2. Of being nuanced infinitely. [Constant’s whole sentence is: “The exemplary nuances here are infinite.”] At a time of trouble, it may be legitimate and wise to order the citizens to carry some means of identification or to provide themselves with some such from the public authorities. If this requirement bore on one individual class only, however, it would be supremely unjust.

Additions

Sometimes the legislators, to palliate the injustices they commit, under the pretext of preventing crime or providing for public safety, resort to a subterfuge as odious as it is illusory. They seem to pity those they hurt, to groan themselves under their harassment, and seek to make amends for this by tokens of esteem and interest. This, however, is to deprive the oppressed of their last remaining support. When a citizen is pursued by a powerful man, if it is a matter of taking his life, his reputation, or his property, it is to be hoped that hearts will be moved and that he will find defenders. When the victim is adorned with flowers, however, when he is seemingly honored, when it is claimed that injustice adds to his glory, the path of the crime is made smooth. This is not a punishment, those who want the ruin of an innocent tell you, this is a precaution, which becomes almost a triumph for the person who is its object. Ostracism transported to modern times.

As prohibitive laws are much more favorable to the encroachments of authority than are the penal laws, government is pleased to exaggerate the small influence of the latter in order to have wider recourse to the former.

Notes

1. When there is no security, there is no moral life. Despotism is hurtful in that it prevents any long-term reckoning of the world. Now, moral life especially needs this kind of reckoning. The moment perhaps favors vice; time alone favors virtue.

2. of production. The large-scale enterprises of merchants are always necessarily intertwined with public affairs. In monarchies, however, public affairs are most of the time as suspect to merchants as they seem to them secure in republican States.

Additions

Despotism in favor of virtue is infinitely more dangerous than despotism in favor of crime. When scoundrels violate due process at the expense of honest men, one knows that this is one crime more. The very violation of due process makes you pay particular attention to it. You learn uncomplainingly and through misfortune to regard such process as sacred, as protecting and conserving the social order. When good men violate due process at the expense of scoundrels, however, the people no longer know where they stand. Due process and the law appear to them like obstacles in the way of justice. They somehow get used to these things and put together some sort of theory of an equitable despotism, which is the overthrow of any kind of thinking, because in the body politic, only due process is stable and resistant to men. The foundations themselves, that is, justice and virtue, can be disfigured. Their names are at the mercy of whoever wants to use them. A feature of all political parties is that they do not hate despotism as such, the first thing in need of hate in a free society, but only this or that despotic act, which seems contrary to their purposes and interests. Once talk of circumstances is allowed, circumstances can always be invoked against principles. Factions march from one circumstance to another, constantly outside the law, sometimes with pure intentions, sometimes with perfidious projects, eternally asking for large-scale measures, in the name of the people, of freedom, of justice. In everything public well-being demands, there are two ways of proceeding, the one legal and the other arbitrary. The first is the only one permissible and always in the long run the one the government finds itself the better for. As long as arbitrary government is considered only as something simply to be snatched from one’s enemy so one can put it to use, that enemy will strive in his turn to seize it, and the struggle will be forever, because arbitrary measures are inexhaustible.

In republics, all arbitrary measures, all formulae intended to serve as a pretext for oppression, rebound on their authors. I find a striking example of this in the Acts of the Constituent Assembly and I will use to recount it the words of one of its members: Clermont-Tonnerre, IV, 90: The National Assembly wanted to declare absolute freedom of religious opinion. The Catholic priests, the supporters of the dominant religion, forced the Assembly to modify this principle by adding this sentence: provided that the manifestation of religious opinion does not threaten public order. Soon this same dominant religion was cruelly abused by this obscure and vague sentence, whose adoption its influence had secured. The overardent friends of the Revolution took advantage of the redraft they had opposed to crush, against all reason, those who had wrung it out of them. 38

The ancients believed that places soiled by crimes had to undergo an expiation; and my belief is that land sullied by an act of despotism needs, for purification, a resounding punishment of the guilty person. Every time in any country I see a citizen arbitrarily incarcerated without seeing shortly afterward the hireling who arrested him and the jailer who received him, and the politician, whoever it was, who violated due process, dragged into the same prisons, I will say: this nation does not know how to be free, nor wish to be so, nor merit it, having not yet learned the first notions of freedom.

If it were given to man to invert, just once, the order of the seasons, whatever advantage he might derive from this privilege in a particular circumstance, he would nonetheless experience as a result an incalculable disadvantage, in that subsequently he would no longer be able to rely on the unvarying regularity and uniform sequence which serve as a base for his working activities.

Notes

1. cannot legitimate in individuals. Men in coming together merely put in common what each of them before possessed in isolation. A thousand individuals who link up, in that linking up give a guarantee and some force to the previous rights they had, but do not create for themselves any new rights. The rights of the majority are only the aggregation of the rights of each one. Nations are only aggregations of individuals. Their rights are only the joining up of individual rights. So what could this public morality be which some wish to oppose to private morality? Public morality consists only in the aggregation of individual duties and rights. Now, injustice, not being anyone’s right, cannot be the right of all. How could individuals acquire by coming together rights which they did not have in isolation?

2. which you wish to seize. The Triumvirs, says M. Ferrand, I, 392, 39 “agreed to withdraw from a republic whose loss had become inevitable those who insisted on wishing to defend it.” Approval of banishments.

Notes

1. praiseworthy tolerance. Each man, says M. Ferrand, must have the freedom to think what he pleases, but not to propagate his opinions if they are dangerous, just as he is permitted to have some poison in his closet but not to distribute it nor to make use of it. 40 Among the sentences which prove the extent to which men are the dupes of words, this one, which has been repeated by many a writer, is one of the most remarkable. We find it anew in the preambles of edicts, in all the sweet-talking discussions of tolerance which were employed to try to slow its development. It is a fact that enlightened men believed for some time that they should be obliged to those in government for this alleged indulgence. The government made it meritorious on their part that they allowed us to think what seemed reasonable to us! But how could they stop us doing so? By what means did they penetrate the secret of our thoughts, that we had been forbidden to express? They claimed our gratitude and imposed a shameful silence on us and did us all the harm they could. They said they respected our independence of thought. Yes, just as long as they did not know what it was, just as long as it stayed silent and sterile, locked up inside us, deprived of all expression, bereft of all social communication, of that fertile source of accuracy and perfecting. Man has a need, however, to express his thought. Thought itself is something real only when it is expressed. What could government do against thought it knew nothing of? It is insolent scorn on tyranny’s part that it should claim to grant as a favor something it cannot refuse.

Notes

1. speech and writing. Independently of speech and the press, individuals have another way of expressing their opinions, that is to say, coming together to discuss them. All our memories rebel against the exercise of that faculty, one so dangerous when it is abused. I will most assuredly not excuse those wild and monstrous gatherings which flung the nation into excesses of all kinds. I know only one circumstance which justifies meetings of opinion between unsophisticated individuals: this is the need to speak up for oppressed individuals. A sort of contagious courage forces the weak to appear strong. An assembly, in moments of danger, is normally directed by the bravest. Esprit de corps makes up for the lack of a sense of justice, and usurpation by a minority cannot take place. In all other circumstances, however, the groups which citizens arrange between themselves to discuss their opinions are more harmful than useful. They are mostly controlled by so-called reformers who substitute themselves for current thinking and the public will. They are a small minority who want control in the name of everybody. These men surround their theories with a force quite other than truth. They set up within the associations they dominate a sort of government, which has all the weight of proper government, without any of its advantages. Government by clubs is the most degrading tyranny, the most inhuman and the coarsest. Should we conclude that the government has the right to ban these associations, to limit the number of members, to forbid the discussion of certain dangerous questions? All laws of this kind are evaded or arbitrary. They require moreover the resources of corruption, since one section of society has to be degraded in order to spy on and denounce the other. Now, any time when, in the case of any objective whatsoever, it is impossible to make a law which is at once precise and feasible and does not need corrupt agents, this objective neither demands nor admits of law. Another remedy must be looked for, and this remedy is freedom. Let government not forbid associations; let it maintain, however, true freedom. Let it defend the freedom of individuals against associations seeking to stifle it. These associations, in losing all means of doing harm, would soon lose all their importance. If the individuals who get together harm the safety of those not forming part of their association, let the government come down hard on these disturbers of peace and order, not as members of a society or sect, but as disturbers. It would be easy to prove that during the French Revolution, the clubs acquired their monstrous power only because right from the start, in order to group citizens under their banners against their will, they used forceful means which the government should have punished. A penal law carried out, for there would have been no need to make any, penal laws existed already, would have been of more value than any number of prohibitive laws. It would have been more certain in effect and more easy of execution. Since, however, prohibitory laws are more favorable to encroachments by government and to its idleness than penal laws are, it likes to overstress how little influence the former have, and to make wide use of the latter. People suppose that political questions are more likely to stir up human passions than are questions of any other sort. This is an error. The intrinsic importance of a question has less impact on the ardor with which men become agitated than that which they attach to themselves. Party bias has less to do with understanding the thing in dispute than with the commitments pride has assumed, the sacrifices people have made, the dangers they run, the allies who surround them, and the enemies they are fighting. In the amphitheater of Constantinople, there was murder over the chariot races and the colors blue and green, just as bitter as murder on the crossroads of Paris in the name of religion and liberty. 41 People sought lettres de cachet against gluckistes and piccinistes, 42 as they did against Jansenists and Atheists. So regard associations like individuals. Ignore them if they are peaceful. Be harsh with them if they trouble the peace. Punish acts. Leave the rest to freedom. But know how to ensure and guarantee it. You will find it, essentially and infallibly, a healing force.

2. from unthinking enthusiasm. I admit for an instant that certain books may corrupt manners or shake the principles of morality. Men should be taught to preserve themselves from these dangers by their own efforts and reason and through defending themselves. If all you do is force to one side corrupting ideas and dangerous sophisms, men will find themselves unprepared when they meet them and will let themselves be disarmed or perverted much more quickly. Children, whose head we have always wrapped for fear they might fall over and hurt it, fall one day when their head is not wrapped, and they crack it. If it is in the interests of one individual to spread bad maxims, it will be in the interests of a thousand others to refute them.

3. the instruction servitude gives. The sudden achievement of freedom intoxicates slaves. The enjoyment of freedom forms men worthy of possessing it.

It is absurd to wish to conceal truths contrary to the established constitution. The established order being reversible, the less men have reflected on the errors it contains and the less they are prepared for the order which must replace it, the more disorder and misfortune will there be in its overthrow and the sequences thereof.

“A people assured of its rights enjoys them in calm and peace. If it misuses them, it is because it mistrusts them. Its haste is the effect of its fear.” Bentham, III, 190.

4. the exaggeration which defies its laws. “Under the Ancien Régime in France, it was enough that a book on moral science was published in Paris to inspire an unfavorable prejudice.” Bentham, III, 178. The true censorship is that of an enlightened public, which withers dangerous opinions and encourages useful discoveries. The audacity of a lampoon, in a free society, will not save it from general contempt. By a contradiction easy to explain, however, the public’s indulgence in this respect is always proportionate to the severity of the government. Bentham, III, 20.

Notes

1. about China. The press in China is as free ostensibly as in England, that is to say that each person may be by occupation a printer. The expeditious way, however, in which in this country any type of fraud is punished, without the formality of any juridical institution, is enough to stop the freedom of the press. The printer, seller, reader of any written thing which offends the government are equally liable to be punished by a caning. The publication of a work containing reflections on the conduct of the government or its principal agents would be followed by the certain death of the author and publisher. So nothing appears on government and politics except in the Peking Gazette. M. de Pauw observes in his Recherches that China is governed entirely by the birch whip and the bamboo cane. 43 To these two things he should have added the annual calendar and the imperial gazette. For these are two instruments of constant use in the government’s hands. This gazette serves to spread to all corners of the empire praise of the virtues and fatherly affection of the sovereign, who occupies the throne. It takes the form of a small pamphlet. It is published every two days. The missionaries claimed that the punishment for a lie inserted in this gazette would be immediate execution. It is famous, however, for descriptions of battles which have never been joined and for announcing victories which have never been won. The missionaries explained themselves badly. They meant only that the editor of the gazette would be punished if he took it upon himself to insert some article which had not been sent to him by the government.

Notes

1. All man’s faculties go together. “As for the evil which can result from censorship, it is impossible to evaluate, since it is impossible to say where it stops. It is nothing less than the danger of stopping all human intellectual progress in all occupations. If that had been true just of men in official positions, what would the result have been today? Religion, law, medicine, morality, all would still be in darkness.” Bentham, III, 22–23.

2. must perish and fall. Governments would like men to be pliant so that they will obey them and brave so that they will defend them, ignorant so they will never hold any opinion of their own, and enlightened so they will be skillful instruments. This combination of opposed and incompatible things can never last long however.

3. changes of scene. The observation that when a government, putting obstacles in the way of thought, prevents its subjects from being busy on their own account, it must itself keep them busy and therefore it must do extraordinary things, is circumstantial. Governments which obstruct individual activity also have the option of doing nothing and remaining inactive, by forcing the nation to remain thus. This is what they often do. Then they and the nation become stupefied.

Caesar, once he had taken away the Romans’ freedom and thereby their one and only pastime, had to announce to them the war against the Parthians. Louis XIV, having succeeded in making the yoke of government heavier, threw France into a series of wars, caused the devastation of the Palatinate, and turned Europe upside down, just to give sustenance to the anxiety of a newly enslaved nation. Nothing is more natural. Under this kind of administration, the government puts itself in the place of the nation. The talk is no longer of the nation, as in free States, but of the government. Now, in such circumstances, the government must constantly prepare what to have discussed. Members of the government find themselves vis-à-vis the governed, in some degree in the situation of favorites vis-à-vis the king, though their connections may otherwise be very different. Louvois pushed Louis XIV into a disastrous undertaking, so as to take away from him any time to think about the behavior of his ministers. Governments which take away from the governed the legitimate exercise of their various talents must use gigantic undertakings to keep them in a state of continual stupefaction.

4. silent wastes. There are, I know, men so fixated on the need for power, so devoured by a bitter, somber egotism, that even this picture will not shock them. Thought must die, so that they can dominate, 44 and were arts, science, and letters to die with thought, they would happily strip the human race of all the dignity of its nature, to perpetuate their hold over that wretched, mutilated species. One might think some genie of evil had cast them onto earth from some unknown planet, when it gave them a man’s face, for the ruin of humanity.

Addition

Thought is a human need like all the others. It is impossible to bid this need be silent by asking men to settle for a different one. All man’s needs want to be satisfied.

Notes

1. revolt against its commands. Need of freedom of conscience, making the most delicate of women emigrate to an uncivilized land, where they perished, for lack of food. Recherches sur les Etats-Unis, I, 34. 45

Notes

1. without government permission. The Lutherans and the Calvinists got together in Strasbourg. “This gathering required government approval, without which Protestant communities are not allowed to change their teachings.” Journal des Débats, 6 thermidor an X [25 July 1802].

Notes

1. its immovable members. From the fact that in Athens the people as a whole pronounced judgments, M. de Montesquieu concludes that in republics the power to judge must be revocable at pleasure. 49 One might note, however, that then it is the whole people who do the judging and, given that, also note that each republic is in a single town and has no more than twenty thousand citizens. When this writer appears not to wish that the power of judges be permanent, Esprit des lois, XI, 6, he speaks less of judges than of juries. This is made clear by this sentence: “judges ought to belong to the same circle as the accused and his peers.” 50 Elsewhere he recognizes that judicial power submitted to the people is so dangerous that the Roman legislators permitted the accused to go into exile before the trial, I, 59. 51 Judges could be temporary among the ancients but cannot be so now, our more complicated social relationships being such as to permit a thousand late but sure acts of vengeance against an independent judge who has reverted to ordinary citizenship. It is good that legislative power depends on the people. It is good that judicial power does not.

2. the sale of offices. 52 Under a despotic monarchy, the sale of offices, as a further guarantee of fixed tenure, was good. The choices of the monarch would surely not have been better. A distinction must be made among the functions of French courts, between those functions connected with legislation, courts always being challenged over these, and those connected with the administration of justice. The first would have been better discharged by an assembly appointed by the nation. It is a good thing, however, that the latter were removed from government remit. This was a shelter against despotism.

3. l’esprit de corps in the judiciary. Esprit de corps is one of the best barriers against servility toward government or factions, in a nation in which everybody lets himself get dragged along by the dominant opinion. Nobody dares to hold an opinion against everybody else’s. Esprit de corps, on the contrary, acts as a shield, and individuals who want to resist the dominant opinion, reassured by that ally, link up with it. An irremovable body of judges is necessary so that a judge, when he judges according to his conscience, is not afraid of offending the government under which he may soon find himself an ordinary citizen again. In a nation which on the one hand is used to despotism and finds it rather convenient for its natural impatience and on the other carries to extremes all the views it has seized upon, the independence of the courts is the sole thing which can make that nation lose the habit of despotism and endow it with principles it cannot abuse. The claims laid against despotism by courts, being always founded on facts, carry with them a conviction and a weight of which theories separated from facts are not capable.

4. that no judgment is without appeal. “The maxim which says that the criminal shall have no appeal is the most absurd ever to enter the mind of man. He who has lost his case, in the first instance, by some trivial law, may appeal to a higher court, while he who has been unjustly condemned to be burned alive by nine municipal magistrates cannot appeal. Now if imbecility itself came to dictate our laws, it would not say anything worse or more horrible than that. For the result of it is that a trivial law is a more important object than the honor and life of a man consigned to the most cruel torments.” De Pauw, Recherches sur les Grecs, II, 6.

5. the institution of the jury system. The main arguments of one author who has attacked the jury system (Gach, president of a court of first instance in the Department of the Lot) 53 rest on the lack of zeal, and the carelessness, ignorance, and frivolity in France. He does not indict the jury system but the nation. It must be remembered, however, that if his arguments are sound, we would have to renounce the jury system in France. We surely know, however, that an institution may at first seem little suited to a nation, because of lack of familiarity, and yet become suitable, if the institution is intrinsically good, because the nation gets used to it and acquires the capacity it was lacking. 54 It would be repugnant to me to think a nation careless of the first of its interests, the administration of justice and the protection afforded to innocence accused. The French, says Gach, will never be well-informed nor determined enough to fulfill the purposes for which juries were instituted. Such is our indifference to everything connected with public administration, such is the power of egotism and individual interest, the tepidness, the absence of public spirit, that the law establishing trial by jury cannot be carried out. 55 But who does not feel that what we need is a public spirit to overcome this tepidness and this egotism? This public spirit would be created by the habit of justice and freedom. Is it to be thought it would exist among the English without the overall pattern of their political institutions? Where the institution of the jury is constantly suspended, however, the freedom of the courts violated, the accused arraigned before commissions, this spirit cannot come to birth. People indict the setting up of juries. It is the way they are undermined which should be indicted. Gach invokes twelve years’ experience. 56 Twelve years of revolutions! The jury, he says, will not be able, as the spirit of the institution requires, to separate its inner conviction from documentary evidence, the evidence of witnesses and other evidence, things which are not necessary when conviction exists and insufficient when it does not. 57 But this is chicanery. There is no principle for separating these things. On the contrary, these are the elements of conviction. The spirit of the institution is solely to the effect that the jury not be bound according to a numerical or legal calculation, but by the impression which the overall mix of objects produced in documentary evidence, witnesses’ evidence, and other evidence has given it. Now, the enlightenment of simple good sense is enough for a jury to know and be able to declare whether, after having heard the witnesses, read through the details of objects, and compared the evidence, it is convinced or not.

If juries, he continues, find a law too severe, they will absolve the accused and declare the circumstance not in keeping with their conscience. He considers the case of a man accused of giving shelter to his brother and thereby incurring the death penalty. 58 This example, for me, far from militating against the jury as an institution, constitutes its greatest praise. It shows that this institution puts obstacles in the way of laws contrary to humanity, justice, and morality. We are men before we are jurors. So, far from blaming the juror who, in this case, pronounced contrary to his conscience and thus failed in his duty as a juror, I would praise him for fulfilling his duty as a man and running in a way within his power, to the help of a man ready to be condemned to death for an action which is not a crime. The example given by Gach does not prove that there should not be juries. It proves that there should not be laws which pronounce a death penalty against a man for giving shelter to his brother. With this type of reasoning, the objection militates against any judicial organization, since one could invent laws so atrocious that no judge, with a jury or not, replaceable or permanent, would wish to apply them.

There is a good definition of the jury: “It is,” says Lauze de Péret (De la garantie individuelle), “the reason of the guilty party, in his normal state of innocence, who stands in judge of that same reason, led astray for the moment by the crime.” 59

The jury judges morally, the judge materially. The jury judges in the way the good sense of every individual would judge, as the good sense of the accused himself would judge, if he were not partial because his own case is involved. The judge pronounces according to the laws dictated by the common interest of the society.

When punishments are excessive, says Gach, or seem so to juries, they will absolve the guilty person, although they will be totally convinced as to his crime. I reply that this is the fault of the punishments and not of the juries. 60 Punishments must not be excessive, and if they seem excessive to juries, this is because they are so, since jurors have no interest in finding them such. It will be said that this is to submit punishments to constant revision by juries. I reply, however, that only in extreme cases will juries resolve to stray from their functions. For, I repeat once more, they are as citizens interested for the sake of public safety in not so straying. Now, in extreme cases, that is to say, when they find themselves between the sense of justice and humanity and the letter of the law, it is not an evil if they so deviate. There should not be a law which so repels the humanity of the common man that juries, selected from within a nation, cannot make up their minds to agree to the application of that law; and the establishment of permanent judges, whom habituation would reconcile to so barbarous a law, far from an advantage, would be an evil.

People say that juries will fail in their duty, at some time out of fear, at another out of mercy. If it is out of fear, the fault belongs to civil administration’s being too negligent. If it is a matter of pity, it is too harsh a law which is at fault.

Several objections against the institution of juries, drawn from their irresolution, from their susceptibility to seduction, could, apart from a few things, apply to judges. If we consider a country in which judges were sometimes harassed and slighted by the government and sometimes abandoned by that same government to the vengeance of the families or accomplices of accused persons, as juries were during the French Revolution, is it to be believed that judges would be much firmer and less shakeable than juries?

The drawbacks of the jury system are all on the side of indulgence. Those of the judges are on the side of severity.

“If there is no country,” says Gach, “where the arts and sciences are cultivated with more success than they are in France by a small number of privileged intelligences, no more is there anywhere the mass of the nation wallows in a more profound ignorance of everything connected with the laws and public administration.” 61 Why is this so? It is because there has always been in the sanctuary of the laws and in public administration a great deal of arbitrariness, and the nature of government distanced French people from these things, and because, to draw closer more precisely to the subject we are dealing with, the formal understanding of criminal trials in France was restricted, and this raised a barrier between justice and the citizens. Change all these things and you will see the national character lose that frivolity and break out of that ignorance, which are only the result of all the bad institutions and which some people cite as a reason for perpetuating them. A people does not remain indifferent to what touches its freedom, its security, its honor, and its life, when it is allowed to get involved in it. When it is indifferent to these great things, it is because it has been forcibly kept from them. The jury system is in this respect all the more necessary to the French people in that the nation seems temporarily not fit for it. It would find in it not only the general advantages inherent in this institution, but also the particular advantage of rebuilding its moral education.

Notes

1. do not lose all their rights. When individuals disrupt the security of society through criminal activity, they lose some of their rights, which this society has the authority to restrain, in order to stop them hurting it. Normally, however, this principle is pushed much too far. The guilty man, separated from his fellow citizens, handed over to the jailers, then to the executioners, seems a being apart, whom nature spurns, whom public pity forsakes, and whom humanity repudiates. I am talking here only of a convicted felon, for it is obvious that short of an overthrow of all justice, the accused, not yet tried, retains all the rights compatible with the measures necessary for his not escaping his trial. The criminal, however, even when convicted, is not stripped of all his rights. One he has is to demand that his trial be public, because human actions are made up of a host of nuances which law cannot grasp. Even when the guilty person is given a punishment, if his action is attenuated by some of these nuances which legal justice could not take into account, public opinion ought to compensate him for this. In the second place, he has the right that the punishment he undergoes is not revolting to human nature and is not open to arbitrary aggravation by the whim of those carrying it out.

2. all experimentation with torture. People believe too much in frightful tortures. In Athens the death of condemned people was very sweet, since each chose the manner of his own death. There was no more crime there than elsewhere.

3. life sentences. I am always fearful that once life sentences are accepted, one or other of the numerous prisons whose establishment would be necessary might not sooner or later turn itself into a State prison, a metamorphosis all the easier in that almost everywhere, for plausible reasons of public safety, only government permission can open the entrance to these lugubrious habitations. I do not like citizens getting used to passing coldly by a prison without asking who it is who is locked up in it, without finding out whether anyone there is a languishing victim of some illegal act, without being able to get in so as to convince himself with his own eyes that the wretchedness of the detainees is not at all aggravated by the harshness or greed of their guards.

4. happiness in debasement. Indelible branding has the same drawback as public works. It prevents any return to virtue and it points to criminals happy in their shame. Bentham allows it for counterfeiters, because in branding the latter it does not remove from them their means of subsistence. “Despised as knaves,” he says, “they will still be employed as people of talent.” 62 But will this not be a very immoral thing, to show people known knaves, employed as people of talent? And if, as is probable, they get used to their shame, what spectacle is more corrupting than satisfaction in opprobrium?

5. the establishment of colonies. Bentham makes a rather strong objection to the establishment of colonies. Deportation is a good thing, he says, for those without resources in their own country. For it is nothing else than a free passage to the place of deportation for him who has committed a crime. II, 426. 63 There is a means of preventing this drawback. This would be to have the deportation preceded by some positive punishment, such as a more or less long imprisonment. This precaution would deter someone tempted to commit a crime in order to get to a new country. The punishment must be separated from the new abode, however. The guilty party must begin his new career without being pursued by society. The good fortune of which the guilty partake in their new refuge would not have a demoralizing effect, like that sometimes experienced by those condemned to public works. The people would not witness this, and they would have proof of the punishment previously undergone by the criminal.

Additions

Say in this chapter that punishments must be varied and refer to Bentham’s work. 64

Speak in this chapter of the right which those who have been unjustly detained, or condemned, in a word, have suffered from the errors of the law, to be compensated at public expense.

Notes

1. by treating it with disfavor. What I say of property, that once it exists, it has to be given power, I say of all institutions; in countries where there is a nobility, that nobility must be given strong legal authority. If we do not want to give it such, all aristocratic distinctions must be abolished. In a word, one must will what one wants. The nobility, in the condition it was in in France, immediately before the Revolution, was an absurd and dangerous institution, precisely because it offended without having powers of containment.

2. or annihilated. “Woe,” says Ganilh, II, 251, “to governments which separate power from wealth!” He adds: “and wealth from freedom!” Indeed, what is needed is that everybody be in a position to acquire some wealth and that those who possess it be entrusted with conserving it.

3. should comprise proprietors. Can nonproprietors, people will say, be represented by proprietors? In the same way as the represented by the representatives. For representatives, by becoming such, cease in many respects to be in the same situation as the represented.

Notes

1. Examples drawn from antiquity. Cicero, De officiis, Livre II, ch. 21, edition d’Olivet, III, 359, quotes this sentence from the Tribune Philippe; non esse in civitate duo millia hominum qui rem haberent. 65 And he reproaches him with a criminal action in having held such a discussion with the people, because he was inclined to the sharing of wealth. But if in the year 649 bc , the era of the Tribunate of Lucius Marcus Philippus, there were in the immensity of the Roman realm only two thousand citizen proprietors, had not property, rather than being a blessing granted by society, become an intolerable abuse, and out of respect for the people, should not a pointless respect for property be abjured? No; but the organization of property needed correcting, being very defective in Rome. Palliatives had been tried. Laws against deeds of trust and entailments and those which gave an equal part to all the sons and daughters tended to divide landed properties. The aristocracy, however, tended to bring them together. This was not the vice of property but of aristocracy.

Among the ancients, where property was not familiar and mobile, political rights could not attach to proprietors alone without injustice. In modern times the opposite obtains.

Among the ancients, the poor were always indebted to the rich. In modern times it is usually the rich who are indebted to the poor. It is important to examine the outcomes of this difference. One of the most striking is that relations between proprietors and nonproprietors are utterly different in the two cases. Among the ancients, the rich demanded from the poor what the latter did not have, money, and that demand requiring for its satisfaction violence, and usually not being satisfied despite this violence, there resulted continual hatred and opposition between these two classes. In modern times the rich demand from the poor what the poor can always supply, labor, and the result is a much greater mutual accord. This could be identified as a reason property could not serve as the basis of political rights in antiquity and can in modern times.

Notes

1. business property. Agriculture has a further advantage over business which I have not mentioned. It demands much more intelligence and makes much more use of it than jobs in industry do. Smith, I, 10, 264. See Mirabeau, Ami des hommes, on the difference between the farming groups and the artisans, I, 54 and following.

Additions

A certain disadvantage of the use of public debt is that it facilitates the undertaking of war, because instead of providing for the expenditure it demands, by taxes which will always be more or less difficult to control and a heavy burden, we defray it by borrowings which are easy to get hold of, on account of the inducements which go with them and the burden of which weighs only in a partial and remote way on the people. Smith, V, 3. 66

“It has been said that a public debt attached to the government’s fate all the creditors of the State, and that these creditors, linked with its good fortune and bad alike, became its natural supports. This is very true; but this means of self-preservation, applying to a bad order of things as to a good, is in every respect as dangerous to a nation as it can be useful.” Say, V. 67

“The growth of public debt distorts the public spirit by multiplying in some nations the number of people who have an interest contrary to the common interest. The rentiers want, above everything, all the wealth of the royal treasury, and since the weight of taxes is the easiest source of this, taxpayers and the people above all who make up the biggest part of these and have no money to lend, find today in the very bosom of the State an opposing faction whose influence grows every day. The growth of public debt increases the power of government by accustoming a large part of the nation to fear above everything the slightest shaking in the works of government or the slightest change in its practices. Administration of Finances, II, 378–379.

This is a remarkable effect of complexity in the political organization of the government machinery. The natural interest of any nation is to pay the fewest contributions possible. The creation of a public debt means that the interest of a large part of the nation is in the growth of taxation.

The contradiction is apparent. The credit which on the one hand weakens government power on the other hand fortifies it.

Note

1. is to swallow small ones. If the rich alone can be powerful, the powerful will become richer every day.

Notes

1. no longer form a distinct class. It is because the different classes of society are mingling that all political power can be put in the hands of the property owners. If they formed an exclusive class they would pass unjust laws because they would become exclusive in outlook. This is what has happened in Europe across several centuries. Owners have for a long time, for example, wanted to limit the duration of leases the better to conserve the properties in their possession. They fancied that a lease agreed by their predecessors ought not to prevent them, year after long year, from enjoying the full value of their lands. Greed, however, always perceives things badly. The proprietors did not foresee how such a rule would erect obstacles to all improvement and thereby harm their true interests in the long run.

2. their most faithful supports. What, however, if owners formed an interest for rendering landed property inalienable? It would be as governors, not as owners, that they would perform this tyrannical act; and let it not be said that this is to evade the objection by verbal trickery. It is so true that this would be in their governmental capacity, that if you supposed government to be in the hands of nonowners, these governors would be just as able to form an interest to make the functions of government inalienable. Secondly, if the countries in which owners adopted such a resolution contained rich nonlandowners, the latter would leave the country and the disadvantages of the resolution would fall back on landowners. If this country contained only poor nonlandowners, even when landowners did not adopt such a resolution, the acquisition of landed property would be closed to nonproprietors, who would have no means of acquiring it.

Notes

1. of entailments. Entailments, says Smith, III, 2, 68 were invented to perpetuate a state of affairs which was in itself a great calamity, I mean the distribution among a very small number of conquerors of an enormous area of lands, and which as a result were inevitably for the most part uncultivated. Given this state of affairs, entailments were reasonable. There was no public justice. Force was the only guarantee against spoliation. Force was located only in sizeable property which provided a certain number of vassals sufficient for the holder’s self-defense. To make properties smaller was to lay them open to invasion by neighbors. Entailments therefore had a reasonable purpose in the given situation, although the situation itself was a vicious one. Entailments, however, as is the way with most human institutions, have outlasted this purpose.

Entailments, insofar as they favor the perpetuation of immense indivisible properties, are unfavorable to farming. A very considerable landowner necessarily neglects a large part of his property. One has only to compare, says Smith, III, 2, the large estates which have remained in the same families without interruption since the times of feudal anarchy, with the possessions of small owners nearby, to judge without any other argument how unfavorable to cultivation overlarge properties are. Properties are like States. Properties which are too small are disadvantageous because the owner is too poor to cultivate them well. Those which are too large, however, are just as disastrous because the owner has neither the interest nor the time to survey all the parts of them equally. Entailments tie down individuals and generations without taking into consideration the changes which may arise in the condition of either.

Notes

1. to strengthen paternal power. Some have wanted paternal power fortified in institutional ways, and they have sought to underpin it, as with all impracticable ideas, by ancient example. Among the ancients the scope of paternal power, against which other philosophers have widely inveighed, was not a disadvantage. Nor is the legal diminution of that power, one which so many moralists eloquently deplore today, a very great evil. The reconciliation of these two apparently contradictory claims lies in the differences between the ancients and us. See Book XVI.

It is not to be doubted nevertheless that the revolutionary shake-up took the diminution of paternal power too far. To remedy this abuse, however, we do not need to establish institutions but to destroy some. Do away with your laws forbidding wills, greater freedom granted to fathers will reestablish their power. Remove the obstacles and the drawbacks will disappear. It is by interfering with everything that you pile these up, and then you complain about them and think you can remedy by even more laws the inconveniences which occur only because there are too many laws already. All the good things about paternal power derive from its being purely natural and moral. If you incorporated it into law, you would destroy its nature. It is not necessary for laws to combat it, but it is necessary that they do not interfere with it. It exists independently of law and must continue thus. To undermine it is unjust. To wish to add to it is pointless, and everything which is pointless becomes disastrous when legislated. Otherwise do not intrude the crudities of government into the delicacy and independence of nature. What you think you are sanctioning, you are corrupting. You are spoiling what you are trying to improve. Paternal power is necessarily arbitrary. Such power is good when it is in the nature of things. It would be disastrous if it existed by law. Paternal power offers us an example of what I constantly say, that usually the abolition of a law would produce a number of advantages which seem mutually quite alien, and for each one of which separately, a host of laws are made which again have their particular drawbacks. The abolition of all entailments on the one hand, and perfect freedom to make wills on the other, that is to say two legal excisions, would produce at once the reestablishment of paternal power and a more equal distribution of wealth. These are advantages which it is believed one can get to by positive laws, but such outcomes one arrives at only imperfectly and pays for in multiple inconveniences, while the absence of two positive laws would produce them much more securely at the same time as it would, by delivering individual freedom and therefore taking away from men certain reasons for violating the law, be just for that reason a very great good.

Materials 70

We are not speaking here of confiscations and other political attacks on property. One cannot consider such violence as routine practice for ordered government. These acts are of the nature of coups d’Etat and all arbitrary measures whose consequences we have examined above. It is therefore against coups d’Etat and against arbitrary measures that we need to take a stand. Confiscations are only one part of these and an inseparable part. When men’s life and freedom are not respected, how could their property be so?

The spoliation which occupies us in this chapter is that which governments allow themselves, to reduce their debts or increase their resources sometimes on the pretext of necessity, sometimes of justice, but always claiming the interest of the State. For just as the zealous apostles of the people’s sovereignty think that public freedom gains from the constraints put on individual freedom, our financiers today believe that the State enriches itself by the ruin of individuals.

These attacks on property are divided into two classes.

In the first, I put part or total bankruptcies, reductions in national debt, either in capital or interest, the payment of these debts in instruments of a lower value than their nominal value, the debasement of money, fiscal retainers, delayed payments, etc.

I put in the second category the acts of government against men who have dealt with government departments in order to supply them with the wherewithal for their military and civil activity, retrospective laws or measures against the newly rich, chambres ardentes, 71 the cancellation of contracts, concessions and sales made by the State to individuals.

There has been recourse to a great variety of names to designate these things. “The obscurities of language,” remarks an English author (Bentham, I, 348), “have served financiers in deceiving the simple. They have said, for example, a retainer and not a theft.”

It is rather curious to note that the same artifice has served legislators who have made manifestly unjust laws. The émigrés during the French Revolution were punished by death and the confiscation of their goods. When the wish was to treat deported people the same way, that is to say, men who had been forced to leave their country, while others were being punished for having left it, it was said bluntly that they belonged among the émigrés, which drove the word out of use and extended the thing. 72 Just as all injustices have a deep similarity between themselves, so there is also analogy in the language of all injustices.

Once a national debt exists, there is only one way to soften its harmful effects, and that is to respect it scrupulously. One gives it in this way a stability which assimilates it, as far as its nature permits, to the other forms of property.

One cannot accept as a means of diminishing the bad effects of public debts that of not paying them. This would be to want to fight an inevitable evil by a pointless and even larger one. Bad faith can never be a remedy for anything. Far from attaining the desired purpose, one would add to the immoral consequences of a property which gives its possessors different interests from the nation of which they are a part, the even more disastrous consequences of uncertainty and arbitrariness. Arbitrary government and uncertainty are the prime causes of what has been called agiotage [gambling]. It never develops more forcibly and actively than when the State is in violation of its agreements. All the citizens are in such circumstances forced to seek in the risks of speculation some compensation for the losses which the government has made them undergo.

Any distinction between creditors, between credits, any enquiry into the transactions of individuals, any research of the route public bills of exchange have followed, of the hands they have passed through till their maturity date, is criminal mismanagement. A government contracts debts and in payment gives government paper to those to whom it owes money. These are forced to sell the instruments it has given them. On what pretext would it proceed from this sale to query the value of these instruments? The more it questions the value, the more they will lose. It will rely on this new depreciation in order that they cash in at a price even lower. This double progression reacting on itself will soon reduce credit to zero and individuals to ruin.

The original creditor has been able to make of his claim what he wanted. If he sold his credit, the fault is not in him, whose need has forced him to this, but in the State which paid him only in promissory notes which he has found himself forced to sell. If he has sold his credit at a giveaway price, the fault is not in the purchaser who has bought it with unfavorable prospects; the fault is again with the State which has created these unfavorable prospects, since the credit sold would not have fallen to a giveaway price if the State had not inspired mistrust.

Setting it so that a note loses value as it passes to a second hand in any circumstances the government is not in a position to know, since these circumstances are free and independent variables, you cause circulation, which has always been regarded as a means of wealth, into a cause of impoverishment. How can one justify this policy which refuses creditors what they are owed and discredits what it has given them? On what basis can the courts condemn the debtor, a creditor himself of a bankrupt government? Well then! Dragged off to a prison stripped of what belonged to me because I have been unable to clear the debts I have contracted on public trust, I will pass in front of the palace whence emanated these thieving laws. On the one side sits the government which robbed me, on the other the judges who punish me for having been robbed.

Any nominal payment is criminal mismanagement. Any issuing of paper which cannot be at will converted into specie, any alteration in the value of money, are false acts. The governments which have recourse to these guilty expedients are nothing but forgers armed with public power. 73 The government which pays a citizen in false values forces him into payments of like nature. In order not to enervate economic exchanges and render them impossible, it is obliged to legitimate all such operations. By creating the need for some people to behave in this way, it furnishes everybody with the excuse. Egotism, far more subtle, more adroit, more prompt, and more diversified than government, rushes forward at the given signal. It confounds all precautionary measures by the speed and complexity of its frauds. When corruption has the justification of necessity, it knows no more limits. If the government wants to establish a difference between its transactions and those of individuals, the injustice of it is only the more scandalous.

A nation’s creditors are only a part of that nation. When taxes are imposed to pay the interest on the national debt, the matter weighs on the whole nation. After all, the State’s creditors, as taxpayers, pay their share of these taxes. By a State bankruptcy, on the contrary, the debt is thrown on the creditors alone. This is therefore to conclude that since a burden is too heavy for a whole nation, it will be carried more easily by a quarter or an eighth of it.

Any enforced reduction in repayment is government default. You have dealt with individuals according to conditions you have freely offered. They have fulfilled these conditions. They have lent you their funds, which they have withdrawn from branches of production which offered them positive returns. You owe them everything you have promised them. The fulfillment of your promises is the legitimate indemnity of the sacrifices they have made and the risks they have run. If you regret having suggested onerous conditions, the fault is yours and in no way theirs, since all they have done is accept them. The fault for this is doubly yours, since it is your earlier breaches of trust above all which have made your conditions onerous. If you had inspired full confidence, you would have obtained better conditions.

If you reduce the debt by a quarter, who will prevent you reducing it by a third, by nine-tenths, by the whole lot? What guarantees will you be able to give to your creditors or to yourself? Whatever one does, the first step makes the second one easier. If strict principles had held you to the fulfillment of your promises, you could have cast about for funds in an ordered and economic way. You, however, have sought yours in fraud. You have regarded it as acceptable that they are at your disposal, they absolve you from all work, privation, and effort. You come back to them constantly, since you no longer have any sense of integrity to hold you back.

Such is the blindness of governments when they abandon the paths of justice, as it is of those who have deluded themselves that by reducing their debt through an act of government, they would rally credit which seemed to be flagging. They have set off from a badly understood principle which they have badly applied. They have thought that the less they owed, the more confidence they would inspire, because they would be better placed to pay their debts. They have confused, however, the effect of a legitimate release and the effect of a default. It is not enough that a debtor can fulfill his commitments; he must further want to, and there must be means to hold him to it. Now, government which takes advantage of its authority to annul part of its debt proves that it lacks the will to pay. Its creditors cannot constrain it thereto. What do its resources matter therefore?

A public debt is not like commodities of basic necessity and ongoing need. The fewer there are of these commodities, the more valuable they are. They have intrinsic value, and their relative value grows with their scarcity. The value of a debt, on the contrary, depends only on the reliability of the debtor. Once this reliability is shaken, value is destroyed. You can reduce the debt in vain, to half, a quarter, or an eighth. What is left of it is only all the more discredited. Nobody needs nor wants a debt which does not get paid. When it comes to individuals, the power to fulfill their commitments is the main condition, because the law is stronger than they. When it is a question of governments, however, the principal condition is will.

There is another kind of default in relation to which governments seem to conduct themselves with even less scruple. Involved in useless ventures, maybe through ambition, or imprudence, or indiscreet activity, they contract with merchants for the supplies necessary for these enterprises. The terms they get are disadvantageous. This has to be. The interests of a government can never be defended with as much zeal as private interests. This fate is common to all transactions where the parties cannot look after themselves, and it is an inevitable one. In this situation the government takes a dislike to certain men who have merely taken advantage of the profit inherent in their situation. It encourages harangues and calumnies against them. It exaggerates its own losses, this is to say its own ineptitude, and because it has been ignorant and inept, it believes it has the right to be violent and unjust. It cancels its deals, it delays or refuses the payments it has promised. It takes general measures which, to reach a few suspects, without proper investigation, surround a whole class. To palliate this iniquity, it needs to represent these measures as hitting only those at the head of the enterprises from which their incomes are being removed. The hostility of the people is worked up against certain odious or tarnished names. The men who are plundered, however, are not isolated. They have not done everything on their own. They have used artisans and manufacturers who have given them real value and service. It is on the latter that the plundering, which seems to be being carried out only against the former, comes to fall. These same people, who, always credulous, applaud the destruction of a few fortunes, allegedly immense ones, which therefore irritate them, do not work out that all this wealth, based on works whose instrument they had been, tended to reflect back even on them, while the destruction of this wealth took away from them themselves the payment for their own work.

Governments always have a more or less great need for the men who deal with them. A government cannot buy with cash transactions as an individual can. It must either pay in advance, which is impracticable; or what it needs must be supplied to it on credit. If it ill-treats the suppliers, what happens? Honest men withdraw, not wishing to work in a business enfeebled from the start. Only rogues come forward and, foreseeing that they will not be paid properly, they take the question of payment into their own hands. A government is too slow, too encumbered, too lumbering in its movements, to follow the nimble decision making and rapid maneuvers of individual interest. We have seen governments wanting to vie with individuals in corruption, but the corruption of the latter was always more skillful. The only effective course for government is loyalty.

The first effect of disfavor cast on a branch of trade is to drive away from it all the traders whom greed does not seduce. The first effect of a despotic system is to inspire in all good men the desire not to encounter this despotism and to avoid transactions which could connect them with this terrible power.

In all countries, economies founded on the violation of public trust have unfailingly met their punishment in the transactions which have followed. The returns to wickedness, despite its arbitrary withholdings and its violent laws, are always paid a hundredfold more than the returns to honesty would be.

Governments lose all credit by enforced reductions of public debt. They unsettle the value of their credit by evaluating it according to the loss it experiences. In this case their own negotiations become ruinous. By changing the value of money, they lose as creditors of the taxpayer and in their purchases what they gain as debtors. 74 By treating suppliers unjustly, they make honest people withdraw, and they find only rogues with whom to deal. 75 Lastly, by destroying credit, they range against them all the creditors of the State, and from this come revolutions.

In England the State’s undertakings have always been sacred since 1688. So the State’s creditors are one of the classes most interested in preserving the government. In France under the monarchy, violations of public trust having been frequent, the creditors of the State, at the first announcement of a deficit, showed themselves eager for a revolution. “Each man believed he saw his safety in taking away from the sovereign the administration of finance and locating it in a national council.” Bentham, Principes du Code civil. 76

Despotism with regard to property is soon followed by despotism with regard to persons. This is first because despotism is contagious and secondly because the violation of property naturally provokes resistance. In this case the government deals severely with the oppressed person who resists, and because it wanted to seize his property from him, it is led to aim a blow at his freedom.

Add that by throwing men into uncertainty about what they own, you provoke them to encroach upon what they do not own. Without security, the economy becomes a matter of trickery, and moderation, imprudence. When everything can be taken away, one must grab as much as possible, because that gives one more chance of retaining something from the spoliation. 77 When everything can be taken away, as much as possible must be spent, because everything spent is so much snatched away from despotism. 78

“Kings,” says Louis XIV in his Memoirs, “are absolute lords and have naturally the full and free disposition of all their subjects’ goods.” 79 When kings regard themselves as absolute lords of all their subjects possess, however, the subjects hide what they possess or dissipate it. If they hide it, this is how much is lost to agriculture, trade, industry, and to prosperity of all kinds. If they lavish it on frivolous, coarse, or unproductive pleasures, this again is so much deflected from worthwhile uses and efficacious economic decisions. Louis XIV believed he was saying something favorable to the wealth of kings. He was really saying something which would be bound to ruin kings by ruining nations.

Materials

In order to sum up the principles which must guide the action of government on property, I will say that government must constrain property when there is an obvious need for public safety. 80 This prerogative distinguishes its jurisdiction over property from its jurisdiction over persons, for it would not have the right to make an attempt on the life of a single innocent, even if this were for the safety of a whole nation. In all the cases, however, in which public safety is not threatened, government must guarantee property and leave it free.

Notes

1. the price cannot rise. Commodities or merchandise do not rise in price solely because they cost more on account of their scarcity. Ordinarily, when an output costs more to produce than its market value, or at least when it costs such a lot and has so feeble a market price that profit is nil or very little, producers turn away from this production and concentrate on another more profitable one. If, however, they could not turn aside from this production, they would have to continue to concentrate on it even at a loss, and the output remaining at the same level, the price would not increase. Little by little, doubtless, the number of producers would diminish, and output being smaller, its price would rise because of its scarcity. If this production, however, were of a fundamental necessity, this would be a new misfortune. Argument against the land tax. First of all, it ruins the farmers, who, being able to produce only the same output and being able to ruin themselves only the more swiftly if they do not produce it, cannot like manufacturers make production scarcer in order to make it dearer. Next, it ruins agriculture, and before equilibrium between the costs and the value of commodities can be established, the people suffer from dearth.

On all occasions when the producer cannot diminish his workforce nor his output, the tax weighs heavily on him. The case here is that of an owner of land.

2. revoltingly iniquitous. For the financial drawbacks of the tax on patents, see Sismondi, Législation de commerce, II, 89 and following.

3. as to the third. “Fraud is the defect of the tax on consumption (indirect tax). Injustice is the defect of the tax on rent (direct tax).”Canard, Principes d’économie politique. 81

Notes

1. as the lottery. What governments believe they gain in money by the lottery tax, they lose and more, even in money, by the harm this tax does to production and by the crimes which it makes the working class commit, crimes which, leaving aside moral considerations and envisaging them only in fiscal terms, are an expense for the State.

Notes

1. encroach upon capital. See on the effect of consumption of capital by nations, Sismondi, I, 4. 82 “If the expenditures of the three productive classes exceed their incomes, the nation must inevitably impoverish itself.” Sismondi, I, 94 and following. 83

2. The State which taxes capital. Government economy is what most favors a country’s prosperity, because it leaves more capital at the working disposal of individuals.

Notes

1. Several of the mines in Peru. From 1736 the tax on mines in Peru had been reduced from a fifth to a tenth. Smith, I, 11. 84

Notes

1. Levying always produces an ill. The first general effect of a tax is to diminish the seller’s profit by reducing consumption in the areas of production taxed. What follows is that those who cultivated these areas abandon them to take up more lucrative ones. They increase the competition in these and consequently reduce the profits. Therefore the tax has an influence on all the sources of rent. Before the tax is spread over all of them, however, and the burden of the taxed branch is shared between all the others, in such a way as to produce equilibrium, there operates a more or less lasting friction, which makes the tax disastrous. “Any old tax is good, any new tax pernicious.” Canard, Principes d’économie poltitique. 85

2. the most deplorable. “Republics die from luxury,” says Montesquieu, “monarchies from poverty.” 86 He concludes from this that economy is suitable for republics and luxury for monarchies. A singular conclusion: for what does the observation itself, on which he bases this conclusion, mean? That republics enrich themselves by prudent economy and monarchies ruin themselves by luxury.

Notes

1. any pointless tax is a theft. “What the well-being of the State demands, obviously enough, is decisiveness and a characteristic touch of inspiration. The taxes appropriate to this public well-being, of which a sovereign is judge and guardian, are proof of justice. What exceeds this measured proportion ceases to be legitimate. There is therefore no other difference between individual excesses and those of the sovereign, if only because the injustice of the former comes from simple ideas which each person can easily distinguish, while the latter, being linked to government complexities, whose extent is as vast as it is involved, no one can judge other than by conjecture. . . . 87 It is a violation of the most sacred trust to use the sacrifices of the people on careless largesse, on pointless expenditures and undertakings foreign to the good of the State. . . . 88 The unreasonable extent of taxation is moreover a constant source of ills and vexations.” Administration des finances, I, Ch. 2. 89

Addition

Excessive taxation is often excused by the alleged necessity of encircling governments with an aura of magnificence. The claim is that to inspire men with respect for their institutions we must bedazzle them with the brilliance of those who hold power. This axiom is equally false in republics and monarchies. In the latter, the unassuming stance of the monarch, being voluntary and thereby meritorious, produces a much deeper impression than the display of a wealth extorted from the governed. Frederick II [the Great] and Charles XII inspired more real respect in this regard than Louis XIV. Ostentation is even less necessary in republics. It is possible that an aristocracy requires that the opulence of the governing class impress the people. This opulence, however, must belong by heredity to this class and must not be raised from daily taxation, a source at once ignoble and odious. As to elected governments, ostentation there produces none of the effects attributed to it. What is done with the avowed purpose of striking, dazzling, or seducing inevitably fails in this purpose. No personal veneration results from trappings which themselves have nothing personal about them. This borrowed magnificence is like our actors’ makeup. Pomp has influence on the nation as spectator, when it is brought into the government by the individual and not when it is so to speak conferred on him, in his governmental capacity. The advantageous effects we expect from ostentation are made up of memories, habits, and traditional reverence. Governments which do not have these supports must renounce these means. If pomp is pointless, however, there is an elegance of form proper to governments; this elegance chimes with the greatest simplicity, just as the most brutal vulgarity goes with display and ostentation. This formal elegance commands true respect. It is the slow and sure effect of education and of life’s whole experience. It is the guarantee of justice, its consequences far more important than one might think. Vulgar men can be moved; but for each occasion when they will be, how many occasions will there be when they remain insensitive and brutal? We should not forget, moreover, that to move vulgar spirits will require an intensification of the sounds and symptoms of grief. Now, as to silent but profound grief, they will not even notice it. How many timid or delicate impressions will recoil before their loathsome and wild persons? How many innocents will there be whose offended pride will freeze the tongue and strangle speech?

Vulgarity and violence are the two greatest scourges in men with power. They put an insurmountable barrier between them and everything noble, enlightened, delicate, and profound in human nature. Vulgar men, irascible men, even when their intentions are pure, are responsible for all the good that they are not asked to do and all the ill which is done without people daring to complain.

An author famous for his writings on how to relieve the burdens of the downtrodden poor, M. de Rumford, says in his memoirs on poorhouses and workhouse prisons, that care of physical needs contributes much to the moral improvement of men, and that he has often observed the most rapid change in criminals themselves, when purer air, better clothes, and healthier food had lifted them, so to speak, into another world. The absence of physical care, he says, creates a sorrow, a malaise which puts the soul into an irritable frame and throws something convulsive and wildly disordered into feelings and actions. 90

Here I am speaking as much of the coarseness of appearance and of that irascibility which powerful men wish to use as a resource so that they will not have to apologize for it as a vice. These things throw our being into a kind of convulsive agitation, which chokes all the sweeter feelings. Man has an influence on himself by his voice, his gestures, his discourse, and just as his inner sensations act on the behavior he adopts, so these adoptions react on his inner life. At some stages of our Revolution, people fell into the most ridiculous contradictions. They had wanted to clothe the government with magnificence and sanctify the vulgarity of its membership. It had not been grasped that what was good in popular institutions was simplicity, the absence of pointless pomp and of an ostentation humiliating to the poor man, and what was good in aristocratic institutions was the elegance of the mores, the loftiness of spirit, and the delicacy of feeling, results all of an education whose provision wealth had permitted. There had been brought together the drawbacks of two systems, stupid ostentation combined with ferocious brutality.

Additions

It is proven that the economy flourishes only under freedom; but if the contrary were demonstrated, the restrictions put on freedom on the pretext of special support for production have consequences so disastrous for general contentment and for morality that it would be better to let the economy languish than attack freedom.

Notes

1. Thus we have three real losses. Here is a fourth one of them. Manufactures which, by keeping going thanks to privileges, diverting funds from those which do not need privileges to sustain themselves, cause the latter to deteriorate owing to shortage of sufficient funds. Sismondi, Législation de commerce, II, 53.

2. combinations which make up for this. Of two things one must occur, either a commerce cannot take place without a state-supported company, and then the company has nothing to fear from the competition of individual firms, or if the company has something to fear from this, then the trade can be conducted without a privileged company, in which case a company of this kind is an injustice.

3. will enlighten all the citizens. It is obvious that each individual in his particular position is far better placed to judge the type of activity his capital can most advantageously set to work than any politico or legislator will be able to do for him. Smith, IV, 2. 91

4. it ruins itself. Commercial companies have this disadvantage, that their directors are like governments. Governments soon develop an interest different from that of the governed. The directors of these companies soon have an interest different from that of the company.

5. bankruptcy. A very remarkable example of the unfortunate effects of state-supported companies is the history of French trade with the Indies, from 1664 to 1719. The company, created in 1664, had an exclusive monopoly. By 1708 it had lost close to twenty million. During this time, merchants from St. Malo engaged in interloping, beset with all the difficulties and dangers of smuggling. They profited by it. In 1708 these traders had the idea of buying the privileges of the company which impeded them and became themselves a privileged company. Their profits ended immediately and within eleven years they took the losses of the Company of the Indies, whose monopoly they had acquired, to thirty million. Savary, Dictionnaire de Commerce, IV, p. 1075. 92

6. wardenships. Apprenticeships prevent individuals from following this or that trade. Guild masters and wardenships are organizations which determine their own numbers and the conditions of admission.

7. the most iniquitous. When one of the conditions of apprenticeship is paying to be accepted into the trade, this is the height of injustice. For it is to keep from work those who have most need for work.

8. the most absurd. The result of fixing the number of people working in each trade is that it is more likely than not that this number will not be proportionate to the needs of consumers. This is because there can be too many or too few. If there are too many, the men in this trade, being unable to take up another since the guild masters in any other would drive them away, work at a loss or do not work and fall into poverty. If there are too few, the price of the labor rises, agreeably to the greed of these workers.

9. the surest spur to such perfecting. A singular pretension of government, which, as Sismondi says, II, 285, wants to teach manufacturers their craft and consumers to know their taste! 93

10. to appraise their merits. I exempt from full freedom of trade professions which touch on public safety, architects, because an unsound house affects all citizens, pharmacists, doctors, lawyers.

11. the price of the goods. Apprenticeships are oppressive from the consumers’ viewpoint because by diminishing the numbers of workers, they increase the labor costs. Therefore they harass the poor man and cost the rich one a surcharge.

12. the English towns. England, despite its system of prohibitions, has always tended to liberalize production. Apprenticeships have been restricted to existing trades since the statute of Elizabeth which established them, and the courts have welcomed the most subtle distinctions tending to remove from these statutes as many trades as possible. For example, you have to have had an apprenticeship to make carts but not to make carriages. Blackstone. 94

13. no corporation. Notice how freedom, as the simple absence of law, brings order to everything. Combinations of individuals practicing the same trade are mostly a conspiracy against the public. Shall we conclude from this that these combinations should be forbidden by prohibitive laws? Not at all. By forbidding them the government condemns itself to much bother, to surveillance, to punishments which would entail grave drawbacks. Just let government refuse to sanction these combinations. Let it not recognize any right to restrict the number of men in this or that job. Just doing this will deprive combinations of any purpose. If twenty persons in a particular trade wish to combine to push up the price of their work to too high a level, others will come forward to do the job at a lower price.

14. the rigging of daily wages. See on the efforts of guild masters to lower and workmen to raise the daily wages and of the impotence of government intervention in this regard, Smith, I, 132–159, Garnier’s translation. 95 The rigging of the daily wage is the sacrifice of the larger party to the smaller.

15. the national wealth. It is to be remarked that at the same time that French manufacturers demand [import] prohibitions to support their manufactures, they all complain of the lack of capital. (See the Statistics from the départements published by the government.) 96 This proves that there is not enough capital for the existing businesses. Now, if they abandoned prohibitions and if free admission of foreign products were to cause the abandonment of part of the industry, the capital would relocate in the direction of the remaining parts. It would no longer be consumed feeding failing manufactures, and truly viable manufactures would gain thereby, as well as the whole body of consumers.

16. and perfect itself. The prohibitions on products of foreign manufacture tend to extinguish emulation by indigenous products. “What is the point,” says Sismondi, II, 163, “of seeking to do better when the government has undertaken to find buyers for the very persons who do the worst?”

17. this greater value. One would think, to see the precautions which governments take against the exportation of specie, that people export it at a loss, simply to play tricks on them.

18. must remain free. “All the times when we chide a nation about the means for fulfilling its obligations, it is as if, in order to increase the credit of a merchant, we forbade him to pay his debts.” Sismondi, I, 200.

19. It will not be exported unprofitably. To justify the precautions taken against the exportation of specie, people greatly exaggerate the fantasies, foolish expenses, and prodigality of individuals. These things, however, make up only an infinitely small part of the total expenditure; and to prevent this very small ill, a much worse one is done, and there is even incurred, by way of payment for spies and legal proceedings, a much greater expense.

The fantasies which lead to the unproductive flight of specie are expenses particular to the rich. Now, the rich man will always have ways of getting his specie out, since he will always be able to pay the smuggling premium.

The supporters of bans on the export of specie say quite correctly that specie, in facilitating exchange and accelerating circulation, creates commerce. Are they not forgetting, however, that commerce creates money, that is to say, brings back specie? They write always as if the purpose of those who demand freedom for the exportation of specie were to drive out everything which is in the country, and they expound very well the benefits of specie and the drawbacks of its disappearance. See Ferrier, Du gouvernement, pp. 13–18. 97 Permitted exportation, however, is not forced exportation. The logic of the defenders of prohibitions is to suppose that all dangerous and injurious things would be done as soon as they were not forbidden. They assert this very complacently, and then they fully demonstrate the evil which will result from it, for example, in the case of specie. They do not examine whether even when its leaving is not prohibited, specie would, indeed, leave. They give themselves over to a pathetic picture of the evils a country would experience if it were deprived of all its specie. This is a logical ruse which deceives much of the world. You affirm one thing; you demonstrate from it a second thing, which is incontestable; and you conclude from the obviousness of the second assertion the truth of the first, although there is no connection between the two. “If France,” says Ferrier, “saw herself losing every year just twenty million, at the end of fifty years, her specie would be reduced by half.” Manufactures would fall, etc. The second assertion is true, doubtless, once one has admitted the first. The difficulty is that the first is not true and can never be true. This is a thing which happens frequently in all disputes. One of the combatants wittingly changes the question, and the other one, not noticing that the question has changed, lets himself be drawn into following his adversary and battling on a false terrain. The opponents of free exportation, instead of proving that exportation set free would cause all the specie to leave, have assumed the thing proven and then demonstrated the bad effects of its leaving. Then their antagonists, instead of proving that free exportation drives out only the superfluous specie, have been pushed by the heat of the discussion to combat everything their opponents said and begun to maintain that all the specie’s leaving would not be a bad thing. See Smith. 98 Thus sophisms by one group set the logic of the opposing group.

To judge this question sanely, one must set off from two principles. First, on all the occasions a people have too little specie, it will not exit, even if exportation is allowed. Secondly, all the times there is too much specie, it will be impossible to prevent its exit, even if exportation is forbidden.

20. piled up law after law. Contradictory measures by governments. They strictly forbid exportation of specie, and they create paper money whose natural and inevitable effect is to expel the specie from their country. See Smith, 99 Sismondi, 100 and Say. 101

21. of a middleman class. A law which everywhere and always has been judged extremely useful is that which forbids any hand to intervene between the farmer and the urban consumer. Is it not obvious, however, that the manufacturer is always distracted from his work by the sale of output, that he can produce more and better output if some capitalist takes care of sales? Why make an exception in this respect of agriculture? If the peasant has to take his commodities to town, he necessarily loses considerable time. He spends what he gets for his products on luxurious town living. The men get drunk and the women corrupted. This way of things depraves and ruins the country people. Mirabeau, Monarchie prussienne, I, 169. 102

22. competition. “As soon as a branch of commerce or any specialized work is of use to the public, this will be all the more true when competition is more freely and generally established in it.” Smith, II, Ch. 2. 103 The principle of competition applies to everything. “The establishment of several banks issuing promissory notes is better,” observes Say, II, Ch. 15, 104 “than the establishment of one. Then each establishment of this kind seeks to merit the favor of the public by offering it the best conditions and the soundest security.”

23. that the minimum is missing. Whoever carefully examines the dearths and famines which have afflicted some part of Europe, during the course of this century and the two preceding ones, on a number of which we have very precise data, will find that no dearth has ever arisen through any coming together of domestic sellers of wheat nor of any other cause than a real scarcity of wheat, perhaps caused sometimes and in a particular place by the ravages of war, but in by far the largest number of cases, by bad years, while a famine has never derived from any other cause than by violent measures of government and by improper means used by government to try to remedy the difficulties of high prices. The trade in wheat, without restrictions, harassment, or limits, which is the most efficacious safeguard against the misfortunes of a famine, is also the best palliative for the dire consequences of scarcity. “For there are no remedies against the consequences of real starvation. They can be alleviated only.” Smith, IV, Ch. 5. 105 He shows very clearly in the same chapter that the more you put discredit on the wheat trade and the more you surround it with dangers, by causing those who devote themselves to this trade to be looked on as monopolists, the more you cause those who devote themselves to this trade, despite the discredit and the dangers, to want to be compensated for this by large profits. The people then find themselves in years of scarcity in the hands of unscrupulous men, who get revenge for the people’s disdain by taking advantage of their distress.

24. to forbid producing. The Maremma of Tuscany produced four times more wheat than was necessary for feeding its inhabitants, before exportation was forbidden. The grand dukes of the House of Medici prohibited it, and the lands remained uncultivated. Sismondi, II, 128. 106 The exportation of wool is severely forbidden in England. What has the result been? That the number of rams has diminished and that wool has become more rare and of lower quality. The first fact was established by a Parliamentary inquiry in 1802. The second all English people recognize. Sismondi, II, 35. 107

25. a habitual calamity. See some excellent ideas in Bentham, Principes du Code civil, Ch. 4, 108 on the intervention of laws regarding subsistence.

26. when it comes to the means of carrying it out. On grain legislation, in the Bibliothèque de l’homme publique, XII, pp. 110 and following. 109 “Any commodity, without exception, must be traded freely if one wants it in abundance. It is enough to harass and restrict its sale to cause its cultivation to be neglected and to make it rare.” 110 Permission to certain individuals to export does more harm than good, since without bestowing more freedom it adds uncertainty to irritation. Thus it is false reasoning to conclude from the harm permission to individuals causes that general freedom would be harmful too. When exportation is forbidden, what happens? Wheat becomes dirt cheap; during that year it is squandered, and in the following years very little and poor quality is grown and there is famine. If people do not want a general system and rely on the prudence of the government, the government’s committing the least error results in the greatest inconvenience, and not only that, but individual interest, which is the best and only guarantee of supplies, knowing it can be thwarted at each second by the arbitrariness, the whim, or the mistakes of the government, loses its assurance and thereby its dynamism. It puts its cunning in the service of fraud rather than in useful economic calculation. First, because its calculation can be unexpectedly hampered. Secondly, because on all the occasions when fraud is possible, there is more to gain by it than from any other financial operation, p. 111. The disadvantages of warehouses, pp. 119–120, 178. Laws against monopolies. Sequence of measures which harass people and are always useless, pp. 148–164. The excellent edict of 1774, p. 192. The need to take precautions on account of the people’s prejudices, pp. 205–211. Excellent report presented to the Assembly of Notables on the commerce in grain. Prohibitions encourage sudden exportation at rock-bottom prices, because they get lifted precisely when grain is cheap, p. 222. To the price of wheat maintained at a modest level by the government there must be added the expenses of the measures necessary to keep it at that level. For nothing is as dear as vexations. Now, these expenses fall back on taxpayers, p. 228. The prohibition on exporting is an indication of shortage, which has the infallible effect of raising prices, p. 234. 111

27. and the most convenient. See Smith on the effects of prohibitions with regard to exportation of and cornering in grains, III, 2. 112

28. the question of the rate of interest. The law must not guarantee usurious rates. At the same time, however, it must grant an assured guarantee to legal rates. For if it does not protect legal rates against all risk, the difficulty of getting oneself paid these rates would cause a resurgence of usury. By firmly guaranteeing legal rates and not usurious ones, the law reconciles everybody. Lenders will prefer legitimate profit, if it is safe, to a larger profit which is precarious. If, on the contrary, no profit is assured, lenders will seek, risks being equal, the largest profit. N.B.: I do not know if all this is fair and does not contradict my principles. Perhaps the best and the simplest is for the law to guarantee all rates of interest however high they may be. Then the security will generate competition and this by itself will bring rates down.

29. failed against it. Frederick William, father of Frederick the Great, was violently prejudiced against the Jews. He harassed them in a thousand ways. He also had to give them privileges, to compensate them for his harassments. He allowed them, for example, exclusive right to lend at usurious rates, because they did not enjoy as much security for the funds they lent as Christians did. A singular arrangement, according to which he authorized the villainy of the former because he had left them defenseless before the villainy of the latter.

30. must not be fixed. Rising interest rates are not always the sign of a bad financial situation. Rates can rise when the scale of capital employed becomes greater, through a more extensive market or a new commerce opening up to a nation. The lowering of interest rates is therefore like falling profits. Such a fall is a sign, sometimes of prosperity, sometimes of the opposite, Sismondi, I, 78. The rate of interest has not fallen in America, despite the rapid growth of public wealth, because the need for capital grows, through the progress of industry, at the same time and even faster than the stock of capital. The rise and fall of interest rates and the rise and fall of profit levels, being sometimes a sign of prosperity and sometimes of the opposite, cannot serve as a rule for steering government measures. N.B.: This is contrary to note 28 above.

31. It causes the flight. In Italy, many rich people have scruples about lending at interest. What is the result? That they hide their specie. This fact is proved by the extreme credulity with which the public adopts all the stories of the discovery of treasure. Sismondi, I, 144. Thus the fruit of the religious teaching which forbids lending at interest is only the vanishing of a supply of funds which would have stimulated industry. We ask who gains from this religious teaching.

32. in Athens. Freedom of trade was always full and complete in Athens. There was no monopoly or exclusive privilege. Neither was there any law against usury. Those, however, who demanded excessively high interest rates were scorned by public opinion. De Pauw, I, 372.

33. Public scrutiny will moderate them. “Usury has constantly been awoken when the wish was to limit the rate of interest or abolish it entirely. The fiercer the measures were and the more severely were they carried out, the more the price of money rose. This was the result of the natural process of things. The more risks the lender ran, the more he needed to be compensated by a high insurance premium. In Rome, during all the time of the Republic, the rate of interest was enormous. The debtors, who were the plebeians, constantly menaced their creditors, the patricians. Mahomet forbade the rate of interest.” What happens? In Muslim countries money is lent usuriously. The lender indemnifies himself for the use of the capital he parts with and again for the danger of the contravention. The same thing happened in Christian countries, above all in relation to the Jews. Say, Livre IV, Ch. 14. 113

Additions

1. “The production encouraged mostly by a system of prohibitions is that which serves to benefit rich and powerful people. That which brings advantages to the poor and needy is almost always neglected or crushed.” See Smith, IV, 8. 114

2. Governments formerly had the policy of blocking the invention or the establishment of machines which economize on labor. Montesquieu approves of them. 115 This was on the pretext that these machines reduced a number of workers to inactivity and poverty. Following the invention of the machine-made stockings frame, the intendants of several provinces inveighed against a discovery which they said would reduce fifty thousand individuals to beggary. The inventor was forbidden to profit from his secret or to communicate it. They even made sure he was put in the Bastille. What happened? On his release he took refuge in England, the English turned his discovery to profit, and ten years afterward France was obliged to procure it with much more expense and difficulty. Since that time, industry of that type has multiplied its products. The poor have benefited, because they are now better clothed, and beggary, far from increasing, has diminished. Say. 116

Notes

1. men preparing for every kind of crime. “There are always many inconveniences from the unnecessary imposing of laws contrary to individual interest and easy to infringe in secret, since this is a way of enticing men to free themselves by degrees from the burden of their conscience. To forbid what one cannot prevent and to expose citizens to continual inquisition, to attach grave punishments to crimes which one can never recognize and yet can always suspect, is to weaken the respect due to the law.” Administration des finances, III, 55–56. “All the times we forbid a thing naturally permitted or necessary, we simply make dishonest people out of those who do it.” Esprit des lois, XXI, 20.

2. artificial crimes. Can a country whose law forbids alike theft, murder, the sale or purchase of such and such a material and such and such a commodity, have any just ideas on moral good or evil?

3. to consider criminal. “Such a smuggler,” says Smith, V, 2, 117 “doubtless guilty of breaking the laws of his country, nevertheless often finds he is incapable of violating those of natural justice. He was born to be in every way an excellent citizen, if the laws of his country had not taken it upon themselves to make criminal actions which in no way at all receive this character from nature.”

4. in North America. The bad effect of government action on production is seen in the influence of commercial regulations in Georgia. Pictet, Tableau des Etats-Unis, II, 308. 118

Additions

1. The Tartars, on their arrival in China, noticed that there were many disadvantages for agriculture in the irregularity of Cantons which were overpopulated, those underpopulated, and those totally unpopulated. They thought seaborne commerce was the source of the trouble, since it drew to the coast families from landlocked provinces where the fields were left fallow. They had the idea of forbidding seaborne commerce and in six provinces of demolishing houses less than three leagues from the sea, and forcing the inhabitants to withdraw deeper into the country. What happened? These people built no houses at all and waited in holes dug in the earth till the Tartar prohibitions fell into disuse. For the least enlightened men have a singular instinct, a prescience which warns them that everything excessive passes away. Indeed, the Tartars relaxed the ban on fishing and seaborne commerce. These families, persecuted so that they would cultivate the soil and who, instead of cultivating it, dug holes in it so they could live in them, left their holes and set themselves up again on the coasts. De Pauw. Egyptians and Chinese. 119

2. Regulations were passed in France to keep watch on the conservation of woods belonging to individuals, so they could not cut them down without permission. The result of these regulations was that individuals feared to plant trees which they had no right to cut down. Steuart, Political Economy, I, 146. 120

Notes

1. about the business outlook. Men in public administration who are guided by the business outlook think the measures which enrich merchants or manufacturers, and quickly to boot, also increase the national wealth. They do not reflect that the wealth of these merchants or manufacturers is formed only at the expense of other individuals in the nation. People do not believe the nation is likely to be enriched when a man who has a gaming house makes a large fortune at the expense of many individuals. The nation is no more enriched when a manufacturer, by virtue of a monopoly, acquires an immense fortune at the expense of many individuals. See Sismondi, Législation du commerce, II, 115 and following. 121 The interest of merchants and leading manufacturers is always opposed to that of the public. Consequently, any proposals coming from this group as to law or the regulation of commerce must be received only with extreme suspicion. Smith, I, 11. 122 Transplantation of the economic decision making of a particular interest group to the administration of public affairs. An individual would gain a lot from being able to make counterfeit money with impunity. Governments have believed they would gain comparably from so doing.

2. large roads. Smith points out on this occasion, I, 11, 123 that the roads were opened and that from this time these petitioners, despite their fears, saw their rents increase and their cultivation improve.

Notes

1. A regime of subsidies: See for the absurdity of subsidies the example of the one granted by the English government for the transport of grain in Ireland. Tableau de la Grande Bretagne, I, 305, 333, 338, 351–352. 124

2. of constraint and harshness. A provincial intendant in France, with a view to encouraging the production of honey and the work of the bees, demanded statements of the number of hives kept in his province. In a few days all the hives were destroyed. Administration des finances, tome not given, p. 238. 125

3. from their natural usage. “Any system which seeks, either by special subsidies to attract to a particular type of industry a larger amount of society’s capital than would naturally make its way there, or by special obstacles forcibly to deflect an amount of capital from a particular industry, in which it would otherwise seek employment, is a system truly subversive of the purpose it espouses as its first and last objective. Very far from accelerating society’s progress toward opulence and real growth, it retards it. Very far from increasing, it diminishes the real value of the annual output of land and of the work of society.” Smith, IV, 9. 126

4. will not bring the same zeal. One could regard as a subsidy the practice whereby workers in Persia are paid by the court, even when they are not working or are ill. Since people are always disposed to praise the government, Chardin bestows eulogies on this practice, Voyages de Perse, II, p. 19. 127 One can consider from the same point of view the practice in Siam whereby those who excel at their work are employed for six years by the court. La Loubère, Relation de Siam, Tome I, Partie II. 128

Notes

1. A people’s first need is to subsist. The Chinese missionaries attribute the famines so frequent in China to the distillation of rice. Who does not feel, however, that in a country where grain is short, it would be more useful to sell it than to distill it, since there would be more need for bread to eat than for spirit to drink. De Pauw, Egyptians and Chinese, I, 80.

2. the marquis de Mirabeau. See the Ami des hommes for supports for agriculture, I, pp. 44–54.

Notes

1. Only by not acting. In his Mémoires, Livre XIX, 129 Sully regards the proliferation of edicts and regulations in relation to commerce and industry, as a direct obstacle to the prosperity of the State. See Garnier’s observations in his Preface to Smith, on the nonintervention of the government in industry, xxii–xxiii. 130 It is the same with men as it is with flocks of sheep. It has been remarked that flocks of sheep prospered particularly in enclosed meadows because they were allowed to pasture freely there and they were troubled by neither the shepherd nor his dog. “Such is the misfortune of France,” says Sismondi, I, 166, “that she always borrows from each theory of political economy whatever is most ruinous in it. Following the political economists she crushed the countryside with the land tax. Following the mercantilists she shackled commerce with her customs houses and impoverished consumers. Following the disciples of Law, she dissipated public wealth twice over along with that of the capitalists, first by the creation of banknotes and then by promissory notes.” 131

Addition

“The regulations of commerce,” says Smith, IV, 7, 132 “have this double drawback, that not only do they cause the birth of very dangerous ills in the state of the body politic, but furthermore these ills are such that it is often difficult to cure them without occasioning, at least for a while, even greater ills.” “When we consider closely,” says Say, I, 35, 133 “the harm which the regulatory system causes when it is set up, and the evils to which one can be exposed in abolishing it, we are naturally led to this reflection: if it is so difficult to give freedom to industry, how much more reserved ought we to be when it is a matter of taking it away?”

Notes

1. see Mirabeau, l’Ami des hommes, I, p. 33, on the monastic institutions. Ibid., p. 38, why the condition of Protestant States is better than that of Catholic States.

2. All detailed legislation. See Mirabeau, Ami des hommes, I, 39.

Notes

1. now only a scourge. The new way of making war, the development of arms and artillery, have lessened the good effects of war. Modern courage has the character of indifference. Gone is that élan, that will, that pleasure in the development of the physical and moral faculties which hand-to-hand combat produced. See Mirabeau, l’Ami des hommes, on necessary wars and wars undertaken through the fantasy of governments, I, 27–29. 134

2. limitless power. The prompt establishment of boundless power is the remedy which can, in these cases (those of extremely large States), prevent breakup: a new misfortune on top of enlargement. Esprit des lois, VIII, 17.

Addition

Let government not get this wrong. It would search in vain to the ends of the earth after glory, tribute money, empire, and the world’s wealth. All it would earn is astonishment. Without morality and freedom, success is only a meteor, which gives life to nothing in its path. People scarcely raise their heads to contemplate it for an instant, before each person continues on his way, silent and cheerless, striving to flee from despotism, misfortune, and death.

Addition

One of the functions of government being to repel foreign invasions, it follows that governments have a right to demand of individuals that they contribute to the national defense. It is impossible to restrict this right within precise limits. Its extent depends entirely on the attacks to which the society finds itself exposed. Governments can set themselves certain statutory limitations in this respect for the convenience of the citizens and the greatest possible facility in the organization of the armed forces. For example, they can fix the age before and after which no military service can be demanded, decide on the necessary exemptions from such service, and establish due processes to ensure that their laws in this regard will not be disobeyed. None of these rules, however, can be regarded as absolute. For a rule of this nature to be absolute, one would need the enemy’s consent, since the robustness of the defense must always be proportionate to the violence of the aggression. One can never therefore affirm that any citizen or class whatsoever will not be obliged to contribute to that defense, since one can never affirm that the contribution of everyone will not be required. What has brought into people’s minds the idea of absolute and irrevocable dispensation or exemptions is that governments have often taken their defensive measures hugely beyond what was necessary, because they had the ulterior motive of turning them into means of attack. So individuals, unable to put limits on the warlike disposition of their governors, have sought at least to protect themselves from some of the consequences of this mania, by supposing that there could be between them and the government certain undertakings in virtue of which it would forgo using them in war. Governments for their part have encouraged this idea, seeing in this never more than very limited renunciation the authorization for them to deploy, as their fancy took them, all those not covered by it. In reality, however, an absolute dispensation is an absurd thing. It is to promise a man that he will be exempt from defending his country, that is, from defending himself, if an enemy comes to attack it. Governments have very clearly sensed this absurdity. They have taken advantage of it in order to say to those without absolute dispensation that they could not refuse to participate in any venture, however faraway or pointless. When the danger came close to their borders, however, they knew very well to tell these bearers of so-called irrevocable dispensations that it was part of their duty as well as in their interest to fight. Doubtless the application of this principle varies according to the extent and circumstances of a country. In a very large realm, it is almost impossible that all the citizens should ever be reduced to taking up arms. The principle exists notwithstanding that, however. In this way the state of the modern world restrains or modifies this principle. The need to fight scarcely bears on any save the group particularly dedicated for more or less of the time to military service. The dwellers in towns, the artisans, the bourgeois, the farmers in the countryside, in a word, all those not formally enrolled, are not held to any resistance toward the enemy.

Notes

1. for finding it. The claim governments make for the control of public intellectual life becomes supremely ridiculous under representative institutions, where opinions, being publicly discussed, come deprived of all mystique. No opinion in this case can be imposed with that fearsome solemnity, born of the union of force and mystery, which accompanied the promulgation of the Zend-Avesta 135 and the Koran. “It is far from being the case,” says Bentham, 136 “that as much intellect, careful reckoning, and prudence have been employed to defend society as to attack it or to prevent crimes rather than commit them.” What Bentham says springs from the fact that individuals are always more reflective and adroit than governments. It is an error to assume a huge gulf between those who dictate the laws and those who receive them. Their respective degrees of enlightenment are always in a certain ratio, and they do not diverge. Nature grants no privileges to any individual. No one gets far ahead of his time and place, and those who do are perhaps the least proper to dominate them.

2. of any government whatever. Political despotism, whether it follows or violates the rules of justice, is, says Aristotle, the overthrow of all law. 137 I will likewise say that the influence of government on thought, whether in the particular circumstances it is exercised in a manner consistent with truth and reason, or contrary to them, is nevertheless in principle the overthrow of all reason and truth. One cannot put the truth to use if one does not know whence it comes, and how and by what chain of reasoning it derives. Dialogues sur le commerce des blés, 162. 138

3. belittled our own judgment. He who, to uphold the authority of an opinion, uses force rather than reasoning may have pure intentions but really causes the greatest of evils. “To summon up in defense of the truth any help other than the facts is the most foolish of errors. He who accepts the truest proposition under the influence of government is not accepting a truth but a lie. He does not understand the proposition, for to understand it would be to grasp the force of the argument which accompanies it, the meaning of all its terms, and their respective compatibility. What he is accepting is what is convenient for submission to usurpation and injustice.” Godwin, Political Justice. 139

Additions

The history of the introduction of Greek philosophy in Rome is a remarkable example of the impotence of government either against truth or error. There was much truth but also error in the philosophy brought to the Romans by the Athenian embassy. 140 On the one hand, the progress of enlightenment had driven the Greek philosophers into rejecting absurd fables, to lifting themselves up to more refined religious notions, to separating morality from vulgar polytheism and placing its principles and its security in the heart and reasoning of man. On the other hand, in the schools of several philosophers, the abuse of a subtle dialectic had unsettled the natural and incontestable principles of justice, submitted everything to interest groups, and in this way sapped the dynamic of all action and stripped virtue itself of what is most noble and pure in it. First of all, the Senate took up Greek philosophy en bloc, an initial mistake which the government could not avoid committing, since it is part neither of its business nor its power to devote itself to the in-depth analysis of any viewpoint whose surface features are all it can ever grasp. The Senate, having taken philosophy en bloc, suffered more for ill than good. This was bound to be so. The sophistry of Carneades, which, glorifying a contemptible flair for impartially attacking directly opposite opinions, spoke in public, sometimes for, sometimes against, justice, should have inspired very critical safeguards against this hitherto unknown intellection. As a result, the Senate banned all Greek philosophy, a second and doubly unfortunate mistake. For in the first place, the Senate was banning, on appearances it had misunderstood, the thing which alone, at a time of moral corruption, could call Romans back to the love of freedom, truth, and virtue. Cato, who decided on the ban on Greek philosophy, did not know that a century after him, this same philosophy, better studied and understood, would be the sole refuge of his grandson against the treasons of fortune and the haughty clemency of Caesar. In the second place, the stern measures taken by the Senate against Greek philosophy served only to prepare for it a triumph whose very delaying made it all the more complete. The representatives from Athens were sent back precipitately to their country. Stern edicts against all foreign doctrines were frequently renewed. Pointless efforts! The impetus had been triggered. It could not be stopped by government means.

Now let us suppose that the Senate of Rome had intervened neither for nor against Greek philosophy. The enlightened men of this capital of the world would have examined the new doctrine impartially. They would have separated the truths it contained from the sophisms which had been introduced by means of these truths. It was, to be sure, not difficult to show that the arguments of Carneades against justice were only wretched quibbles. It was not difficult to reawaken in the heart of Roman youth the indelible feelings which are in the heart of all men, and to raise the indignation of these still youthful minds against an exposition which, consisting entirely in equivocation and chicanery, ought by the simplest analysis soon to find itself covered with ridicule and scorn. This analysis, however, could not be the work of government, which ought only to render it possible by leaving discussion free. For discussion, when it is banned, takes place nonetheless, but imperfectly, with confusion, intense emotion, resentment, and violence. Some would like to replace this discussion by edicts and soldiers. These means are convenient and seem sure. They have the air of bringing everything together, ease, brevity, dignity. They have only one fault: they never work. The young Romans kept all the more obstinately in their memory the discourses of the Sophists, whose persons it seemed to them had been unjustly driven out. They regarded the dialectic of Carneades, less as an opinion needing examination than as a good in need of defense, since they were threatened with having it snatched from them. The study of Greek philosophy was no longer a matter of simple speculation, but of what seemed far more precious still, at a stage of life when the mind is endowed with all the forces of resistance, a matter of triumph over government. The enlightened men of riper age, reduced to choosing between the abandonment of all philosophical study or disobedience to the government, were forced to the latter course by the enjoyment of letters, a passion which grows every day because its enjoyment is of itself. The former followed philosophy into its Athenian exile; the latter sent their children there. And philosophy, returning later from its banishment, had all the more influence, in that it arrived from afar and had been acquired with more difficulty.

The Aristotelian metaphysics was anathematized by this fearsome power, which made passions and thoughts and sovereigns and subjects bend under its yoke. It was against the ashes of a philosopher dead for twenty centuries that the Council of Paris, under Philip the Fair, directed its thunderbolts, and this dumb dust emerged victorious from the combat. The metaphysics of the preceptor of Alexander was more than ever adopted in the schools; it became the object of a religious veneration. It had its apostles, its martyrs, its missionaries, and the theologians themselves bent the dogmas of Christianity, in order to reconcile them with the maxims of the peripatetics, so irresistible is public opinion in its progressive advance, and so far is power, civil, religious, and political, forced in spite of itself to follow that advance, happy in order to save appearances, to sanction what it wanted to forbid, and to put itself at the head of the movement it had initially claimed to be stopping.

The Interim of Charles V is a memorable example of the ideas governments contrive for themselves as regards their authority on public opinion. The Interim, as we know, was an order to believe provisionally such and such dogmas, until it was decided which dogmas one should believe. It is an idea which can be conceived by governments only in a state of drunkenness, that of telling man to believe as true for a while that which one announces can be declared false later.

Notes

1. in the widest sense of that expression. Human faculties can be divided into two classes, those whose purpose is to satisfy needs or to procure present enjoyment, and those which lead to future improvement. Agriculture, commerce, the exact and natural sciences must be placed in the first class; the second takes in morality, the knowledge of earlier opinions and facts, everything which tends to establish relations between us and the past generations or to prepare such relations between us and the generations to follow. We can call the first faculties work faculties, the second intellectual faculties.

2. almost all encourage them. We have seen men who cultivated the sciences, indifferent to the situation of their fellow citizens and their country, continuing their studies with the same composure in the midst of the most bloody proscriptions and under the most degrading despotism, and indiscriminately permitting diverse tyrannies to make use of their discoveries or to take pride in their success. Considered from this point of view, the arts and sciences are truly only a kind of work of a more difficult nature, of a more extensive use than that of the manufacturer and artisan, but nevertheless separated from the great purpose of, and no less foreign to, what good minds understand particularly by philosophy. Doubtless, even then scientists serve philosophy by their results, but we cannot attribute to those who devote themselves in this way any merit. It occurs in spite of them or without their knowing. Insofar as there is any within them, they make science into a vulgar trade, which provides only nourishment for curiosity and an instrument for government, of whatever kind it may be. Once it gets involved in protecting them, power tends to give them their direction.

3. the agreed sphere. The hope of favors from government leads men committed to science to choose compliantly the subject of their research according to the fantasy of the powers of the moment. They deny themselves the leisure they need. They no longer believe themselves accountable for their own time, to themselves, to the public, to posterity, but to their patrons and protectors. They hasten to publish conjectures which are still uncertain, as though they were definitive findings; they put forward as discovery that which is not such, or which is worse still, they recoil before the truths to which the sequence of reasoning and experiment leads them, if these truths get too close to certain opinions which are in disfavor. All their faculties are vitiated by the intrusion of motives foreign to the nature of their study and to the love of what is true and to freedom of thought.

4. persecution is the more valuable. How much brilliance persecution promotes. Socrates, before falling victim to the anger of the Athenians, was so obscure that when Aristophanes cast him in the open-air theater in The Clouds, delegates of the allied towns, who were at the opening performance, went home very disgruntled that they had been occupied for such a long time with the spectacle of a man called Socrates, in whom they took no interest. Elien, Histoires Diverses, II, 13. 141

Additions

Governments which claim to favor enlightenment fasten haphazardly on the viewpoints which they protect. Sometimes, by charlatanry or gracious condescension, they submit themselves to a vain show of discussion; but to them reasoning is just superfluous politesse. Their mulishness guarantees them the obedience of all who surround them. Look at Frederick the Great disputing with the philosophers, Frederick the Great, of all men the most fit to relinquish power. Intellection constitutes his avant-garde; but you are aware, behind it, of the force, almost shameful, of his complacency, and of the despotism which sees itself as infallibly right.

No one wants the influence of enlightenment more than I; but it is precisely because I want it, because I prefer it to any other sort of approach, that I do not want a distorted version. It is in order to conserve in all its vigor the domination of the whole of the educated class that I reject, with revulsion, its subordination to a small section of itself, often the less enlightened part. I would hope to prevent the free, gradual, and peaceful activity of all from being slowed down, and even halted, by privileges granted to the few.

To listen to the writers on government policy for education, one would think that we have only to tear open a veil, to make a long-concealed light shine.

The Athenians had a tribunal for assessing plays. Never did any tribunal pronounce more absurd judgments. This was the tribunal which crowned the tragedies of Dionysius the Elder, who had been accused of letting himself be suborned. De Pauw, Recherches sur les Grecs, I, 145, 184–187. 142 Elien, Histoires Diverses, II, 8. 143 Diodore de Sicile, XVII. Quintilian. 144

There are two parts to the existence of man in society, the one he holds in common, which he makes dependent on other people, and the other, which he keeps private and independent. I call the first social existence, the second, individual existence. Man has obviously more means for perfecting his individual existence than his social existence. For he is obliged to adjust the latter to the faculties of the majority of his fellows, and cannot thus go beyond the common ground, whereas he is free to take his individual existence to whatever degree of improvement his faculties allow him. The result is what we have said more than once, that when it is necessary to submit the individual to society, society’s way of thinking, that is to say, the common way of thinking, however imperfect it may be, must prevail sovereignly. In all other cases, however, individual ways of thinking must stay free. It is not that individual abilities cannot come together to act with more force or perseverance. It is necessary, though, that they come together freely, that they are not forced to mingle and place themselves by contract on a common basis. Any time they come together, there is on both sides some curtailment of faculties. Any transaction between individual minds to form a collective one takes place at the expense of the more perfect ones.

Notes

1. attributed to it. The government by its wrong measures or its so-called promotion of morality does as much harm to morality as to freedom. It substitutes for subtle motives and the instinct for good, which drive our decent actions, motives which deprive these actions of any morality or merit, just as in the case of opinions, it substitutes for the chain of reasoning which should lead us to the truth by way of conviction, reasons which, not belonging to rational argument or to evidence, lead us to believe that the truth has all the disadvantages of error. For the perfection of the species it perverts individuals, just as for the happiness of the species it oppresses them.

Additions

See Mirabeau, The Friend of Men. On the prerogative of the sovereign on the affections, I, 9. On the efforts of governments to lead men to frugality by honor and by example, p. 22.

In China the law has sought to regulate everything. In the event, however, it has regulated only manners. It has not regulated moral behavior. The people there are overwhelmed with constraints and lost in corruption.

Morality, like sentiment, like affection, belongs uniquely to individual human resilience. The individual pronounces according to a thousand nuances, a thousand ramifications, a thousand subtleties which it is impossible to determine precisely and therefore to submit to collective authority. The true judge of morality is the heart of man, and the executor of its judgments is opinion, free and hence individual opinion, separated from government and in no way distorted by its association with power. There is an important distinction which must not be misunderstood. Since most actions opposed to morality also upset public order, society must repress these actions. This is not, however, because of their intrinsic merit or demerit. It is because they are contrary to the purpose of the public security for which political government was instituted. We must be wary of confusing two absolutely different things, the aversion which an action invokes in the individual being insofar as it is immoral, and the severity which the political body exercises against that action insofar as it is perturbative. When an immoral action is at the same time contrary to social order, it should be envisaged in two ways: as immoral such that public opinion stigmatizes it; as contrary to order such that government represses it. These are two different tribunals whose competences are, and must forever remain, distinct. They do so remain; for we see every day force being exercised and public opinion refusing to ratify its judgments. The edict on duels, says M. Ferrand, gave new life to the viewpoint it was intended to destroy, IV, 333. 145 This distinction, however, must still be recognized in theory, so that it can never be obscured in practice. If we confused these two things, we would give to the collective body a necessarily boundless jurisdiction over moral life, since for all the issues on which the collective body pronounces, there exists no higher body which can quash its decisions. Because we have not sanctified this distinction in a sufficiently formal way, there has come about some kind of notion of a liaison between morality and the collective authority, a liaison which, being purely artificial and arbitrary, is not amenable to definition and renders morality, which is at once the holiest of individual properties and the most unchangeable rule of this universe, a protean thing, modifiable by government, at the mercy of institutions, and able to vary in each country, in each century, under each government.

Coercive laws, which under various penalties would enforce actions commanded by morality, such as gratitude, would have this bad effect, that they would substitute motives of fear for natural ones.

When government interferes only to maintain justice, dangerous feelings moderate and sociable ones are developed. From the single principle of equality flow all the forms of improvement. Once the rights of all are guaranteed, that is to say, once individuals are prevented from using violence against each other, the result is that the sole means of happiness is the exercise of virtue. If governments would content themselves with guaranteeing the rights of everybody, riches would no longer be anything save means of physical enjoyment and not of oppression, privilege, or superiority over other men. Now, physical pleasures being necessarily very limited, the rich would soon wish to draw from their opulence another advantage. They would use it to gain the affection of their fellows, since this opulence would no longer enable them to dominate the latter. This use of wealth would have led to all the social virtues without the intervention of government. It is the same with all those questions over which governments arrogate to themselves a moral influence.

Bentham, I, 101, gives a very good example of the bad effects of intervention by government, aimed at repressing certain vices. 146

Notes

1. a body of doctrine. From the fact that an idea is useful as an individual one, one should not always conclude that it would be equally so were it to be established as a dominant or collective one. Mirabeau said: there exist no national truths. 147 I say: there exist no governmental truths. Thought in its nature is one and individual. It is impossible to make a collective being of it. It can be tortured, choked, or killed. But its nature does not change.

2. active and independent. It is necessary to arrange as far as possible that the teachers need a lot of pupils, that is to say, to distinguish themselves by their work and their knowledge. The only way of attaining this purpose is not to give them a salary sufficient for their ease, but only such that an accident, or illness, or some circumstance which took away their pupils from them for a while, would not reduce them to poverty. To wish to replace this dependence, which teachers must have on the public, by making them dependent on an alien authority, such as that of the government or some of its agents, is a bad measure in several respects. First, there are other ways of pleasing that authority than by zeal, activity, and knowledge. Secondly, that authority does not have the necessary enlightenment. It can be exercised capriciously and insolently, and it is in the nature of power that it often is exercised thus. . . . “Everything which obliges or commits a number of students to remain in a college or a university independently of the merit or reputation of the masters,” such as on the one hand the necessity of taking certain degrees, which can be conferred only in certain places, and on the other scholarships and aid granted to poor students, have the effect of lessening the zeal and reducing the need for knowledge on the part of the masters privileged thus under any arrangement whatever. . . . 148 What has happened in relation to government has happened rather generally in relation to education. Most public establishments have the appearance of having been set up not for the benefit of the scholars but for the convenience of the masters. Smith, V, I. 149

3. human knowledge. All the fine establishments in America are private, the great hospital in Philadelphia, the reform school, the libraries, the canals, the bridges, the schools known as academies, the charitable pharmacies, the marine societies, the locks on the waterways, the high roads. Pictet, Tableau des Etats-Unis. 150

Additions

“Morality must be learned everywhere and taught nowhere.” Say, V, 8. 151

Is a candidate required to prove himself? The proper thing to do is not to consult the professors, who are judges and partial, who must find everything which comes from their school good, and everything which does not come from it bad. . . . We have to determine the candidate’s merit and not the place where he studied nor the time he studied there; since the demand that a certain course be taken in a designated place is to displace another course which could be a better one. To prescribe a certain course of study is to proscribe any other more expeditious possibility. 152

It is impossible, people will say, for the government not to control educational establishments which it funds or where it pays the salaries. It is impossible to separate instruction entirely from education. Instruction itself would suffer, since lacunae would necessarily result. Yes, but then the government must allow individuals the right to set up private schools and all parents the right to choose between government-managed education and education managed by private individuals.

Garnier, in his Notes on Smith, 153 shows very clearly that the government when it offers free education, other than of the elementary sort, deflects the manual workers of society in a detrimental and worthless way from their natural occupations. See also Smith’s observations on the drawbacks of scholarships, I, 10. 154

You can teach facts by rote, but reasoning never.

“The natural arrangement of education, leaving the choice, the manner, and the burden of education to the parents, can be compared to a series of experiences, whose purpose is the perfecting of the general intellect. Everything advances and develops through this emulation of individuals, through this difference between ideas and between minds, in a word, through the variety of individual stimuli. But if everything were thrown into a single mold, if teaching were to assume everywhere the character of legal government, errors would perpetuate themselves, and there would be no more progress.” Bentham, II, 200–201.

Notes

1. less bad and more good. Everything in nature has its disadvantages, but the institutions consistent with nature have the advantage that since nature is essentially conservative, it has ensured that these disadvantages will not be without remedy, whereas in institutions contrary to nature, since the conserving force is not there, the disadvantages which they entail are often irreparable. Thus by requiring that each man be charged with looking after his own interests, nature has without doubt exposed the human race to two very great evils. Strong feeling and false reckoning are such that individuals often acquit themselves very badly in the task entrusted to them. If, however, fearful of the danger attaching to this natural arrangement, we have the idea of charging one man to watch over the interests of another, or of several others, what is the result of this artificial institution? First of all, the same disadvantages arise as from the natural institution, since the same passions, the same erroneous reckonings, can be found in the person who has been entrusted with interests which are not his own. The natural institution, however, carried its own remedy. Every man suffers from the errors he commits in his own affairs and does not delay in putting things right. The artificial institution, by contrast, is without remedy. The man who, against nature’s wish, decides for another, does not suffer in the least from the errors he commits. They bear upon other people. They do not enlighten him at all; he does not put them right therefore. Moreover, what would be implied if he gained from it? A further risk. He whom you have deprived of the right of looking after his interests will perhaps resist the man you have put in his place, and both will find themselves the worse for it. On all occasions when that which is natural, that is to say just, that is to say conforming with equality (equality, justice, nature: it is the same thing), seems to you to entail disadvantages and you do not know their remedy, trust in experience, which will straightaway show them to you, unless you have brought, which happens almost always, something artificial to the natural institution, and then it is usually this addition which is creating the disadvantages or blocking the restorative power of action. Whenever an institution which is against nature is suggested to you and you do not see its disadvantageous side, it is only experience which you are lacking. The disadvantage exists and will soon develop.

2. in the name of rendering it happy. “It is absurd to reason on men’s happiness other than in terms of their own desires and sensations. It is absurd to wish to demonstrate in a set of calculations that a man is fortunate, when he thinks himself unfortunate.” 155 Bentham’s argument against slavery, but which applies to everything. Government has been defined as the institution aimed at creating the happiness of men. There is a great difference between guaranteeing the happiness individuals create for themselves, or create between themselves, and taking over their role in the construction of their happiness. It is almost always by claiming to do it that governments cease to do so.

Addition

The ordinary goings-on of governments: they begin by doing harm. They notice this. Instead of stopping the harm they have done, by warding off the cause, and returning to a salutary inaction, they build up various types of counteractivities and produce, inadequately and painfully, through two opposing pressures, what would have existed naturally, but more completely and less painfully, from freedom alone.

Notes

1. frequent relations between the diverse classes. It is a disadvantage for any mode of election if the electors and the elected are separated. See Smith on the advantageous influence of popular election in giving rise to some consideration for the lower class of farmers. 156

Notes

1. disproportionate with the rest of things. We find fault with innovators for making laws of opposite outlook to existing public opinion, and we are right. They prefer the future, or what they call the future, to the present, and they have no right to do this. The law, however, which perpetuates itself when it is no longer the expression of national sentiment, makes a mistake of the same kind, with the sole difference that it is before the past which it wants the present to bow. Now, time plays no part in it. Past public opinion no longer exists; it cannot motivate laws. No more does future public opinion exist; perhaps it never will. It too cannot motivate laws. Present public opinion is the only one which really exists.

2. And what would novelty have produced more unfortunate? China is a precise example of a nation where everything has been rendered static. So our new political writers go into ecstasies about or on Chinese institutions, institutions which have had the result, however, of China having been constantly conquered by foreigners less numerous than the Chinese. To make the Chinese static it has been necessary to destroy in them the energy which would have served to defend them.

Addition

At the moment when certain institutions were established, since they were proportionate to the condition of morals and received opinions, or rather that they were the actual effect of these opinions and morals, they had a relative utility and goodness. These advantages have lessened to the extent that the human spirit and institutions have become modified. Governments often think they do great good by reestablishing institutions in what they call their purity. This purity, however, turns out to be precisely the thing most contrary to contemporary ideas and the most liable in consequence to do harm. From this difference between institutions which are static and ideas which are progressive, there results the bulk of the contradictions and false arguments of governments and writers. They see that in a certain period a certain institution was useful, and they imagine that if now it is harmful, this is because it has degenerated. It is precisely the opposite. The institution has stayed the same, but the ideas have changed and the cause of the evil to which you want to bring a solution or remedy is not in the degeneration of the former but in the imbalance between the two. Government connections with the law are a matter on which it is very important to come to some agreement. Two types of imperfections must be distinguished in the laws, one their opposition to morality, the other their imbalance with regard to current ideas. A law can be at variance with morality through the effect of ignorance and universal barbarism. This, then, is the misfortune of the age. A law can be at variance with morality through the effect of error or of the specific corruption of a government. Then it is the crime of the lawmaker. Antiquity offers us an example of the first kind of imperfection, in the tolerance of ancient philosophers for slavery. Modern times supply us with examples of the second, in the unjust decrees which were enacted during our Revolution. In this latter case the evil is much more incalculable than in the former. The legislator puts himself not only in opposition to morality, but to public opinion. Not only does he outrage the former, but he oppresses the latter. He fights simultaneously against what ought to be the case and against what is. From this there follows an important truth. It is that no anterior example can legitimate an injustice. This injustice was excusable when the human spirit had not recognized it as such, only as an inevitable misfortune. With the enlightening of the human spirit, the excuse ceases and the government which prolongs or renews the injustice renders itself guilty of a double outrage.

The laws which bear the impress of general intellectual imperfection are in balance with the period for which they exist. More perfect laws would clash with ideas. According to this reckoning, the needs of the people not being the origin of their laws, and their authors acting spontaneously and fallibly, the people find themselves exposed to all the drawbacks attached to the imbalance of laws with ideas and to all those whose provenance may be in the mistakes of lawmakers.

Additions

At all times when improvements are the natural and real product of the general will, this is to say, of what are felt to be the needs of everybody, expressed through the freedom of the press, the sole faithful and independent interpreter of public opinion, these improvements have at least a relative worth. When, however, the government makes itself judge, it looks for that relative worth in its own ponderings, its own opinions, in its own enlightenment, and the improvements, which are supposed to be acquiring the highest degree of perfection possible, are sometimes contrary to the general wishes and not in line with current ideas, and sometimes contrary to the eternal and universal principles of morality. Governments which arrogate to themselves the right to improvement are, when they are corrupt, hypocrites, and even when they are well-intentioned, wholesale gamblers with the system, to whose multiform errors the people find themselves constantly sacrificed. The laws which bear the impress of general intellectual imperfection are in harmony with the time for which they exist. More perfect laws would clash with the ideas.

There are improvements which, taken abstractly, are incontestable. As long as the nation does not want them, however, this is because it does not need them, and time alone, and free expression of individual opinion, through the press, can make it want them. Government must not even be accorded the right to promote these improvements. This would be to attribute to it a function which belongs only to enlightened individuals. Now, government cannot be composed of such individuals, and enlightened individuals, moreover, have useful power by way of public opinion, only because they do not possess formal power.

“Oh hammer-blow reformers, you are the most unfortunate of gardeners.” Mirabeau, The Friend of Men, I, 78.

I often say we should respect the habits of peoples, yet at the same time I propose many things which seem contrary to these habits. It must be observed, however, that I propose only negative things. This is to say that I counsel governments not to exert their authority in favor of such and such a set of restrictions, which they believe in their interest to maintain. By no longer exerting their authority in this direction, they do not hurt existing practices at all. They permit each person to continue to do freely what formerly they commanded him to do. It can happen that for a long while the acquired habit may be the stronger. Bit by bit, however, if it is contrary to the real interest of individuals, they will free themselves from it, one after the other, and the good will be accomplished without any great shock. Imagine a herd whose owner had, for a long time and by misjudgment, kept it on arid, sterile soil, surrounding it with a fence. If to have it transported to a better pasture you have it taken out by force, by exciting the dogs against it and frightening it with shouts, you may well find that several of the beasts will be wounded hurling themselves outside and even that the fright may be so great that many scatter and get lost. Just take down the fence, however, and leave the flock in peace. It will stay some time on the land where it is used to pasturing; but bit by bit, it will spread out all around, and after some time and imperceptible movement it will arrive in the fertile meadow where you want to transport it.

People always give great praise to statesmen who work for the future. Is it truly necessary, however, is it really natural, that in the matter of government men work for the future, that is to say, for generations who do not exist yet and of whose condition, ideas, dispositions, and circumstances one is in ignorance?

Charlemagne is always praised to us as a great legislator, and to prove it they tell us that his monarchy fell only when his laws fell. The talent of a legislator, however, would have lain in making laws which did not fall. The praises given to all these legislative talents are like those accorded to constitutions, by its being said that they would work perfectly if everyone were willing to obey them, as if the art of constitutions were not by definition to get oneself obeyed by everybody.

Greece owes the brilliance of her annals more to the progressive way in which she civilized herself than to any circumstances unique to her. Greeks were left by happy chance to the sure and slow movement of domestic civilization. The foreign colonies which came there carrying the seeds of some arts were not strong enough to conquer, nor refined enough to corrupt, nor informed enough to enlighten. The leaders of these colonies were ordinarily either criminals fleeing the punishment menacing them in their own country, or ambitious people driven out by enemy factions. Wandering at random, they were blown by the winds onto some unknown shore. They found there inhabitants who, constantly exposed to incursions by neighboring nations, and to seeing themselves carried off along with their beasts and wives, had conceived an invincible hatred against all foreigners. The newcomers were bound to add to this hatred by the violence necessary for their subsistence and for their safety. Thus the early days were spent in continual stress on both sides and reciprocal massacres. Established finally on a small territory, the new colonists found that all that surrounded them were numerous and untamed hordes, whom they could conquer but not subdue and to whose incursions they were frequently exposed. As to their original homeland, the emigrants could not, given the reasons which had forced them to abandon it, keep up any relationship with it. On the contrary, it often happened that their compatriots were their most mortal enemies. Thus it is easy to see that the civilization of Greece must not be attributed to the colonies which established themselves there. It was time alone which civilized the Greeks, and this slower way is also the best of all ways.

One can reduce the other ways to three, civilization by conquerors, civilization by the conquered, and last, civilization by tyrants. The Americans furnish us with an example of the first, the barbarians of the north and the Chinese with one of the second, and the Russians with a case of the third.

When it is the conquerors who take on the education of the conquered, they begin by degrading their pupils. Their interest of the moment does not demand that they make men of them, but slaves. It is therefore to form humble and hardworking slaves, deft and docile machines, that these teachers, with power to hand, strive successfully. It is only after eight or ten generations that the sad remains of the indigenous peoples, their community reduced to a hundredth part of the numbers of their ancestors, begin to mingle with their oppressors, and to civilize themselves imperfectly, through the imitation of their corrupted mores and through the adoption of their erroneous opinions.

When, on the contrary, subjugated peoples civilize their masters, they enervate them without softening them, and they degrade them without policing them. The vices of luxury come to join with the ferocity of barbarism, and from this mixture are born the most dire effects. In the history of these peoples, the rapine, the violence, the devastation which characterize the uncivilized man, are accompanied by the cowardice, the weakness, the shameful pleasures of man, corrupted by a long abuse of civilization.

Lastly, when a despot wants to police his slaves, he thinks he need only wish this. Accustomed to seeing them tremble and grovel at the least sign, he thinks they will enlighten themselves similarly. To hasten their progress, he conceives of no other expedients than those of tyranny. He believes that, in this way, he is preparing his peoples for enlightenment, freedom’s very daughter. He wants his subjects to learn, think, and see only as he does, and he gets irritated equally by nostalgia for the old mores and by the censure of new institutions. What are the results of these mad efforts? Let us cast a glance on that vast empire whose rapid progress people often vaunt. We will see there the great, prizing above everything else servile imitation in the practices of their neighbors; the sciences in the hands of foreigners who, obscure in their own country, come to seek wealth and renown in a nation they despise; and the people reduced to a condition of slavery, with no inkling that they are supposed to be undergoing enlightenment.

Those who make law by means of the lash seem to me like chickens which, bored with sitting, break their eggs in order to make them hatch.

When you set up an institution without the popular consciousness being ready for it, this institution, however good it may be in principle, is not an organization, but a mechanism.

“We do nothing better than what we do freely and by following our natural talents.” The Spirit of the Laws, XIX, 5.

What we say about speculative functions, etc., in the Additions to Ch. 1, Book III, must be placed in this chapter.

Additions

Diverse and almost constant causes of error. First, confusion of ideas. Secondly, the effect taken for the cause. Thirdly, negative effects advanced as proofs of positive assertions. Fourthly, interest placed on the commitment to the purpose, without examination of the means. Fifthly, because of instead of despite.

Notes

1. within very narrow limits. “The citizens,” says Sismondi, IV, 370, “find consolation for the loss of their liberty in the acquisition or sharing of a large power. This compensation exists only in a State where the citizens are few in number and where consequently the chance of coming to supreme power is large enough or close enough to mitigate the daily sacrifice which each citizen makes of his rights to this power. Thus in the republics of Antiquity there was no civil liberty. The citizen had seen himself as a slave of the nation of which he was a part. He gave himself over entirely to the decisions of the sovereign, without challenging the legislator’s right to control all his actions, to constrain his will in everything. On the other hand, however, he was himself in turn this sovereign and this legislator. He knew the value of his suffrage in a nation small enough that each citizen could be a power, and he felt that it was to himself as sovereign that as a subject he sacrificed his civil freedom. 157 One senses how illusory such a compensation would be” in a country which counted millions of active citizens. 158

Notes

1. Ignorance of the compass. “Men, not knowing the use of the compass, were scared of losing sight of the coast, and given the state of imperfection in the art of shipbuilding, they did not dare to abandon themselves to the impetuous waves of the ocean. To traverse the Pillars of Hercules, that is to say, to navigate beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, was for long regarded in Antiquity as the most daring and astonishing enterprise. The Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, the most skillful navigators and the most knowledgeable shipbuilders in these ancient times, did not even attempt this passage until very late, and they were for a long time the only people who dared do it.” Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, 3. 159

2. his interests and his fate bound up. “Modern nations which are complete and able to exist by themselves remain almost in the same condition when their governments are overthrown.” Say, IV, Ch. 12. 160

3. They move their assets far away. When a citizen found only savages outside his country, and thus only death or deprivation of all human society were the consequences of expatriation, the fatherland to which one owed life and all the goods which make it precious could demand many more sacrifices than today, when a citizen, leaving his country, finds everywhere almost the same mores, the same physical commodities, and in many respects the same moral ideas. When Cicero said: “Pro qua patria mori, et cui nos totos dedere et in qua nostra omnia ponere et quasi consecrare debemus,” 161 it was the case that the fatherland contained then everything a man held dear, and that to lose his fatherland was to lose his wife, his children, his friends, all his affections, all his possessions. The time of patriotism has passed. To be able to demand sacrifices from us, the fatherland must be dear to us, and to be dear to us, it must not strip us of all that we love. Now, what do we love in our fatherland? Freedom, security, public safety, the ownership of our goods, the possibility of rest, activity, glory, and a host of rights of all kinds. The word “fatherland” brings into our imagination much more the coming together of all these enjoyments than the topographical idea of a particular country. If it is suggested to us that we sacrifice all these enjoyments to the fatherland, this is to suggest that we sacrifice to the fatherland, the fatherland itself. This is to want to make us dupes of words. This applies equally to society. There are only individuals in society. Society means all individuals. Now, to sacrifice the happiness of all individuals to society, that is to say, to all individuals, is that not a contradiction in terms?

4. a stranger or an enemy. Hatred of strangers among the ancients, in the midst of the greatest civilization. Nations, says the jurist Pomponius, Leg V O de captivis, with whom we have no friendship, no hospitality, no alliance, are not our enemies. However, if one thing which belongs to us falls into their power, they are its proprietors. Free men become their slaves, and they are in the same situation with respect to us. 162

Additions

Among the ancients, individuals were often fed or drew their resources from the wealth of the public. Among the moderns, the wealth of the public is made up of the wealth of individuals.

The spoils of the vanquished and the ransoms of prisoners were the sole funds allocated by the Spartans to public needs.

“It is in following absurd ideas drawn from the mores of the Romans, that Valerius Maximus and Juvenal spoke of Demosthenes as if he had been the son of a blacksmith, who lived only by the labor of his hands. On the contrary, this was a most illustrious citizen and most distinguished by his wealth.” 163 His father had possessed two manufacturing plants, where he worked fifty-two slaves. Demosthenes in his first address against his tutor Aphobes. The noblest families of Attica had factories themselves. Pauw, Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks, I, 68. 164

Montesquieu remarks in The Spirit of the Laws, XX, 2, that commerce unites nations but does not similarly unite individuals, 165 from which it results that nations being united, they mingle, that is to say that there is no patriotism, and the individuals not being united, they are no longer anything but traders, that is to say, they are no longer citizens.

The spirit of the ancients was so uncommercial that Aristotle numbered brigandage among the means of acquisition.

“Today lands are discovered by sea voyages. In former times, seas were discovered by land voyages.” Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, XXI, 9.

Notes

1. are intolerable. Even when the spirit of the age did not incline toward civil liberty, the size of societies would make that freedom necessary. Laws on mores, celibacy, and idleness are impossible in a large state, and it would be vexing beyond measure to carry them out, if they were tried.