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Page 55
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 labour, and of population,
which legislative measures occasion; displacements, which render so
uncertain and precarious the very sources of existence, and thus
aggravate to such an extent the responsibility of Governments.
Unhappily, law is by no means confined to its own department. Nor is it
merely in some indifferent and debateable views that it has left its
proper sphere. It has done more than this. 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, in effacing amongst Rights, that limit which was its true
mission to respect; it has placed the collective force in the service of
those who wish to traffic, 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 defence 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--bare egotism and false philanthropy.
Let us speak of the former.
Self-preservation and development is the common aspiration of all men,
in such a way that if every one 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, sacerdotal 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 which
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 labour. This is the origin of property.
But yet 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, labour being 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 labour, it prevails; and neither religion nor
morality can, in this case, prevent it from prevailing.
When does plunder cease, then? When it becomes less burdensome and more
dangerous than labour. It is very evident that the proper aim of law is
to oppose the powerful obstacle of collective force to this fatal
tendency; that all its measures should be in favour of property, and
against plunder.
But the law is made, generally, by one man, or by one class of men. And
as law cannot exist without the sanction and the support of a
preponderating force, it must finally place this force in the hands of
those who legislate.
This inevitable phenomenon, combined with the fatal tendency which, 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 organised 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.
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