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Section 8 One of the strangest phenomena of our time and one that will probably be a matter
of astonishment to our descendants is the doctrine which is founded upon this triple hypothesis,
the radical passiveness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, the infallibility of the legislator.
This is the sacred symbol of the party that proclaims itself exclusively democratic.
It is true that it professes also to be social, so far as it is democratic, it has an unlimited
faith in mankind. So far as it is social, it places mankind beneath the mud. Our political rights
under discussion is a legislator to be chosen. Oh, then the people possess science by instinct.
They are gifted with an admirable discernment. Their will is always right. The general will cannot
or suffrage cannot be too universal. Nobody is under any responsibility to society. The will and
the capacity to choose well are taken for granted. Can the people be mistaken? Are we not living in
an age of enlightenment? What are the people to be forever led about by the nose? Have they not
acquired their rights at the cost of effort and sacrifice? Have they not given sufficient
proof of intelligence and wisdom? Are they not arrived at maturity? Are they not in a state
to judge for themselves? Do they not know their own interest? Is there a man or a class who would
dare to claim the right of putting himself in the place of the people of deciding and evading for
them? No, no. The people would be free and they shall be so. They wish to conduct their own
affairs and they shall do so. But when once the legislator is duly elected, then indeed the
style of his speech alters. The nation is sent back into passiveness, inertness, nothingness,
and the legislator takes possession of omnipotence. It is for him to invent, for him to direct,
for him to impel, for him to organize. Mankind has nothing to do but to submit. The hour of
despotism has struck. And we must observe that this is decisive for the people just before so enlightened,
so moral, so perfect, have no inclinations at all, or if they have any, these all lead them downwards
towards degradation. And yet they ought to have a little liberty, but are we not assured by Mr.
Considerant that liberty leads fatally to monopoly? Are we not told that liberty is competition
and that competition according to Mr. Louis Blanc is a system of extermination for the people
and of ruination for trade? For that reason, people are exterminated and ruined in proportion as
they are free. Take for example Switzerland, Holland, England and the United States.
Does not Mr. Louis Blanc tell us again that competition leads to monopoly? And that for the same
reason, cheapness leads to exorbitant prices? That competition tends to drain the sources of
consumption and diverts production to a destructive activity. That competition forces production to
increase and consumption to decrease when it follows that free people produce for the sake of not
consuming, that there is nothing but oppression and madness among them and that it is absolutely
necessary for Mr. Louis Blanc to see to it. What sort of liberty should be allowed to men,
liberty of conscience? But we should see them all profiting by the permission to become atheists,
liberty of education, but parents would be paying professors to teach their sons immorality
and error. Besides, if we are to believe Mr. Thiers, education if left to the national liberty
would cease to be national and we should be educating our children in the ideas of the Turks
or the Hindus, instead of which, thanks to the legal despotism of the universities,
they have the good fortune to be educated in the noble ideas of the Romans. Liberty of labor?
But this is only competition whose effect is to leave all products unconsumed to exterminate the
people and to ruin the tradesmen. The liberty of exchange? Ah, but it is well known that the
protectionists have shown over and over again that a man will inevitably be ruined when he exchanges
freely and that to become rich it is necessary to exchange without liberty. Liberty of association,
but according to the socialist doctrine, liberty and association exclude each other for the liberty
of men is attacked just to force them to associate. You must see then that the socialist
Democrats cannot in conscience allow men any liberty because by their own nature they tend in
every instance to all kinds of degradation and demoralization. We are therefore left to conjecture
in this case upon what foundation at universal suffrage is claimed for them with so much
importunity. The pretensions of organizers suggest another question which I have often asked
them and to which I am not aware that I ever received an answer. Since the natural tendencies
of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the
tendencies of organizers are always good? Do not legislatures and their agents form a part of the
human race? Do they consider that they are composed of different materials from the rest of mankind?
They say that society, when levered to itself, rushes to inevitable destruction because its instincts
are perverse. They presume to stop it in its downward course and to give it a better direction.
They have therefore received from heaven intelligence and virtues that place them beyond and above
mankind. Let them show their title to this superiority. They would be our shepherds and we are to be
their flock. This arrangement presupposes in them a natural superiority, the right to which we
are fully justified in calling upon them to prove. You must observe that I am not contending against
their right to invent social combinations, to propagate them, to recommend them, and to try them
upon themselves at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose them upon us
through the medium of the law, that is, by force and by public taxes. I would not insist upon the
cabitists, the forriariists, the prudonians, the academics, and the protectionists renouncing their
own particular ideas. I would only have them renounce the idea that is common to them all,
these that are subjecting us by force to their own categories and rankings, to their social
laboratories, to their ever inflating bank, to their Greco-Roman morality, and to their commercial
restrictions. I would ask them to allow us the faculty of judging over their plans and not to
oblige us to adopt them if we find that they hurt our interests or our repugnant to our consciences.
To presume to have recourse to power and taxation, besides being oppressive and unjust,
implies further the pernicious assumption that the organized is infallible and mankind incompetent.
And if mankind is not competent to judge for itself, why do they talk so much about universal
suffrage? This contradiction in ideas is unhappily to be found also in facts, and who else the
French nation has preceded all others in obtaining its rights, or rather its political claims.
This has by no means prevented it from being more governed, and directed, and imposed upon,
and fettered, and cheated, than any other nation. It is also the one of all others,
where revolutions are constantly to be dreaded, and it is perfectly natural that it should be so.
So long as this idea is retained, which is admitted by all our politicians, and so energetically
expressed by Monsieur Louis Blanc in these words, society receives its impulse from power.
So long as men consider themselves as capable of feeling, yet passive,
incapable of raising themselves by their own discernment, and by their own energy to any
morality, or well-being, and while they expect everything from the law. In a word,
while they admit that their relations with the state are the same as those of the flock with
the shepherd, it is clear that the responsibility of power is immense. Fortune and misfortune,
wealth and destitution, equality and inequality all proceed from it. It is charged with everything,
it undertakes everything. It does everything. Therefore, it has to answer for everything.
If we are happy, it has a right to claim our gratitude, but if we are miserable, it alone must
bear the blame. Are not our persons and property in fact at its disposal? Is not the law omnipotent?
In creating the educational monopoly, it is undertaken to answer the expectations of fathers of
families who have been deprived of liberty, and if these expectations are disappointed, whose fault
is it? In regulating industry, it has undertaken to make it prosper, otherwise it would have been
absurd to deprive it of its liberty, and if it suffers whose fault is it? In pretending to adjust
the balance of commerce by the game of tariffs, it undertakes to make commerce prosper,
and if so far from prospering, it is destroyed, whose fault is it? In granting its protection
to maritime armaments in exchange for their liberty, it is undertaken to render them self-sufficient,
if they become burdensome, whose fault is it? Thus, there is not a grievance in the nation,
for which the government does not voluntarily make itself responsible. Is it any wonder that every
failure threatens to cause a revolution? And what is the remedy proposed? To extend indefinitely
the dominion of the law, i.e. the responsibility of government. But if the government undertakes to
raise and to regulate wages and is not able to do it, if it undertakes to assist all those who
are in want and is not able to do it, if it undertakes to provide work for every labor and is not
able to do it, if it undertakes to offer to all who wish to borrow easy credit and is not able to do it,
if in words that we regret should have escaped the pin of Monsieur de la Martine, quote,
the state considers that its mission is to enlighten, to develop, to enlarge, to strengthen,
to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people, and quote, if it fails in this,
is it not obvious that after every disappointment, which alas is more than probable,
there will be a no less inevitable revolution,
end of section 8.
