Take upon yourself, my lord, the character of Lycurgus or
of Solon. Before you finish reading
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this essay, amuse yourself with giving laws to some wild
people in America or in Africa. Establish 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 in law consists 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 seventeenth and eighteenth
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
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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 and 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 has
been, with an inconceivable absence of discernment, and upon the
faith of a puerile conventionalism, that they have admitted what is
inadmissible, viz., 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 politicians, of
placing themselves beyond
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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
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, think only of subjecting it to the
philanthropic despotism of their social inventions, and making it bear
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.