The Law by Frederic Bastiat
Forward
Anyone building a personal library of liberty
must include in it a copy of Frederic Bastiat's classic essay, The Law.
First published in 1850 by the great French economist and journalist,
it is as clear a statement as has ever been made
of the Original American Ideal of Government, as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence,
that the main purpose of any government is the protection of the lives, liberties and
property of its citizens.
Bastiat believed that all human beings possessed the God-given natural rights of individuality,
liberty, property.
This is man, he wrote. These three gifts from God precede all human legislation.
But even in his time, writing in the late 1840s, Bastiat was alarmed over how the law had been perverted into an instrument of what he called legal plunder.
Far from protecting individual rights, the law was increasingly used to deprive one group of citizens of those rights for the benefit of another group, and especially for the benefit of the state itself.
He condemned the legal plunder of protectionist tariffs, government subsidies of all kinds, progressive taxation, public schools, government jobs programs, minimum wage laws, welfare, usury laws, and more.
Bastiat's warnings of the dire effects of legal plunder are as relevant today as they were the day he first issued them.
The system of legal plunder, which many now celebrate as democracy, will erase from everyone's
conscience, he wrote, the distinction between justice and injustice.
The plundered classes will eventually figure out how to enter the political game and plunder
their fellow man.
and will never be guided by any principles of justice, but only by brute political force.
The great French champion of liberty also forecasts the corruption of education by the state.
Those who held government-endowed teaching positions, he wrote, would rarely criticize
legal plunder lest their government endowments be ended.
The system of legal plunder would also greatly exaggerate the importance of politics in the
Society. That would be a most unhealthy development, as it would encourage even more citizens to
seek to improve their own well-being, not by producing goods and services for the marketplace,
but by plundering their fellow citizens through politics. Bastiat was also wise enough to
anticipate what modern economists call rent-seeking and rent-avoidance behavior. These two clumsy
Policy phrases refer respectively to the phenomena of lobbying for political favors,
legal plunder, and of engaging in political activity directed at protecting oneself from
being the victim of plunder seekers.
For example, the steel manufacturing industry lobbies for high tariffs on steel, whereas
Steel-using industries, like the automobile industry, can be expected to lobby against
high tariffs on steel.
The reason why modern economists are concerned about rent-seeking is the opportunity cost
involved.
The more time, effort and money that is spent by businesses on conniving to manipulate politics,
merely transferring wealth, the less time is spent on producing goods and services which
increases wealth. Thus legal plunder impoverishes the entire society despite the fact that a
small but politically influential part of the society benefits from it. It is remarkable
in reading the law how perfectly accurate Bastiat was in describing the status of his
is Day, which, it turns out, were not much different from the statist of today or any
other day.
The French socialist of Bastiat's day espoused doctrines that perverted charity, education
and morals, for one thing.
True charity does not begin with the robbery of taxation, he pointed out.
Socialist schooling is inevitably an exercise in statist brainwashing, not genuine education,
and it is hardly moral for a large-gang government to legally rob one segment of the population,
keep most of the loot, and share a little of it with various needy individuals.
Socialists want to play God, Bastiat observed, anticipating all the future tyrants and despots
of the world who would try to remake the world in their image, whether that image would be
communism, fascism, the glorious union, or global democracy.
Bastiat also observed that socialists wanted forced conformity, rigid regimentation of
of the population through pervasive regulation, forced equality of wealth, and dictatorship.
As such, they were the mortal enemies of liberty.
Dictatorship need not involve an actual dictator.
All that was needed, said Bastiat, was the laws enacted by a congress or a parliament
that would achieve the same effect, forced conformity.
Bastiat was also wise to point out that the world has far too many great men, fathers
of their countries and so forth, who in reality are usually nothing but petty tyrants with
a sick and compulsive desire to rule over others.
The defenders of the free society should have a healthy disrespect for all such men.
Bastiat admired America and pointed to the America of 1850 as being as close as any society
in the world to his ideal of a government that protected individual rights to life,
liberty and property.
There were two major exceptions however, the twin evils of slavery and protectionist tariffs.
Frederic Bastiat died on Christmas Eve 1850 and did not live to observe the convulsions
that the America he admired so much would go through in the next 15 years and longer.
It is unlikely that he would have considered the U.S. government's military invasion
of the southern states in 1861, the killing of some 300,000 citizens, and the bombing,
burning and plundering of the regions, cities, towns, farms and businesses as being consistent
in any way with the protection of the lives, liberties and properties of those citizens
as promised by the Declaration of Independence.
Had he lived to see all of this, he most likely would have added legal murder to legal plunder
as one of the two great sins of government.
He would likely have viewed the post-war Republican Party with its 50% average tariff rates, its
massive corporate welfare schemes, and its 25-year campaign of genocide against the Plains
Indians as first-rate plunderers and traitors to the American ideal.
In the latter pages of the law, Bastiat offers the sage advice that what was really needed
was a science of economics that would explain the harmony or lack thereof of a free society
as opposed to socialism. He made a major contribution to this end himself with the publication of
his book, Economic Harmonies, which can be construed as a precursor to the modern literature
of the Austrian School of Economics. There is no substitute for a solid understanding
Combating of the market order and of the realities of politics when it comes to combating the
kinds of destructive socialistic schemes that plague de Bastiat's day as well as ours.
Anyone who reads this great essay along with other free market classics such as Henry Haslett's
Economics in One Lesson and Murray Rothbard's Power in Market will possess enough intellectual
The Law. The Law perverted. The Law, and in its wake, all the collective forces of the
nation. The Law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue
To one entirely contrary, the law become the tool of every kind of avarice instead of being
its check, the law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish.
Truly this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the
attention of my fellow citizens.
We hold from God the gift that, as far as we are concerned, contains all others—life—physical,
intellectual and moral life.
But life cannot support itself.
He who has bestowed it has entrusted us with the care of supporting it, of developing it,
and of perfecting it.
To that end, he has provided us with a collection of wonderful faculties.
He has plunged us into the midst of a variety of elements.
It is by the application of our faculties to these elements that the phenomena of assimilation
and of appropriation, by which life pursues the circle that has been assigned to it, are
Existence, faculties, assimilation. In other words, personality, liberty, property. This is man. It is of these three things that it may be said, apart from all demagogic subtlety, that they are anterior and superior to all human legislation.
It is not because men have made laws that personality, liberty and property exist.
On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty and property exist beforehand that
men make laws.
What then is law?
As I have said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful
defense.
Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person,
his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements
of life, elements each of which is rendered complete by the others, and that cannot be
understood without them.
For what are our faculties but the extension of our personality?
And what is property but an extension of our faculties?
If every man has the right of defending, even by force, his person, his liberty, and his
property, a number of men have the right to combine together, to extend, to organize a
common force, to provide regularly for this defense.
If right, then, has its principle, its reason for existing, its lawfulness in individual
right, and the common force cannot rationally have any other end or any other mission than
that of the isolated forces for which it is substituted, thus, as the force of an individual
cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty, or the property of another individual, for
For the same reason, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the
liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes.
For this perversion of force would be, in one case as in the other, in contradiction
to our premises.
For who will dare to say that force has been given to us, not to defend our rights, but
to annihilate the equal rights of our brethren?
And if this be not true of every individual force acting independently, how can it be
true of the collective force which is only the organized union of isolated forces?
Nothing therefore can be more evident than this.
The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense.
It is the substitution of collective for individual forces.
For the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what
they have a right to do, to secure persons liberties and properties, and to maintain
each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all.
And if a people established upon this basis were to exist, it seems to me that order would
prevail among them in their acts as well as in their ideas.
It seems to me that such a people would have the most simple, the most economical, the
least oppressive, the least to be felt, the most restrained, the most just, and consequently
the most stable government that could be imagined, whatever its political form might be.
For under such an administration, everyone would feel that he possessed all the fullness
as well as all the responsibility of his existence.
So long as personal safety was ensured, so long as labor was free and the fruits of labor
secured against all unjust attacks, no one would have any difficulties to contend with
in the State.
When prosperous, we should not, it is true, have to thank the State for our success.
But when unfortunate, we should no more think of taxing it with our disasters than our peasants
think of attributing to it the arrival of hail or frost.
We should know it only by the inestimable blessing of safety.
It may further be affirmed that, thanks to the non-intervention of the state in private
Affairs, our wants and their satisfactions would develop themselves in their natural order.
We should not see poor families seeking for literary instruction before they were supplied
with bread.
We should not see towns peopled at the expense of rural districts, nor rural districts at
the expense of towns.
We should not see those great displacements of capital, of labor, and of population that
that legislative measures occasion, displacements that render so uncertain and precarious the
very sources of existence, and thus enlarge to such an extent the responsibility of governments.
Unhappily, law is by no means confined to its own sphere, nor is it merrily in some
ambiguous and debatable views that it has left its proper sphere. It has done more than
It has acted in direct opposition to its proper end.
It has destroyed its own object.
It has been employed in annihilating that justice which it ought to have established,
interfacing amongst rights that limit which it was its true mission to respect.
It has placed the collective force in the service of those who wish to traffic without
Without Risk and Without Scruple, In the Persons, the Liberty and the Property of Others.
It has converted plunder into a right that it may protect it, and lawful defense into
a crime that it may punish it.
How has this perversion of law been accomplished, and what has resulted from it?
The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different causes, naked greed
and Misconceived Philanthropy.
Let us speak of the former.
Self-preservation and development is the common aspiration of all men, in such a way that
if everyone enjoyed the free exercise of his faculties and the free disposition of their
fruits, social progress would be incessant, uninterrupted, inevitable.
But there is also another disposition which is common to them.
This is to live and to develop when they can at the expense of one another.
This is no rash imputation emanating from a gloomy, uncharitable spirit.
History bears witness to the truth of it by the incessant wars, the migrations of races,
sectarian oppressions, the universality of slavery, the frauds in trade, and the monopolies
with which its annals abound.
This fatal disposition has its origin in the very constitution of man, in that primitive
and universal and invincible sentiment that urges it towards its well-being and makes
it seek to escape pain.
Man can only derive life and enjoyment from a perpetual search and appropriation, that
is from a perpetual application of his faculties to objects or from labor. This is the origin
of property. But also he may live and enjoy by seizing and appropriating the productions
of the faculties of his fellow men. This is the origin of plunder. Now, labor being in
in itself a pain, and man, being naturally inclined to avoid pain, it follows, and history
proves it, that wherever plunder is less burdensome than labor, it prevails, and neither religion
nor morality can, in this case, prevent it from prevailing.
When does plunder cease then?
When it becomes more burdensome and more dangerous than labor.
It is very evident that the proper aim of law is to oppose the fatal tendency to plunder
with the powerful obstacle of collective force, that all its measures should be in favor of
property and against plunder.
But the law is made generally by one man, or by one class of man, and as law cannot
exist without the sanction and the support of the preponderant force, it must finally
This inevitable phenomenon, combined with the fatal tendency that, we have said, exists in the heart of man, explains the almost universal perversion of law.
It is easy to conceive that, instead of being a check upon injustice, it becomes its most invincible instrument.
It is easy to conceive that according to the power of the legislator, it destroys for its
own profit, and in different degrees amongst the rest of the community, personal independence
by slavery, liberty by oppression, and property by plunder.
It is in the nature of men to rise against the injustice of which they are the victims,
When, therefore, plunder is organized by law, for the profit of those who perpetrate it,
all the plundered classes tend, either by peaceful or revolutionary means, to enter
in some way into the manufacturing of laws.
These classes, according to the degree of enlightenment at which they have arrived,
may propose to themselves two very different ends, when they thus attempt the attainment
of their Political Rights. Either they may wish to put an end to lawful plunder, or they
may desire to take part in it. Woe to the nation where this latter thought prevails
amongst the masses at the moment when they, in their turn, seize upon the legislative
power. Up to that time, lawful plunder has been exercised by the few upon the many, as
is the case in countries where the right of legislating is confined to a few hands.
But now it has become universal, and the equilibrium is sought in universal plunder.
The injustice that society contains, instead of being rooted out of it, is generalized.
As soon as the injured classes have recovered their political rights, their first thought
What is not to abolish plunder, this would suppose them to possess enlightenment which
they cannot have, but to organize against the other classes and to their own detriment
a system of reprisals as if it was necessary before the reign of justice arrives that all
should undergo a cruel retribution, some for their iniquity and some for their ignorance.
It would be impossible, therefore, to introduce into society a greater change and a greater
evil than this, the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
What would be the consequences of such a perversion?
It would require volumes to describe them all.
We must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking.
In the first place, it would efface from everybody's conscience the distinction between justice
and injustice.
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to
make them respected is to make them respectable.
When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in
and the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or of losing his respect for
the law, two evils of equal magnitude between which it would be difficult to choose.
It is so much in the nature of law to support justice that in the minds of the masses they
are one and the same.
There is in all of us a strong disposition to regard what is lawful as legitimate, so
So much so that many falsely derive all justice from law.
It is sufficient, then, for the law to order and sanction plunder, that it may appear to
many consciences just and sacred.
Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders not only in those who profit by them, but
in those who suffer by them.
If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of these institutions, it is said directly.
You are a dangerous experimenter, a utopian, a theorist, a despiser of the laws.
You would shake the basis upon which society rests.
If you lecture upon morality or political economy, official bodies will be found to
make this request to the government.
And henceforth, science be taught not only with sole reference to free exchange to liberty,
property and justice, as has been the case up to the present time, but also and especially
with reference to the facts and legislation contrary to liberty, property and justice
that regulate French industry, that in public lecterns salaried by the treasury, the professor
abstain rigorously from endangering in the slightest degree the respect due to the laws
now in force.
So that if a law exists that sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression or plunder in any
form whatever, it must not even be mentioned.
For how can it be mentioned without damaging the respect that it inspires?
No further, morality and political economy must be taught in connection with this law,
that is, under the supposition that it must be just only because it is law.
Another effect of this deplorable perversion of the law is that it gives to human passions
and to political struggles, and in general to politics, properly so called, an exaggerated
importance.
I could prove this assertion in a thousand ways, but I shall confine myself by way of
an illustration to bringing it to bear upon a subject which has of late occupied everybody's
mind, universal suffrage.
Whatever may be thought of it by the adepts of the School of Rousseau, which professes
is to be very far advanced, but which I consider 20 centuries behind, universal suffrage, taking
the word in its strictest sense, is not one of those sacred dogmas with respect to which
examination and doubt are crimes.
Serious objections may be made to it.
In the first place, the word universal conceals a gross sophism.
There are in France 36 million inhabitants.
To make the right of suffrage universal, 36 million electors should be reckoned.
The most extended system reckons only 9 million.
Three persons out of four, then, are excluded.
And more than this, they are excluded by the fourth.
Upon what principle is this exclusion founded?
Upon the principle of incapacity.
Universal suffrage then means universal suffrage of those who are capable.
In point of fact, who are the capable?
Are age, sex, and judicial condemnations the only conditions to which incapacity is to
be attached?
On taking a nearer view of the subject, we may soon perceive the reason why the right
of suffrage depends upon the presumption of incapacity, the most extended system differing
from the most restricted in the conditions on which this incapacity depends and which
constitutes not a difference in principle but in degree.
This motive is that the elector does not stipulate for himself but for everybody.
If as the Republicans of the Greek and Roman tone pretend the right of suffrage had fallen
to the lot of everyone at his birth, it would be an injustice to adults to prevent women
and children from voting.
Why are they prevented?
Because they are presumed to be incapable.
And why is incapacity a reason for exclusion?
Because the elector does not reap alone the responsibility of his vote.
Because every vote engages and affects the community at large.
I know what might be said in answer to this. I know what might be objected. But this is not the place to settle a controversy of this kind. What I wish to observe is this, that this same controversy, in common with the greater part of political questions, that agitates, excites, and unsettles the nations, would lose its significance.
is almost all its importance if the law had always been what it ought to be.
In fact, if law were confined to causing all persons, all liberties, and all properties
to be respected, if it were merely the organization of individual right and individual defense,
if it were the obstacle, the check, the chastisement, opposed to all oppression, to all plunder,
Is it likely that we should dispute much as citizens on the subject of the greater or
lesser universality of suffrage?
Is it likely that it would compromise that greatest of advantages, the public peace?
Is it likely that the excluded classes would not quietly wait for their turn?
Is it likely that the enfranchised classes would be very jealous of their privileged?
And is it not clear that the interest of all being one and the same, some would act without
much inconvenience to the others?
But if the fatal principle should come to be introduced, that under-pretensive organization,
regulation, protection or encouragement, the law may take from one party in order to give
to Another help itself to the wealth acquired by all the classes that it may increase that
of one class, whether that of the agriculturalist, the manufacturers, the ship owners, or artists
and comedians, then certainly in this case there is no class which may not try and with
reason to place its hand upon the law, that would not demand with fury its right of election
and Eligibility, and that would overturn society rather than not obtain it.
Even beggars and vagabonds will prove to you that they have an incontestable title to it.
They will say, we never buy wine, tobacco or salt without paying the tax, and a part
of this tax is given by law in perquisites and gratuities to men who are richer than
we are.
Electors make use of the law to create an artificial rise in the price of bread, meat, iron or cloth.
Since everybody traffics in law for his own profit, we should like to do the same.
We should like to make it produce the right to assistance, which is the poor man's plunder.
To effect this, we ought to be electors and legislators.
That we may organize on a large scale, alms for our own class, as you have organized on
On a large scale, protection for yours.
Don't tell us that you will take our cause upon yourselves and throw to us 600,000 francs
to keep us quiet like giving us a bone to pick.
We have other claims, and at any rate, we wish to stipulate for ourselves as other classes
have stipulated for themselves.
How is this argument to be answered?
Yes, as long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true mission, that
it may violate property instead of securing it, everybody will be wanting to manufacture
law, either to defend himself against plunder or to organize it for his own profit.
The political question will always be prejudicial, predominant and absorbing.
In a word, there will be fighting around the door of the legislative palace.
The struggle will be no less furious within it.
To be convinced of this, it is hardly necessary to look at what passes in the chambers in
France and in England.
It is enough to know how the question stands.
Is there any need to prove that this odious perversion of law is a perpetual source of
of Hatred and Discord, that it even tends to social disorganization.
Look at the United States.
There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain,
which is to secure to everyone his liberty and his property.
Therefore there is no country in the world where social order appears to rest upon a
more solid basis.
Nevertheless, even in the United States, there are two questions, and only two, that from the beginning have endangered political order.
And what are these two questions? That of slavery and that of tariffs.
That is precisely the only two questions in which, contrary to the general spirit of this republic, law has taken the character of a plunderer.
Slavery is a violation, sanctioned by law, of the rights of the person.
Protection is a violation, perpetrated by the law upon the rights of property.
And certainly it is very remarkable that, in the midst of so many other debates, this
double legal scourge, the sorrowful inheritance of the old world, should be the only one which
which can, and perhaps will, cause the rupture of the Union.
Indeed, a more astounding fact in the heart of society cannot be conceived than this.
That law should have become an instrument of injustice.
And if this fact occasions consequences so formidable to the United States, where there
There is but one exception. What must it be with us in Europe, where it is a principle,
a system? Mr. Montalembert, adopting the thought of a famous proclamation of Mr. Carlier, said,
We must make war against socialism. And by socialism, according to the definition of
Mr. Charles Dufresne, he meant plunder. But what plunder did he mean? For there are two
Two sorts, extra-legal and legal plunder.
As to extra-legal plunder, such as theft or swindling, which is defined, foreseen and
punished by the penal code, I do not think it can be adorned by the name of socialism.
It is not this that systematically threatens the foundations of society.
Besides, the war against this kind of plunder has not waited for the signal of Mr. Montalemberg
It has gone on since the beginning of the world.
France was carrying it on long before the revolution of February, long before the appearance
of socialism, with all the ceremonies of magisteries, police, gendarmerie, prisons, dungeons and
scaffolds.
It is the law itself that is conducting this war, and it is to be wished, in my opinion,
that the law should always maintain this attitude with respect to plunder.
But this is not the case.
The law sometimes takes its own part.
Sometimes it accomplishes it with its own hands in order to save the parties benefitted
the shame, the danger and the scruple.
Sometimes it places all this ceremony of magistery, police, gendarmerie and prisons at the service
of the Plunderer and treats the plundered party when he defends himself as the criminal.
In a word, there is a legal plunder and it is no doubt this that is meant by Mr. Montalembert.
This plunder may be only an exceptional blemish in the legislation of a people and in this
case the best thing that can be done is without so many speeches and lamentations to do away
Stay with it as soon as possible, notwithstanding the clamors of interested parties.
But how is it to be distinguished?
Very easily.
See whether the law takes from some persons that which belongs to them to give to others
what does not belong to them.
See whether the law performs for the profit of one citizen and to the injury of others.
An act that this citizen cannot perform without committing a crime. Abolish this law without delay.
It is not merely an iniquity. It is a fertile source of iniquities, for it invites reprisals.
And if you do not take care, the exceptional case will extend, multiply and become systematic.
No doubt the party benefited will exclaim loudly. He will assert his acquired rights.
Rights, he will say that the state is bound to protect and encourage his industry.
He will plead that it is a good thing for the state to be enriched, that it may spend
the more and thus shower down salaries upon the poor workmen.
Take care not to listen to this sophistry, for it is just by the systematizing of these
These arguments that legal plunder becomes systematized.
And this is what has taken place.
The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other.
It is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it.
Now legal plunder may be exercised in an infinite multitude of ways.
Since common infinite multitude of plans for organization, tariffs, protection, perquisites,
gratuities, encouragements, progressive taxation, free public education, right to work, right
to profit, right to wages, right to assistance, right to instruments of labor, gratuity of
credit, and so forth, and so forth.
And it is all these plans, taken as a whole, with what they have in common, legal plunder,
that takes the name of socialism.
Now socialism thus defined in forming a doctrinal body, what other war would you make against
it than a war of doctrine?
You find this doctrine false, absurd, abominable?
Refute it.
This will be all the easier, the more false, absurd and abominable it is.
Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting out of your legislation every particle
of socialism which may have crept into it.
And this will be no light work.
Mr. Montalember has been reproached with wishing to turn brute force against socialism.
He ought to be exonerated from this reproach, for he has plainly said, the war that we must
make against socialism must be one that is compatible with the law, honor and justice.
But how is it that Mr. Montalembert does not see that he is placing himself in a vicious
circle?
You would oppose law to socialism, but it is the law that socialism invokes.
It aspires to legal, not extra-legal, plunder.
It is of the law itself, like monopolist of all kinds, that it wants to make an instrument.
And when, once, it has the law on its side, how will you be able to turn the law against
it?
How will you place it under the power of your tribunals, your gendarmes, and of your prisons?
What will you do then?
You wish to prevent it from taking any part in the making of laws, you would keep it outside
the legislative palace.
In this, you will not succeed, I venture to prophecy, so long as legal plunder is the
basis of the legislation within.
It is absolutely necessary that this question of legal plunder should be determined and
there are only three solutions of it.
1. When the few plunder the many. 2. When everybody plunders everybody else.
And 3. When nobody plunders anybody.
Partial plunder, universal plunder, absence of plunder.
Amongst these we have to make our choice.
The law can only produce one of these results.
Partial Plunder
This is the system that prevailed so long as the elective privilege was partial, a system that is resorted to, to avoid the invasion of socialism.
Universal Plunder
We've been threatened by this system when the elective privilege has become universal.
The masses having conceived the idea of making law on the principle of legislators who had preceded them.
Absence of Plunder. This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, conciliation, and of good sense, which I shall proclaim with all the force of my lungs, which is very inadequate, alas, till the day of my death.
and, in all sincerity, can anything more be required at the hands of the law?
Can the law, whose necessary sanction is force, be reasonably employed upon anything beyond
securing to everyone his right?
I defy anyone to remove it from this circle without perverting it, and consequently turning
force against right.
And as this is the most fatal, the most illogical social perversion that can possibly be imagined,
it must be admitted that the true solution, so much sought after, of the social problem
is contained in these simple words, law is organized justice.
Now it is important to remark that to organize justice by law, that is to say by force, excludes
It's the idea of organizing by law or by force any manifestation whatever of human
activity, labor, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, instruction, the fine arts or religion.
For any one of these organizing would inevitably destroy the essential organization.
How, in fact, can we imagine force encroaching upon the liberty of citizens without infringing upon justice, and so acting against its proper aim?
Here I am taking on the most popular prejudice of our time. It is not considered enough that law should be just. It must be philanthropic.
It is not sufficient that it should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive exercise of his faculties applied to his physical, intellectual, and moral development.
It is required to extend well-being, instruction, and morality directly over the nation.
This is the fascinating side of socialism.
But, I repeat it, these two missions of the law contradict each other.
We have to choose between them.
A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.
Mr. Dilla-Martin wrote to me one day thus, Your doctrine is only the half of my program.
You have stopped at liberty.
I go on to fraternity.
I answered him.
The second part of your program will destroy the first.
And in fact it is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary.
I cannot possibly conceive fraternity legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed
and justice legally trampled underfoot.
Legal plunder has two roots.
One of them, as we have already seen, is in human greed. The other is in misconceived
philanthropy. Before I proceed, I think I ought to explain myself upon the word plunder.
I do not take it as it often is taken in a vague, undefined relative or metaphorical
sense. I use it in its scientific acceptation and as expressing the opposite idea to property.
When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it without his
consent and without compensation to him who has not created it, whether by force or by
artifice, I say that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated.
I say that this is exactly what the law ought to repress always and everywhere.
If the law itself performs the action it ought to repress, I say that plunder is still perpetrated,
and even in a social point of view, under aggravated circumstances.
In this case, however, he who profits from the plunder is not responsible for it.
It is the law, the lawgiver, society itself, and this is where the political danger lies.
It is to be regretted that there is something offensive in the word. I have sought in vain
for another, for I would not wish at any time and especially just now to add an irritating
word to our disagreements. Therefore, whether I am believed or not, I declare that I do
not mean to impugn the intentions nor the morality of anybody. I am attacking an idea
that I believe to be false, a system that appears to me to be unjust, and this is so
independent of intentions that each of us profits by it without wishing it, and suffers
from it without being aware of the cause.
Any person must ride under the influence of party spirit or of fear, who would call into
question the sincerity of protectionism, of socialism, and even of communism, which are
are one and the same plant in three different periods of its growth.
All that can be said is that plunder is more visible by its partiality in protectionism.
If protection were only granted in France to a single class, to the engineers for instance,
it would be so absurdly plundering as to be unable to maintain itself.
Thus we see all the protected trades combine, make common cause and even recruit themselves
in such a way as to appear to embrace the mass of the national labor.
They feel instinctively that plunder is slurred over by being generalized.
Plunder is more visible by its universality in communism.
Since it follows that, of the three systems, socialism is still the most vague, the most
undefined, and consequently the most sincere.
Be that as it may, to conclude that legal plunder has one of its roots in misconceived
philanthropy is evidently to put intentions out of the question.
With this understanding, let us examine the value, the origin, and the tendency of this
popular aspiration, which pretends to realize the general good by general plunder.
The socialists say, since the law organizes justice, why should it not organize labor,
instruction, and religion?
Why?
Because it could not organize labor, instruction and religion without disorganizing justice.
For remember that law is force and that consequently the domain of the law cannot properly extend
beyond the domain of force.
When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but
a mere negation.
They only oblige him to abstain from doing harm.
They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property.
They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others.
They hold themselves on the defensive.
They defend the equal right of all.
They fulfill a mission whose harmlessness is evident, whose utility is palpable and whose
legitimacy is not to be disputed.
This is so true that, as a friend of mine once remarked to me, to say that the aim of
the law is to cause justice to reign is to use an expression that is not rigorously exact.
It ought to be said the aim of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning.
In fact, it is not justice that has an existence of its own.
It is injustice.
The one results from the absence of the other.
But when the law, through the medium of its necessary agent force, imposes a form of labor,
a method or a subject of instruction, a creed or worship, it is no longer negative.
It acts positively upon men.
It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own will, the initiative of the
legislator for their own initiative.
They have no need to consult, to compare, to foresee.
The law does all that for them.
The intellect is for them a useless encumbrance.
They cease to be men.
They lose their personality, their liberty, their property.
Try to imagine a form of labor imposed by force that is not a violation of liberty,
a transmission of wealth imposed by force that is not a violation of property.
If you cannot succeed in reconciling this, you are bound to conclude that the law cannot
organize labor and industry without organizing injustice.
When from the seclusion of his office, a politician takes a view of society, he is struck with
the spectacle of inequality that presents itself.
He mourns over the sufferings that are the lot of so many of our brethren, sufferings
He ought perhaps to ask himself whether such a social state has not been caused by the plunder of ancient times, exercised in the way of conquest, and by plunder of more recent times, effected through the medium of the laws.
He ought to ask himself whether, granting the aspiration of all men to well-being and improvement,
the reign of justice would not suffice to realize the greatest activity of progress
and the greatest amount of equality compatible with that individual responsibility that God
has awarded as a just retribution of virtue and vice?
He never gives this a thought.
His mind turns towards combinations, arrangements, legal or factitious organizations.
He seeks the remedy in perpetuating and exaggerating what has produced the evil.
For justice apart, which we have seen is only negation, is there any one of these legal
arrangements that does not contain the principle of plunder?
You say, there are men who have no money, and you apply to the law.
But the law is not a self-supplied fountain, whence every stream may obtain supplies independently
of society.
Nothing can enter the public treasury in favor of one citizen or one class, but what other
citizens and other classes have been forced to send to it.
If everyone draws from it only the equivalent of what he has contributed to it, your law,
it is true, is no plunderer, but it does nothing for men who want money.
It does not promote equality.
It can only be an instrument of equalization as far as it takes from one party to give to
another, and then it is an instrument of plunder.
And in this life, the protection of tariffs, subsidies, right to profit, right to labor,
right to assistance, free public education, progressive taxation, gratuitousness of credit,
social workshops, and you will always find at the bottom legal plunder, organized injustice.
You say, there are men who want knowledge, and you apply to the law, but the law is not
is not a torch that sheds light that originates within itself, it extends over a society where there are men who have knowledge and others who have not, citizens who want to learn and others who are disposed to teach.
It can only do one of two things, either allow a free operation to this kind of transaction, that is, let this kind of want satisfy itself freely, or else preempt the will of the people in the matter and take from some of them sufficient to pay professors commissioned to instruct others for free.
But in this second case, there cannot fail to be a violation of liberty and property, legal plunder.
You say, here are men who are wanting in morality or religion, and you apply to the law.
But law is force, and need, I say, how far it is a violent and absurd enterprise to introduce force in these matters?
As the result of its systems and of its efforts, it would seem that socialism, notwithstanding all itself complacency, can scarcely help perceiving the monster of legal plunder.
But what does it do? It disguises it cleverly from others, and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, association.
And because we do not ask so much at the hands of the law, because we only ask it for justice, it alleges that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization and association, and they brand us with the name of individualist.
We can assure them that what we repudiate is not natural organization, but forced organization.
Association. It is not free association but the forms of association that they would impose
upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity but legal fraternity. It is not providential
solidarity but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility.
Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds government and society.
And so, every time we object to a thing being done by government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all.
We disapprove of education by the state, well then we are against education altogether.
We object to a state religion, then we would have no religion at all.
We object to an equality which is brought about by the state when we are against equality, and so forth, and so forth.
They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat because we object to the cultivation
of corn by the state.
How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain—prosperity
in a positive sense, wealth, science, religion—should ever have gained ground in the political world?
The modern politicians, particularly those of the socialist school, found their different
theories upon one common hypothesis, and surely a more strange and more presumptuous notion
could never have entered a human brain.
They divide mankind into two parts.
Men in general, except one, form the first.
The politician himself forms the second, which is by far the most important.
In fact, they begin by supposing that men are devoid of any principle of action and
of any means of discernment in themselves, that they have no initiative, that they are
inert matter, passive particles, atoms without impulse, at best a vegetation indifferent
to its own mode of existence, susceptible of assuming from an exterior will and hand
and Infinite Number of Forms, more or less symmetrical, artistic and perfected. Moreover,
every one of these politicians does not hesitate to assume that he himself is, under the names
of organizer, discoverer, legislator, instituter or founder, this will and hand, this universal
initiative, this creative power, whose sublime mission it is to gather together these scattered
Materials, that is, men, into society.
Starting from these data, as a gardener, according to his caprice, shapes his trees into pyramids,
parasols, cubes, cones, vases, espaliers, distaffs, or fans, so the socialist, following
his chimera, shapes poor humanity into groups, series, circles, sub-circles, honeycombs,
or social workshops, with all kinds of variations.
And as the gardener, to bring his trees into shape, needs hatchets, pruning hooks, saws
and shears, so the politician, to bring society into shape, needs the forces which he can
only find in the laws, the law of tariffs, the law of taxation, the law of assistance
and the law of education.
It is so true that the socialists look upon mankind as a subject for social experiments
that if, by chance, they are not quite certain of the success of these experiments, they
will request a portion of mankind as a subject to experiment upon.
It is well known how popular the idea of trying all systems is, and one of their chiefs has
has been known seriously to demand of the constituent assembly a parish with all its
inhabitants upon which to make his experiments.
It is thus that an inventor will make a small machine before he makes one of the regular
size.
Thus, the chemist sacrifices some substances, the agriculturalist some seed and a corner
of his field to make trial of an idea.
Now think of the difference between the gardener and his trees, between the inventor and his
machine, between the chemist and his substances, between the agriculturalist and his seed.
The socialist thinks, in all sincerity, that there is the same difference between himself
and mankind.
No wonder the politicians of the 19th century look upon society as an artificial production
of the legislator's genius.
This idea, the result of a classical education, has taken possession of all the thinkers and
great writers of our country.
To all these persons, the relations between mankind and the legislator appear to be the
same as those that exist between the clay and the potter.
Moreover, if they have consented to recognize in the heart of man a capability of action
and in his intellect a faculty of discernment, they have looked upon this gift of God as
a fatal one and thought that mankind, under these two impulses, tended fatally towards
ruin.
They have taken it for granted that if abandoned to their own inclinations, men would only
occupy themselves with religion to arrive at atheism, with instruction to come to ignorance
and with labor and exchange to be extinguished in misery.
Happily, according to these writers, there are some men termed governors and legislators
upon whom heaven has bestowed opposite tendencies not for their own sake only, but for the sake
of the rest of the world.
Whilst mankind tends to evil, they incline to good.
Whilst mankind is advancing toward darkness, they are aspiring to enlightenment.
Whilst mankind is drawn towards vice, they are attracted by virtue.
And this granted, they demand the assistance of force by means of which they are to substitute
their own tendencies for those of the human race.
It is only needful to open, almost at random, a book on philosophy, politics or history,
to see how strongly this idea, the child of classical studies and the mother of socialism,
is rooted in our country.
That mankind is merely inert matter, receiving life, organization, morality and wealth from
Classical Conventionalism shows us everywhere, behind passive society, a hidden power under
the names of law or legislator, or by a mode of expression which refers to some person
or Persons of Undisputed Weight and Authority, but Not Named, which moves, animates, enriches,
and regenerates mankind.
We will give a quotation from Beausuay.
One of the things which was the most strongly impressed, by whom, upon the mind of the Egyptians,
was the love of their country.
Nobody was allowed to be useless to the state.
The law assigned to every one his employment, which descended from father to son.
No one was permitted to have two professions nor to adopt another.
But there was one occupation which was obliged to be common to all.
This was the study of the laws and of wisdom.
Ignorance of religion and the political regulations of the country was excused in no condition
of Life. Moreover, every profession had a district assigned to it. By whom? Amongst good laws, one of the best things was that everybody was taught to observe then. By whom? Egypt abounded with wonderful inventions and nothing was neglected which could render life comfortable and tranquil.
Thus men, according to Bossouet, derive nothing from themselves.
Patriotism, wealth, inventions, husbandry, science, all come to them by the operation of the laws or by kings.
All they have to do is to be passive.
It is on this ground that Bossouet takes exception when Diodorus accuses the Egyptians of rejecting wrestling and music.
How is that possible, says he, since these arts were invented by Trismegistus?
It is the same with the Persians.
One of the first cares of the prince was to encourage agriculture.
As there were posts established for the regulation of the armies, so there were offices for the
superintending of rural works.
The respect with which the Persians were inspired for royal authority was excessive.
The Greeks, although full of mind, were no less strangers to their own responsibilities,
so much so that of themselves, like dogs and horses, they would not have ventured upon
the most simple gains.
In a classical sense it is an undisputed thing that everything comes to the people from without.
The Greeks, naturally full of spirit and courage, had been early cultivated by kings and colonies
who had come from Egypt.
From them they had learned the exercises of the body, foot races and horse and chariot
races.
The best thing that the Egyptians had taught them was to become docile and to allow themselves
was to be formed by the laws for the public good.
Phenelon, reared in the study and admiration of antiquity and a witness of the power of
Louis XIV, Phenelon naturally adopted the idea that mankind should be passive and that
its misfortunes and its prosperities, its virtues and its vices are caused by the external
influence that is exercised upon it by the law or by the makers of the law. Thus, in
his Utopia of Salentum, he brings the men with their interests, their faculties, their
desires and their possessions under the absolute direction of the legislator. Whatever the
subject may be, they themselves have no voice in it. The prince judges for them. The nation
and is just a shapeless mass of which the prince is the soul.
In him resides the thought, the foresight, the principle of all organization, of all
progress.
On him, therefore, rests all the responsibility.
In proof of this assertion, I might transcribe the whole of the tenth book of Telemachus.
I refer the reader to it and shall content myself with quoting some passages taken at
random from this celebrated work, to which, in every other respect, I am the first to
render justice.
With the astonishing credulity that characterizes the classics, Fenelon, against the authority
of reason and of facts, admits the general felicity of the Egyptians and attributes it
not to their own wisdom, but to that of their king's.
We could not turn our eyes to the two shores without perceiving rich towns and country
seats agreeably situated, fields that were covered every year without intermission with
golden crops, meadows full of flocks, laborers bending under the weight of fruits that the
earth lavished on its cultivators, and shepherds who made the echoes around repeat the soft
sounds of their pipes and flutes.
Happy, said Mentor, is that people who is governed by a wise king.
Mentor afterwards desired me to remark the happiness and abundance that was spread over all the country of Egypt, where 22,000 cities might be counted.
He admired the excellent police regulations of the cities, the justice administered in favor of the poor against the rich,
The good education of the children who were accustomed to obedience, labor, and the love of arts and letters.
The exactness with which all the ceremonies of religion were performed.
The disinterestedness, the desire of honor, the fidelity to men, and the fear of the gods with which every father inspired his children.
He could not sufficiently admire the prosperous state of the country.
Happy, said he, is the people whom a wise king rules in such a manner.
Fennelon's idol on Crete is still more fascinating, mentors made to say.
All that you will see in this wonderful island is the result of the laws of minus.
The education that the children receive renders the body healthy and robust.
They are accustomed from the first to a frugal and laborious life.
It is supposed that all the pleasures of sense innervate the body and the mind.
No other pleasure is presented to them but that of being invincible by virtue, that of
acquiring much glory.
There they punish three vices that go unpunished amongst other people, ingratitude, dissimulation,
and avarice.
As to pomp and dissipation, there is no need to punish these, for they are unknown in Crete.
No costly furniture, no magnificent clothing, no delicious feasts, no gilded palaces are
allowed.
It is thus that Mentor prepares his scholar to mold and manipulate, doubtless with the
most philanthropic intentions, the people of Ithaca.
And to confirm him in these ideas, he gives him the example of solentum.
So we receive our first political notions.
We are taught to treat men very much as Oliver de Ceres teaches farmers to manage and to
mix the soil. Montesquieu. To sustain the spirit of commerce it is necessary that all
the laws should favor it, that these same laws by their regulations in dividing the
fortunes in proportion as commerce enlarges them should place every poor citizen in sufficiently
Thus the laws are to dispose of all fortunes.
Although in a democracy real equality be the soul of the state, yet it is so difficult
to establish that an extreme exactness in this matter would not always be desirable.
It is sufficient that a census be established to reduce or fix the differences to a certain
point, after which it is for particular laws to equalize, as it were, the inequality by
burdens imposed upon the rich and reliefs granted to the poor.
Here again we see the equalization of fortunes by law, that is, by force.
There were in Greece two kinds of republics. One was military as Sparta, the other commercial
as Athens. In the one it was wished, by whom, that the citizens should be idle. In the other,
the love of labor was encouraged. It is worth our while to pay little attention to the extent
of genius required by these legislators, that we may see how, by confounding all the virtues,
They showed their wisdom to the world.
Lysergius, blending theft with the spirit of justice, the hardest slavery with extreme
liberty, the most atrocious sentiments with the greatest moderation, gave stability to
his city.
He seemed to deprive it of all its resources, arts, commerce, money and walls.
There was ambition without the hope of rising.
There were natural sentiments where the individual was neither child nor husband nor father.
Chastity was even deprived of modesty.
By this road, Sparta was led on to grandeur and to glory.
The phenomenon that we observe in the institutions of Greece has been seen in the midst of the
degeneracy and corruption of our modern times.
An honest legislator has formed a people where property has appeared as natural as
bravery among the Spartans. Mr. Penn is a true lysergist, and although the former had
peace for his object and the latter war, they resemble each other in the singular path upon
which they have led their people, in their influence over free men, in the prejudices
which they have overcome the passions they have subdued.
Paraguay furnishes us with another example.
Society has been accused of the crime of regarding the pleasure of commanding as the only good
of life, but it will always be a noble thing to govern men by making them happy.
Those who desire to form similar institutions will establish community of property as in
in the Republic of Plato, the same reverence as he enjoined for the gods, separation from
strangers for the preservation of morality, and make the city, and not the citizens, create
commerce.
They should give our arts without our luxury, our wants without our desires.
Vulgar infatuation may exclaim, if it likes, it is monoskew, magnificent, sublime.
I am not afraid to express my opinion, and to say, what? You have the gall to call that fine? It is frightful. It is abominable. And these extracts, which I might multiply, show that according to Montesquieu, the persons, the liberties, the property, mankind itself, are nothing but grist for the mill of the sagacity of lawgivers.
Rousseau. Although this politician, the paramount authority of the Democrats, makes the social
edifice rest upon the general will, no one has so completely admitted the hypothesis
of the entire passiveness of human nature in the presence of the lawgiver. If it is
true that a great prince is a rare thing, how much more so must a great lawgiver be?
The former has only to follow the pattern proposed to him by the latter.
This latter is the engineer who invents the machine.
The former is merely the workman who sets it in motion.
And what part have men to act in all this?
That of the machine, which is set in motion?
Or rather, are they not the brute matter of which the machine is made?
Thus, between the legislator and the prince, between the prince and his subjects, there
There are the same relations as those that exist between the agricultural writer and
the agriculturalist, the agriculturalist and the Claude.
At what a vast height, then, is the politician placed who rules over legislators themselves
and teaches them their trade in such imperative terms as the following?
Would you give consistency to the state?
Putting the extremes together as much as possible suffer neither wealthy persons nor beggars.
If the soil is poor and barren, or the country too much confined for the inhabitants, turn
to industry and the arts, whose productions you will exchange for the provisions which
you require.
On a good soil, if you are short of inhabitants, give all your attention to agriculture, which
which multiplies men, and banish the arts, which only serve to depopulate the country.
Pay attention to extensive and convenient coasts.
Cover the sea with vessels, and you will have a brilliant and short existence.
If your seas wash only inaccessible rocks, let the people be barbarous and eat fish.
They will live more quietly, perhaps better and most certainly more happily.
In short, besides those maxims which are common to all, every people has its own particular
circumstances which demand a legislation peculiar to itself.
It was thus that the Hebrews formally, and the Arabs more recently, had religion for
their principal object.
That of the Athenians was literature, that of Carthage and Tyre, commerce, of Rhodes
Naval Affairs, of Sparta, War, and of Rome, Virtue.
The author of The Spirit of Laws has shown the art by which the legislator should frame
his institutions towards each of these objects.
But if the legislator, mistaking his object, should take up a principle different from
that which arises from the nature of things, if one should tend to slavery and the other
Further to liberty, if one to wealth and the other to population, one to peace and the
other to conquests, the laws will insensibly become enfeebled, the Constitution will be
impaired, and the state will be subject to incessant agitations until it is destroyed
or becomes changed and invincible nature regains her empire.
But if nature is sufficiently invincible to regain its empire, why does not Rousseau admit
that it had no need of the legislator to gain its empire from the beginning?
Why does he not allow that by obeying their own impulse, men would of themselves apply
agriculture to a fertile district, and commerce to extensive and commodious coasts without
The Interference of a Lysergist, a Solon or a Rousseau who would undertake it at the risk
of deceiving themselves. Be that as it may, we see with what a terrible responsibility
Rousseau invests inventors, institutors, conductors and manipulators of societies. He is therefore
very exacting with regard to them.
He who dares to undertake the institutions of a people ought to feel that he can, as
it were, transform every individual who is by himself a perfect and solitary whole, receiving
his life and being from a larger whole of which he forms a part.
He must feel that he can change the constitution of man to fortify it and substitute a social
Renal and moral existence for the physical and independent one that we have all received
from nature.
In a word, he must deprive man of his own powers to give him others that are foreign
to him.
Poor human nature.
What would become of its dignity if it were entrusted to the disciples of Rousseau?
The climate, that is, the air and the soil, is the first element for the legislator. His
resources prescribe to him his duties. First, he must consult his local position. A population
dwelling upon maritime shores must have laws fitted for navigation. If the colony is located
in an inland region, a legislator must provide for the nature of the soil and for its degree
of Fertility. It is more especially in the distribution of property that the wisdom of
legislation will appear. As a general rule, and in every country, when a new colony is
founded, land should be given to each man sufficient for the support of his family.
In an uncultivated island, which you are colonizing with children, it will only be needful to
to let the germs of truth expand in the developments of reason.
But when you establish old people in a new country, the skill consists in only allowing
it those injurious opinions and customs which it is impossible to cure and correct.
If you wish to prevent them from being perpetuated, you will act upon the rising generation by
a general and public education of the children.
A prince or legislator ought never to found a colony without previously sending wise men
there to instruct the youth.
In a new colony, every facility is open to the precautions of the legislator who desires
to purify the tone and the manners of the people.
If he has genius and virtue, the lands and the men there are at his disposal, will inspire
to compare his soul with the plan of society that a writer can only vaguely trace, and
in a way that would be subject to the instability of all hypotheses, which are varied and complicated
by an infinity of circumstances too difficult to foresee and to combine.
One would think it was a professor of agriculture who was saying to his pupils, the climate
It is the only rule for the agriculturalist. His resources dictate to him his duties. The
first thing he has to consider is his local position. If he is on clay soil, he must do
so and so. If he has to contend with sand, this is the way in which he must set about
it. Every facility is open to the agriculturist who wishes to clear and improve his soil.
If he only has the skill, the manure which he has at his disposal will suggest to him
from a Plan of Operation, which a professor can only vaguely trace, and in a way that
would be subject to the uncertainty of all hypotheses, which vary and are complicated
by an infinity of circumstances too difficult to foresee and to combine.
But oh, sublime writers, deign to remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, this
This manure of which you are disposing in so arbitrary a manner are men, your equals,
intelligent and free beings like yourselves, who have received from God, as you have, the
faculty of seeing, of foreseeing, of thinking, and of judging for themselves.
Mably, he is supposing the laws to be worn out by time and by the neglect of security
and Continues Thus. Under these circumstances, we must be convinced that the bonds of government
are slack. Give them a new tension, it is the reader who is addressed, and the evil
will be remedied. Think less of punishing the faults than of encouraging the virtues
that you want. By this method, you will bestow upon your republic the vigor of youth. Through
ignorance of this, a free people has lost its liberty. But if the evil has made so much
In such a way that the ordinary magistrates are unable to remedy it effectually have recourse
to an extraordinary magistrate whose time should be short and its power considerable.
The imagination of the citizens requires to be impressed.
In this style he goes on through 20 volumes.
There was a time when under the influence of teaching like this, which is the foundation
Education of Classical Education, Everyone Was for Placing Himself Beyond and Above Mankind
for the Sake of Arranging, Organizing and Instituting It in His Own Way, Kondelac.
Take upon yourself, my lord, the character of Lysergis or of Solon.
Before you finish reading this essay, amuse yourself with giving laws to some wild people
in America or in Africa.
Teach these roving men in fixed dwellings, teach them to keep flocks, endeavor to develop
the social qualities that nature has implanted in them, make them begin to practice the duties
of humanity, cause the pleasures of the passions to become distasteful to them by punishments,
and you will see these barbarians, with every plan of your legislation, lose a vice and
gain a virtue.
All these people have had laws, but few among them have been happy.
Why is this?
Because legislators have almost always been ignorant of the object of society, which is
to unite families by a common interest.
Impartiality and law consist in two things, in establishing equality in the fortunes and
in the dignity of the citizens.
In proportion to the degree of equality established by the laws, the dearer will they become to
every citizen?
How can avarice, ambition, dissipation, idleness, sloth, envy, hatred or jealousy agitate men
who are equal in fortune and dignity, and to whom the laws leave no hope of disturbing
their equality?
What has been told you of the Republic of Sparta ought to enlighten you on this question.
No other state has had laws more in accordance with the order of nature or of equality.
It is not to be wondered at that the 17th and 18th centuries should have looked upon
the human race as inert matter, ready to receive everything, form, figure, impulse, movement
and Life from a Great Prince or a Great Legislator or a Great Genius.
These ages were reared in the study of antiquity, and antiquity presents everywhere, in Egypt,
Persia, Greece and Rome, the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their
fancy and mankind to this end enslaved by force or by imposture.
And what does this prove? That because men in society are improvable, error, ignorance,
despotism, slavery and superstition must be more prevalent in early times. The mistake
of the writers quoted above is not that they have asserted this fact, but that they have
proposed it as a rule for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Their mistake
Ludwig has been, with an inconceivable absence of discernment and upon the faith of a puerile
conventionalism, that they have admitted what is inadmissible, namely the grandeur, dignity,
morality and well-being of the artificial societies of the ancient world.
They have not understood that time produces and spreads enlightenment, and that in proportion
to the increase of enlightenment, right ceases to be upheld by force, and society regains
possession of herself.
And in fact, what is the political work that we are endeavoring to promote?
It is no other than the instinctive effort of every people towards liberty.
And what is liberty, whose name can make every heart beat, and which can agitate the world,
but the union of all liberties, the liberty of conscience, of education, of association,
of the press, of movement, of labor, and of exchange.
In other words, the free exercise for all of all the inoffensive faculties.
And again, in other words, the destruction of all despotisms, even of legal despotism,
and the reduction of law to its only rational sphere, which is to regulate the individual
right of legitimate defense or to repress injustice.
This tendency of the human race, it must be admitted, is greatly thwarted, particularly
in our country, by the fatal disposition resulting from classical teaching and common to all
All politicians of placing themselves beyond mankind to arrange, organize and regulate it
according to their fancy.
For whilst society is struggling to realize liberty, the great men who place themselves
at its head imbued with the principles of the 17th and 18th centuries think only of
of subjecting it to the philanthropic despotism of their social inventions and making it there
with docility, according to the expression of Rousseau, the yoke of public felicity as
pictured in their own imaginations.
This was particularly the case in 1789.
No sooner was the old system destroyed than society was to be submitted to other artificial
arrangements, always with the same starting point, the omnipotence of the law.
Sandjust.
The legislator commands the future.
It is for him to will for the good of mankind.
It is for him to make men what he wishes them to be.
Robespierre.
The function of government is to direct the physical and moral powers of the nation towards
the object of its institution.
The L'Ouveraine, a people who are to be restored to liberty, must be formed anew.
Ancient prejudices must be destroyed, antiquated customs changed, depraved affections corrected,
inveterate vices eradicated.
For this a strong force and a vehement impulse will be necessary.
Citizens, the inflexible austerity of Lycurgus created the firm basis of the Spartan Republic.
The feeble and trusting disposition of Salon plunged Athens into slavery.
This parallel contains the whole science of government.
Le Pelletier, considering the extent of human degradation, I am convinced of the necessity
of effecting an entire regeneration of the race, and if I may so express myself, of creating
Men, therefore, are nothing but raw material.
It is not for them to will their own improvement.
They are not capable of it.
According to Sandus, it is only the legislator who is.
Men are merely to be what he wills that they should be.
According to Robespierre, who copies Rousseau literally, the legislator is to begin by assigning
And below, Farren would teach us that it ought to have no prejudices, affections, nor wants,
but such as are authorized by the legislator.
He even goes so far as to say that the inflexible austerity of a man is the basis of a republic.
We have seen that in cases where the evil is so great that the ordinary magistrates
are unable to remedy it, Mabley recommends a dictatorship to promote virtue.
Have recourse, says he, to an extraordinary magistrate whose time shall be short and his
is power considerable. The imagination of the people requires to be impressed. This doctrine has not been neglected.
Listen to Robespierre. The principle of the Republican government is virtue and the means to be adopted during its establishment is terror.
We want to substitute in our country morality for self-indulgence, probity for honor, principles for customs, duties for decorum,
Forum, The Empire of Reason for the Tyranny of Fashion, Contempt of Vice for Contempt of
Misfortune, Pride for Insolence, Greatness of Soul for Vanity, Love of Glory for Love
of Money, Good People for Good Company, Merit for Intrigue, Genius for Wit, Truth for Glitter,
The Charm of Happiness for the Weariness of Pleasure, The Greatness of Man for the Littleness
of the Great, a magnanimous, powerful, happy people for one that is easy, frivolous, degraded.
That is to say, we would substitute all the virtues and miracles of a republic for all
the vices and absurdities of monarchy.
At what a vast height above the rest of mankind does Robespierre place himself here and observe
the arrogance with which he speaks.
He is not content with expressing the desire for a great renovation of the human heart.
He does not even expect such a result from a regular government.
No, he intends to effect it himself and by means of terror.
The object of the discourse from which this puerile and laborious mass of antithesis is
extracted was to exhibit the principles of morality that ought to direct a revolutionary
Government. Moreover, when Robespierre asks for a dictatorship, it is not merely for the
purpose of repelling a foreign enemy or putting down factions. It is that he may establish,
by means of terror and as a preliminary to the operation of the Constitution, his own
principles of morality. He pretends to nothing short of extirpating from the country, by
by means of terror, self-interest, honor, customs, decorum, fashion, vanity, the love
of money, good company, intrigue, wit, luxury and misery.
It is not until after he, Robespierre, shall have accomplished these miracles, as he rightly
calls them, that he will allow the law to regain her empire.
Truly, it would be well if these visionaries, who think so much of themselves and so little
of mankind, who want to renew everything, would only be content with trying to reform
themselves.
The task would be arduous enough for them.
In general, however, these gentlemen, the reformers, legislators and politicians, do
Do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over mankind.
No, they are too moderate and too philanthropic for that.
They only contend for the despotism, the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law.
They aspire only to make the law.
To show how universal this strange disposition has been in France, I had need not only to
have copied the whole of the works of Mabli, Reynaud, Rousseau, Fenlon, and to have made
long extracts from Bossouet and Montesquieu, but to have given the entire transactions
of the sittings of the Convention. I shall do no such thing, however, but merely refer
Boehm-Bawerk, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat, Israel Kirzner, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Friedrich Hayek, Mises Institute, Austrian School, Praxeology, Catallactics, Man Economy and State, The Theory of Money and Credit
is hostile to liberty, yet this did not prevent him from giving this lesson to his son in
his will.
To govern is to diffuse morality, education and well-being.
After all this, I hardly need show by fastidious quotations the opinions of Morelli, Babouf,
Owen, St. Simon and Fourier.
I shall confine myself to a few extracts from Louis Blanc's book on the Organization of
Labor.
In our project, society receives the impulse of power.
In what does the impulse that power gives to society consist?
In imposing upon it the project of Mr. Louis Blanc.
On the other hand, society is the human race.
The human race, then, is to receive its impulse from Mr. Louis Blanc.
It is at liberty to do so or not, it will be said.
Of course, the human race is at liberty to take advice from anybody, whoever it may be.
But this is not the way in which Mr. Louis Blanc understands the thing.
He means that his project should be converted into law and consequently forcibly imposed
by Power.
In our project, the state has only to give a legislation to labor by means of which the
industrial movement may and ought to be accomplished in all liberty.
It, the state, merely places society on an incline, that is all, that it may descend
when once it is placed there by the mere force of things and by the natural concourse of
the established mechanism.
But what is this incline?
And indicated by Mr. Louis Blanc, does it not lead to an abyss? No, it leads to happiness.
Why then does not society go there of itself? Because it does not know what it wants and
it requires an impulse. What is to give it this impulse? Power. And who is to give the
impulse to power? The inventor of the machine, Mr. Louis Blanc. We shall never get out of
The Circle, Mankind Passive and a Great Man Moving It by the Intervention of the Law.
Once on this incline, will society enjoy something like liberty? Without a doubt. And what is
liberty? Once for all, liberty consists not only in the right granted, but in the power
given to man to exercise, to develop his faculties under the empire of justice and under the
and the Protection of the Law.
And this is no vain distinction.
There is a deep meaning in it and its consequences are imponderable.
For when once it is admitted that man to be truly free must have the power to exercise
and develop his faculties, it follows that every member of society has a claim upon it
for such education as shall enable his faculties to display themselves and for the tools of
of Labor, without which human activity can find no scope. Now, by whose intervention
is society to give to each of its members the requisite education and the necessary tools
of labor, unless by that of the state? Thus, liberty is power. And what does this power
consist in possessing education and tools of labor? Who is to give education and tools
Tools of Labor, society who owes them, but whose intervention is society to give tools
of labor to those who do not possess them, by the intervention of the state.
From whom is the state to obtain them?
It is for the reader to answer this question and to notice whither all this tends.
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.
Are 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 err. 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 knows? 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 of acting for them? No, no,
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
or if they have any these all lead them downwards toward 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, whence 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 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?
But it is well known that the protectionists have shown over and over again that a man
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 a tact just to force them to associate.
We 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 universal suffrage
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 the legislators 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 left to itself, rushes to inevitable destruction because its
instincts are perverse.
They presume to stop it in its downward course and to give it 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, to try them upon themselves at their own expense
I would not insist upon the Quebecist, the Forerist, the Proudhonians, the academics and the protectionists renouncing their own particular ideas.
I would only have them renounce the idea that is common to them all, namely that of 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 of their plans and not to oblige
us to adopt them if we find that they hurt our interest or are repugnant to our consciences.
To presume to have recourse to power and taxation, besides being oppressive and unjust, implies
is 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 whilst the
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 Mr. 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
In regulating industry, it is 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
They Make Itself Responsible. Is it any wonder that every failure threatens to cause a revolution?
And what of the remedy proposed? To extend indefinitely the dominion of the law? That
is 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
are in want and is not able to do it, if it undertakes to provide work for every laborer
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 pen of Mr.
Dilla-Martin, 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? 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?
I shall now resume the subject by remarking that immediately after the economical part
of the Question. Political economy precedes politics. The former has to discover whether
human interests are harmonious or antagonistic, a fact which must be settled before the latter
can determine the prerogatives of government. Well, that immediately after the economical
part of the question and before the political part, a leading question presents itself.
It is the following. What is law? What ought it to be? What is its domain? What are its
limits? Where, in fact, does the prerogative of the legislator stop? I have no hesitation
in answering. Law is common force organized to prevent injustice. In short, law is justice.
It is not true that the legislator has absolute power over our persons and property, since
they pre-exist and his work is only to secure them from injury.
It is not true that the mission of the law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas,
our will, our education, our sentiments, our works, our exchanges, our gifts, our enjoyments.
Its mission is to prevent the rights of one from interfering with those of another in
any one of these things. Law, because it has force for its necessary sanction, can only
have the domain of force, which is justice. And as every individual has a right to have
recourse to force only in cases of lawful defense, so collective force, which is only
Only the union of individual forces cannot be rationally used for any other end.
The law, then, is solely the organization of individual rights that existed before law.
Law is justice.
So far from being able to oppress the people or to plunder their property, even for a philanthropic
Its mission is to protect the people and to secure to them the possession of their property.
It must not be said either that it may be philanthropic, so long as it abstains from all oppression.
For this is a contradiction. The law cannot avoid acting upon our persons and property.
If it does not secure them, then it violates them if it touches them.
Nothing can be more clear and simple, more perfectly defined and bounded, or more visible to every eye, for justice is a given quantity, immutable and unchangeable, and which admits of neither increase nor diminution.
Depart from this point, make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, industrial, literary or artistic, and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty, you will be upon unknown ground, in a forced utopia, or, what is worse, in the midst of a multitude of contending utopias, each striving to gain possession of the law and impose it upon you.
For fraternity and philanthropy have no fixed limits as justice has.
Where will you stop? Where is the law to stop?
One person, Mr. de Saint-Crick, will only extend his philanthropy to some of the industrial classes
and will require the law to slight the consumers in favor of the producers.
Another, like Mr. Consideron, will take up the cause of the working classes
and claim for them by means of the law at a fixed rate, clothing, lodging, food and everything necessary for the support of life.
A third, Mr. Louis Blanc, will say and with reason that this would be an incomplete fraternity and that the law ought to provide them with tools of labor and education.
A fourth will observe that such an arrangement still leaves room for inequality and that
the law ought to introduce into the most remote hamlets luxury, literature and the arts.
This is the high road to communism.
In other words, legislation will be, as it is now, the battlefield for everybody's dreams
and everybody's covetousness.
Law is Justice.
In this proposition, we represent to ourselves a simple, immovable government, and I defy
anyone to tell me whence the thought of a revolution, an insurrection, or a simple disturbance
could arise against a public force confined to the repression of injustice.
Under such a system, there would be more well-being, and this well-being would be more equally distributed.
And as to the sufferings inseparable from humanity, no one would think of accusing the
government of them, for it would be as innocent of them as it is of the variations of the
temperature.
Have the people ever been known to rise against the Court of Appeals or assail the justices
of the Peace for the Sake of Claiming the Rate of Wages, Free Credit, Tools of Labor,
the Advantages of the Tariff or the Social Workshop. They know perfectly well that these
matters are beyond the jurisdiction of the Justices of the Peace, and they would soon
learn that they are not within the jurisdiction of the law quite as much. But if the law were
to be made upon the principle of fraternity, if it were to be proclaimed that from it proceed
and all benefits and all evils, that it is responsible for every individual grievance
and for every social inequality, then you open the door to an endless succession of
complaints, irritations, troubles and revolutions.
Law is justice.
And it would be very strange if it could properly be anything else.
Is not justice right? Are not rights equal? With what show of right can the law interfere
to subject me to the social plans of M. Mimeurel, de Maloon, Thiers, or Louis Blanc, rather
than to subject these gentlemen to my plans? Is it to be supposed that nature has not bestowed
Is it for the law to make choice of one amongst so many fancies and to make use of the public force in its service?
Law is justice.
And let it not be said, as it continually is, that the law in this sense would be atheistic, individual and heartless,
What then? Does it follow that if we are free we shall cease to act? Does it follow that
if we do not receive an impulse from the law, we shall receive no impulse at all? Does it
Does it follow that if the law confines itself to securing to us the free exercise of our faculties, our faculties will be paralyzed?
Does it follow that if the law does not impose upon us forms of religion, modes of association, methods of education,
rules for labor, directions for exchange and plans for charity,
Law is justice, and it is under the law of justice.
Under the reign of right, under the influence of liberty, security, stability, and responsibility, that every man will attain to the fullness of his worth, to all the dignity of his being, and that mankind will accomplish with order and with calmness. Slowly it is true, but with certainty, the progress ordained for it.
I believe that my theory is correct, for whatever be the question upon which I am arguing, whether it be religious, philosophical, political, or economical, whether it affects well-being, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, property, labor, exchange, capital, wages, taxes, population, credit, or government.
At whatever point of the scientific horizon I start from, I invariably come to the same
thing.
The solution of the social problem is in liberty.
And have I not experience on my side, cast your eye over the globe, which are the happiest,
the most moral and the most peaceable nations, those where the law interferes the least with
with Private Activity, where the government is the least felt, where individuality has
the most scope and public opinion the most influenced, where the machinery of the administration
is the least important and the least complicated, where taxation is lightest and least unequal,
popular discontent the least excited and the least justifiable, where the responsibility
of Individuals and Classes is the most active, and where, consequently, if morals are not
in a perfect state, at any rate they tend incessantly to correct themselves, where transactions,
meetings and associations are the least fettered, where labor, capital and production suffer
the least from artificial displacements, where mankind follows most completely its own natural
of course, where the thought of God prevails the most over the inventions of men, those
in short who realize the most nearly this idea that within the limits of right all should
flow from the free, perfectible and voluntary action of man. Nothing be attempted by the
I cannot avoid coming to this conclusion that there are too many great men in the world.
There are too many legislators, organizers, institutors of society, conductors of the
people, fathers of nations and so forth and so forth.
Too many persons place themselves above mankind to rule and patronize it.
Too many persons make a trade of looking after it.
It will be answered, you yourself are occupied upon it all this time.
Very true, but it must be admitted that it is in another sense entirely that I am speaking,
and if I join the reformers, it is solely for the purpose of inducing them to relax
I am not doing, as Vocasson did with his automaton, but as a physiologist does with a human frame,
I would study and admire it.
I am acting with regard to it in the spirit that animated a celebrated traveler.
He found himself in the midst of a savage tribe, a child had just been born, and a crowd
Part of soothsayers, magicians and quacks were around it, armed with rings, hooks, and bandages.
One said, This child will never smell the perfume of a calumet unless I stretch his nostrils.
Another said, He will be without the sense of hearing unless I draw his ears down to
his shoulders.
A third said, He will never see the light of the sun unless I give his eyes an oblique
direction.
A fourth said, he will never be upright unless I bend his legs.
A fifth said, he will not be able to think unless I press his brain.
Stop, said the traveler.
Whatever God does is well done.
Do not pretend to know more than he.
And as he has given organs to this frail creature, allow those organs to develop themselves,
to strengthen themselves by exercise, use, experience and liberty.
God has implanted in mankind also all that is necessary to enable it to accomplish its
destinies.
There is a providential social physiology as well as a providential human physiology.
The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the
and the Grand Heir of Liberty. Away then with quacks and organizers, away with their rings and their chains and their hooks and their pincers, away with their artificial methods, away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their state religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions,
and their equalization by taxation. And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun, reject all systems and try liberty, liberty which is an act of faith in God and in His work.