‹1st›, ‹The natural sanction›; which is that of which I have just
been speaking—the necessary suffering or recompense which certain
acts and habits entail.
‹2d›, ‹The religious sanction›; or the punishments and rewards of
another life, which are annexed to acts and habits, according as they
are vicious or virtuous.
‹3d›, ‹The legal sanction›; or the punishments and rewards decreed
beforehand by society.
Of these three sanctions, I confess that the one which appears to me
fundamental is the first. In saying this I cannot fail to run counter
to sentiments which I respect; but I must be permitted to declare my
opinion.
Is an act vicious because a revelation from above has declared it
to be so? Or has revelation declared it vicious because it produces
consequences which are bad? These questions will probably always form
a subject of controversy between the philosophical and the religious
mind.
I believe that Christianity can range itself on the side of those
who answer the last of these two questions in the affirmative.
Christianity itself tells us that it has not come to oppose the
natural law, but to confirm it.[112] We can scarcely admit that God,
who is the supreme principle of order, should have made an arbitrary
classification of human actions, that He should have denounced
punishment on some, and promised reward to others, and this without
any regard to the effects of these actions, that is to say, to their
discordance, or concordance, in the universal harmony. [p479]
When He said, “Thou shalt not kill—thou shalt not steal,” no doubt
He had in view to prohibit certain acts because they were hurtful to
man and to society, which are His work.
Regard to consequences is so powerful a consideration with man that
if he belonged to a religion that forbade acts which universal
experience proved to be useful, or that sanctioned the observance of
habits palpably hurtful, I believe that such a religion could not be
maintained, but that it would at length give way before the progress
of knowledge. Men could not long suppose that the deliberate design
of God was to cause evil and to interdict good.
The question which I broach here has perhaps no very important
bearing on Christianity, since it ordains only what is good in
itself, and forbids only what is bad.
But the question I am now examining is this, whether in principle the
religious sanction goes to confirm the natural sanction, or whether
the natural sanction goes for nothing in presence of the religious
sanction, and should give way to the latter when they come into
collision.
Now, if I am not mistaken, the tendency of ministers of religion is
to pay little attention to the natural sanction. For this they have
an unanswerable reason: “God has ordained this; God has forbidden
that.” There is no longer any room left for reasoning, for God is
infallible and omnipotent. Although the act should lead to the
destruction of the world, we must march on like blind men, just as
we would do if God addressed us personally, and showed us heaven and
hell.
It may happen, even in the true religion, that actions in themselves
innocent are forbidden by Divine authority. To exact interest for
money, for example, has been pronounced sinful. Had mankind given
obedience to that prohibition, the race would long since have
disappeared from the face of the earth. For without interest the
accumulation of capital is impossible; without capital there can
be no co-operation of anterior and present labour; without this
co-operation there can be no society; and without society man cannot
exist.
On the other hand, on examining the subject of interest more
nearly, we are convinced that not only is it useful in its general
effects, but that there is in it nothing contrary to charity and
truth—certainly not more than there is in the stipend of a minister
of religion, and less than in certain perquisites belonging to his
office.
Thus, all the power of the Church has not been able for an [p480]
instant to supersede, in this respect, the nature of things. The
most which has been accomplished is to cause to be disguised one of
the forms, and that the least usual form, of exacting interest, in a
number of very trifling transactions.
In the same way, as regards precepts; when the Gospel says, “Unto
him who smiteth thee on the one cheek, offer also the other,”
it gives a precept which, if taken literally, would destroy the
right of legitimate defence in the individual, and consequently in
society. Now, without this right, the existence of the human race is
impossible.
And what has happened? For eighteen hundred years this saying has
been repeated as a mere conventionalism.
But there is a still graver consideration. There are false religions
in the world. These necessarily admit precepts and prohibitions
which are in antagonism with the natural sanctions attached to
certain acts. Now, of all the means which have been given us to
distinguish, in a matter so important, the true from the false, that
which emanates from God from that which proceeds from imposture,
none is more certain, more decisive, than an examination of the good
or bad consequences which a doctrine is calculated to have on the
advancement and progress of mankind—‹a fructibus eorum cognoscetis
eos›.
‹Legal sanction.›—Nature having prepared a system of punishments and
rewards, in the shape of the effects which necessarily proceed from
each act and from each habit, what is the province of human law?
There are only three courses it can take—to allow Responsibility to
act, to chime in with it, or to oppose it.
It seems to me beyond doubt that when a legal sanction is brought
into play, it ought only to be to give more force, regularity,
certainty, and efficacy to the natural sanction. These two powers
should co-operate, and not run counter to each other.
For example, if fraud is in the first instance profitable to him who
has recourse to it, in the long-run it is more frequently fatal to
him; for it injures his credit, his honour, and his reputation. It
creates around him distrust and suspicion. It is, besides, always
hurtful to the man who is the victim of it. Finally, it alarms
society, and obliges it to employ part of its force in expensive
precautions. The sum of evil, then, far exceeds the sum of good. This
is what constitutes natural Responsibility, which acts constantly
as a preventive and repressive check. We can understand, however,
that the community does not choose to depend altogether on the slow
action of necessary responsibility, and judges it fit to add a legal
sanction to the natural sanction. In [p481] that case, we may say
that the legal sanction is only the natural sanction organized and
reduced to rule. It renders punishment more immediate and more
certain; it gives more publicity and authenticity to facts; it
surrounds the suspected party with guarantees, and affords him a
regular opportunity to exculpate himself if there be room for it; it
rectifies the errors of public opinion, and calms down individual
vengeance by substituting for it public retribution. In fine—and this
perhaps is the essential thing—it does not destroy the lessons of
experience.
We cannot, then, say that the legal sanction is illogical in
principle, when it advances alongside the natural sanction and
concurs in the same result. It does not follow, however, that the
legal sanction ought in every case to be substituted for the natural
sanction, and that human law is justified by the consideration alone
that it acts in the sense of Responsibility.
* * * * *
The artificial distribution of punishments and rewards includes
in itself, and at the expense of the community, an amount of
inconvenience which it is necessary to take into account. The
machinery of the legal sanction comes from men, is worked by men, and
is costly.
Before submitting an action or a habit to organized repression, there
is always this question to be asked:—
Does the excess of good which is obtained by the addition of legal
repression to natural repression compensate the evil which is
inherent in the repressive machinery?
In other words, is the evil of artificial repression greater or less
than the evil of impunity?
In the case of theft, of murder, of the greater part of crimes and
delicts, the question admits of no doubt. Every nation of the earth
represses these crimes by public force.
But when we have to do with a habit which it is difficult to account
for, and which may spring from moral causes of delicate appreciation,
the question is different, and it may very well be that, although
this habit is universally esteemed hurtful and vicious, the law
should remain neuter, and hand it over to natural responsibility.
In the first place, this is the course which the law ought to take in
the case of an action or a habit which is doubtful, which one part of
the population thinks good and another part bad. You think me wrong
in following the Catholic ritual; I think you wrong in adopting the
Lutheran faith. Let God judge of that. Why should I aim a blow at
you, or why should you aim a blow [p482] at me? If it is not right
that we should strike at each other, how can it be right that we
should delegate a third party, the depositary of the public force, to
chastise one of us for the satisfaction of the other?
You allege that I am wrong in teaching my child the moral and natural
sciences; I believe that you are wrong in teaching your child Greek
and Latin exclusively. Let us act on both sides according to our
feeling of what is right. Let our families be acted on by the law of
Responsibility. That law will punish the one who is wrong. Do not
invoke human law, which may punish the one who is right.
You assert that I would do better to pursue such or such a career,
to work according to your process, to employ an iron in place of a
wooden plough, to sow thin in place of sowing thick, to purchase
in the East rather than in the West. I maintain just the contrary.
I have made all my calculations; and surely I am more interested
than you in not falling into any mistake in matters upon the right
ordering of which my welfare, my existence, and the happiness
of my family depend, while in your case they interest only your
‹amour-propre› and the credit of your systems. Give me as much
advice as you please, but constrain me to nothing. I decide upon ‹my
own proper risk and peril›, and surely that is enough without the
tyrannical intervention of law.
We see that, in almost all the important actions of life, it is
necessary to respect free will, to rely on the individual judgment
of men, on that inward light which God has given them for their
guidance, and after that to leave Responsibility to do its own work.
The intervention of law in analogous cases, over and above the very
great inconvenience of opening the way equally to error and to truth,
has the still greater inconvenience of paralyzing intelligence
itself, of extinguishing that light which is the inheritance of
humanity and the pledge of progress.
But even when an action, a habit, a practice is acknowledged by
public good sense to be bad, vicious, and immoral, when it is so
beyond doubt; when those who give themselves up to it are the first
to blame themselves,—that is not enough to justify the intervention
of law. As I have already said, it is necessary also to know if, in
adding to the bad consequences of this vice the bad consequences
inherent in all legal repression, we do not produce, in the long-run,
a sum of evil which exceeds the good which the legal sanction adds to
the natural sanction.
We might examine, for instance, the evils which would result [p483]
from the application of the legal sanction to the repression of
idleness, prodigality, avarice, egotism, cupidity, ambition.
Let us take the case of idleness.
This is a very natural inclination, and there are not wanting men
who join the chorus of the Italians when they celebrate the ‹dolce
far niente›, and of Rousseau, when he says, ‹Je suis paresscux avec
délices›. We cannot doubt, then, that idleness is attended with a
certain amount of enjoyment. Were it not so, in fact, there would be
no idleness in the world.
And yet there flows from this inclination a host of evils, so much so
that the wisdom of nations has embodied itself in the proverb that
‹Idleness is the parent of every vice›.
The evils of idleness infinitely surpass the good; and it is
necessary that the law of Responsibility should act in this matter
with some energy, either as a lesson or as a spur, seeing that
it is in fact by labour that the world has reached the state of
civilisation which it has now attained.
Now, considered either as a lesson or as a spur to action, what would
a legal sanction add to the providential sanction? Suppose we had
a law to punish idleness. In what precise degree would such a law
quicken the national activity?
If we could find this out, we should have an exact measure of the
benefit resulting from the law. I confess I can form no idea of
this part of the problem. But we must ask, at what price would this
benefit, whatever it were, be purchased; and surely little reflection
is needed in order to see that the certain inconveniences of legal
repression would far exceed its problematical advantages.
In the first place, there are in France thirty-six millions of
inhabitants. It would be necessary to exercise over them all a
rigorous ‹surveillance›, to follow them into their fields, their
workshops, to their domestic circles. Think of the number of
functionaries, the increase of taxes, etc., which would be the result.
Then, those who are now industrious—and the number, thank God, is
great—would be, no less than the idle, subjected to this intolerable
inquisition. It is surely an immense inconvenience to subject a
hundred innocent people to degrading measures, in order to punish one
guilty person whom nature has herself taken it in hand to chastise.
And then, when does idleness begin? In the case of each man
brought to justice, the most minute and delicate inquiries would
be necessary. Was the accused really idle, or did he merely take
[p484] necessary repose? Was he sick, or was he meditating, or was
he saying his prayers, etc.? How could we appreciate all those shades
of difference? Did he work harder and longer in the morning in order
to have a little more time at his disposal in the evening? How many
witnesses, judges, juries, policemen, would be needed, how much
resistance, espionage, and hatred would be engendered! . . . . .
Next we should have the chapter of judicial blunders. How great an
amount of idleness would escape! and, in return, how many industrious
people would go to redeem in prison the inactivity of a day by the
inactivity of a month!
With these consequences and many others before our eyes, we say, Let
natural Responsibility do its own work. And we do well in saying so.
The Socialists, who never decline to have recourse to despotism
in order to accomplish their ends—for the end is everything
with them—have branded Responsibility under the name of
‹individualism›,—and have then tried to annihilate it, and absorb it
in the sphere of action of a ‹solidarity› extended beyond all natural
bounds.
The consequences of this perversion of the two great springs of
human perfectibility are fatal. There is no longer any dignity, any
liberty, for man. For, from the moment that the man who acts is
not personally answerable for the good or bad consequences of his
actions, his right to act singly and individually no longer exists.
If each movement of the individual is to reflect back the series of
its effects on society at large, the initiative of each such movement
can no longer be left to the individual—it belongs to society. The
community alone must decide all, and regulate all,—education, food,
wages, amusements, locomotion, affections, families, etc. Now, the
law is the voice of Society; the law is the legislator. Here, then,
we have a flock and a shepherd,—less than that even, inert matter,
and a workman. We see, then, to what point the suppression of
Responsibility and of individualism would lead us.
To conceal this frightful design from the eyes of the vulgar, it
was necessary to flatter their selfish passions by declaiming
against egotism. To the suffering classes Socialism says, “Do not
trouble yourselves to examine whether your sufferings are to be
ascribed to the law of Responsibility. There are fortunate people
in the world, and in virtue of the law of Solidarity they ought to
share their prosperity with you.” And for the purpose of paving the
way to the degrading level of a factitious, official, legal, con
[p485] strained, and unnatural Solidarity, they erect spoliation
into a system, they twist all our notions of justice, and they
exalt that individualist sentiment, which they were thought to have
proscribed, up to the highest point of power and perversity. Their
whole system is thus of a piece,—negation of the harmonies which
spring from liberty in the principle,—despotism and slavery in the
result,—immorality in the means.
* * * * *
Every effort to divert the natural course of responsibility is a
blow aimed at justice, at liberty, at order, at civilisation, and at
progress.
‹At justice.› An act or a habit being assumed to exist, its good
or bad consequences must follow necessarily. Were it possible,
indeed, to suppress these consequences, there would doubtless be
some advantage in suspending the action of the natural law of
responsibility. But the only result to which a written law could lead
would be that the good effects of a bad action would be reaped by the
author of that action, and that its bad effects would fall back on a
third party, or upon the community; which has certainly the special
aspect of injustice.
Thus, modern societies are constituted on the principle that the
father of a family should rear and educate his children. And it
is this principle which restrains within just limits the increase
and distribution of population; each man acting under a sense of
responsibility. Men are not all indued with the same amount of
foresight; and[113] in large towns improvidence is allied with
immorality. We have nowadays a regular budget, and an administration,
for the purpose of collecting children abandoned by their parents;
no inquiry discourages this shameful desertion, and a constantly
increasing number of destitute children inundates our poorer
districts.
Here, then, we have a peasant who marries late in life, in order not
to be overburdened with a family, obliged to bring up the children of
others. He will not inculcate foresight on his son. Another lives in
continence, and we see him taxed to bring up a set of bastards. In a
religious point of view, his conscience is tranquil, but in a human
point of view he must call himself a fool. . . . . .
We do not pretend here to enter on the grave question of public
[p486] charity, we wish only to make this essential observation,
that the more a State is centralized, the more that it turns natural
responsibility into factitious solidarity, the more it takes away
from consequences (which thenceforth affect those who have no
connexion with their cause) their providential character of justice,
chastisement, and preventive restraint.
When Government cannot avoid charging itself with a service
which ought to remain within the domain of private activity, it
ought at least to allow the responsibility to rest as nearly as
possible where it would naturally fall. Thus, in the question of
foundling hospitals, the principle being that the father and mother
should bring up the child, the law should exhaust every means of
endeavouring to enforce this. Failing the parents, this burden should
fall on the commune; and failing the commune, on the department. Do
you desire to multiply foundlings ‹ad infinitum›? Declare that the
State will take charge of them. It would be still worse if France
should undertake to maintain the children of the Chinese, and ‹vice
versa›. . . . . .
It is, in truth, a singular thing that we should be always
endeavouring to make laws to check the evils of responsibility! Will
it never be understood that we do not annihilate these evils—we only
turn them into a new channel? The result is one injustice the more,
and one lesson the less. . . . . .
How is the world to be improved if it be not by every man learning
to discharge his duty better? And will each man not discharge his
duties better in proportion as he has more to suffer by neglecting
or violating them? If social action is to be mixed up in the work of
responsibility, it ought to be in order to second it, not to thwart
it, to concentrate its effects, not to abandon them to chance.
It has been said that opinion is the mistress of the world.
Assuredly, in order that opinion should have its proper sway it
is necessary that it should be enlightened; and opinion is so
much more enlightened in proportion as each man who contributes
to form it perceives more clearly the connexion of causes and
effects. Now nothing leads us to perceive this connexion better than
experience, and experience, as we know, is personal, and the fruit of
responsibility.
In the natural play, then, of this great law of responsibility we
have a system of valuable teaching with which it is very imprudent to
tamper.
If, by ill-considered combinations, you relieve men from
responsibility for their actions, they may still be taught by
theory—but [p487] no longer by experience. And I doubt if
instruction which has never been sanctioned and confirmed by
experience is not more dangerous than ignorance itself. . . . . .
The ‹sense of responsibility› is eminently capable of improvement.
This is one of the most beautiful moral phenomena. There is nothing
which we admire more in a man, in a class, in a nation, than the
feeling of responsibility. It indicates superior moral culture, and
an exquisite sensibility to the awards of public opinion. It may be,
however, that the sense of responsibility is highly developed in
one thing and very little in another. In France, among the educated
classes, one would die of shame to be caught cheating at play or
addicting oneself to solitary drinking. These things are laughed
at among the peasants. But to traffic in political rights, to make
merchandise of his vote, to be guilty of inconsistency, to cry out by
turns ‹Vive le Roi! Vive la Ligue!› as the interest of the moment may
prompt, these are things which our manners do not brand with shame.
The development of the sense of responsibility may be much aided by
female intervention. . . . . .
Females are themselves extremely sensible of the feeling of
responsibility. . . . . . It rests with them to create this ‹force
moralisatrice› among the other sex; for it is their province to
distribute praise and blame effectively. Why, then, do they not do
so? because they are not sufficiently acquainted with the connexion
between causes and effects in the moral world. . . . . .
The science of morals is the science of all, but especially of the
female sex, for they form the manners of a nation. . . . . . [p488]
XXI.
SOLIDARITY.
If man were perfect, if he were infallible, society would present
a very different harmony from that which is the subject of our
inquiries. Ours is not the society of Fourier. It does not exclude
evil; it admits dissonances; only we assert that it does not cease to
be harmony if these dissonances pave the way to concord, and bring us
back to it.
Our point of departure is that man is fallible, and that God has
given him free will; and with the faculty of choosing, that of
erring, of mistaking what is false for what is true, of sacrificing
the future to the present, of giving way to unreasonable desires,
etc. . . . .
Man errs. But every act, every habit has its consequences.
By means of Responsibility, as we have seen, these consequences fall
back on the author of the act. A natural concatenation of rewards or
punishments, then, attracts him towards good, or repels him from evil.
Had man been destined to a solitary life, and to solitary labour,
Responsibility would have been his only law.
But he is differently placed; he is sociable ‹by destination›.
It is not true, as Rousseau has said, that man is naturally a
‹perfect and solitary whole›, and that the will of the lawgiver has
transformed him into a fraction of a greater ‹whole›. The family,
the province, the nation, the human race, are aggregates with which
man has ‹necessary› relations. Hence it follows that the actions
and the habits of the individual produce, besides the consequences
which fall back upon himself, other good or bad consequences which
extend themselves to his fellow-men. This is what we term the law of
‹Solidarity›, which is a sort of ‹collective Responsibility›.
This idea of Rousseau that the legislator has invented society—an
idea false in itself—has been injurious in this respect, that it has
led men to think that Solidarity is of legislative creation, and we
[p489] shall immediately see that modern legislators have based upon
this doctrine their efforts to subject society to an ‹artificial
solidarity›, acting in an inverse sense to ‹natural solidarity›. In
everything, the principle of these great manipulators of the human
race is to set up their own work in room of the work of God, which
they disown.
* * * * *
Our first task is to prove undeniably the natural existence of the
law of ‹Solidarity›.
In the eighteenth century they did not believe in it. They adhered to
the doctrine of the personality of faults. The philosophers of the
last century, engaged above all in the reaction against Catholicism,
would have feared, by admitting the principle of Solidarity, to open
a door to the doctrine of ‹original sin›. Every time Voltaire found
in the Scriptures a man bearing the punishment of another, he said
ironically, “This is frightful, but the justice of God is not that of
man.”
We are not concerned here to discuss ‹original sin›. But what
Voltaire laughed at is nevertheless a fact, which is not less
incontestable than it is mysterious. The law of Solidarity makes its
appearance so frequently and so strikingly, in the individual and
in the masses, in details and in the aggregate, in particular and
in general facts, that to fail to recognise it implies either the
blindness of sectarianism or the zeal of embittered controversy.
The first rule of all human justice is to concentrate the punishment
of an action on its author, in virtue of the principle that faults
are personal. But this law, sacred as regards individuals, is not the
law of God, or even the law of society.
Why is this man rich? Because his father was active, honest,
industrious, and economical. The father practised virtue; the son
reaps the rewards.
Why is this other man always suffering, sick, feeble, timorous, and
wretched? Because his father, endowed with a powerful constitution,
abused it by debauchery and excess. To the guilty fall the agreeable
consequences of vice, to the innocent fall its fatal consequences.
There exists not a man upon this earth whose condition has not
been determined by thousands of millions of facts in which his own
determinations have had no part. What I complain of to-day was
perhaps caused by the caprice of my great-grandfather, etc.
Solidarity manifests itself on a greater scale still, and at
distances which are still more inexplicable, when we consider the
[p490] relations of divers nations, or of different generations of
the same people.
Is it not strange that the eighteenth century was so occupied with
intellectual or material works of which we are now enjoying the
benefit? Is it not marvellous that we ourselves should make such
efforts to cover the country with railways, on which none of us
perhaps will ever travel? Who can fail to recognise the profound
influence of our old revolutions on the events of our own time? Who
can foresee what an inheritance of peace or of discord our present
discussions may bequeath to our children?
Look at the public loans. We make war,—we obey savage passions,—we
throw away by these means valuable power; and we find means of laying
the scourge of all this destruction on our children, who may haply
hold war in abhorrence, and be unable to understand our passions and
hatreds.
Cast your eyes upon Europe; contemplate the events which agitate
France, Germany, Italy, and Poland, and say if the law of
‹Solidarity› is a chimerical law.
There is no need to carry this enumeration farther. In order to
prove undeniably the existence of the law, it is enough that the
action of one man, of one people, of one generation, exerts a certain
influence upon another man, another people, or another generation.
Society at large is only an aggregate of solidarities which cross and
overlap one another. This results from the communicable nature of
human intelligence. Conversation, literature, discoveries, sciences,
morals, etc., are all examples of this. All these unperceived
currents by which one mind corresponds with another, all these
efforts without visible connexion, the resulting force of which
nevertheless pushes on the human race towards an equilibrium, towards
an average level which is always rising—all that vast treasury of
utilities and of acquired knowledge which each may draw upon without
diminishing it, or augment without being aware of it,—all this
interchange of thoughts, of productions, of services, and of labour,
of good and evil, of virtue and vice, which makes the human family
one grand whole, and imparts to thousands of millions of ephemeral
existences a common, a universal, a continuous life,—all this is
‹Solidarity›.
Naturally, then, and to a certain extent, there is an incontestable
Solidarity among men. In other words, Responsibility is not
exclusively personal, but is shared and divided. Action emanates from
individuality; consequences are spread over the community.
We must remark that it is in the nature of every man ‹to desire
[p491] to be happy›. You may say that I am extolling egotism
if you will; I extol nothing; I show, I prove undeniably, the
existence of an innate universal sentiment, which can never cease
to exist,—personal interest, the desire for happiness, and the
repugnance to pain.
Hence it follows that the individual is led so to order his conduct
that the good consequences of his actions accrue to himself, while
the bad effects fall upon others. He endeavours to spread these bad
consequences over the greatest possible number of men, in order that
they may be less perceived, and call forth less reaction.
But opinion, ‹that mistress of the world›, the daughter of
solidarity, brings together all those scattered grievances, and
collects all aggrieved interests into a formidable resisting mass.
When a man’s habits become injurious to those who live around
him, they call forth a feeling of repulsion. We judge such habits
severely. We denounce them, we brand them; and the man who gives
himself up to them becomes an object of distrust, of contempt, and of
abhorrence. If he reap some advantages, they are soon far more than
compensated by the sufferings which public aversion accumulates on
his head. To the troublesome consequences which a bad habit always
entails in virtue of the law of ‹Responsibility›, there come to be
added other consequences still more grievous in virtue of the law of
‹Solidarity›.
Our contempt for the man soon extends to the habit, to the vice; and
as the want of consideration is one of our most powerful springs of
action, it is clear that solidarity, by the reaction which it brings
to bear against vicious acts, tends to restrain and to prevent them.
Solidarity, then, like Responsibility, is a ‹progressive force›;
and we see that, in relation to the author of the act, it resolves
itself, if I may so speak, into ‹repercussive or reflected
responsibility›; that it is still a system of reciprocal rewards and
punishments, admirably fitted to circumscribe evil, to extend good,
and to urge on mankind on the road of progress.
But in order that it should operate in this way,—in order that those
who benefit or suffer from an action which is not their own should
react upon its author by approbation or disapprobation, by gratitude
or resistance, by esteem, affection, praise, or blame, hatred or
vengeance,—one condition is indispensable; and that condition is,
that the connecting link between the act and all its effects should
be known and appreciated.
When the public is mistaken in this respect, the law fails in its
design. [p492]
An act is hurtful to the masses; but the masses are convinced that
this act is advantageous to them. What is the consequence? The
consequence is, that instead of reacting against it, in place of
condemning it, and by that means restraining it, the public exalt it,
honour it, extol it, and repeat it.
Nothing is more frequent, and here is the reason of it:
An act produces on the masses not only an effect, but a series of
effects. Now it frequently happens that the primary effect is a
local good, visible and tangible, whilst the ulterior effects set
a-filtering through the body politic evils which are difficult to
discover or to connect with their cause.
War is an example of this. In the infancy of society, we do not
perceive all the consequences of war. And, to say truth, in a state
of civilisation in which there is a less amount of anterior labour
(capital) exposed to destruction, less science and money devoted to
the machinery of war, etc., these consequences are less prejudicial
than they afterwards become. We see only the first campaign, the
booty which follows victory, the intoxication of triumph. At
that stage, war and warriors are very popular. Then we see the
enemy, having become conqueror in his turn, burning down houses
and harvests, levying contributions, and imposing laws. In these
alternations of success and misfortune, we see generations of men
annihilated, agriculture crushed, and two nations impoverished. We
see the most important portion of the people contemning the arts of
peace, turning their arms against the institutions of their country,
serving as the tools of despotism, employing their restless energy
in sedition and civil discord, and creating barbarism and solitude
at home, as they had formerly done among their neighbours. Do we
then pronounce war to be plunder upon a great scale? . . . No; we
see its effects without desiring to understand its cause; and when
this people, in a state of decadence, shall be invaded in its turn
by a swarm of conquerors, centuries after the catastrophe, grave
historians will relate that the nation fell because the people had
become enervated by peace, because they had forgotten the art of war
and the austere virtues of their ancestors.
I could point out the same illusions in connexion with the system of
slavery. . . . .
The same thing is true of religious errors. . . . .
In our own day, the ‹régime› of prohibition gives rise to the same
fallacy. . . . .
To bring back public opinion, by the diffusion of knowledge and
the profound appreciation of causes and effects, into that [p493]
intelligent state in which bad tendencies come to be branded, and
prejudicial measures opposed, is to render a great service to one’s
country. When public opinion, deceived and misled, honours what is
worthy of contempt, contemns what is honourable, punishes virtue
and rewards vice, encourages what is hurtful and discourages what
is useful, applauds a lie and smothers truth under indifference
or insult, a nation turns its back upon progress, and can only be
reclaimed by terrible lessons and catastrophes.
We have indicated elsewhere the gross misuse which certain Socialist
schools have made of the word Solidarity. . . . .
Let us now see in what spirit human laws should be framed.
It seems to me that here there can be no room for doubt. Human law
should coincide with the natural law. It should facilitate and
ensure the just retribution of men’s acts; in other words, it should
circumscribe solidarity, and organize reaction in order to enforce
responsibility. The law can have no other object than to restrain
vicious actions and to multiply virtuous ones, and for that purpose
it should favour the just distribution of rewards and punishments,
so that the bad effects of an act should be concentrated as much as
possible on the person who commits it. . . . .
In acting thus, the law conforms itself to the nature of things;
solidarity induces a reaction against a vicious act, and the law only
regulates that reaction. . . . .
* * * * *
The law thus contributes to progress: The more rapidly it brings
back the bad effect of the act upon the agent, the more surely it
restrains the act itself.
To give an example: Violence is attended with pernicious
consequences. Among savages the repression of violence is left to the
natural course of things; and what happens? It provokes a terrible
reaction. When a man has committed an act of violence against another
man, an inextinguishable desire of vengeance is lighted up in the
family of the injured party, and is transmitted from generation to
generation. The law interferes; and what ought it to do? Should it
limit itself to stifle the desire for vengeance, to repress it, to
punish it? It is clear that this would be to encourage violence,
by sheltering it from reprisals. This is not, then, what the law
should do. It ought to substitute itself, so to speak, for the spirit
of vengeance, by organizing in its place a reaction against the
violence. It should say to the injured family, “I charge myself with
the repression of the act you complain of.” When the whole tribe
considers itself as injured and menaced, the [p494] law inquires
into the grievance, interrogates the guilty party, makes sure that
there is no error as to the fact and as to the person, and thus
represses with regularity and certainty an act which would have been
punished irregularly.[114] . [p495]
XXII.
SOCIAL MOTIVE FORCE.
It belongs to no human science to assign the ultimate reason of
things.
Man suffers; society suffers. We ask why? This is to ask why God has
been pleased to indue man with sensibility and free will. As regards
this, no one knows more than the revelation in which he has faith has
taught him.
But whatever may have been the designs of God, what human science can
take as its point of departure is a positive fact, namely, that man
has been created ‹free› and indued with ‹feeling›.
This is so true that I defy those who are astonished at it to
conceive a living, thinking, acting being indued with volition
and affections—such a being, in short, as man—yet destitute of
sensibility and free will.
Could God have ordered things otherwise? Reason undoubtedly answers
‹yes›, but imagination says eternally ‹no›, so radically impossible
is it for us to separate in thought humanity from this double
attribute. Now, to be indued with ‹feeling› is to be capable of
experiencing sensations which are agreeable or painful. Hence comfort
or uneasiness. From the moment, then, that God gave existence to
sensibility, He permitted evil, or the possibility of evil.
In giving us free will, He has indued us with the faculty, at least
in a certain measure, of shunning evil and seeking after good. Free
will supposes and accompanies intelligence—what would the faculty of
choosing signify if it were not allied with the faculty of examining,
of comparing, of judging? Thus, every man who comes into the world
brings with him ‹mind› and a ‹motive force›.
The motive force is that personal irresistible impulse, the essence
of all our forces, which leads us to shun Evil and seek [p496] after
Good. We term it the instinct of preservation, personal or private
interest.
This sentiment has been sometimes decried, sometimes misunderstood,
but as regards its existence there can be no doubt. Irresistibly we
seek after all which, according to our notions, can ameliorate our
destiny, and we avoid all which is likely to deteriorate it. This is
at least as certain as it is that every material molecule possesses
centripetal and centrifugal force. And just as the double movement of
attraction and repulsion is the grand spring of the physical world,
we may affirm that the double force of human attraction towards
happiness and human repulsion from pain is the mainspring of the
social mechanism.
But it is not enough that man is irresistibly led to prefer good to
evil; he must also be able to discern what is good and what is evil.
This is what God has provided for in giving him that marvellous and
complex mechanism called intelligence. To fix his attention, to
compare, judge, reason, connect effects with causes, to remember,
to foresee; such are—if I may use the expression—the wheels of that
admirable machine.
The impulsive force which is possessed by each of us moves under the
direction of our intelligence. But our intelligence is imperfect.
It is liable to error. We compare, we judge, we act in consequence;
but we may err, we may make a bad choice, we may tend towards
evil, mistaking it for good, or we may shun good, mistaking it
for evil. This is the first source of social ‹dissonances›; and
it is inevitable, for this reason, that the great motive spring
of humanity—personal interest—is not, like material attraction, a
blind force, but a force guided by an imperfect intelligence. Let
us be very sure, then, that we shall not see Harmony except under
this restriction. God has not seen proper to found social order or
Harmony upon perfection, but upon human perfectibility, our capacity
for improvement. If our intelligence is imperfect, it is improvable.
It develops, enlarges, and rectifies itself. It begins of new and
verifies its operations. Experience at each moment puts us right,
and Responsibility suspends over our heads a complete system of
punishments and rewards. Every step that we take on the road of
error plunges us into increased suffering, and in such a way that
the warning cannot fail to be heard, and the rectification of our
determinations, and consequently of our actions, follows, sooner or
later, with infallible certainty.
Under the impulse which urges him on, ardent to pursue happiness,
prompt to seize it, man may be seeking his own good in the misery of
others. This is a second and an abundant source of [p497] discordant
social combinations. But the limit of such disturbances is marked;
and they find their inevitable doom in the law of Solidarity.
Individual force thus misapplied calls forth opposition from all the
analogous forces, which, antagonistic to evil by their nature, repel
injustice and chastise it.
It is thus that progress is realized, and it is not the less progress
from being dearly bought. It springs from a native impulse, which is
universal and inherent in our nature, directed by an intelligence
which is frequently misled, and subjected to a will which is
frequently depraved. Arrested on its march by Error and Injustice,
it receives the all-powerful assistance of Responsibility and
Solidarity to enable it to surmount these obstacles, and it cannot
fail to receive that assistance since it springs from these obstacles
themselves.
This internal, universal, and imperishable motive power, which
resides in each individual and constitutes him an active being, this
tendency of every man to pursue happiness and shun misery, this
product, this effect, this necessary complement of sensibility,
without which sensibility would be only an inexplicable scourge, this
primordial phenomenon which is at the bottom of all human actions,
this attractive and repulsive force which we have denominated the
mainspring of the social mechanism, has had for detractors the
greater part of our publicists; and this is one of the strangest
aberrations which the annals of science present.
It is true that self-interest is the cause of all the evils, as it is
of all the good, incident to man. It cannot fail to be so, since it
determines all our acts. Seeing this, some publicists can imagine no
better means of eradicating evil than by stifling ‹self-interest›.
But as by this means they would destroy the very spring and motive of
our activity, they have thought proper to endow us with a different
motive force, namely, ‹devotion›, ‹self-sacrifice›. They hope that
henceforth all transactions and social combinations will take place
at their bidding, upon the principle of self-abandonment. We are no
longer to pursue our own happiness, but the happiness of others; the
warnings of sensibility are to go for nothing, like the rewards and
punishments of Responsibility. All the laws of our nature are to
be reversed; the spirit of sacrifice is to be substituted for the
instinct of preservation; in a word, no one is to think longer on
his own personality, but for the purpose of hastening to sacrifice
it to the public good. It is from such a universal transformation of
the human heart that certain publicists, who think themselves very
religious, expect to realize perfect social harmony. They [p498]
have forgotten to tell us how they hope to effect this indispensable
preliminary, the transformation of the human heart.
If they are foolish enough to undertake this, they will find that
they want the power to accomplish it. Do they desire the proof of
what I say? Let them try the experiment on themselves; let them
endeavour to stifle in their own hearts all feeling of self-interest,
so that it shall no longer make its appearance in the most ordinary
actions of life. They will not be long in finding out their
powerlessness. Why, then, pretend to impose upon all men, without
exception, a doctrine to which they themselves cannot submit?
I confess myself unable to see anything religious, unless it be
in intention and appearance, in these affected theories, in these
impracticable maxims which they affect so earnestly to preach, while
they continue to act just as the vulgar act. Is it, I would ask, true
and genuine religion which inspires these catholic economists with
the presumptuous thought that God has done His work ill, and that it
is their mission to repair it? Bossuet did not think so when he said,
“Man aspires to happiness, and he cannot help aspiring to it.”
Declamations against personal interest never can have much scientific
significance; for self-interest is part of man’s indestructible
nature—at least, we cannot destroy it without destroying man himself.
All that religion, morals, and political economy can do is to give
an enlightened direction to this impulsive force—to point out not
only the primary, but the ulterior consequences of those acts to
which it urges us. A superior and progressive satisfaction consequent
on a transient suffering, long continued and constantly increased
suffering following on a momentary gratification; such, after all,
are moral good and evil. That which determines the choice of men
towards virtue is an elevated and enlightened interest, but it is
always primarily a personal interest.
If it is strange that personal interest should be decried, when
considered not with reference to its immoral abuse, but as the
providential moving spring of all human activity, it is still
stranger that it should have been put aside altogether, and that men
should have imagined themselves in a situation to frame a system of
social science without taking it into account.
It is an inexplicable instance of folly that publicists in general
should regard themselves as the depositaries and the arbiters of this
motive spring. Each starts from this point of departure: Assuming
that mankind are a flock, and that I am the shepherd, [p499] how am
I to manage in order to make mankind happy? Or this: Given on the
one hand a certain quantity of clay, and on the other a potter, what
should the potter do in order to turn that clay to the best account?
Our publicists may differ when the question comes to be which is
the best potter, who forms and moulds the clay most advantageously;
but they are all at one upon this, that their function is to knead
the human clay, and what the clay has to do is simply to be kneaded
by them. Under the title of legislators they establish between
themselves and the human race relations analogous to those of
guardian and ward. The idea never occurs to them that the human
race is a living sentient body, indued with volition, and acting
according to laws which it is not their business to invent, since
they already exist, nor to impose, but to study; that humanity is an
aggregate of beings in all respects like themselves, and in no way
inferior or subordinate; endowed both with an impulse to act, and
with intelligence to choose; which feels on all sides the stimulus
of Responsibility and Solidarity; and that, in short, from all these
phenomena there results an aggregate of self-existing relations,
which it is not the business of science to create, as they imagine,
but to observe.
Rousseau, I think, is the publicist who has most naïvely exhumed
from antiquity this omnipotence of the resuscitated legislator of
the Greeks. Convinced that the social order is a human invention, he
compares it to a machine; men are the wheels of that machine, the
ruler sets it in motion; the lawgiver invents it, under the impulse
given him by the publicist, who thus finds himself definitively the
mainspring and regulator of the human species. This is the reason why
the publicist never fails to address himself to the legislator in the
imperative style; he decrees him to decree: “Found your society upon
such or such a principle; give it good manners and customs; bend it
to the yoke of religion; direct its aims and energies towards arms,
or commerce, or agriculture, or virtue,” etc. Others more modest
speak in this way: “Idlers will not be tolerated in the republic; you
will distribute the population conveniently between the towns and the
country; you will take order that there shall be neither rich nor
poor,” etc.
These formulas attest the unmeasured presumption of those who employ
them. They imply a doctrine which does not leave one atom of dignity
to the human race.
I know not whether they are more false in theory or pernicious in
practice. In both views, they lead to deplorable results.
They would lead us to believe that the social economy is an [p500]
artificial arrangement coined in the brain of an inventor. Hence
every publicist constitutes himself an inventor. His greatest desire
is to find acceptance for his mechanism; his greatest care is to
create abhorrence of all others, and principally of that which
springs spontaneously from the organization of man and from the
nature of things. The books conceived and written on this plan are,
and can only be, prolix declamations against Society.
This false science does not study the concatenation of effects and
causes. It does not inquire into the good and evil produced by men’s
actions, and trust afterwards to the motive force of Society in
choosing the road it is to follow. No; it enjoins, it constrains,
it imposes, or, if it cannot do that, it counsels; like a natural
philosopher who should say to the stone, “Thou art not supported; I
order thee to fall, or at least I advise it.” It is upon this footing
that M. Droz has said that “the design of political economy is to
render easy circumstances as general as possible,”—a definition which
has been welcomed with great favour by the Socialists, because it
opens a door to every Utopia, and leads to artificial regulation.
What should we say if M. Arago were to open his course in this
way, “The object of astronomy is to render gravitation as general
as possible?” It is true that men are animated beings, indued with
volition, and acting under the influence of free will. But there
also resides in them an internal force, a sort of gravitation;
and the question is to know towards what they gravitate. If it be
fatally, inevitably, towards evil, there is no remedy, and assuredly
the remedy will not come to us from a publicist subject like other
men to the common tendency. If it be towards good, here we have the
motive force already found; science has no need to substitute for
it constraint or advice. Its part is to enlighten our free will, to
display effects as flowing from causes, well assured that, under the
influence of truth, “ease and material prosperity tend to become as
general as possible.”
Practically, the doctrine which would place the motive force of
society, not in mankind at large, nor in their peculiar organization,
but in legislators and governments, is attended with consequences
still more deplorable. It tends to draw down upon Governments a
crushing responsibility, from which they never recover. If there are
sufferings, it is the fault of Government; if there are poor, it is
the fault of Government. Is not Government the prime mover? If the
mainspring is bad or inoperative, break it, and choose another. Or
else they lay the blame on science itself; and in our days we have
it repeated ‹ad nauseam› that “all social sufferings are [p501]
imputable to Political Economy.”[115] Why not, when Political Economy
presents herself as having for design to realize the happiness of men
without their co-operation? When such notions prevail, the last thing
men take it into their heads to do is to turn their regards upon
themselves, and inquire whether the true cause of their sufferings is
not their own ignorance and injustice; their ignorance which brings
them under the discipline of Responsibility, and their injustice
which draws down upon them the reaction of Solidarity. How should
mankind ever dream of seeking in their errors the cause of their
sufferings when the human race is persuaded that it is inert by
nature, and that the principle of all activity, consequently of all
responsibility, is external, and resides in the will of the lawgiver
and the governing power?
Were I called upon to mark the feature which distinguishes Socialism
from Political Economy, I should find it here. Socialism boasts of
a vast number of sects. Each sect has its Utopia, and so far are
they from any mutual understanding, that they declare against each
other war to the knife. The ‹atelier social organisé› of M. Blanc,
and the ‹an-archie› of M. Proudhon,—the ‹association› of Fourier,
and the ‹communisme› of M. Cabet,—are as different from each other
as night is from day. Why do these sectarian leaders, then, range
themselves under the common denomination of ‹Socialists›, and what is
the bond which unites them against natural or providential society?
They have no other bond than this, ‹they all repudiate natural
society›. What they wish is an artificial society springing ready
made from the brain of the inventor. No doubt, each of them wishes
to be the Jupiter of this Minerva—no doubt each of them hugs his
own contrivance, and dreams of his own social order. But they have
this in common, that they recognise in humanity neither the motive
force, which urges mankind on to good, nor the ‹curative› force,
which delivers them from evil. They fight among themselves as to
what form they are to mould the human clay into, but they are all
agreed that humanity is clay to be moulded. Humanity is not in their
eyes a living harmonious being, that God himself has provided with
progressive and self-sustaining forces, but rather a mass of inert
matter which has been waiting for them to impart to it sentiment
and life; it is not a subject to be studied, but a subject to be
experimented on.
Political Economy, on the other hand, after having clearly shown
[p502] that there are in each man forces of impulse and repulsion,
the aggregate of which constitutes the social impellent, and after
being convinced that this motive force tends towards good, never
dreams of annihilating it in order to substitute another of its own
creation, but studies the varied and complicated social phenomena to
which it gives birth.
Is this to say that Political Economy is as much a stranger to social
progress, as astronomy is to the motion of the heavenly bodies?
Certainly not. Political Economy has to do with beings which are
intelligent and free,—and, as such, let us never forget, subject to
error. Their tendency is towards good; but they may err. Science,
then, interferes usefully, not to create causes and effects, not to
change the tendencies of man, not to subject him to organizations, to
injunctions, or even to advice, but to point out to him the good and
the evil which result from his determinations.
Political Economy is thus quite a science of observation and
exposition. She does not say to men, “I enjoin you, I counsel you,
not to go too near the fire;” she does not say, “I have invented
a social organization; the gods have taught me institutions which
will keep you at a respectful distance from the fire.” No, Political
Economy only shows men clearly that fire will burn them, proclaims
it, proves it, and does the same thing as regards all other social
or moral phenomena, convinced that this is enough. The repugnance to
die by fire is considered as a primordial pre-existent fact, which
Political Economy has not created, and which she cannot alter or
change.
Economists cannot be always at one; but it is easy to see that their
differences are quite of another kind from those which divide the
Socialists. Two men who devote their whole attention to observe one
and the same phenomenon and its effects—rent, for example, exchange,
competition—may not arrive at the same conclusion, and this proves
nothing more than that one of the two has observed the phenomenon
inaccurately or imperfectly. It is an operation to be repeated. With
the aid of other observers, the probability is that truth in the end
will be discovered. It is for this reason, that if each economist
were, like each astronomer, to make himself fully acquainted with
what his predecessors have done, as far as they have gone, the
science would be progressive, and for that reason more and more
useful, rectifying constantly observations inaccurately made, and
adding indefinitely new observations to those which had been made
before.
But the Socialists,—each pursuing his own road, and coining [p503]
artificial combinations in the mint of his own brain,—may pursue
their inquiries in this way to all eternity without coming to any
common understanding, and without the labours of one aiding to any
extent the labours of another. Say profited by the labours of Adam
Smith; Rossi by those of Say; Blanqui and Joseph Garnier by those
of all their predecessors. But Plato, Sir Thomas More, Harrington,
Fénélon, Fourier, might amuse themselves with organizing according
to their own fancy a Republic, an Utopia, an Oceana, a Salente, a
Phalanstère, and no one would ever discover the slightest affinity
between their chimerical creations. These dreamers spin all out of
their own imaginations, men as well as things. They invent a social
order without respect to the human heart, and then they invent a
human heart to suit their social order. [p504]
XXIII.
EXISTENCE OF EVIL.
In these last days science has retrograded and been driven back. It
has been bent and twisted under the obligation imposed upon it, if I
may so speak, of denying the existence of Evil under pain of being
convicted of denying the existence of God.
Writers whose business it is to display exquisite sensibility,
unbounded philanthropy, and unrivalled devotion to religion, have
got into the way of saying, “Evil cannot enter into the providential
plan. Suffering is no ordinance of God and nature, but comes from
human institutions.”
As this doctrine falls in with the passions that they desire to
cherish, it soon becomes popular. Books and journals have been
filled with declamations against society. Science is no longer
permitted to study facts impartially. Whoever dares to warn men that
a certain vice, a certain habit, leads necessarily to certain hurtful
consequences, is marked down as a man destitute of human feelings,
without religion, an Atheist, a Malthusian, an Economist.
Socialism has carried its folly so far as to announce the termination
of all social suffering, but not of all individual suffering. It has
not ventured to predict that a day will come when man will no longer
suffer, grow old, and die.
Now, I would ask, is it easier to reconcile with the infinite
goodness of God, evil which assails individually every man who comes
into the world, than evil which is extended over society at large?
And then is it not a contradiction so transparent as to be puerile,
to deny the existence of suffering in the masses, when we admit its
existence in individuals?
Man suffers, and will always suffer. Society, then, also suffers, and
will always suffer. Those who address mankind should have the courage
to tell them this. Humanity is not [p505] a fine lady with delicate
nerves and an irritable temperament, from whom we must conceal the
coming storm, more especially when to foresee it is the only way
to ensure our getting out of it safely. In this respect, all the
books with which France has been inundated, from Sismondi and Buret
downwards, appear to me to be wanting in virility. Their authors dare
not tell the truth; nay, they dare not investigate it, for fear of
discovering that absolute poverty is the necessary starting-point of
the human race, and that, consequently, so far are we from being in a
position to attribute that poverty to the social order, it is to the
social order that we must attribute all the triumphs which we have
already achieved over our original destitution. But, then, after such
an avowal, they could no longer constitute themselves tribunes of the
people, and the avengers of the masses oppressed by civilisation.
After all, science merely establishes, combines, and deduces facts;
she does not create them; she does not produce them, nor is she
responsible for them. Is it not strange that men should have gone the
length of announcing and disseminating the paradox, that if mankind
suffer, their sufferings are due to Political Economy? Thus, after
being blamed for investigating the sufferings of society, Political
Economy is accused of engendering those sufferings by that same
investigation.
I assert that science can do nothing more than observe and establish
facts. Prove to us that humanity, instead of being progressive, is
retrograde; and that inevitable and insurmountable laws urge mankind
on to irremediable deterioration. Show us that the law of Malthus and
that of Ricardo are true in their worst and most pernicious sense,
and that it is impossible to deny the tyranny of capital, or the
incompatibility between machinery and labour, or any of the other
contradictory alternatives in which Châteaubriand and Tocqueville
have placed the human race; then I maintain that science ought to
proclaim this, and proclaim it aloud.
Why should we shut our eyes to a gulf which is gaping before us?
Do we require the naturalist or the physiologist to reason upon
individual man, on the assumption that his organs are exempt from
pain or not liable to destruction? ‹Pulvis es, et in pulverem
reverteris›; such is the declaration of anatomical science backed
by universal experience. No doubt, this is a hard truth for us to
receive—not less hard than the contested propositions of Malthus and
Ricardo. But are we for this reason to spare the delicate sensibility
which has sprung up all at once among our modern [p506] publicists,
and has given existence to Socialism? Is medical science, for the
same reason, to affirm audaciously that we are constantly renewing
our youth and are immortal? Or, if medical science refuse to stoop to
such juggling, are we to foam at the mouth, and cry out, as has been
done in the case of the social sciences—“Medical science admits the
existence of pain and death; it is misanthropical; it is cruel; it
accuses God of being malevolent or powerless; it is impious; it is
atheistical; nay, more, it creates the evil the existence of which it
refuses to deny”?
I have never doubted that the Socialist schools have led away many
generous hearts and earnest minds, and I have no wish to humiliate
any one. But the general character of Socialism is very whimsical,
and I cannot help asking myself how long such a tissue of puerilities
can continue in vogue.
In Socialism all is affectation.
It affects scientific forms and scientific language, and we have seen
what sort of science it teaches.
In its writings, it affects a delicacy of nerve so feminine as to be
unable to listen to a tale of social sufferings; and whilst it has
introduced into literature this insipid and mawkish sensibility, it
has established in the arts a taste for the trivial and the horrible;
in ordinary life, a sort of scarecrow fashion in dress, appearance,
and deportment—the long beard, the grim and sullen countenance, the
vulgar airs of a village Titan or Prometheus. In politics (where such
puerilities are less innocent), Socialism has introduced the doctrine
of energetic means of ‹transition›, the violence of revolutionary
practices, life and material interests sacrificed ‹en masse› to what
is ideal and chimerical. But what Socialism affects, above all, is
a certain show and appearance of religion? This is only one of the
Socialist tactics, it is true—such tactics are always disgraceful to
a school when they lead to hypocrisy.
These Socialists are perpetually talking to us of Christ; but I would
ask them, how it is that while they acknowledge that Christ, the
innocent ‹par excellence›, prayed in His agony that “the cup might
pass from Him,” adding, “Nevertheless, not my will but Thine be
done,” they should think it strange that mankind at large should be
called upon to exercise resignation also.
No doubt, had God willed it, He might have so arranged His almighty
plans that just as the individual advances towards inevitable death,
the human race might have advanced towards inevitable destruction. In
that case, we should have had no choice but to [p507] submit, and
science, whether she liked it or not, must have admitted the sombre
social ‹dénoûment›, just as she now admits the melancholy individual
‹dénoûment›.
But happily it is not so.
There is redemption for man, and for humanity.
The one is indued with an immortal soul; the other with indefinite
perfectibility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [p508]
XXIV.
PERFECTIBILITY.
That the human race is perfectible; that it progresses towards a
higher and higher level; that its wealth is increasing and becoming
more equalized; that its ideas are being enlarged and purified; that
its errors, and the oppressions which these errors support, are
disappearing; that its knowledge shines with brighter and brighter
effulgence; that its morality is improving; that it is learning,
by reason or by experience, in the domain of responsibility, the
art of earning a constantly larger amount of recompense, and a
constantly smaller amount of chastisement; that, consequently, evil
is continually lessening, and good continually increasing;—these are
conclusions which it is impossible to doubt when we scrutinize the
nature of man and that intelligent principle, which is his essence,
which was breathed into him with the breath of life, and warrants the
scriptural declaration that man is made in the image of God.
We know too well that man is not a perfect being. Were he perfect,
he would not reflect a vague resemblance of God; he would be
God himself. He is imperfect, then,—subject to error and to
suffering,—but, on the other hand, were he stationary, what title
could he have to claim the unspeakable privilege of bearing in
himself the image of a perfect being?
Moreover, if intelligence, which is the faculty of comparing, of
judging, of rectifying errors, of learning, does not constitute
individual perfectibility, what can constitute it?
And if the union of all individual perfectibilities, especially among
beings capable of communicating to each other their acquisitions,
does not afford a guarantee for collective perfectibility, we must
renounce all philosophy and all moral and political science.
What constitutes man’s perfectibility is his intelligence, or the
[p509] faculty which has been given to him of passing from error,
which is the parent of evil, to truth, which is the generating
principle of good.
It is science and experience which cause man to abandon, in his mind,
error for truth, and afterwards, in his conduct, evil for good; it is
the discovery which he makes, in phenomena and in acts, of effects
which he had not suspected.
But to enable him to acquire this science, he must have an interest
in acquiring it. In order that he should profit by this experience,
he must have an interest in profiting by it. It is in the law of
responsibility, then, that we must search for the means of realizing
human perfectibility.
And as we can form no idea of responsibility apart from liberty;
as acts which are not voluntary can afford neither instruction
nor available experience; as beings capable of being improved or
deteriorated by the exclusive action of external causes without the
participation of choice, reflection, or free will (although this
happens in the case of unconscious organized matter), could not be
called perfectible, in the moral acceptation of the word, we must
conclude that liberty is the very essence of progress. To impair
man’s liberty is not only to hurt and degrade him; it is to change
his nature; it is (in the measure and proportion in which such
oppression is exercised) to render him incapable of improvement; it
is to despoil him of his resemblance to the Creator; it is to dim and
deaden in his noble nature that vital spark which glowed there from
the beginning.
But in thus proclaiming aloud our fixed and unalterable belief in
human perfectibility, and in progress, which is necessary in every
sense, and which, by a marvellous correspondence, is as much more
active in one direction as it is more active in all others, we must
not be regarded as indulging in Utopianism, or be considered as
optimists, believing “all to be for the best, in the best of worlds,”
and expecting the immediate arrival of the millennium.
Alas! when we turn our regards on the world as it is, and see around
us the enormous amount of mud and meanness, suffering and complaint,
vice and crime, which still exist,—when we reflect on the moral
action exerted on society by the classes who ought to point out to
the lagging multitude the way to the New Jerusalem,—when we ask
ourselves what use the rich make of their fortune, the poets of their
genius, philosophers of their scientific lucubrations, journalists
of the ministry with which they are invested, high functionaries,
ministers of state, representatives of the people, kings, of the
power which fate has placed in their hands,—when [p510] we witness
revolutions like that which has recently agitated Europe, and in
which each man seems to be in search of what must in the long-run
prove fatal to himself and to society at large,—when we see cupidity
in all shapes and among all ranks, the constant sacrifice of the
interests of others to our own selfish interest, and of the future to
the present,—when we see that great and inevitable moving spring of
the human race, personal interest, still making its appearance only
in manifestations the most material and the most improvident,—when
we see the working classes, preyed upon by the parasitism of public
functionaries, rise up in revolutionary convulsions, not against this
withering parasitism, but against wealth legitimately acquired, that
is to say, against the very element of their own deliverance and the
principle of their own right and force,—when such spectacles present
themselves to us on all sides, we get afraid of ourselves, we tremble
for our faith in human perfectibility, the light would seem to waver,
and be on the eve of extinction, leaving us in the fearful darkness
of Pessimism.
But no—there is no ground for despair. Whatever be the impressions
which too recent circumstances have made upon us, humanity still
moves onward. What causes the illusion is that we measure the life of
nations by the short span of our own individual lives; and because
a few years are a long period for us, we imagine them also a long
period for them. But even adopting this inadequate measure, the
progress of society on all sides is visible. I need scarcely remind
you of the marvels which have already been accomplished in what
concerns material advantages, the improved salubrity of towns, and in
the means of locomotion and communication, etc.
In a political point of view, has the French nation gained no
experience? Who dares affirm that had all the difficulties through
which we have just passed presented themselves half a century ago,
or sooner, France would have overcome them with as much ability,
prudence, and wisdom, and with so few sacrifices? I write these lines
in a country which has been fertile in revolutions. Florence used to
have a rising every five years, and at each rising one-half of her
citizens robbed and murdered the other half. Had we only a little
more imagination—not that which creates, invents, and assumes facts,
but that which recalls them and brings them to mind—we should be
more just to our times and to our contemporaries! What remains true,
and it is a truth which no one can know better than an Economist, is
this, that human progress, especially in its dawn, is excessively
slow, so very slow as to give rise to despair in the heart of the
philanthropist. . . . . [p511]
Men whose genius invests them with the power of the press ought, it
seems to me, to regard things more nearly, before scattering amidst
the social fermentation discouraging speculations which imply for
humanity the alternative of two modes of degradation.
We have already seen some examples of this, when treating of
population, of rent, of machinery, of the division of inheritance,
etc.
Here is another, taken from M. de Châteaubriand, who merely
formulates a fashionable conventionalism: “The corruption of morals
and the civilisation of nations march abreast. If the last present
means of liberty, the first is an inexhaustible source of slavery.”
It is beyond doubt that civilisation presents means of liberty, and
it is equally beyond doubt that corruption is a source of slavery.
That which is doubtful, more than doubtful,—and what for my own
part I deny solemnly and formally,—is this, that civilisation and
corruption march abreast. If it were so, a fatal equilibrium would
be established between ‹the means of liberty› and ‹the sources of
slavery›; and immobility would be the fate of the human race.
There cannot, moreover, enter into the human heart a thought more
melancholy, more discouraging, more desolating, a thought more fitted
to urge us to despair, to irreligion, to impiety, to blasphemy, than
this, that every human being, whether he wills it or not, whether
he doubts it or not, proceeds on the road of civilisation—and
civilisation is corruption!
Then, if all civilisation be corruption, wherein consist its
advantages? It is impossible to pretend that civilisation is
unattended with moral, intellectual, and material advantages, for
then it would cease to be civilisation. As Châteaubriand employs
the term, civilisation signifies material progress, an increase
of population, of wealth, of prosperity, the development of
intelligence, the advancement of the sciences; and all these steps of
progress imply, according to him, a corresponding retrogression of
the moral sense.
This were enough to tempt men to a wholesale suicide; for I repeat
that material and intellectual progress is not of our preparation
and ordination. God himself has decreed it, in giving us expansible
desires and improvable faculties. We are urged on to it without
wishing it, without knowing it,—Châteaubriand, and his equals, if
he has any, more than any one else. And this progress is to sink
us deeper and deeper into immorality and slavery, by means of
corruption! . . . . . . [p512]
I thought at first that Châteaubriand had let slip an unguarded
phrase, as poets frequently do, without examining it too narrowly.
With that class of writers, sound sometimes runs away with sense.
Provided the antithesis is symmetrical, what matters it that the
thought be false or objectionable? Provided the metaphor produces its
intended effect, that it has an air of inspiration and depth, that it
secures the applause of the public, and enables the author to pass
for an oracle, of what importance are exactitude and truth?
I had thought, then, that Châteaubriand, giving way to a momentary
excess of misanthropy, had allowed himself to formulate a
conventionalism, a vulgarism dragged from the kennel. “Civilisation
and corruption march abreast,” is a phrase that has been repeated
since the days of Heraclitus, but it is not more true on that account.
At a distance of several years, however, the same great writer has
reproduced the same thought, and in a more didactic form; which shows
that it expressed his deliberate opinion. It is proper to combat
it, not because it comes from Châteaubriand, but because it has got
abroad, and so generally prevails.
“The material condition is ameliorated,” he says, “intellectual
progress advances, and nations, in place of profiting, decay. Here
is the explanation of the decay of society and the growth of the
individual. Had the moral sense been developed in proportion to the
development of intelligence, there would have been a counter weight,
and the human race would have grown greater without danger. But it
is just the contrary which happens. The perception of good and evil
is obscured in proportion as intelligence is enlightened; conscience
becomes narrowed in proportion as ideas are enlarged.”—‹Mémoires
d’Outre-Tombe›, vol. xi. [p513]