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 easy circumstances to enable him to work like
the others, and every rich citizen in such mediocrity that
he must work, in order to retain or to acquire.
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 a little attention to the
extent of genius required by these legislators, that
{30}
we may see how, by confounding all the virtues, they showed
their wisdom to the world. Lycurgus, 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 even was 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 probity has appeared as natural as
bravery among the Spartans. Mr. Penn is a true Lycurgus, and
although the former had peace for his object, and the latter
war, they resemble each other in the singular path along
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 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.
{31}
Vulgar infatuation may exclaim, if it likes, "It is Montesquieu!
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 are the same relations as those
that exist between the agricultural writer and the agriculturist,
the agriculturist and the clod. 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? Bring the
extremes together as much as possible. Suffer neither
wealthy persons nor beggars.
{32}
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
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 formerly, 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 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?
{33}
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 Lycurgus,
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
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?