason, that if each economist were, like each astronomer, to make himself fully acquainted with what his predecessors have done, as far as they have gone, the science would be progressive, and for that reason more and more useful, rectifying constantly observations inaccurately made, and adding indefinitely new observations to those which had been made before.
But the Socialists,—each pursuing his own road, and coining [p503] artificial combinations in the mint of his own brain,—may pursue their inquiries in this way to all eternity without coming to any common understanding, and without the labours of one aiding to any extent the labours of another. Say profited by the labours of Adam Smith; Rossi by those of Say; Blanqui and Joseph Garnier by those of all their predecessors. But Plato, Sir Thomas More, Harrington, Fénélon, Fourier, might amuse themselves with organizing according to their own fancy a Republic, an Utopia, an Oceana, a Salente, a Phalanstère, and no one would ever discover the slightest affinity between their chimerical creations. These dreamers spin all out of their own imaginations, men as well as things. They invent a social order without respect to the human heart, and then they invent a human heart to suit their social order. [p504]
XXIII. EXISTENCE OF EVIL
In these last days science has retrograded and been driven back. It has been bent and twisted under the obligation imposed upon it, if I may so speak, of denying the existence of Evil under pain of being convicted of denying the existence of God.
Writers whose business it is to display exquisite sensibility, unbounded philanthropy, and unrivalled devotion to religion, have got into the way of saying, “Evil cannot enter into the providential plan. Suffering is no ordinance of God and nature, but comes from human institutions.”
As this doctrine falls in with the passions that they desire to cherish, it soon becomes popular. Books and journals have been filled with declamations against society. Science is no longer permitted to study facts impartially. Whoever dares to warn men that a certain vice, a certain habit, leads necessarily to certain hurtful consequences, is marked down as a man destitute of human feelings, without religion, an Atheist, a Malthusian, an Economist.
Socialism has carried its folly so far as to announce the termination of all social suffering, but not of all individual suffering. It has not ventured to predict that a day will come when man will no longer suffer, grow old, and die.
Now, I would ask, is it easier to reconcile with the infinite goodness of God, evil which assails individually every man who comes into the world, than evil which is extended over society at large? And then is it not a contradiction so transparent as to be puerile, to deny the existence of suffering in the masses, when we admit its existence in individuals?
Man suffers, and will always suffer. Society, then, also suffers, and will always suffer. Those who address mankind should have the courage to tell them this. Humanity is not [p505] a fine lady with delicate nerves and an irritable temperament, from whom we must conceal the coming storm, more especially when to foresee it is the only way to ensure our getting out of it safely. In this respect, all the books with which France has been inundated, from Sismondi and Buret downwards, appear to me to be wanting in virility. Their authors dare not tell the truth; nay, they dare not investigate it, for fear of discovering that absolute poverty is the necessary starting-point of the human race, and that, consequently, so far are we from being in a position to attribute that poverty to the social order, it is to the social order that we must attribute all the triumphs which we have already achieved over our original destitution. But, then, after such an avowal, they could no longer constitute themselves tribunes of the people, and the avengers of the masses oppressed by civilisation.
After all, science merely establishes, combines, and deduces facts; she does not create them; she does not produce them, nor is she responsible for them. Is it not strange that men should have gone the length of announcing and disseminating the paradox, that if mankind suffer, their sufferings are due to Political Economy? Thus, after being blamed for investigating the sufferings of society, Political Economy is accused of engendering those sufferings by that same investigation.
I assert that science can do nothing more than observe and establish facts. Prove to us that humanity, instead of being progressive, is retrograde; and that inevitable and insurmountable laws urge mankind on to irremediable deterioration. Show us that the law of Malthus and that of Ricardo are true in their worst and most pernicious sense, and that it is impossible to deny the tyranny of capital, or the incompatibility between machinery and labour, or any of the other contradictory alternatives in which Châteaubriand and Tocqueville have placed the human race; then I maintain that science ought to proclaim this, and proclaim it aloud.
Why should we shut our eyes to a gulf which is gaping before us? Do we require the naturalist or the physiologist to reason upon individual man, on the assumption that his organs are exempt from pain or not liable to destruction? ‹Pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris›; such is the declaration of anatomical science backed by universal experience. No doubt, this is a hard truth for us to receive—not less hard than the contested propositions of Malthus and Ricardo. But are we for this reason to spare the delicate sensibility which has sprung up all at once among our modern [p506] publicists, and has given existence to Socialism? Is medical science, for the same reason, to affirm audaciously that we are constantly renewing our youth and are immortal? Or, if medical science refuse to stoop to such juggling, are we to foam at the mouth, and cry out, as has been done in the case of the social sciences—“Medical science admits the existence of pain and death; it is misanthropical; it is cruel; it accuses God of being malevolent or powerless; it is impious; it is atheistical; nay, more, it creates the evil the existence of which it refuses to deny”?
I have never doubted that the Socialist schools have led away many generous hearts and earnest minds, and I have no wish to humiliate any one. But the general character of Socialism is very whimsical, and I cannot help asking myself how long such a tissue of puerilities can continue in vogue.
In Socialism all is affectation.
It affects scientific forms and scientific language, and we have seen what sort of science it teaches.
In its writings, it affects a delicacy of nerve so feminine as to be unable to listen to a tale of social sufferings; and whilst it has introduced into literature this insipid and mawkish sensibility, it has established in the arts a taste for the trivial and the horrible; in ordinary life, a sort of scarecrow fashion in dress, appearance, and deportment—the long beard, the grim and sullen countenance, the vulgar airs of a village Titan or Prometheus. In politics (where such puerilities are less innocent), Socialism has introduced the doctrine of energetic means of ‹transition›, the violence of revolutionary practices, life and material interests sacrificed ‹en masse› to what is ideal and chimerical. But what Socialism affects, above all, is a certain show and appearance of religion? This is only one of the Socialist tactics, it is true—such tactics are always disgraceful to a school when they lead to hypocrisy.
These Socialists are perpetually talking to us of Christ; but I would ask them, how it is that while they acknowledge that Christ, the innocent ‹par excellence›, prayed in His agony that “the cup might pass from Him,” adding, “Nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done,” they should think it strange that mankind at large should be called upon to exercise resignation also.
No doubt, had God willed it, He might have so arranged His almighty plans that just as the individual advances towards inevitable death, the human race might have advanced towards inevitable destruction. In that case, we should have had no choice but to [p507] submit, and science, whether she liked it or not, must have admitted the sombre social ‹dénoûment›, just as she now admits the melancholy individual ‹dénoûment›.
But happily it is not so.
There is redemption for man, and for humanity.
The one is indued with an immortal soul; the other with indefinite perfectibility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [p508]
XXIV. PERFECTIBILITY
That the human race is perfectible; that it progresses towards a higher and higher level; that its wealth is increasing and becoming more equalized; that its ideas are being enlarged and purified; that its errors, and the oppressions which these errors support, are disappearing; that its knowledge shines with brighter and brighter effulgence; that its morality is improving; that it is learning, by reason or by experience, in the domain of responsibility, the art of earning a constantly larger amount of recompense, and a constantly smaller amount of chastisement; that, consequently, evil is continually lessening, and good continually increasing;—these are conclusions which it is impossible to doubt when we scrutinize the nature of man and that intelligent principle, which is his essence, which was breathed into him with the breath of life, and warrants the scriptural declaration that man is made in the image of God.
We know too well that man is not a perfect being. Were he perfect, he would not reflect a vague resemblance of God; he would be God himself. He is imperfect, then,—subject to error and to suffering,—but, on the other hand, were he stationary, what title could he have to claim the unspeakable privilege of bearing in himself the image of a perfect being?
Moreover, if intelligence, which is the faculty of comparing, of judging, of rectifying errors, of learning, does not constitute individual perfectibility, what can constitute it?
And if the union of all individual perfectibilities, especially among beings capable of communicating to each other their acquisitions, does not afford a guarantee for collective perfectibility, we must renounce all philosophy and all moral and political science.
What constitutes man’s perfectibility is his intelligence, or the [p509] faculty which has been given to him of passing from error, which is the parent of evil, to truth, which is the generating principle of good.
It is science and experience which cause man to abandon, in his mind, error for truth, and afterwards, in his conduct, evil for good; it is the discovery which he makes, in phenomena and in acts, of effects which he had not suspected.
But to enable him to acquire this science, he must have an interest in acquiring it. In order that he should profit by this experience, he must have an interest in profiting by it. It is in the law of responsibility, then, that we must search for the means of realizing human perfectibility.
And as we can form no idea of responsibility apart from liberty; as acts which are not voluntary can afford neither instruction nor available experience; as beings capable of being improved or deteriorated by the exclusive action of external causes without the participation of choice, reflection, or free will (although this happens in the case of unconscious organized matter), could not be called perfectible, in the moral acceptation of the word, we must conclude that liberty is the very essence of progress. To impair man’s liberty is not only to hurt and degrade him; it is to change his nature; it is (in the measure and proportion in which such oppression is exercised) to render him incapable of improvement; it is to despoil him of his resemblance to the Creator; it is to dim and deaden in his noble nature that vital spark which glowed there from the beginning.
But in thus proclaiming aloud our fixed and unalterable belief in human perfectibility, and in progress, which is necessary in every sense, and which, by a marvellous correspondence, is as much more active in one direction as it is more active in all others, we must not be regarded as indulging in Utopianism, or be considered as optimists, believing “all to be for the best, in the best of worlds,” and expecting the immediate arrival of the millennium.
Alas! when we turn our regards on the world as it is, and see around us the enormous amount of mud and meanness, suffering and complaint, vice and crime, which still exist,—when we reflect on the moral action exerted on society by the classes who ought to point out to the lagging multitude the way to the New Jerusalem,—when we ask ourselves what use the rich make of their fortune, the poets of their genius, philosophers of their scientific lucubrations, journalists of the ministry with which they are invested, high functionaries, ministers of state, representatives of the people, kings, of the power which fate has placed in their hands,—when [p510] we witness revolutions like that which has recently agitated Europe, and in which each man seems to be in search of what must in the long-run prove fatal to himself and to society at large,—when we see cupidity in all shapes and among all ranks, the constant sacrifice of the interests of others to our own selfish interest, and of the future to the present,—when we see that great and inevitable moving spring of the human race, personal interest, still making its appearance only in manifestations the most material and the most improvident,—when we see the working classes, preyed upon by the parasitism of public functionaries, rise up in revolutionary convulsions, not against this withering parasitism, but against wealth legitimately acquired, that is to say, against the very element of their own deliverance and the principle of their own right and force,—when such spectacles present themselves to us on all sides, we get afraid of ourselves, we tremble for our faith in human perfectibility, the light would seem to waver, and be on the eve of extinction, leaving us in the fearful darkness of Pessimism.
But no—there is no ground for despair. Whatever be the impressions which too recent circumstances have made upon us, humanity still moves onward. What causes the illusion is that we measure the life of nations by the short span of our own individual lives; and because a few years are a long period for us, we imagine them also a long period for them. But even adopting this inadequate measure, the progress of society on all sides is visible. I need scarcely remind you of the marvels which have already been accomplished in what concerns material advantages, the improved salubrity of towns, and in the means of locomotion and communication, etc.
In a political point of view, has the French nation gained no experience? Who dares affirm that had all the difficulties through which we have just passed presented themselves half a century ago, or sooner, France would have overcome them with as much ability, prudence, and wisdom, and with so few sacrifices? I write these lines in a country which has been fertile in revolutions. Florence used to have a rising every five years, and at each rising one-half of her citizens robbed and murdered the other half. Had we only a little more imagination—not that which creates, invents, and assumes facts, but that which recalls them and brings them to mind—we should be more just to our times and to our contemporaries! What remains true, and it is a truth which no one can know better than an Economist, is this, that human progress, especially in its dawn, is excessively slow, so very slow as to give rise to despair in the heart of the philanthropist. . . . . [p511]
Men whose genius invests them with the power of the press ought, it seems to me, to regard things more nearly, before scattering amidst the social fermentation discouraging speculations which imply for humanity the alternative of two modes of degradation.
We have already seen some examples of this, when treating of population, of rent, of machinery, of the division of inheritance, etc.
Here is another, taken from M. de Châteaubriand, who merely formulates a fashionable conventionalism: “The corruption of morals and the civilisation of nations march abreast. If the last present means of liberty, the first is an inexhaustible source of slavery.”
It is beyond doubt that civilisation presents means of liberty, and it is equally beyond doubt that corruption is a source of slavery. That which is doubtful, more than doubtful,—and what for my own part I deny solemnly and formally,—is this, that civilisation and corruption march abreast. If it were so, a fatal equilibrium would be established between ‹the means of liberty› and ‹the sources of slavery›; and immobility would be the fate of the human race.
There cannot, moreover, enter into the human heart a thought more melancholy, more discouraging, more desolating, a thought more fitted to urge us to despair, to irreligion, to impiety, to blasphemy, than this, that every human being, whether he wills it or not, whether he doubts it or not, proceeds on the road of civilisation—and civilisation is corruption!
Then, if all civilisation be corruption, wherein consist its advantages? It is impossible to pretend that civilisation is unattended with moral, intellectual, and material advantages, for then it would cease to be civilisation. As Châteaubriand employs the term, civilisation signifies material progress, an increase of population, of wealth, of prosperity, the development of intelligence, the advancement of the sciences; and all these steps of progress imply, according to him, a corresponding retrogression of the moral sense.
This were enough to tempt men to a wholesale suicide; for I repeat that material and intellectual progress is not of our preparation and ordination. God himself has decreed it, in giving us expansible desires and improvable faculties. We are urged on to it without wishing it, without knowing it,—Châteaubriand, and his equals, if he has any, more than any one else. And this progress is to sink us deeper and deeper into immorality and slavery, by means of corruption! . . . . . . [p512]
I thought at first that Châteaubriand had let slip an unguarded phrase, as poets frequently do, without examining it too narrowly. With that class of writers, sound sometimes runs away with sense. Provided the antithesis is symmetrical, what matters it that the thought be false or objectionable? Provided the metaphor produces its intended effect, that it has an air of inspiration and depth, that it secures the applause of the public, and enables the author to pass for an oracle, of what importance are exactitude and truth?
I had thought, then, that Châteaubriand, giving way to a momentary excess of misanthropy, had allowed himself to formulate a conventionalism, a vulgarism dragged from the kennel. “Civilisation and corruption march abreast,” is a phrase that has been repeated since the days of Heraclitus, but it is not more true on that account.
At a distance of several years, however, the same great writer has reproduced the same thought, and in a more didactic form; which shows that it expressed his deliberate opinion. It is proper to combat it, not because it comes from Châteaubriand, but because it has got abroad, and so generally prevails.
“The material condition is ameliorated,” he says, “intellectual progress advances, and nations, in place of profiting, decay. Here is the explanation of the decay of society and the growth of the individual. Had the moral sense been developed in proportion to the development of intelligence, there would have been a counter weight, and the human race would have grown greater without danger. But it is just the contrary which happens. The perception of good and evil is obscured in proportion as intelligence is enlightened; conscience becomes narrowed in proportion as ideas are enlarged.”—‹Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe›, vol. xi. [p513]
XXV
RELATIONS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY WITH MORALS, WITH POLITICS, WITH LEGISLATION.[116]
WITH RELIGION.
A phenomenon is always found placed between two other phenomena, one of which is its ‹efficient›, and the other its ‹final› cause; [p514] and science has not done with that phenomenon as long as either of these relations remains undeveloped.
The human mind generally begins, I think, with the discovery of final causes, because they are more immediately interesting to us. No species of knowledge, besides, leads us with more force towards religious ideas, or is more fitted to make us feel in all the fibres of our heart a lively sense of gratitude for the inexhaustible goodness of God.
Habit, it is true, has so familiarized us with a great number of these ‹providential intentions›, that we enjoy them without thought. We see, and we hear, without thinking of the ingenious mechanism of the eye and of the ear. The sun, the dew, the rain, lavish upon us their useful effects, or their gentle sensations, without awakening our surprise or our gratitude. This is solely owing to the continued action upon us of these admirable phenomena. For let a final cause, although comparatively insignificant, come to be disclosed to us for the first time, let the botanist explain to us why this plant affects such or such a form, or why that other is clothed in such or such a colour, we immediately feel in our heart the unspeakable enchantment with which new proofs of the power, the goodness, and the wisdom of God never fail to penetrate us.
The region of final intentions, then, is for man’s imagination as an atmosphere impregnated with religious ideas.
But after we have perceived, or had a glimpse of the phenomenon in this aspect, we have still to study it in another relation, that is to say, to seek for its efficient cause. [p515]
It is strange, but it sometimes happens, that after having obtained the full knowledge of that cause, we find that it carries with it so necessarily the effect which we had admired at first, that we refuse to recognise in it longer the character of a final cause; and we say: “I was very simple to believe that God had provided such an arrangement with such a design; I see now that the cause which I have discovered being given (and it is inevitable), this arrangement must follow necessarily, apart from any pretended providential intention.”
It is thus that defective and superficial science, with its scalpel and its analyses, comes sometimes to destroy in our souls the religious sentiment to which the simple aspect of nature had given rise.
This is the case frequently with the anatomist and the astronomer. What a strange thing it is, exclaims the ignorant man, that when an extraneous substance penetrates into a tissue, where its presence does great injury, an inflammation and a suppuration take place, which tend to expel it! No, says the anatomist, there is nothing intentional in that expulsion. It is a ‹necessary› effect of the suppuration; and the suppuration itself is a ‹necessary› effect of the presence of an extraneous substance in our tissues. If you wish it, I shall explain to you the mechanism, and you will acknowledge yourself that the effect follows the cause, but that the cause has not been arranged intentionally to produce that effect, since it is itself the necessary effect of an anterior cause.
How I admire, says the ignorant man, the foresight of God, who has willed that the rain should not descend on the soil in a sheet, but should fall in drops, as if it came from the gardener’s watering-pot! Were it not so, vegetation would be impossible. You throw away your admiration, answers the learned naturalist; the cloud is not a sheet of water; if it were, it could not be supported by the atmosphere. It is a collection of microscopic vesicles, or minute bladders like soap-bubbles. When their density increases, or when they burst by compression, these thousands of millions of infinitesimal drops fall, growing larger in their descent by the vapour of the water which they precipitate, etc. If vegetation is benefited in consequence, it is by accident; but we must not think that the Creator amuses himself in sending us down water through the sieve of a monster watering-pot.
Ignorance, we must confess, very often imparts a certain plausibility to science, when the connexion of causes and effects is regarded in this way, by attributing a phenomenon to a final intention which does not exist, and which is dissipated before the light of superior knowledge. [p516]
Thus, in former days, before men had any knowledge of electricity, they were frightened by the noise of thunder, being able to recognise in that astounding voice, bellowing amid the storm, nothing less than a manifestation of Divine wrath. This is an association of ideas which, like many others, has disappeared before the progress of physical science. Man is so constituted, that when a phenomenon affects him, he searches for the cause of it; and if he finds out that cause, he gives it a name. Then he sets himself to find out the cause of that cause, and so he goes on until he can mount no higher, when he stops, and exclaims, “‹It is God; it is the will of God›.” This is his ‹ultima ratio›. He is arrested, however, only for the moment. Science advances, and soon this second, third, or fourth cause, which had remained unperceived, is revealed to his eyes. Then science says, This effect is not due, as we believed, to the immediate will of God, but to that natural cause which I have just discovered. And man, after having taken possession of this discovery, after having gained this step in the region of science, finds himself, so to speak, one step farther removed from the region of Faith, and again asks, What is the cause of that cause? And not finding it, he persists in the ever-recurring explanation, “It is the will of God.” And so he proceeds onwards for indefinite ages, through a countless succession of scientific revelations and exercises of faith.
This procedure on the part of mankind must appear to superficial minds to be destructive of every religious idea; for is the result of it not this, that as science advances, God recedes? Do we not see clearly that the domain of final intentions is narrowed in proportion as the domain of natural causes is enlarged?
Unhappy are they who give to this fine problem so narrow a solution. No, it is not true that as science advances, the idea of God recedes. On the contrary, what is true is that, as our intelligence increases, this idea is enlarged, and broadened, and elevated. When we discover a natural cause for what we had imagined an immediate, spontaneous, supernatural act of the Divine will, are we to conclude that that will is absent or indifferent? No, indeed; all that it proves is, that that will acts by processes different from those which it had pleased us to imagine. All that it proves is, that the phenomenon which we regarded as an accident in creation occupies its place in the universal frame; and that everything, even the most special effects, have been foreseen from all eternity by the divine prescience. What! is the idea which we form of the power of God lessened when we come to see that each of the countless results which we discover, or which escape our [p517] investigations, not only has its natural cause, but is bound up in an infinite circle of causes; so that there is not a detail of movement, of force, of form, of life, which is not the product of the great whole, or which can be explained apart from that whole.
But why this dissertation, which is foreign, as it would seem, to the main object of our inquiries? The phenomena of the social economy have likewise their efficient cause, and their providential intention. In this department, as in natural science, as in anatomy, or in astronomy, men have frequently denied the final cause precisely because the efficient cause assumes the character of an absolute necessity.
The social world abounds in harmonies, of which we can form no adequate or complete conception until the mind has remounted to causes, in order to seek their explanation, and descended to effects, to discover the destination of the phenomena. . . . .
NOTES.