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My favorite chapter from War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898) is chapter 7 of book 2. I think it can stand on its own as a short story:

7. THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL

I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney Hill, sleeping in a made bed for the first time since my flight to Leatherhead. I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking into that house — afterwards I found the front door was on the latch — nor how I ransacked every room for food, until just on the verge of despair, in what seemed to me to be a servant’s bedroom, I found a rat-gnawed crust and two tins of pineapple. The place had been already searched and emptied. In the bar I afterwards found some biscuits and sandwiches that had been overlooked. The latter I could not eat, they were too rotten, but the former not only stayed my hunger, but filled my pockets. I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian might come beating that part of London for food in the night. Before I went to bed I had an interval of restlessness, and prowled from window to window, peering out for some sign of these monsters. I slept little. As I lay in bed I found myself thinking consecutively — a thing I do not remember to have done since my last argument with the curate. During all the intervening time my mental condition had been a hurrying succession of vague emotional states or a sort of stupid receptivity. But in the night my brain, reinforced, I suppose, by the food I had eaten, grew clear again, and I thought.

Three things struggled for possession of my mind: the killing of the curate, the whereabouts of the Martians, and the possible fate of my wife. The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall; I saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every step of our conversation from the moment when I had found him crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing to the fire and smoke that streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge. We had been incapable of co-operation — grim chance had taken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I should have left him at Halliford. But I did not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do. And I set this down as I have set all this story down, as it was. There were no witnesses — all these things I might have concealed. But I set it down, and the reader must form his judgment as he will.

And when, by an effort, I had set aside that picture of a prostrate body, I faced the problem of the Martians and the fate of my wife. For the former I had no data; I could imagine a hundred things, and so, unhappily, I could for the latter. And suddenly that night became terrible. I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at the dark. I found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of my return from Leatherhead I had not prayed. I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers, had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in extremity; but now I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with the darkness of God. Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place — a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity — pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.

The morning was bright and fine, and the eastern sky glowed pink, and was fretted with little golden clouds. In the road that runs from the top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of the panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the Sunday night after the fighting began. There was a little two-wheeled cart inscribed with the name of Thomas Lobb, Greengrocer, New Malden, with a smashed wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there was a straw hat trampled into the now hardened mud, and at the top of West Hill a lot of blood-stained glass about the overturned water trough. My movements were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I had an idea of going to Leatherhead, though I knew that there I had the poorest chance of finding my wife. Certainly, unless death had overtaken them suddenly, my cousins and she would have fled thence; but it seemed to me I might find or learn there whither the Surrey people had fled. I knew I wanted to find my wife, that my heart ached for her and the world of men, but I had no clear idea how the finding might be done. I was also sharply aware now of my intense loneliness. From the corner I went, under cover of a thicket of trees and bushes, to the edge of Wimbledon Common, stretching wide and far.

That dark expanse was lit in patches by yellow gorse and broom; there was no red weed to be seen, and as I prowled, hesitating, on the verge of the open, the sun rose, flooding it all with light and vitality. I came upon a busy swarm of little frogs in a swampy place among the trees. I stopped to look at them, drawing a lesson from their stout resolve to live. And presently, turning suddenly, with an odd feeling of being watched, I beheld something crouching amid a clump of bushes. I stood regarding this. I made a step towards it, and it rose up and became a man armed with a cutlass. I approached him slowly. He stood silent and motionless, regarding me.

As I drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him. There was a red cut across the lower part of his face.

“Stop!” he cried, when I was within ten yards of him, and I stopped. His voice was hoarse. “Where do you come from?” he said.

I thought, surveying him.

“I come from Mortlake,” I said. “I was buried near the pit the Martians made about their cylinder. I have worked my way out and escaped.”

“There is no food about here,” he said. “This is my country. All this hill down to the river, and back to Clapham, and up to the edge of the common. There is only food for one. Which way are you going?”

I answered slowly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have been buried in the ruins of a house thirteen or fourteen days. I don’t know what has happened.”

He looked at me doubtfully, then started, and looked with a changed expression.

“I’ve no wish to stop about here,” said I. “I think I shall go to Leatherhead, for my wife was there.”

He shot out a pointing finger.

“It is you,” said he; “the man from Woking. And you weren’t killed at Weybridge?”

I recognised him at the same moment.

“You are the artilleryman who came into my garden.”

“Good luck!” he said. “We are lucky ones! Fancy you!” He put out a hand, and I took it. “I crawled up a drain,” he said. “But they didn’t kill everyone. And after they went away I got off towards Walton across the fields. But —— It’s not sixteen days altogether — and your hair is grey.” He looked over his shoulder suddenly. “Only a rook,” he said. “One gets to know that birds have shadows these days. This is a bit open. Let us crawl under those bushes and talk.”

“Have you seen any Martians?” I said. “Since I crawled out —— “

“They’ve gone away across London,” he said. “I guess they’ve got a bigger camp there. Of a night, all over there, Hampstead way, the sky is alive with their lights. It’s like a great city, and in the glare you can just see them moving. By daylight you can’t. But nearer — I haven’t seen them — ” (he counted on his fingers) “five days. Then I saw a couple across Hammersmith way carrying something big. And the night before last” — he stopped and spoke impressively — “it was just a matter of lights, but it was something up in the air. I believe they’ve built a flying-machine, and are learning to fly.”

I stopped, on hands and knees, for we had come to the bushes.

“Fly!”

“Yes,” he said, “fly.”

I went on into a little bower, and sat down.

“It is all over with humanity,” I said. “If they can do that they will simply go round the world.”

He nodded.

“They will. But —— It will relieve things over here a bit. And besides —— ” He looked at me. “Aren’t you satisfied it is up with humanity? I am. We’re down; we’re beat.”

I stared. Strange as it may seem, I had not arrived at this fact — a fact perfectly obvious so soon as he spoke. I had still held a vague hope; rather, I had kept a lifelong habit of mind. He repeated his words, “We’re beat.” They carried absolute conviction.

“It’s all over,” he said. “They’ve lost one — just one. And they’ve made their footing good and crippled the greatest power in the world. They’ve walked over us. The death of that one at Weybridge was an accident. And these are only pioneers. They kept on coming. These green stars — I’ve seen none these five or six days, but I’ve no doubt they’re falling somewhere every night. Nothing’s to be done. We’re under! We’re beat!”

I made him no answer. I sat staring before me, trying in vain to devise some countervailing thought.

“This isn’t a war,” said the artilleryman. “It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants.”

Suddenly I recalled the night in the observatory.

“After the tenth shot they fired no more — at least, until the first cylinder came.”

“How do you know?” said the artilleryman. I explained. He thought. “Something wrong with the gun,” he said. “But what if there is? They’ll get it right again. And even if there’s a delay, how can it alter the end? It’s just men and ants. There’s the ants builds their cities, live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until the men want them out of the way, and then they go out of the way. That’s what we are now — just ants. Only —— “

“Yes,” I said.

“We’re eatable ants.”

We sat looking at each other.

“And what will they do with us?” I said.

“That’s what I’ve been thinking,” he said; “that’s what I’ve been thinking. After Weybridge I went south — thinking. I saw what was up. Most of the people were hard at it squealing and exciting themselves. But I’m not so fond of squealing. I’ve been in sight of death once or twice; I’m not an ornamental soldier, and at the best and worst, death — it’s just death. And it’s the man that keeps on thinking comes through. I saw everyone tracking away south. Says I, ‘Food won’t last this way,’ and I turned right back. I went for the Martians like a sparrow goes for man. All round” — he waved a hand to the horizon — “they’re starving in heaps, bolting, treading on each other… .”

He saw my face, and halted awkwardly.

“No doubt lots who had money have gone away to France,” he said. He seemed to hesitate whether to apologise, met my eyes, and went on: “There’s food all about here. Canned things in shops; wines, spirits, mineral waters; and the water mains and drains are empty. Well, I was telling you what I was thinking. ‘Here’s intelligent things,’ I said, ‘and it seems they want us for food. First, they’ll smash us up — ships, machines, guns, cities, all the order and organisation. All that will go. If we were the size of ants we might pull through. But we’re not. It’s all too bulky to stop. That’s the first certainty.’ Eh?”

I assented.

“It is; I’ve thought it out. Very well, then — next; at present we’re caught as we’re wanted. A Martian has only to go a few miles to get a crowd on the run. And I saw one, one day, out by Wandsworth, picking houses to pieces and routing among the wreckage. But they won’t keep on doing that. So soon as they’ve settled all our guns and ships, and smashed our railways, and done all the things they are doing over there, they will begin catching us systematic, picking the best and storing us in cages and things. That’s what they will start doing in a bit. Lord! They haven’t begun on us yet. Don’t you see that?”

“Not begun!” I exclaimed.

“Not begun. All that’s happened so far is through our not having the sense to keep quiet — worrying them with guns and such foolery. And losing our heads, and rushing off in crowds to where there wasn’t any more safety than where we were. They don’t want to bother us yet. They’re making their things — making all the things they couldn’t bring with them, getting things ready for the rest of their people. Very likely that’s why the cylinders have stopped for a bit, for fear of hitting those who are here. And instead of our rushing about blind, on the howl, or getting dynamite on the chance of busting them up, we’ve got to fix ourselves up according to the new state of affairs. That’s how I figure it out. It isn’t quite according to what a man wants for his species, but it’s about what the facts point to. And that’s the principle I acted upon. Cities, nations, civilisation, progress — it’s all over. That game’s up. We’re beat.”

“But if that is so, what is there to live for?”

The artilleryman looked at me for a moment.

“There won’t be any more blessed concerts for a million years or so; there won’t be any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds at restaurants. If it’s amusement you’re after, I reckon the game is up. If you’ve got any drawing-room manners or a dislike to eating peas with a knife or dropping aitches, you’d better chuck ‘em away. They ain’t no further use.”

“You mean —— “

“I mean that men like me are going on living — for the sake of the breed. I tell you, I’m grim set on living. And if I’m not mistaken, you’ll show what insides you’ve got, too, before long. We aren’t going to be exterminated. And I don’t mean to be caught either, and tamed and fattened and bred like a thundering ox. Ugh! Fancy those brown creepers!”

“You don’t mean to say —— “

“I do. I’m going on, under their feet. I’ve got it planned; I’ve thought it out. We men are beat. We don’t know enough. We’ve got to learn before we’ve got a chance. And we’ve got to live and keep independent while we learn. See! That’s what has to be done.”

I stared, astonished, and stirred profoundly by the man’s resolution.

“Great God!” cried I. “But you are a man indeed!” And suddenly I gripped his hand.

“Eh!” he said, with his eyes shining. “I’ve thought it out, eh?”

“Go on,” I said.

“Well, those who mean to escape their catching must get ready. I’m getting ready. Mind you, it isn’t all of us that are made for wild beasts; and that’s what it’s got to be. That’s why I watched you. I had my doubts. You’re slender. I didn’t know that it was you, you see, or just how you’d been buried. All these — the sort of people that lived in these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used to live down that way — they’d be no good. They haven’t any spirit in them — no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other — Lord! What is he but funk and precautions? They just used to skedaddle off to work — I’ve seen hundreds of ‘em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket train, for fear they’d get dismissed if they didn’t; working at businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn’t be in time for dinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets, and sleeping with the wives they married, not because they wanted them, but because they had a bit of money that would make for safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world. Lives insured and a bit invested for fear of accidents. And on Sundays — fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits! Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they’ll come and be caught cheerful. They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them. And the bar loafers, and mashers, and singers — I can imagine them. I can imagine them,” he said, with a sort of sombre gratification. “There’ll be any amount of sentiment and religion loose among them. There’s hundreds of things I saw with my eyes that I’ve only begun to see clearly these last few days. There’s lots will take things as they are — fat and stupid; and lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it’s all wrong, and that they ought to be doing something. Now whenever things are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you’ve seen the same thing. It’s energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean inside out. These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety. And those of a less simple sort will work in a bit of — what is it? — eroticism.”

He paused.

“Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them; train them to do tricks — who knows? — get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed. And some, maybe, they will train to hunt us.”

“No,” I cried, “that’s impossible! No human being —— “

“What’s the good of going on with such lies?” said the artilleryman. “There’s men who’d do it cheerful. What nonsense to pretend there isn’t!”

And I succumbed to his conviction.

“If they come after me,” he said; “Lord, if they come after me!” and subsided into a grim meditation.

I sat contemplating these things. I could find nothing to bring against this man’s reasoning. In the days before the invasion no one would have questioned my intellectual superiority to his — I, a professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes, and he, a common soldier; and yet he had already formulated a situation that I had scarcely realised.

“What are you doing?” I said presently. “What plans have you made?”

He hesitated.

“Well, it’s like this,” he said. “What have we to do? We have to invent a sort of life where men can live and breed, and be sufficiently secure to bring the children up. Yes — wait a bit, and I’ll make it clearer what I think ought to be done. The tame ones will go like all tame beasts; in a few generations they’ll be big, beautiful, rich-blooded, stupid — rubbish! The risk is that we who keep wild will go savage — degenerate into a sort of big, savage rat… . You see, how I mean to live is underground. I’ve been thinking about the drains. Of course those who don’t know drains think horrible things; but under this London are miles and miles — hundreds of miles — and a few days rain and London empty will leave them sweet and clean. The main drains are big enough and airy enough for anyone. Then there’s cellars, vaults, stores, from which bolting passages may be made to the drains. And the railway tunnels and subways. Eh? You begin to see? And we form a band — able-bodied, clean-minded men. We’re not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out again.”

“As you meant me to go?”

“Well — I parleyed, didn’t I?”

“We won’t quarrel about that. Go on.”

“Those who stop obey orders. Able-bodied, clean-minded women we want also — mothers and teachers. No lackadaisical ladies — no blasted rolling eyes. We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race. And they can’t be happy. Moreover, dying’s none so dreadful; it’s the funking makes it bad. And in all those places we shall gather. Our district will be London. And we may even be able to keep a watch, and run about in the open when the Martians keep away. Play cricket, perhaps. That’s how we shall save the race. Eh? It’s a possible thing? But saving the race is nothing in itself. As I say, that’s only being rats. It’s saving our knowledge and adding to it is the thing. There men like you come in. There’s books, there’s models. We must make great safe places down deep, and get all the books we can; not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books. That’s where men like you come in. We must go to the British Museum and pick all those books through. Especially we must keep up our science — learn more. We must watch these Martians. Some of us must go as spies. When it’s all working, perhaps I will. Get caught, I mean. And the great thing is, we must leave the Martians alone. We mustn’t even steal. If we get in their way, we clear out. We must show them we mean no harm. Yes, I know. But they’re intelligent things, and they won’t hunt us down if they have all they want, and think we’re just harmless vermin.”

The artilleryman paused and laid a brown hand upon my arm.

“After all, it may not be so much we may have to learn before — Just imagine this: four or five of their fighting machines suddenly starting off — Heat-Rays right and left, and not a Martian in ‘em. Not a Martian in ‘em, but men — men who have learned the way how. It may be in my time, even — those men. Fancy having one of them lovely things, with its Heat-Ray wide and free! Fancy having it in control! What would it matter if you smashed to smithereens at the end of the run, after a bust like that? I reckon the Martians’ll open their beautiful eyes! Can’t you see them, man? Can’t you see them hurrying, hurrying — puffing and blowing and hooting to their other mechanical affairs? Something out of gear in every case. And swish, bang, rattle, swish! Just as they are fumbling over it, swish comes the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has come back to his own.”

For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and the tone of assurance and courage he assumed, completely dominated my mind. I believed unhesitatingly both in his forecast of human destiny and in the practicability of his astonishing scheme, and the reader who thinks me susceptible and foolish must contrast his position, reading steadily with all his thoughts about his subject, and mine, crouching fearfully in the bushes and listening, distracted by apprehension. We talked in this manner through the early morning time, and later crept out of the bushes, and, after scanning the sky for Martians, hurried precipitately to the house on Putney Hill where he had made his lair. It was the coal cellar of the place, and when I saw the work he had spent a week upon — it was a burrow scarcely ten yards long, which he designed to reach to the main drain on Putney Hill — I had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams and his powers. Such a hole I could have dug in a day. But I believed in him sufficiently to work with him all that morning until past midday at his digging. We had a garden barrow and shot the earth we removed against the kitchen range. We refreshed ourselves with a tin of mock-turtle soup and wine from the neighbouring pantry. I found a curious relief from the aching strangeness of the world in this steady labour. As we worked, I turned his project over in my mind, and presently objections and doubts began to arise; but I worked there all the morning, so glad was I to find myself with a purpose again. After working an hour I began to speculate on the distance one had to go before the cloaca was reached, the chances we had of missing it altogether. My immediate trouble was why we should dig this long tunnel, when it was possible to get into the drain at once down one of the manholes, and work back to the house. It seemed to me, too, that the house was inconveniently chosen, and required a needless length of tunnel. And just as I was beginning to face these things, the artilleryman stopped digging, and looked at me.

“We’re working well,” he said. He put down his spade. “Let us knock off a bit” he said. “I think it’s time we reconnoitred from the roof of the house.”

I was for going on, and after a little hesitation he resumed his spade; and then suddenly I was struck by a thought. I stopped, and so did he at once.

“Why were you walking about the common,” I said, “instead of being here?”

“Taking the air,” he said. “I was coming back. It’s safer by night.”

“But the work?”

“Oh, one can’t always work,” he said, and in a flash I saw the man plain. He hesitated, holding his spade. “We ought to reconnoitre now,” he said, “because if any come near they may hear the spades and drop upon us unawares.”

I was no longer disposed to object. We went together to the roof and stood on a ladder peeping out of the roof door. No Martians were to be seen, and we ventured out on the tiles, and slipped down under shelter of the parapet.

From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of Putney, but we could see the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed, and the low parts of Lambeth flooded and red. The red creeper swarmed up the trees about the old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters. It was strange how entirely dependent both these things were upon flowing water for their propagation. About us neither had gained a footing; laburnums, pink mays, snowballs, and trees of arbor-vitae, rose out of laurels and hydrangeas, green and brilliant into the sunlight. Beyond Kensington dense smoke was rising, and that and a blue haze hid the northward hills.

The artilleryman began to tell me of the sort of people who still remained in London.

“One night last week,” he said, “some fools got the electric light in order, and there was all Regent Street and the Circus ablaze, crowded with painted and ragged drunkards, men and women, dancing and shouting till dawn. A man who was there told me. And as the day came they became aware of a fighting-machine standing near by the Langham and looking down at them. Heaven knows how long he had been there. It must have given some of them a nasty turn. He came down the road towards them, and picked up nearly a hundred too drunk or frightened to run away.”

Grotesque gleam of a time no history will ever fully describe!

From that, in answer to my questions, he came round to his grandiose plans again. He grew enthusiastic. He talked so eloquently of the possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I more than half believed in him again. But now that I was beginning to understand something of his quality, I could divine the stress he laid on doing nothing precipitately. And I noted that now there was no question that he personally was to capture and fight the great machine.

After a time we went down to the cellar. Neither of us seemed disposed to resume digging, and when he suggested a meal, I was nothing loath. He became suddenly very generous, and when we had eaten he went away and returned with some excellent cigars. We lit these, and his optimism glowed. He was inclined to regard my coming as a great occasion.

“There’s some champagne in the cellar,” he said.

“We can dig better on this Thames-side burgundy,” said I.

“No,” said he; “I am host today. Champagne! Great God! We’ve a heavy enough task before us! Let us take a rest and gather strength while we may. Look at these blistered hands!”

And pursuant to this idea of a holiday, he insisted upon playing cards after we had eaten. He taught me euchre, and after dividing London between us, I taking the northern side and he the southern, we played for parish points. Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to the sober reader, it is absolutely true, and what is more remarkable, I found the card game and several others we played extremely interesting.

Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of extermination or appalling degradation, with no clear prospect before us but the chance of a horrible death, we could sit following the chance of this painted pasteboard, and playing the “joker” with vivid delight. Afterwards he taught me poker, and I beat him at three tough chess games. When dark came we decided to take the risk, and lit a lamp.

After an interminable string of games, we supped, and the artilleryman finished the champagne. We went on smoking the cigars. He was no longer the energetic regenerator of his species I had encountered in the morning. He was still optimistic, but it was a less kinetic, a more thoughtful optimism. I remember he wound up with my health, proposed in a speech of small variety and considerable intermittence. I took a cigar, and went upstairs to look at the lights of which he had spoken that blazed so greenly along the Highgate hills.

At first I stared unintelligently across the London valley. The northern hills were shrouded in darkness; the fires near Kensington glowed redly, and now and then an orange-red tongue of flame flashed up and vanished in the deep blue night. All the rest of London was black. Then, nearer, I perceived a strange light, a pale, violet-purple fluorescent glow, quivering under the night breeze. For a space I could not understand it, and then I knew that it must be the red weed from which this faint irradiation proceeded. With that realisation my dormant sense of wonder, my sense of the proportion of things, awoke again. I glanced from that to Mars, red and clear, glowing high in the west, and then gazed long and earnestly at the darkness of Hampstead and Highgate.

I remained a very long time upon the roof, wondering at the grotesque changes of the day. I recalled my mental states from the midnight prayer to the foolish card-playing. I had a violent revulsion of feeling. I remember I flung away the cigar with a certain wasteful symbolism. My folly came to me with glaring exaggeration. I seemed a traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was filled with remorse. I resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on into London. There, it seemed to me, I had the best chance of learning what the Martians and my fellowmen were doing. I was still upon the roof when the late moon rose.

Read the whole thing at lowercase liberty.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

THE SYSTEM OF ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS

CHAPTER XI

EIGHTH EPOCH.—PROPERTY

1.—Property is inexplicable apart from the economic series.—Of the organization of common sense, or problem of certainty.

The problem of property is, after that of human destiny, the greatest that reason can propose, and the last that it will be able to resolve. Indeed, the theological problem, the enigma of religion, has been explicated; the philosophical problem, which treats the value and legitimacy of knowledge, is resolved: there remains the social problem, which simply joins these two, and the solution of which, as everyone believes, comes essentially from property.

I will set out in this chapter the theory of property in itself [en soi], that is, in its origin, its spirit, its tendency, and its relations with the other economy categories. As for determining property for itself, as it must be after the integral solution of the contradictions, and what it becomes every day, this is, as I have said, the last phase of the social constitution, the object of a new labor, of which this one aims to provide a glimpse of the design and to posit the bases.

In order to understand clearly the theory of property in itself, it is necessary to address the highest concerns, and to present in a new way the essential identity of philosophy and political economy.

As civilization, from the point of view of industry, aims to constitute the value of products and organize labor, and as society is nothing other than this constitution and this organization, the object is to found judgment by determining the value of knowledge and organizing the common sense; and what we call logic is nothing other than this determination and organization.

Logic, society, which is to say always reason: such is then the destiny here below of our species, considered in its generative faculties, activity and intelligence. Thus humanity, by its successive manifestations, is a living logic: it is this which made us say, at the beginning of this work, that each economic fact is the expression of a law of the mind, and that as there is nothing in the understanding that has not been previously in experience, neither is there anything in social practice which does not come from an abstraction of reason.

Thus, society, like logic, has as a primordial law the agreement of reason and experience. To bring reason and experience into accord, to advance theory and practice in unison, is what both the economist and the philosopher propose; it is the first and last commandment imposed on every man who acts and thinks. It is a simple condition, doubtless, if one only envisions it in that formula, seemingly so simple; but it involves a prodigious effort, if one considers all that man has done from the beginning, as much in order to escape from it as in order to comply.

But what do we mean by the agreement of reason and experience, or, as we have called it, the organization of common sense, which is itself only logic?

First, I call common sense judgment insofar as it applies to things that are intuitively and immediately evident, of which the perception requires neither deduction nor research. Common sense is more than instinct: instinct has no consciousness of its determinations, while common sense knows what it wants and why. Common sense is not faith, genius or habit, which are neither known nor judged, while common sense is known and judged, as it knows and judges all that surrounds it.

Common sense is equal in all men. This is what brings to ideas the highest degree of evidence and the most perfect certainty: it is not this which has aroused philosophical doubt.

Common sense is at once reason and experience synthetically united: it is, once more, judgment but without dialectic or calculation.

But common sense, by the very fact that it falls only on things that are immediately evident, rejects general ideas, and the linking of propositions, and consequently method and science: so that the more a man gives himself to speculation, the more he seems to depart from common sense, starting with certainty. How then do men, equal in common sense, become equal in science, which they naturally reject?

Common sense is susceptible to neither increase nor decrease: judgment considered in itself cannot cease to be always the same, always equal to itself and identical. How, once more, is it possible, not only to maintain equality of capacities apart from common sense, but also to raise knowledge in them above common sense?

That difficulty, so formidable at first glance, evaporates when we look at it closely. To organize the judiciary faculty, or common sense, is, properly speaking, to discover the general procedures by means of which the mind comes to know the unknown by a series of judgments which all, taken in isolation, are of an intuitive and immediate evidence, but taken together give a formula that one could not have obtained without that progression, a formula which, consequently, surpasses the ordinary scope of common sense.

Thus the entire system of our knowledge rests on common sense, but raises itself indefinitely above common sense, which, bound to the particular and the immediate, cannot embrace the general with its simple regard, and must, in order to achieve that, divide it: like a man who, covering in a step only the width of a furrow, by repeating the same movement a certain number of times, circles the globe. [1]

Agreement of reason and experience, organization of the common sense, discovery of the general procedures by which the judgment, always identical, raises itself to the most sublime contemplations: such is the major work of humanity, that which has given rise to the largest, most complicated and most dramatic incident which has been accomplished on the earth. Neither science, religion nor society had to go anywhere near so long and deploy so much power in order to be established: this great labor, begun thirty centuries ago, has hardly managed to define itself. Eight volumes would hardly suffice to tell the story: I am going, in a few pages, to retrace the principle phases. This summary is indispensable to us in order to explain the appearance of property.

[1] Dialectic is properly the advance of the mind from one idea to another, across a superior idea, a series.

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WHAT IS THE USE OF A BUILDING LAW?

By John Beverley Robinson.

TO impugn the utility of any law is just now a delicate and thankless task. The blind deference that in the past was displayed to ecclesiastical rules, has in our day, lacking better things to worship, been transferred to the civil law. Our State-directed schools, as was inevitable, have become the nurseries of political superstitions, which display themselves in our Fourth-of-July self-gratulations and in the total unconsciousness, in ordinary minds, that anything better than our political arrangements can by any possibility evolve from present conditions. To these, there is no higher test of right than the vote of a legislature. That the majority can do no wrong, is as firmly grounded in their faith as was in the mediaeval mind the doctrine that the king can do no wrong. With them, to obey the law is the chief virtue. They have lost the sense of virtue that demands disobedience to law, where the instinctive sentiment of justice is not satisfied.

Yet a few are beginning to ask: What is the limit, in reason, to this power of the majority? Is it true that the majority has a right to force us—the minority—to anything it may please? If not, what is the limit to its authority? And the answer comes from the chief of the philosophers of recent years,—with all his faults, the prophet of the future, Herbert Spencer:

“‘No human laws are of any validity if contrary to the law of nature; and such of them as are valid, derive all their force and all their authority mediately or immediately from this original.’ Thus writes Blackstone, to whom let all honor be given for having so far outseen the ideas of his time; and indeed we may say of our time.

“A good antidote, this, for those political superstitions which so widely prevail. A good check upon that sentiment of power-worship which still misleads us by magnifying the prerogatives of constitutional governments as it once did those of monarchs. Let men learn that a legislature is not ‘our God upon earth,’ though, by the authority they ascribe to it and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.” (Social Statics, p. 229.)

After a page or two devoted to pointing out the unavoidable final abolition of government, and the contradictions and absurdities involved in its present temporary existence, he continues:

“Of the political superstitions lately alluded to, none is so universally diffused as the notion that majorities are omnipotent. Under the impression that the preservation of order will ever require power to be wielded by some party, the moral sense of our time feels that such power cannot rightly be conferred on any but the largest moiety of society.

“It interprets literally the saying that the voice of the people is the voice of God,’ and transferring to the one the sacredness attached to the other, it concludes that from the will of the people, that is of the majority, there can be no appeal. Yet this belief is entirely erroneous.”

It is not my purpose to criticise present laws; but rather to deny the right of anybody,—of any majority, to undertake the control of the details of construction, or indeed to enforce any requirements, save possibly the barest and simplest for the avoidance of what manifestly threatens impending danger. Most cities have their building laws, and have suffered the ill effects of such short-sighted legislation. The subject presented for review is, therefore, so wide in its range that the limits of a magazine article require me to confine my observations to some one locality. Let us then note some of the points in the New York building law which are open to criticism.

The opening paragraphs lay down a series of rules for the various thicknesses of walls, which are, to say the least, inflexible and excessive. Moreover, they rarely touch the really critical points at all: the width of the piers between the openings. Provided your wall is as thick as the law requires, the amount of solid may be attenuated in the other direction without exciting comment. To substitute skilful arrangement for dead weight of masonry is sternly repressed by the provisions that hollow walls, or walls built with buttresses, must have the same amount of materials as straight walls; reducing those who wish to save material to the alternative of perforating the wall with many flues, or of filling the interior of the wall with sand, as one enterprising builder did.

Take again the requirement of bondstones, as they are called, in piers of a certain size, although the weight of opinion is that the pier is weakened rather than strengthened by the presence of bondstones. In the past the law required the use of bondstones in walls as well as in piers; and in old buildings strings of bondstones may be seen, serving no purpose but to render the wall less homogenous and more liable to crack at that point. This provision, with others requiring the use of bluestone, was long retained by the power of thebluestone dealers. Previous to that the law recognized and permitted the use of bond timbers in walls, a practice which has fallen into disuse from its inherent viciousness, but without discountenance while it continued from the law.

So, still, the custom of veneering the fronts of buildings with a thin scale of stone is recognized by the law of to-day, and the method for doing so is laid down simply confirming the usual practice; but the only method that can be called constructive, that by which the stone facing is bonded into and made a part of the wall, the devisers of the law seem never to have heard of.

One of the delusions of the law is the demand that all iron work shall be tested. What more reasonable, thinks the ordinary citizen, when cast-iron is known to be often affected by flaws than to make a law that it shall be tested? While we are about it, let us extend the law to cover the testing of wrought iron, too. Actually what does it amount to? There is not a machine on earth, nor is it practicable to apply a load, that will test a large iron girder or column, scarcely even a small one. The only testing machine used by the inspector is a small piece of chalk, wherewith, having calculated the strength by an unintelligible formula, he chalks the lintel or beam in question.

Many provisions of the law are simply superfluous, or related to matters which no inspector could control without being on the spot all the time. Among the first is the amusingly solemn paragraph to the effect that all floor beams shall be suited to the weight they have to sustain. In practice such a loose provision gives opportunity for tyranny and corruption. Even where these do not occur the strength required will depend upon the affability of the superintendent, perhaps upon the Welsh rarebit he had for supper.

The laying down of minute proportions of lime and cement in mortar is equally deceptive. Nobody can tell but in the most general way whether such instructions are complied with or not, unless he watches every shovelful that is mixed. As for the prescription of quality it is almost as useless. One contractor that I happen to know of kept a load or two of very good sand in front of the building, much to the gratification of the inspector, while the work was built with the most indescribably bad mixture of dust and vegetable mould, openly used for mortar in a pen at the rear of the lot.

Probably the crowning absurdity of the law is that part which orders a brick wall to be built around all elevators. Here again nothing could seem more reasonable to the people who are not intimately acquainted with details. A brick elevator shaft is supposed to act as a chimney and to conduct fire and smoke harmlessly out, through the skylight on top. Really, the necessary openings on each story, in spite of alleged fireproof doors, serve to conduct the flames, fanned to furnace heat by the draft of the brick-shaft, to each story of the building at the same moment. So great is the heat generated by the chimney-like shaft, that quite recently a fire was communicated to adjoining premises through an apparently perfect brick wall. A series of hatchways offers no such advantage to the fire, but permits it to be confined, for a while at least, to the story where it starts. Especially ridiculous is this demand for a brick wall about elevators when no such wall is required for hoistways. That is to say, you may hoist a barrel through trap doors by hooking it on the end of a rope; but if you hook a platform on the rope, and put the barrel on the platform you must build a brick shaft to hoist it in. I do not insist much upon such criticisms. What I do insist upon is the utter impossibility of framing any statute that can cover the multitudinous, complicated, various and ever-changing conditions of building operations.

Few people have any conception of the inventiveness that is required in all mechanical operations. From the village carpenter to the engineer, all are occupied with continually new problems, for which new solutions must be found.

For the architect not least is this inventiveness required. Indeed, more than most technical workers the architect must be an inventor, because he is called upon to solve, not only problems of construction, but continually to devise new designs to be constructed, of which the value is largely that they are new. The fundamental objection to such statute law is, that it hinders this process of invention and thereby necessarily retards progress in the art of building. The more perfect the law the more perfectly does it accomplish this result. An ideally perfect law would at once put an end to all progress, and render the possession of intellect an injury rather than an advantage to architects. The most that a law can do is to perpetuate the best known existing methods. In a few years of normal progress these would become obsolete. To give discretion to the authorities is virtually to place legislation in the hands of individuals; not to give them discretion makes it more and more difficult to modify the law. Ideal perfection has fortunately not yet been attained in the general building law. In the matter of plumbing, which is in charge of the Board of Health, with its autocratic powers, the regulations may be regarded as ideal. It is a mere waste of time nowadays for an architect to reflect upon the best method of doing the plumbing of a building; it is for him to ask humbly what the authorities will deign to prescribe. The law, as it stands, requires extravagantly costly plumbing, and has the earnest support of all of the ablest and most conscientious plumbers.

The converse side of this disparagement of high capacity and discouragement of new ideas, which the law necessarily involves, is the direct support to incapacity which the law affords. Many a man practices architecture on the strength of his permit from the Department of Buildings, when, not to speak of his client’s lack of confidence in him, his own knowledge of his weakness and fear of taking the responsibility involved would deter him from doing so, were it not for the false assurance conveyed to one and the false confidence to the other by the official seal. This function of bolstering up those whom natural selection would weed out, is sufficient in itself to condemn the law.

A very extraordinary instance of this process of the restriction by law of the competent and fortification by law of the incompetent is going on in Chicago. They have been building there a very remarkable series of buildings of excessive height, eighteen or twenty stories. These buildings have been constructed on an entirely new principle: a steel frame with a mere skin of masonry. They are put up with extraordinary rapidity and at comparatively small proportionate cost. In the grade of engineering ability required they are on a par with the big bridges and tunnels that engineers do. It would seem that the men who have thus successfully struck out a new line and successfully completed such buildings should be competent to do more of the same thing. Yet a proposal is on foot for the governmental regulation of such buildings. Especially does this seem grotesque when it is remembered that of all the large buildings in Chicago all are successful but the Government building recently completed: that is reported to be settling continuously and disastrously in spite of the millions lavished upon it.

To turn for a moment to the frequently advanced criticism, not only of the building laws, but of the excise and many other laws that attempt to control actions which mankind does not generally rank as criminal,—the fostering of underhand evasion and corruption. It would be possible for any one who was interested in doing so to collect a very startling list of the deliberate violations of the building law that occur every day.

It is a delicate matter with most people to charge evasion of the building law. As for myself, I regard such evasion as a virtue, and a charge to that effect from me is an encomium. Apart from proof—proof I cannot offer; I am not the one to tell tales out of school—it is an inevitable inference that evasion must occur, whether accompanied by corruption or not. In point of fact it occurs in both ways. To obtain a permit and to build a building in accordance with it, are two very different matters; and it is usually far easier to make any required concessions to get a permit, and then arrange to build the building as you please afterward, than to delay matters by trying to get a permit in the first place for every little thing you want to do. Corruption exists, but they who know the ropes rarely find it necessary to resort to it; besides its cost is to be avoided if possible.

At the bottom, we must dwell upon the fact that the popular opinion upon which the building law is based, is a mistaken opinion. This opinion is that people will not build well unless they are compelled to. The truth is that, while building laws impede progress, they do not advance the customary grade of work a single degree. It is the customary standard of work that is always made into law. If it were not customary it could not be enforced and is not enforced. What is customary and generally recognized as safe will be carried out as well without the aid of a law.

The old common law—the unwritten law of public opinion— which every transgression makes self-evident, and which all people instinctively respect and obey, is all-sufficient for all cases. Every attempt to make a statute law that will fit the ever-changing conditions is, in the nature of things, an impossibility.

“But why cite individual cases? * * * * What is the statute-book but a record of such unhappy guesses? or history but a narrative of their unsuccessful issues? And what forwarder are we now? Is not our government as busy still as though the work of law-making commenced but yesterday? Has it made any apparent progress towards a final settlements of social arrangements? Does it not rather each year entangle itself still further in the web of legislation, confounding the already heterogeneous mass of enactments into still greater confusion? Nearly every parliamentary proceeding is a tacit confession of incompetency. There is scarcely a bill introduced but is entitled ‘An Act to amend an Act.’ The ‘Whereas’ of almost every preamble heralds an account of the miscarriage of previous legislation. Alteration, explanation and repeal, form the staple employment of every session. All our great agitations are for the abolition of institutions purporting to be for the public good. The history of one scheme is the history of all. First comes enactment, then probation, then failure; next an amendment and another failure; and, after many alternate tinkerings and abortive trials, arrives at length repeal, followed by the substitution of some fresh plan, doomed to run the same course, and share a like fate.” {Social Statics, p. 21.)

“‘It is a gross delusion to believe in the sovereign power of political machinery,’ says M. Guizot. True: and it is not only a gross delusion, but a very dangerous one. Give a child exaggerated notions of its parent’s power, and it will by-and-by cry for the moon. Let a people believe in government-omnipotence, and they will be pretty certain to get up revolutions to achieve impossibilities. Between their exorbitant ideas of what the state ought to do for them on the one side, and its miserable performances on the other, there will surely be generated feelings extremely inimical to social order—feelings which, by adding to the dissatisfaction otherwise produced, may occasion outbreaks that would not else have occurred.” (Social Statics, p. 318.)

What, then, is the use of the Building Law? Beginning with a general laying down of a few important points, and backed in these points by public opinion, it has grown to be a large mass of minute rules with which public opinion has no acquaintance and no sympathy. From a handful of persons charged with enforcing the law the bureau has grown now to a hundred. Still the cry is for more laws, more and more minute and exacting regulations, more extravagant spending of other people’s money in costly construction. With each intensification of the law the demand is for more inspectors to carry it out, or at least to collect pay for carrying it out. The law has become a political engine. Its offices are valuable considerations. The power which the law created reacts to perpetuate and increase the law, for with every increase of the law comes an increase of power to the political party that has the administration of it. The use of the Building Law is to help the politicians.

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SOURCE: Engineering Magazine. I, 5 (August, 1891) 656-662.

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photo by Nathan Callahan.

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Transmutation of Virtues into Vices

Charles Erskine Scott Wood

I believe a very tolerable essay could be written on the transmutation of virtues into vices—perhaps it has been done. There is no new thing under the sun—a saying I give little adherence to. Proverbs, maxims and such generalizations would find the lie every day, if it were looked for. There is much new under the sun—and it is not impossible that some day an editor may have a principle, and a great daily tell the truth. This old world Is ever new—that Is the fascination of it. Not only new to each of us who opens his eyes for the first time upon the panorama and frets across the stage his brief moment—but in truth new—new lands, new life, new thoughts. And there is the very core of the matter—new thoughts.

People talk of unchanging human nature—eternally the same. Human nature is changing as much as the human body did and probably much more and faster than the human body is now changing, though It is dangerous to speculate on evolution In which millions of years are minutes. The body has adapted itself to its present environment, and little change may be expected unless the environment changes; but the environment of mind and thought is constantly changing before our very eyes, and human nature is changing with it.

Does anyone fancy that we have the human nature of the cave dwellers? Gentlemen whose conception of justice was appetite and the might to gratify It; who did not on occasion hesitate to eke out the scant subsistence of a non-prosperous administration by devouring their grandmothers and other weak antiques; and quite right, too, from the view point of nature. We ourselves must admit that we would rather have the cave dwelling paterfamilias and his amiable mate preserve the divine spark for transmission to us, by recourse to grandpa or grandma as a larder rather than that by self-denial and literal self-sacrifice, all human life should become extinct and we ourselves be barred from our succession to this wonderful world of nickel-in-the-slot drama and tinhorn tragedy.

There Is no doubt that, as we picture the cave gentleman at his necessitous or perhaps diplomatic meal with bloody front gnawing the raw bones of his mother-in-law,—nephew, grandfather, or whichever relative his taste and an overruling providence decreed should be removed from their midst to his; we realize that we of to-day have progressed In our nature; even an editor has a somewhat different cannibalistic method, and presumably a different nature.

But those who cling to the absolute unchanging quality of human nature will say: Take an editor, even the greatest, and put him on a raft in mid-ocean—the reader will understand that this Is wholly hypothetical God forbid that any editor, even the greatest, should In fact be put on a raft in mid-ocean and the world left rocking In chaos—take an editor, the objector will say (as If the editor were a worm,) and put him on a raft In mid-ocean with one other and no food and he will devour his companion as relishfully as did our late lamented ancestor of the cave.

The world is full of the self-sacrifice of the strong for the weak. Common sailors have said good-bye to a comrade and let go the support too frail for both.

It was Greenwood, I think, who shut himself in the leaking air-lock of the Hudson river tunnel to drown rather than drown the four or five laborers he had put through to safety. It is a pity to forget the names of such heroes—greater than those of war—but after all the name is not so material; the important fact is that human nature furnishes such examples—many of them. Cave-dwelling human nature furnished not one.

The cave gentleman's effort at charity was doubtless to crush the skull of the sufferer with a stone-—a method having certainly some advantages over ours, but as a whole we have progressed in conception and intention.

But we need not harry too cruelly the shades of our cave ancestors who lived the truly simple life. The historic ancients of the really splendid civilizations of Greece and Rome did not have the emotions of pity for humanity and dumb brutes as we have them, nor the sense of duty toward the unfortunate as we have It. Nay, there are whole nations to-day who have not developed into their natures the sense of brotherhood of man and kinship with animals. ' Where we find but so much as one example of a new trait' in human nature, that gives us a right to claim it to our credit.

It is perfectly true that the evolution of a finer human nature or soul builds upon fundamentals. While the desire to live is a general human instinct, there will be the desire to eat and enjoy life, out of which must come the struggle for comfort and joy, and from this struggle, of necessity, selfishness. Selfishness is the most desirable thing in the world. It is the electrifying spark, the vital emotion. It Is a virtue and yet behold how the virtue of the cave-dweller, when the great essential was that life should not vanish from the planet and that the fittest should survive, becomes thw vice of our time when the mentally predatory and by no means fittest are crushing those who, because of loftier ideals or simpler honesty are open to exploitation.

Altruism, or thought for others, self-sacrifice, unselfishness has been developed by the Christian impulse into the chiefest of the virtues. If you have not this then are you but as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.

Yet what a vice this virtue may become. How many unselfish wives do we see being devoured by selfish husbands, or husbands by wives; patient daughters wearing out their lives in subjection to demanding mothers. Lives of men and women literally sucked dry by good, virtuous, loving, selfish vampires. When what every life craves is freedom—free, free to live its own life in its own way, giving expression to all which bubbles up from within.

It matters nothing at all if there be a heaven where the selfish will be punished and the unselfish rewarded. Let heaven take care of itself. No one has a right to ask another to give up his individuality In this world, to lose his quota of present joy and trust to a heavenly reward. It is not a fair bargain.

I do not say to the leeches: Be less selfish. Do not suck dry these lives about you. It would be a useless appeal, for such is their nature; but I do say to the victims (in some hope that I may be heard because of the fundamental instinct" of selfishness within us all): Be more selfish—your life was given, to you to live. Live it. Draw the line between a just attention to others and your essential duty to yourself. Let living be reciprocal. Let the parasites upon you also give. If all cannot be unselfish, then let all be selfish.

The word has got an ugly meaning—people pretend to recoil from the trait it expresses—none recoil more than those very ones who are sucking the lives of others. My own irritation Is not so much with the selfish ones who rule, who master, who override, who demand, who receive and who absorb—they are at least following their natures—as with the unselfish ones who do not oppose to this selfishness an equal selfishness; who stifle because of what I think is a false Ideal, the natural desire to live their own lives. I do not believe, they are following their natures so much as their Ideals of duty. Whatever may come hereafter, this world is all we know. It stands upon its own footing, and no person has a right to absorb the life of another, and no person has a right to let his individuality and his life-expression and life-longings be absorbed by another. His highest duty, higher than any other possible, for it is to the race as well as to himself. Is to live his own life in his own way to the very fullness thereof.

The virtues as well as the vices have their root in selfishness. It is the parent stock; and what are virtues and what are vices will always be open to dispute. Pride is a virtue as self-respect; it is a vice as exaggerated self-esteem. Love may be a vice and hate a virtue, so these names go masquerading under different guises, according to the motive, the object and the degree. Of the primal instincts—offshoots from selfishness—jealousy is the one which I cannot find virtuous in any degree. In the form of parental solicitude it may be accepted, but the variety which we have developed in the sex relation is wholly bad.

It is brutal and unintellectual, prolific of much misery, narrowing to life and debasing to the soul.

I have heard people actually defend jealousy by saying it is common to the brutes, that the dog, the cat, the horse show jealousy. Curious recommendation. I have no doubt the late lamented cave-dweller, in his impulse to sex supremacy, slaughtered his rivals precisely as one Captain Hains has recently done, though the gallant Captain is additionally the victim of an artificial development called "Honor." The sense of ownership of his mate in the savage can be understood, especially as he bought her—but just how a man's honor is blotted by any act of another of which he had no knowledge, I cannot comprehend. My honor is in my own keeping; and to my way of thinking an unfaithful wife can be left to her choice with greater honor than to commit murder for her sake.

I write these impressions too hurriedly ever to be thorough (and by the way they are in no sense the editorials of this magazine, but my personal impressions for what they may be worth). What I intend to offer as food for better and deeper thought than mine is that selfishness, self-interest, measurement by the scale of self, self-gratification is the root of all impulses and human attributes, and unless we are to believe Nature (or God) all wrong, we cannot believe selfishness to be wrong. That in fact the same trait may be a virtue or a vice according to the circumstances of application, and that it is by no means a virtue to crush out ourselves idolatrously before the unchecked selfishness of another or others—rather it is the highest duty to live our lives according to the deep longings thereof—for the longings are of God and no man can say what great good may come to the world from their full and free expression.

The world is full of idols; we bow down to them and worship them, and though they are senseless images, we ourselves are not so, and it is by our own conceptions which we accept as coming from the idol that we enslave ourselves. Let our conceptions therefore be just. Measure them more by ourselves and our rights to life and in life, and we will find that much which we have called duty, honor, obedience, self-sacrifice, are fetiches, and the whole world will be juster and saner and happier—I truly believe far, far happier when they are overthrown.

SOURCE: The Pacific Monthly. XX (1908) 454-455.

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New Rendering of Ten Commandments.

BY STEPHEN PEARL ANDREWS.

I. Thou shalt have no other gods than The Most High (that, whatever it is, that embodies, to thy conception, the supremest excellence).

II. Thou shalt not make, unto thee, any sham substitute, or inferior likeness of this thy supreme ideal; whether it be in itself relatively high (in heaven above), or mean (in the earth beneath); or base (in the water under the earth). Thou shalt not degrade (bow down) thyself, in respect to any such, nor come under the yoke of their tyranny over thee; for the Supreme Excellence (The Most High—God) is in direct antagonism (a jealous God) against all such degradations of the soul, and will cause the consequences of thy dereliction to follow thee and thy children's children through all coming time (as the necessary consequence of heredity and of the solidarity of race); while tending, on the contrary, to raise and comfort those who devoutly love and serve all Goodness and Truth.

III. Thou shalt not make a pretentious display even of thy devotion to the Most High (taking his name in vain), as by invoking such high considerations on trifling occasions, thereby bringing them into contempt; for the Most High is thereby profaned.

IV. Remember the days of special convocations, and all such appointments as thou hast made; on other occasions thou shalt complete thy work; such as might binder thee in the fulfillment of thy engagements; for the stated occasion is the period of rest from ordinary occupations. In this manner, let thy influence over others who are subject to it (son, daughter, man servant, and even the inferior animals) conduce to the faithful performance of duties and the fulfillment of all obligations; for, by special appointments the world is made, during the fitting seasons; followed by seasons of rest; whereby it appears that the Most High has instituted seasons of repose, equally with seasons of activity, or work.

V. Honor the noble ancestors of the race, as thou honorest thy father and thy mother; so that the continuity of humanity may be recognized and conceived, in that perpetual dominion which The Most High (the umpire of destinies) assigns to man over the world.

VI. Thou shalt not wantonly exhaust or destroy the vitality of thyself or others (shalt not kill).

VII. Thou shalt not mix thy procreative of life-giving forces wantonly, excessively, nor in any wise unwisely, but only in due respect to the highest uses; not, therefore, adulterously; but in purity of purpose, manner, and degree (shalt not commit adultery).

VIII. Thou shalt not withdraw even thine own from the help of others; but thou shalt endow others with constant blessing; devising sedulously the ways of doing good (shalt not steal).

IX. Thou shalt bear truthful witness to the good there is in thy neighbor, in preponderance over the evil; thy neighbor being all mankind (shalt not bear false witness).

X. Thou shalt earnestly covet the highest well-being of thy neighbor, in all his relations of life, in his domestic companionship, in his political and industrial pursuits, and in whatsoever he does (shalt not covet anything that is his).

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

 [Part 1] - [Part 2] - [Part 3]

XIX

With governmental control, such as was held by fallen administrations and such as we have preserved until the current time, one can boldly address a challenge to any who would seriously accept public functions; that would be to diminish the personnel of two formidable armies that weigh at the same time on the liberties and on the fortune of France: the army of the offices and that of the barracks. One can challenge him, consequently, not to proclaim liberty—if that happens I will laugh—but to introduce that liberty into actions and lead him to be something other than a nonentity.

Even more, one could challenge him to reduce taxes. Better still! he is forbidden to keep them at sixteen million, a monstrous figure, of which, what is more, the insufficiency could easily be shown by whoever is finance minister.

Here, in its true colors, is what governmental control accomplishes: slavery and ruin.

That control, on attributing itself the right to rule according to its fancy the movement and the thought of each citizen, has produced, in the moral order, a result not less deplorable. Truly! it has legalized everything.

Oh well! one would be strangely mistaken if one believed that legality carries within its litigious bowels the seed of human probity.

The legislation of France is not founded on the respect of individuals; it is founded on the principle of violation of public right, since lese-majesty, respect for the king, for the emperor, for the government, is consecrated at its root.

The law has never had social sanction among us: there has only been royal sanction and sanction by governmental supremacy whose character has always been to protect the minorities.

Our legislation is therefore immoral, because it is not based on the majority.

This legislation, moreover, necessarily coming after the vices that it seeks to suppress, is in reality nothing but the consecration of these vices. A code teaching me what I must avoid and what I must do; and in its spirit I practice right conveniently enough, since I abstain from wrong. Well, this could introduce a fundamental deception in public belief, since an able man, confronted with the law, finds himself with the same features as a man who is truly virtuous.

A legally honest man is one against whom no grounds for complaint have been proven; but a skilful man is not without the right to claim the benefits of the same definition! He who has carried out shadowy misdeeds, without witness and without coming to grief, skillfully avoiding the prohibitive letter of the law, and who enjoys the protection of the judge is also a man against whom no grounds for complaint have been proven. This one, too, is an honest man! and he would be in greater error to follow the law of social equity, the rule of morality, while the legal gospel is there before his eyes, while he has a clear field in unforeseen circumstances, while he is, with his ability, up to all foreseen cases, and for whom, ultimately, there is the friendship of the judge.

According to legality, therefore, equity goes according to the judgment of the court and the public conscience is taken over by the conscience of statute book.

Legality! but in pushing the social body of the people into pure and simple legality, governments have created and brought into the world a fraud, the poetry of pugilism.

The man, required to have the skill to avoid the trap set by the legislator, does not even bother to become a hypocrite. After having cleverly escaped the forethought of the law, he boasts of it as something to recommend to his contemporaries; he has sailed close to the wind with the law and the victory is his: what a superior being!

It goes without saying that our legislation, made up of scholarly compendiums, whose scrutiny and interpretation is only for the erudite, has fallen short of the morality of simple people who have always been and do not cease to be the quarry of the jurists.

Here, then, is what the much vaunted work of the legislative assemblies have provided us with: a celebrated statute book, a gravestone raised by public grief on the tomb of virtue! Each moral failing has, on passing, come to write its formula on this glossy book, and, the more numerous the formulas, the more beautiful the statute book, but also the more beautiful the statute book, the more perverted the society.

XX

Something one should never tire of repeating, is that morality can only exist among free people, and free people are those whose government, speaking very little of the national language, speak above all foreign languages; the government of democracies is principally diplomatistic.

Among us, he who speaks of government speaks of the Republic, the State, society. These words, in effect, the red Republic, the tricolor Republic, etc., which try our patience, signify nothing but the red government, the tricolor government, etc. As far as the administration is concerned, the government, that is the Republic.

Who thinks this is wrong?

The men of today, indeed quite different from those of times gone by, sense, though they understand nothing, that their being and their property are entirely separate from the administrative body. They feel it so much that, on letting, as a result to custom, a government establish itself on a model of past times, they effectively retire from it, not granting it their confidence, and not agreeing to aid it materially, without grumbling, faced with force or in fear. They feel it so much so that they take it upon themselves to control, publicly, the acts of administration. Well, a power whose acts are controlled has forfeited its rights, since its authority is undermined.

But this error, which consists of hiding the whole of society under the symbol of government, is strongly embedded in public beliefs.

The influence of tradition has made of it an article of national faith, which everyday finds itself in more direct opposition with the public will and public sentiment.

Thus, everyone knows that a popular movement puts nothing in danger but the official fortune of a few men; despite public bills and proclamations saying that the movement puts society in danger, the nation allows it without further consideration.

If I wanted to adopt the reasoning of skilled people, who use for their own interests the powers that society confers upon them, this would lead me to a curious conclusion, a disappointing commentary on the tumultuous spectacle of revolutions!

XXI

I have seen, in the few years that my memory is able to embrace, a very respectable number of popular movements.

When these movements fail at the first step, their leaders are arrested, thrown into jail, tried and convicted as criminals of the State. The proclamations posted on every wall in Paris and sent to the very smallest township tell society that it has just been saved.

Certainly, at this news, logically I would have to think that if, by some sort of misunderstanding, authority had been overwhelmed, if the army had weakened, if the movement had gone beyond the law, that would have been the end of society: France would have been pillaged, sacked, set ablaze, lost!

When, however, these movements, mastering all obstacles, overturning authority, passing the armed forces have followed their course and arrived at their goal, then their leaders are carried in triumph, hailed as heroes and raised to the highest heights of the judiciary. The proclamations posted on every wall in Paris and sent to the very smallest township tell society that it has just been saved. Thus society, incessantly in danger, is always saved!

Who saves it? Those that put it in danger.

Who puts it in danger? Those that save it.

It is to say that society is never more completely lost than when it is saved.

And that it is never better saved than when it is lost.

And I said that by adopting the reasoning of the skilled people who make use of the power with which society endows them for their own personal ends, it would lead me to a curious conclusion!

Curious, indeed, and logically explicable by the facts.

Thus, taking us back to 23 February, according to the Journal des débat, Le Constitutionnel, Le Siècle and all the other newspapers that defend social order, it is understood that the agitators in Paris at that time were nothing but unsanctioned troublemakers who wanted nothing less than the subversion, the overturn and the ruin of society.

These unsanctioned troublemakers triumphed the next day and, immediately, every citizen said what he liked, wrote, printed what he liked, did what he liked, went where he liked, went out and came in when he liked; enjoyed, in a word, his natural liberty in all ways socially possible, amid the most complete security, favored by the most fraternal urbanity. Society was, in short, saved by and for each of its members.

Well, this happened the day when, according to the friends of order, society was lost.

Thus, again, to the voice of the defenders of social order became added, for reasons known to itself, that of Le National: the June agitators were nothing but unsanctioned troublemakers who wanted nothing less than the subversion, the overturn and the ruin of society. These troublemakers failed and, immediately, every citizen was barracked in his own home, scrupulously examined on his own premises, disarmed, thrown in jail by a simple ill-willed denunciation, reduced to the most complete and absolute silence, placed under the unruly surveillance of the state-of-siege police and governed by the sharp, pointed and undiscerning law of the sword. Society was, therefore, lost by and for each of its members.

Well, this happened the day when, according to the friends of order, this time including Le National, society was saved.

From which I am forced to conclude, just as I have already said and proven, that society is never more completely lost than when it is saved and that it is never better saved than when it is lost.

This is, oh France, the spectacle, as delicate as it is subtle, that plays out in front of other nations and before posterity, in the country the most intelligent in the world.

What an indecorous comedy!

XXII

I do nothing more here than to state the facts; I note them and report them as they appear to me. Regarding the commentary, I simply repeat what I have said elsewhere: I do not believe at all in the efficacy of armed rebellion, and for a simple reason, which is that I do not believe at all in the efficacy of armed governments.

An armed government is a brutal entity, since its only principle is force. An armed revolution is a brutal thing, because it has no other principle than force.

When one is ruled by the arbitrariness of barbarism, it is necessary to kick like a barbarian; and, as for the arms one crosses over their chests, the parties would do well to oppose weapons.

As much as a government, in place of improving the condition of things, only improves the condition of a few people, a revolution, the inevitable end of such a government, will only be a substitution of persons instead of being a change of matters.

Armed governments are the authorities of the movement, the administration of the party.

Armed revolutions are the wars of the movement, the campaigns of the party.

The nation is as much a stranger to armed government as it is to armed revolution; but if it is the case that a revolutionary party is more immediately worried than the nation by the governing party, it will also be the case that one day the nation worried in its turn will complain about the government, and that it will be in that precise moment that it will win the moral support of the people, that the revolutionary party will wage battle.

From there, this kind of public recognition leads to bloody rabble-rousing, which under the pompous title of revolutions, hides the impertinence of a few valets rushing to become masters.

When the people have understood the position that has been reserved for them in these Saturnalias they pay for, when they have realized the ignoble and stupid role that they have been made to play, they will know that armed revolution is a heresy from the point of view of principles; they will know that violence is antipodal to right; and once resolved on the morality and the inclinations of the violent parties, whether those of government or revolutionary, there will be a revolution among them brought about by the single force of right: the force of inertia, the denial of assistance. In the denial of assistance will be the repeal of the laws on legal assassination and the proclamation of equity.

This supreme act of national sovereignty I see happen here, not as a calculated result, but as an expression of the law of necessity, as an inevitable product of an administrative avidity, of the extinction of credit and the gloomy arrival of destitution. This revolution, which will be French and not solely Parisian, will tear France from Paris to lead it back to a municipality; then, and only then, will the national sovereignty become fact, since it will be founded on the sovereignty of the commune.

To these words of sovereignty of the commune, all the great minds, who have dragged patriotism to the bar of vocabulary to make the Republic a question of words, exclaim in admiration the name three times holy of unity.

Unity! The time is ripe speak about it. In the midst of the divisions tearing the country apart, I ask what has been made of national unity by the lame paraders who speak in its name!

Unity! I know of only one way to destroy it; that is to want to constitute it by force. If someone had the power to act on the planets, and if, under the pretext of constituting the unity of the solar system, he tried to make them adhere by force to the center, he would destroy the equilibrium and reestablish chaos.

There is someone here who supports unity more than anyone else; that someone is the French people; and if France does not understand that she must promptly leave the stomach of the administration, or else be dissolved there, that will not be my fault, nor the fault of the coarse peritoneum which elaborate the digestion.

XXIII

Let us say, moreover, that the result of an armed revolution, supposing that the revolution is generously interpreted by a kindhearted man, all-powerful over opinion, honest, disinterested and democratic like Washington, the result of an armed revolution, I have said, can turn to the profit of public law.

The tyrants overturned, before others come to take their place, there always appears, on top of the ruins of the tyranny, a man greater than the others, a man whom everyone sees, whom everyone hears, and he is the master of the debris; it is up to him to scatter it or reconstruct it.

If Monsieur de Lamartine had had the genius of action, as he had genius of matters of intelligence, 24 February would have been the date of the French Republic, instead of being nothing but invective.

France, on that day, had expected everything from that man, to whom national sympathies had spontaneously handed over the puissant steering of the destiny of the people.

He only had to say to us in the harmonious rhythm of his beautiful language: “The government of the king is abolished: France is no longer at the Hôtel de Ville!”

“Your masters have gone and they will not be replaced!”

“Their law was in force; it is in force no longer. It will not return!”

“You are returned to yourselves; the foreigner will learn from me that you are free.”

“Keep a watch over yourselves; I’ll keep a watch on the borders!”

Certainly, after declarations so substantial, our representatives, whoever they had been, would not have lost sight of the fact that they had to define national law, and not the frenzied law of governments.

Perhaps Monsieur de Lamartine would have perished, a victim of ambitious men left without prey. The despair of the apprentice tyrants might perhaps have been unleashed on him; but his death, like that of all great citizens, would have been fecund! And since, as he said, ideas vegetate in human blood, his would have remained at the beginning of the free era, as an eternal protestation against the tyranny of the delivered.

Unfortunately, instead of scattering the elements of despotism, he set about collecting them together again in order to reassemble them; today the building is complete except for the keystone. It is not he that lives in it, but it is inhabited; not too much worse, perhaps, but not much better either.

Ah, well! the time has come to leave words and come to action!

The time has come to know what democracy wants to say!

The time has arrived for all Frenchmen, in whose arteries still beats a little Gallic blood, who, from Diocletian to Charlemagne, protested against the tyranny of the empire, to assume their position as free citizens, and to call to account the cowardice and the inability of the men of the people, the Republican individualities, for our collapsed credit, for our vanished capital, for our paralyzed industries, for our lay-offs, for our extinguished trade, for our products without market; for our France, finally, so unproductive, so alienated, so venal, so prostituted, so debased, so inhospitable, so foreign to ourselves, so polluted by the tax authorities, and so close to contempt for its children, that they will soon not have enough love in their hearts to set their courage against attempts by their ravishers!

The time has come, for we are facing a decisive spectacle: on one side there is the government which defies the nation;

On the other side, there is the nation which defies the government.

Well, it must be, by complete necessity, that either the government devours the country or that the country absorbs the government.

END

[Translation by Collective Reason (Robert Tucker, Jesse Cohn, and Shawn P. Wilbur.) Robert did most of the hard work, and I'm responsible for the final choices.]

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

 [Part 1] - [Part 2] - [Part 3]

XIX

With governmental control, such as was held by fallen administrations and such as we have preserved until the current time, one can boldly address a challenge to any who would seriously accept public functions; that would be to diminish the personnel of two formidable armies that weigh at the same time on the liberties and on the fortune of France: the army of the offices and that of the barracks. One can challenge him, consequently, not to proclaim liberty—if that happens I will laugh—but to introduce that liberty into actions and lead him to be something other than a nonentity.

Even more, one could challenge him to reduce taxes. Better still! he is forbidden to keep them at sixteen million, a monstrous figure, of which, what is more, the insufficiency could easily be shown by whoever is finance minister.

Here, in its true colors, is what governmental control accomplishes: slavery and ruin.

That control, on attributing itself the right to rule according to its fancy the movement and the thought of each citizen, has produced, in the moral order, a result not less deplorable. Truly! it has legalized everything.

Oh well! one would be strangely mistaken if one believed that legality carries within its litigious bowels the seed of human probity.

The legislation of France is not founded on the respect of individuals; it is founded on the principle of violation of public right, since lese-majesty, respect for the king, for the emperor, for the government, is consecrated at its root.

The law has never had social sanction among us: there has only been royal sanction and sanction by governmental supremacy whose character has always been to protect the minorities.

Our legislation is therefore immoral, because it is not based on the majority.

This legislation, moreover, necessarily coming after the vices that it seeks to suppress, is in reality nothing but the consecration of these vices. A code teaching me what I must avoid and what I must do; and in its spirit I practice right conveniently enough, since I abstain from wrong. Well, this could introduce a fundamental deception in public belief, since an able man, confronted with the law, finds himself with the same features as a man who is truly virtuous.

A legally honest man is one against whom no grounds for complaint have been proven; but a skilful man is not without the right to claim the benefits of the same definition! He who has carried out shadowy misdeeds, without witness and without coming to grief, skillfully avoiding the prohibitive letter of the law, and who enjoys the protection of the judge is also a man against whom no grounds for complaint have been proven. This one, too, is an honest man! and he would be in greater error to follow the law of social equity, the rule of morality, while the legal gospel is there before his eyes, while he has a clear field in unforeseen circumstances, while he is, with his ability, up to all foreseen cases, and for whom, ultimately, there is the friendship of the judge.

According to legality, therefore, equity goes according to the judgment of the court and the public conscience is taken over by the conscience of statute book.

Legality! but in pushing the social body of the people into pure and simple legality, governments have created and brought into the world a fraud, the poetry of pugilism.

The man, required to have the skill to avoid the trap set by the legislator, does not even bother to become a hypocrite. After having cleverly escaped the forethought of the law, he boasts of it as something to recommend to his contemporaries; he has sailed close to the wind with the law and the victory is his: what a superior being!

It goes without saying that our legislation, made up of scholarly compendiums, whose scrutiny and interpretation is only for the erudite, has fallen short of the morality of simple people who have always been and do not cease to be the quarry of the jurists.

Here, then, is what the much vaunted work of the legislative assemblies have provided us with: a celebrated statute book, a gravestone raised by public grief on the tomb of virtue! Each moral failing has, on passing, come to write its formula on this glossy book, and, the more numerous the formulas, the more beautiful the statute book, but also the more beautiful the statute book, the more perverted the society.

XX

Something one should never tire of repeating, is that morality can only exist among free people, and free people are those whose government, speaking very little of the national language, speak above all foreign languages; the government of democracies is principally diplomatistic.

Among us, he who speaks of government speaks of the Republic, the State, society. These words, in effect, the red Republic, the tricolor Republic, etc., which try our patience, signify nothing but the red government, the tricolor government, etc. As far as the administration is concerned, the government, that is the Republic.

Who thinks this is wrong?

The men of today, indeed quite different from those of times gone by, sense, though they understand nothing, that their being and their property are entirely separate from the administrative body. They feel it so much that, on letting, as a result to custom, a government establish itself on a model of past times, they effectively retire from it, not granting it their confidence, and not agreeing to aid it materially, without grumbling, faced with force or in fear. They feel it so much so that they take it upon themselves to control, publicly, the acts of administration. Well, a power whose acts are controlled has forfeited its rights, since its authority is undermined.

But this error, which consists of hiding the whole of society under the symbol of government, is strongly embedded in public beliefs.

The influence of tradition has made of it an article of national faith, which everyday finds itself in more direct opposition with the public will and public sentiment.

Thus, everyone knows that a popular movement puts nothing in danger but the official fortune of a few men; despite public bills and proclamations saying that the movement puts society in danger, the nation allows it without further consideration.

If I wanted to adopt the reasoning of skilled people, who use for their own interests the powers that society confers upon them, this would lead me to a curious conclusion, a disappointing commentary on the tumultuous spectacle of revolutions!

XXI

I have seen, in the few years that my memory is able to embrace, a very respectable number of popular movements.

When these movements fail at the first step, their leaders are arrested, thrown into jail, tried and convicted as criminals of the State. The proclamations posted on every wall in Paris and sent to the very smallest township tell society that it has just been saved.

Certainly, at this news, logically I would have to think that if, by some sort of misunderstanding, authority had been overwhelmed, if the army had weakened, if the movement had gone beyond the law, that would have been the end of society: France would have been pillaged, sacked, set ablaze, lost!

When, however, these movements, mastering all obstacles, overturning authority, passing the armed forces have followed their course and arrived at their goal, then their leaders are carried in triumph, hailed as heroes and raised to the highest heights of the judiciary. The proclamations posted on every wall in Paris and sent to the very smallest township tell society that it has just been saved. Thus society, incessantly in danger, is always saved!

Who saves it? Those that put it in danger.

Who puts it in danger? Those that save it.

It is to say that society is never more completely lost than when it is saved.

And that it is never better saved than when it is lost.

And I said that by adopting the reasoning of the skilled people who make use of the power with which society endows them for their own personal ends, it would lead me to a curious conclusion!

Curious, indeed, and logically explicable by the facts.

Thus, taking us back to 23 February, according to the Journal des débat, Le Constitutionnel, Le Siècle and all the other newspapers that defend social order, it is understood that the agitators in Paris at that time were nothing but unsanctioned troublemakers who wanted nothing less than the subversion, the overturn and the ruin of society.

These unsanctioned troublemakers triumphed the next day and, immediately, every citizen said what he liked, wrote, printed what he liked, did what he liked, went where he liked, went out and came in when he liked; enjoyed, in a word, his natural liberty in all ways socially possible, amid the most complete security, favored by the most fraternal urbanity. Society was, in short, saved by and for each of its members.

Well, this happened the day when, according to the friends of order, society was lost.

Thus, again, to the voice of the defenders of social order became added, for reasons known to itself, that of Le National: the June agitators were nothing but unsanctioned troublemakers who wanted nothing less than the subversion, the overturn and the ruin of society. These troublemakers failed and, immediately, every citizen was barracked in his own home, scrupulously examined on his own premises, disarmed, thrown in jail by a simple ill-willed denunciation, reduced to the most complete and absolute silence, placed under the unruly surveillance of the state-of-siege police and governed by the sharp, pointed and undiscerning law of the sword. Society was, therefore, lost by and for each of its members.

Well, this happened the day when, according to the friends of order, this time including Le National, society was saved.

From which I am forced to conclude, just as I have already said and proven, that society is never more completely lost than when it is saved and that it is never better saved than when it is lost.

This is, oh France, the spectacle, as delicate as it is subtle, that plays out in front of other nations and before posterity, in the country the most intelligent in the world.

What an indecorous comedy!

XXII

I do nothing more here than to state the facts; I note them and report them as they appear to me. Regarding the commentary, I simply repeat what I have said elsewhere: I do not believe at all in the efficacy of armed rebellion, and for a simple reason, which is that I do not believe at all in the efficacy of armed governments.

An armed government is a brutal entity, since its only principle is force. An armed revolution is a brutal thing, because it has no other principle than force.

When one is ruled by the arbitrariness of barbarism, it is necessary to kick like a barbarian; and, as for the arms one crosses over their chests, the parties would do well to oppose weapons.

As much as a government, in place of improving the condition of things, only improves the condition of a few people, a revolution, the inevitable end of such a government, will only be a substitution of persons instead of being a change of matters.

Armed governments are the authorities of the movement, the administration of the party.

Armed revolutions are the wars of the movement, the campaigns of the party.

The nation is as much a stranger to armed government as it is to armed revolution; but if it is the case that a revolutionary party is more immediately worried than the nation by the governing party, it will also be the case that one day the nation worried in its turn will complain about the government, and that it will be in that precise moment that it will win the moral support of the people, that the revolutionary party will wage battle.

From there, this kind of public recognition leads to bloody rabble-rousing, which under the pompous title of revolutions, hides the impertinence of a few valets rushing to become masters.

When the people have understood the position that has been reserved for them in these Saturnalias they pay for, when they have realized the ignoble and stupid role that they have been made to play, they will know that armed revolution is a heresy from the point of view of principles; they will know that violence is antipodal to right; and once resolved on the morality and the inclinations of the violent parties, whether those of government or revolutionary, there will be a revolution among them brought about by the single force of right: the force of inertia, the denial of assistance. In the denial of assistance will be the repeal of the laws on legal assassination and the proclamation of equity.

This supreme act of national sovereignty I see happen here, not as a calculated result, but as an expression of the law of necessity, as an inevitable product of an administrative avidity, of the extinction of credit and the gloomy arrival of destitution. This revolution, which will be French and not solely Parisian, will tear France from Paris to lead it back to a municipality; then, and only then, will the national sovereignty become fact, since it will be founded on the sovereignty of the commune.

To these words of sovereignty of the commune, all the great minds, who have dragged patriotism to the bar of vocabulary to make the Republic a question of words, exclaim in admiration the name three times holy of unity.

Unity! The time is ripe speak about it. In the midst of the divisions tearing the country apart, I ask what has been made of national unity by the lame paraders who speak in its name!

Unity! I know of only one way to destroy it; that is to want to constitute it by force. If someone had the power to act on the planets, and if, under the pretext of constituting the unity of the solar system, he tried to make them adhere by force to the center, he would destroy the equilibrium and reestablish chaos.

There is someone here who supports unity more than anyone else; that someone is the French people; and if France does not understand that she must promptly leave the stomach of the administration, or else be dissolved there, that will not be my fault, nor the fault of the coarse peritoneum which elaborate the digestion.

XXIII

Let us say, moreover, that the result of an armed revolution, supposing that the revolution is generously interpreted by a kindhearted man, all-powerful over opinion, honest, disinterested and democratic like Washington, the result of an armed revolution, I have said, can turn to the profit of public law.

The tyrants overturned, before others come to take their place, there always appears, on top of the ruins of the tyranny, a man greater than the others, a man whom everyone sees, whom everyone hears, and he is the master of the debris; it is up to him to scatter it or reconstruct it.

If Monsieur de Lamartine had had the genius of action, as he had genius of matters of intelligence, 24 February would have been the date of the French Republic, instead of being nothing but invective.

France, on that day, had expected everything from that man, to whom national sympathies had spontaneously handed over the puissant steering of the destiny of the people.

He only had to say to us in the harmonious rhythm of his beautiful language: “The government of the king is abolished: France is no longer at the Hôtel de Ville!”

“Your masters have gone and they will not be replaced!”

“Their law was in force; it is in force no longer. It will not return!”

“You are returned to yourselves; the foreigner will learn from me that you are free.”

“Keep a watch over yourselves; I’ll keep a watch on the borders!”

Certainly, after declarations so substantial, our representatives, whoever they had been, would not have lost sight of the fact that they had to define national law, and not the frenzied law of governments.

Perhaps Monsieur de Lamartine would have perished, a victim of ambitious men left without prey. The despair of the apprentice tyrants might perhaps have been unleashed on him; but his death, like that of all great citizens, would have been fecund! And since, as he said, ideas vegetate in human blood, his would have remained at the beginning of the free era, as an eternal protestation against the tyranny of the delivered.

Unfortunately, instead of scattering the elements of despotism, he set about collecting them together again in order to reassemble them; today the building is complete except for the keystone. It is not he that lives in it, but it is inhabited; not too much worse, perhaps, but not much better either.

Ah, well! the time has come to leave words and come to action!

The time has come to know what democracy wants to say!

The time has arrived for all Frenchmen, in whose arteries still beats a little Gallic blood, who, from Diocletian to Charlemagne, protested against the tyranny of the empire, to assume their position as free citizens, and to call to account the cowardice and the inability of the men of the people, the Republican individualities, for our collapsed credit, for our vanished capital, for our paralyzed industries, for our lay-offs, for our extinguished trade, for our products without market; for our France, finally, so unproductive, so alienated, so venal, so prostituted, so debased, so inhospitable, so foreign to ourselves, so polluted by the tax authorities, and so close to contempt for its children, that they will soon not have enough love in their hearts to set their courage against attempts by their ravishers!

The time has come, for we are facing a decisive spectacle: on one side there is the government which defies the nation;

On the other side, there is the nation which defies the government.

Well, it must be, by complete necessity, that either the government devours the country or that the country absorbs the government.

END

[Translation by Collective Reason (Robert Tucker, Jesse Cohn, and Shawn P. Wilbur.) Robert did most of the hard work, and I'm responsible for the final choices.]

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

[Part 1] - [Part 2]

XIII

But there are people who remain far from accepting this reasoning. The theoreticians, our masters, find idea preferable to fact. And this doctrine that they maintain provides them with a dividend which strongly encourages them to continue maintaining it.

In their view, provided that tax payments continue and provided that the rain respects the words Republic and Liberty on the front of public buildings, we are republicans and free.

These people are very powerful!

As powerful as that well-advised character of Arab proverbs who, without touching in any way the contents of a vase, believed that in changing the label, he changed the liqueur.

As powerful as those burlesque geniuses in the farces at the fair, who believe their clothes safe from catching alight because they have on their chest boards carrying assurances against fire.

These people, I repeat, are extraordinarily powerful!

Listening attentively to the intricacies of their arguments, we hear much spoken—and loudly—of the sovereignty of the people. Do you believe it has ever been permitted to insult the sovereign? You reply: No? Ah, well! That is because you were told that the people are sovereign and that you do not have the right to insult the people? I would like better, for my part, to deny the sovereignty of the people and believe in the sovereignty of the government that I am required to respect.

I say that I would rather believe in the sovereignty of government; I am forced to believe in it, everyone is forced to believe in it like me; I do not exist, no one exists for himself; our existence is not at all our own. We do not live civilly, commercially, industrially, religiously, or intellectually except for the government.

Can we travel without a safe-conduct pass signed by it? Can we buy a property or make a transaction without it intervening? Can we profess a religion which it has not validated? Can we teach ourselves other than in the schools and with the books approved by its university? Can we publish anything other than what it permits us to publish? And to push these considerations of this regulating tyranny to the extremes of triviality: can we smoke a cigar which it has not itself sold to us? Are we lawyers, medics, teachers, merchants, artists, agents, town criers, without it giving us a license? No! We do not exist, I say to you, we are inert objects, parts belonging to a conscious and complicated machine whose crank handle is in Paris!

Well, I say that this is an irregular situation, a situation as embarrassing for the government as it is fatal for the nation.

I can understand that it was possible to for Richelieu to govern like this; the France of past centuries was completely and voluntarily under the crown of the king. But woe to those who do not take note of the difference in the times! Today, every citizen feels and deliberates for himself, and control of official acts is everywhere!

XIV

There are, however, in the healthy part of the nation, in the core of good public sense, people who fear to look clearly at the situation; people who cannot resolve themselves to understand that in desperately bleeding themselves to maintain five hundred thousand employees and as many soldiers, they hold back a million men from production and create, to the benefit of I do not know which Minotaur, an official parasitism whose formidable manner dries up in the heart of the country the confidence and credit that is just that source on which this same parasitism comes meanwhile to quench itself.

They perpetuate the crisis and they perpetuate it because they are afraid!

They are afraid of the socialists, and they fear for their property; they are afraid for their religion, they are afraid for their family!

They are afraid of socialists? ... Of which socialists are they afraid?

There are the socialists of Fourier.

There are the socialists of Pierre Leroux.

There are the socialists of Proudhon.

There are the socialists of Considerant.

There are the socialists of Louis Blanc.

There are the socialists of Cabet.

There are, in fact, socialists that I know, and then those that I do not know and that I shall never know, because socialism fragments, subdivides, diversifies itself and separates into factions like everything that is not defined. Well, socialism is not defined.

Socialism is, in short, a very obscure philosophical system, highly complicated, extraordinarily confusing, that erudite men are obliged to study in minute detail to arrive most often at not understanding anything at all.

Socialism, according to what it is possible to grasp from all its proposals, wants to make of society a huge hive into each pigeon-hole of which will be placed a citizen, who will be enjoined to remain silent and wait patiently, while alms are made of his own money. The major dispensers of these alms, supreme tax-collectors of universal revenues, will create a general staff, reasonably well endowed, which on getting up in the morning deigns to satisfy the public appetite; and which, if it sleeps in longer than usual, will leave thirty-six million men without food.

Socialism is an attempt at geometric equilibrium whose demonstration—based on a principle of immobility—does not know to have for its foundation human societies essentially active and progressive. Socialism is an abstract speculation, just as the current administration is an abstract speculation; the people who do not understand the latter do not understand the former either. Well, the people never freely adopt what they do not at all understand.

Socialism, in short, wants to carry on the affairs of the people, and for that it has come too late, or I am much mistaken.

But the socialists are philosophers who have the same right to teach their doctrines as their adversaries have to teach theirs. Just as the people have the right to judge the latter, they have the right to appraise the former.

No one can put himself in the place of the people to pronounce condemnation or recognition of the excellence of a doctrine; since in that diversity of tastes and inclinations that mottle society, there is no doctrine that is bad for all, nor is there one that is good for all.

Tolerance, in theological order, has not resolved the problem of civil concord; the problem rests also on tolerance in social and political order.

State religions have caused, during the centuries, discords and massacres which we now find pitiable.

State doctrines have at the current time caused so much blood to flow that our children gather together to erect a monument to our shame.

We have eliminated state religions; why do we wait to crush state doctrines?

If we do not see any problem with those who wish to have churches, temples or synagogues constructed, at their expense, on land that belongs to them as their own; I do not at all see any problem with those who wish to construct convents, phalansteries or palaces, at their expense, on land that belongs to them as their own.

And if it is simple enough to let the Catholics, the protestants and the Jews have the right to maintain, at their respective expense, in the churches, the temples and the synagogues, the priests, ministers and rabbis; it is just as simple for the monks, socialists and men of court to have the right to maintain, at their expense, in the convents, in the phalansteries, in the palaces, the superiors, the patriarchs and the princes.

All these things fall within the accommodation of the taste, of the faith, of the conscience of each one of us, and it is perhaps possible that one can be a monk, a socialist, a man of court and an excellent citizen at the same time, since the religions, which must remain outside the laws of the State, do not dispense at all with obedience to the laws of the State.

But what includes at least as much buffoonery as strangeness is the determination made by a myriad of systems to attempt political campaigns, and their respective pretensions to make the whole country contribute to the costs of their establishment and the inauguration of their authority in the name of the public and the nation!

We only need to provide a circus acrobat with five hundred thousand bayonets for the act to become a social doctrine and for the wishes and caprices of Pulcinella to be made into the laws of State. We are, certainly, very near to arriving there, and it surprises me that we are not there already.

But I have digressed enough on that subject. Let us return.

XV

They have fear for their property, fear for their religion, fear for their family?

The ultimate sectarians of intolerance, those that babble among us in that language—still unintelligible, alas!—of the tyrants of humanity, repeat without ceasing their disheveled sentences on the subject of religion, of property, of family.

These ridiculous defenders of God and of society lack the intelligence to understand that the ability to save that which they ascribe to necessarily implies the ability to lose it; they do not perceive, as seriously as they take their puerile Quixotism, that the guard they mount at the temple door and at home puts, in their eyes, God and society at their discretion. It just does not enter the heads of these great children, that while saying to God and to society “we have saved you from destruction,” it is as if they were saying “it has depended on us that you continue to exist; you owe us your life.”

Do you see an articulated apparatus of organic life, claiming a right to the initiative on the existence of God and society?

Do you see here the moral and material universe under the dependence of a degenerate quadrumane which could be finished off with just a fillip or a catarrh?

Shame and pity!

Enough of this wretched and discordant bragging!

Enough of this grandeur founded on the abasement of the public!

Enough of this audacity built on fear!

Religion, property, and the family have survived Geneva rationalism, the philosophy of Voltaire, forfeiture agreements, and the dissolution of social ties from antiquity; religion, property, and the family are, in fact, unassailable by individuals. To defend them is to exploit them! To protect them is to plunder them!

How well the intriguers of every hue—those who believe themselves powerful enough to threaten these institutions as much as those who claim the ability to defend them, all those, in a word, who, living by intimidation and terrorism, have an interest in perpetuating universal panic—how well do all these know that religion, property, and the family have never had a more efficacious protector than time; there has, consequently, never been a possibility of their being attacked other than by time.

Time, without anyone taking any notice, without anyone formulating a complaint, time modifies them all: religion, property, and the family. The current state of the Church with its degenerate discipline and its neutrality in secular politics would make the audacious Hildebrand die of a fit of rage.

The current state of property, with its breaking up into an infinite number of pieces and the melancholic handing over of the chateaus, would bring despair to the great tenants of the last century.

The current state of the family, with the incessant displacement of individuals, the submission to the domestic yoke, the separation resulting from cosmopolitanism, would profoundly wound the patriarchal traditions of our ancestors.

The goings-on of future generations, if we were to see them, would shock our prejudices, our customs, our way of life.

Thus, everything changes without destroying itself, and the human spirit only accepts that for which it is prepared. Every day, it opens itself to new interests, to which it can accommodate itself without shock. After a period of time, the coming together of interests gives rise to a new institution, which, having arrived en bloc beforehand, would have surprised and injured everyone, but having arrived in a providential way has not hurt anyone and has satisfied all.

Let us speak and have no fear.

Fear is nothing but the condemnation of oneself, and once one is condemned there is no shortage of executioners.

XVI

The hypothesis of spoliation has been put forward.

No one can believe in the corruptibility of the majorities, without denying at the same time human reason and the principle of its demonstration. If the majorities are incorruptible, they are equitable, since the basic law of equity is respect for acquired right.

Acquired right has been respected even among people where the means of acquisition have been denied to the majority. How can this right be violated among us, where the acquisition, as much as it is still impeded, can nonetheless be considered public.

Let one not speak to me of brigandage, when it is substantiated that it is only carried out by minorities and that its exercise requires its organization.

Let one not speak to me of brigandage, when in the place of a plan by some unacceptable organization one brings me some shouts in the street or some argument at a club.

The people are not responsible for the exceptional insanity of a few spirits. The mad are the lost children of humanity.

Brigandage is not organizable. I am wrong, one can organize it, and here is how: put in each commune an authority more jealous of individual law than public law; establish in each arrondissement, in each department hateful magistrates, intolerant and fanatical; put at the top of this hierarchy a supreme head, blinded by the pride of domination and nourished by impious dogmas; give to this man four or five thousand armed men for support, and spoliation as a rallying call and the violation of acquired rights is consummated. But one says to me that this picture is of nothing but administrative organization, founded on the constitution. I avow it, and what follows from it that a malefactor who does not embrace the administration of the State would be nothing to fear. But this also amounts to saying that this administration squashes us in some way, that we are at the complete mercy of anyone bold enough that chance can allow to happen.

Give the people spoliation as a rallying call and this rallying call will encase itself in the probity of numbers.

How this rallying call goes out from the administration, the systematic webs of which embrace all individuals and all the territory, and the supreme thought propagates like electricity to be lost in blood!

Such is the only possible organization of brigandage, and such is, finally, a usage perhaps applied by the government of representative monarchies.

Those that own, do they fear that they might be individually plundered by those who do not? I sympathize with them while being able to condemn them, because by that they tell me themselves what they would be disposed to do if they had nothing.

And, yet, they err; they are more honest people than they think. They reason from the point of view of the needs that their fortune has given them. I understand that if they were suddenly deprived of the satisfaction of these needs, which have become for them, in some way, natural, they would have to suffer, and that it is under this impression that they argue. But there is one thing that they forget, that is, that if they had never had their fortune, they would not have had their needs either.

Is it not, moreover the case, by virtue of the same principle, that he who would come to dispossess me today, could himself be dispossessed tomorrow? And if things go on like that with each dispossessing the other, what is going to become of production?

Can such an absurd state of things perhaps be understood by sensible people, where the day after a revolution where everything is at the discretion of the masses, and where perversity, in the state of emergency, finds itself drowned in public probity?

If the majority, who do not own anything, had an instinct for plunder, it would have been a long time since the minority who owned anything had anything left.

If there are criminals in our communities, let us count them; it is an easy job; and if we find a few or if we do not find any, we are not going to believe that we exercise here the monopoly of equity: people are the same everywhere.

If the domineering and insolent rage of a few men tear to shreds popular magnanimity and bring into disrepute human character, it follows that the dogma of improbity is the rationale of tyrannies, and the security of tyrants is based on the hatred and mistrust of citizens among themselves.

As for me, separated from the parties to remain human, I defend humanity with esprit de corps.

XVII

But here is what I hear said:

If socialism comes into power, it would be able to compel its recognition. That objection, I expect.

It is quite true that as philosophers, as apostles of a doctrine, as teachers, the socialists have are not at all frightening. All of their opinions might therefore be expressed without danger, seeing that these opinions do not at all aspire to government.

Well, so! Do we think that good public sense would make justice of the absurd, and we fear being governed by the absurd? Do we feel thus that one could govern us contrary to good sense? Do we feel thus that one could violate, surprise our religion as soon as one comes to govern us? But, that admitted, we are incessantly in danger of being handed over! What I say is that, being in danger, we have already been handed over; because, in matters of public security, probabilities are certainties.

At the moment when we recognize that one could do violence to us one does violence to us; it is an inevitable law, inescapable and inherent in all states of dependence.

It is therefore not the socialists that it is necessary to fear, that it is necessary to exorcise; it is necessary to fear, it is necessary to exorcise the institution of government, by virtue of the fact that it can strike us. This institution alone is bad, is dangerous, and whoever is put at the head of this institution will immediately be as dangerous as the socialists; first, because he can become the institution, and second, because he can be surprised and conquered by the socialists, and, finally, because his system can be as bad as, or worse than, theirs.

As long as there is no untrammeled freedom of opinion in France, in order for a doctrine to emerge, it will be forced to attempt the overthrow of the government, for its sole means of action will be to become official State doctrine, to govern; and as long as an official State doctrine governs, it will necessarily consider other doctrines as dangerous rivals and proscribe them.

Thus it is that we continue to see these vicious struggles to which society lends its children and its money, these battles of scheming and ambition that I would call ridiculous if they weren’t so atrocious, and of which the outcome—those outcast today to be lauded tomorrow—makes criminality or heroism a mere question of the date.

XVIII

It is therefore shown that socialism is no more to be feared in itself than any other philosophical doctrine. It is established that it can become dangerous only in the condition of governing. That comes down to saying that nothing is dangerous which does not govern; from this it follows that whoever governs is already or can become dangerous—and the strict consequence is still that the nation can have no other public enemy than the government.

That having been said, it is beyond doubt that the only important thing in modern times, as well as the only one against which our representatives have not prepared themselves, consists in simplifying the administrative organism to the degree demanded by individual liberty, which has been without guarantee until this day, and by the reduction of taxation, which will be impossible to do as long as we persist on the path already beaten by the governments with its fat budgets.

The present governmental institution is the same as that of last year, and that of last year resumes all the powers of Louis XIV, with the sole exception that the unity of action of the royal trust finds itself re-divided among six or seven ministerial departments set up by a parliamentary majority. Can we be a free people, as long as our entire existence, from the civil order to the hygienic order, will be so regulated?

If we posit the guarantee of our individual liberty, if we resolve to move ourselves by our own movement, the nation will acquire again that power of which it was relieved or that has been usurped from it; that necessary power, indispensable to the balance of popular prerogatives with governmental initiative.

If the nation recovered its strength, the assembly, which comes from its own ranks, would not soon forget its real master, where true sovereignty lies, and in the contract that would be set forth between France and its stewards, there would remain no means for the latter to make themselves masters of the former.

[to be concluded...]

[Translation by Collective Reason (Robert Tucker, Jesse Cohn, and Shawn P. Wilbur.) Robert did most of the hard work, and I'm responsible for the final choices.]

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

[Part 1] - [Part 2]

XIII

But there are people who remain far from accepting this reasoning. The theoreticians, our masters, find idea preferable to fact. And this doctrine that they maintain provides them with a dividend which strongly encourages them to continue maintaining it.

In their view, provided that tax payments continue and provided that the rain respects the words Republic and Liberty on the front of public buildings, we are republicans and free.

These people are very powerful!

As powerful as that well-advised character of Arab proverbs who, without touching in any way the contents of a vase, believed that in changing the label, he changed the liqueur.

As powerful as those burlesque geniuses in the farces at the fair, who believe their clothes safe from catching alight because they have on their chest boards carrying assurances against fire.

These people, I repeat, are extraordinarily powerful!

Listening attentively to the intricacies of their arguments, we hear much spoken—and loudly—of the sovereignty of the people. Do you believe it has ever been permitted to insult the sovereign? You reply: No? Ah, well! That is because you were told that the people are sovereign and that you do not have the right to insult the people? I would like better, for my part, to deny the sovereignty of the people and believe in the sovereignty of the government that I am required to respect.

I say that I would rather believe in the sovereignty of government; I am forced to believe in it, everyone is forced to believe in it like me; I do not exist, no one exists for himself; our existence is not at all our own. We do not live civilly, commercially, industrially, religiously, or intellectually except for the government.

Can we travel without a safe-conduct pass signed by it? Can we buy a property or make a transaction without it intervening? Can we profess a religion which it has not validated? Can we teach ourselves other than in the schools and with the books approved by its university? Can we publish anything other than what it permits us to publish? And to push these considerations of this regulating tyranny to the extremes of triviality: can we smoke a cigar which it has not itself sold to us? Are we lawyers, medics, teachers, merchants, artists, agents, town criers, without it giving us a license? No! We do not exist, I say to you, we are inert objects, parts belonging to a conscious and complicated machine whose crank handle is in Paris!

Well, I say that this is an irregular situation, a situation as embarrassing for the government as it is fatal for the nation.

I can understand that it was possible to for Richelieu to govern like this; the France of past centuries was completely and voluntarily under the crown of the king. But woe to those who do not take note of the difference in the times! Today, every citizen feels and deliberates for himself, and control of official acts is everywhere!

XIV

There are, however, in the healthy part of the nation, in the core of good public sense, people who fear to look clearly at the situation; people who cannot resolve themselves to understand that in desperately bleeding themselves to maintain five hundred thousand employees and as many soldiers, they hold back a million men from production and create, to the benefit of I do not know which Minotaur, an official parasitism whose formidable manner dries up in the heart of the country the confidence and credit that is just that source on which this same parasitism comes meanwhile to quench itself.

They perpetuate the crisis and they perpetuate it because they are afraid!

They are afraid of the socialists, and they fear for their property; they are afraid for their religion, they are afraid for their family!

They are afraid of socialists? ... Of which socialists are they afraid?

There are the socialists of Fourier.

There are the socialists of Pierre Leroux.

There are the socialists of Proudhon.

There are the socialists of Considerant.

There are the socialists of Louis Blanc.

There are the socialists of Cabet.

There are, in fact, socialists that I know, and then those that I do not know and that I shall never know, because socialism fragments, subdivides, diversifies itself and separates into factions like everything that is not defined. Well, socialism is not defined.

Socialism is, in short, a very obscure philosophical system, highly complicated, extraordinarily confusing, that erudite men are obliged to study in minute detail to arrive most often at not understanding anything at all.

Socialism, according to what it is possible to grasp from all its proposals, wants to make of society a huge hive into each pigeon-hole of which will be placed a citizen, who will be enjoined to remain silent and wait patiently, while alms are made of his own money. The major dispensers of these alms, supreme tax-collectors of universal revenues, will create a general staff, reasonably well endowed, which on getting up in the morning deigns to satisfy the public appetite; and which, if it sleeps in longer than usual, will leave thirty-six million men without food.

Socialism is an attempt at geometric equilibrium whose demonstration—based on a principle of immobility—does not know to have for its foundation human societies essentially active and progressive. Socialism is an abstract speculation, just as the current administration is an abstract speculation; the people who do not understand the latter do not understand the former either. Well, the people never freely adopt what they do not at all understand.

Socialism, in short, wants to carry on the affairs of the people, and for that it has come too late, or I am much mistaken.

But the socialists are philosophers who have the same right to teach their doctrines as their adversaries have to teach theirs. Just as the people have the right to judge the latter, they have the right to appraise the former.

No one can put himself in the place of the people to pronounce condemnation or recognition of the excellence of a doctrine; since in that diversity of tastes and inclinations that mottle society, there is no doctrine that is bad for all, nor is there one that is good for all.

Tolerance, in theological order, has not resolved the problem of civil concord; the problem rests also on tolerance in social and political order.

State religions have caused, during the centuries, discords and massacres which we now find pitiable.

State doctrines have at the current time caused so much blood to flow that our children gather together to erect a monument to our shame.

We have eliminated state religions; why do we wait to crush state doctrines?

If we do not see any problem with those who wish to have churches, temples or synagogues constructed, at their expense, on land that belongs to them as their own; I do not at all see any problem with those who wish to construct convents, phalansteries or palaces, at their expense, on land that belongs to them as their own.

And if it is simple enough to let the Catholics, the protestants and the Jews have the right to maintain, at their respective expense, in the churches, the temples and the synagogues, the priests, ministers and rabbis; it is just as simple for the monks, socialists and men of court to have the right to maintain, at their expense, in the convents, in the phalansteries, in the palaces, the superiors, the patriarchs and the princes.

All these things fall within the accommodation of the taste, of the faith, of the conscience of each one of us, and it is perhaps possible that one can be a monk, a socialist, a man of court and an excellent citizen at the same time, since the religions, which must remain outside the laws of the State, do not dispense at all with obedience to the laws of the State.

But what includes at least as much buffoonery as strangeness is the determination made by a myriad of systems to attempt political campaigns, and their respective pretensions to make the whole country contribute to the costs of their establishment and the inauguration of their authority in the name of the public and the nation!

We only need to provide a circus acrobat with five hundred thousand bayonets for the act to become a social doctrine and for the wishes and caprices of Pulcinella to be made into the laws of State. We are, certainly, very near to arriving there, and it surprises me that we are not there already.

But I have digressed enough on that subject. Let us return.

XV

They have fear for their property, fear for their religion, fear for their family?

The ultimate sectarians of intolerance, those that babble among us in that language—still unintelligible, alas!—of the tyrants of humanity, repeat without ceasing their disheveled sentences on the subject of religion, of property, of family.

These ridiculous defenders of God and of society lack the intelligence to understand that the ability to save that which they ascribe to necessarily implies the ability to lose it; they do not perceive, as seriously as they take their puerile Quixotism, that the guard they mount at the temple door and at home puts, in their eyes, God and society at their discretion. It just does not enter the heads of these great children, that while saying to God and to society “we have saved you from destruction,” it is as if they were saying “it has depended on us that you continue to exist; you owe us your life.”

Do you see an articulated apparatus of organic life, claiming a right to the initiative on the existence of God and society?

Do you see here the moral and material universe under the dependence of a degenerate quadrumane which could be finished off with just a fillip or a catarrh?

Shame and pity!

Enough of this wretched and discordant bragging!

Enough of this grandeur founded on the abasement of the public!

Enough of this audacity built on fear!

Religion, property, and the family have survived Geneva rationalism, the philosophy of Voltaire, forfeiture agreements, and the dissolution of social ties from antiquity; religion, property, and the family are, in fact, unassailable by individuals. To defend them is to exploit them! To protect them is to plunder them!

How well the intriguers of every hue—those who believe themselves powerful enough to threaten these institutions as much as those who claim the ability to defend them, all those, in a word, who, living by intimidation and terrorism, have an interest in perpetuating universal panic—how well do all these know that religion, property, and the family have never had a more efficacious protector than time; there has, consequently, never been a possibility of their being attacked other than by time.

Time, without anyone taking any notice, without anyone formulating a complaint, time modifies them all: religion, property, and the family. The current state of the Church with its degenerate discipline and its neutrality in secular politics would make the audacious Hildebrand die of a fit of rage.

The current state of property, with its breaking up into an infinite number of pieces and the melancholic handing over of the chateaus, would bring despair to the great tenants of the last century.

The current state of the family, with the incessant displacement of individuals, the submission to the domestic yoke, the separation resulting from cosmopolitanism, would profoundly wound the patriarchal traditions of our ancestors.

The goings-on of future generations, if we were to see them, would shock our prejudices, our customs, our way of life.

Thus, everything changes without destroying itself, and the human spirit only accepts that for which it is prepared. Every day, it opens itself to new interests, to which it can accommodate itself without shock. After a period of time, the coming together of interests gives rise to a new institution, which, having arrived en bloc beforehand, would have surprised and injured everyone, but having arrived in a providential way has not hurt anyone and has satisfied all.

Let us speak and have no fear.

Fear is nothing but the condemnation of oneself, and once one is condemned there is no shortage of executioners.

XVI

The hypothesis of spoliation has been put forward.

No one can believe in the corruptibility of the majorities, without denying at the same time human reason and the principle of its demonstration. If the majorities are incorruptible, they are equitable, since the basic law of equity is respect for acquired right.

Acquired right has been respected even among people where the means of acquisition have been denied to the majority. How can this right be violated among us, where the acquisition, as much as it is still impeded, can nonetheless be considered public.

Let one not speak to me of brigandage, when it is substantiated that it is only carried out by minorities and that its exercise requires its organization.

Let one not speak to me of brigandage, when in the place of a plan by some unacceptable organization one brings me some shouts in the street or some argument at a club.

The people are not responsible for the exceptional insanity of a few spirits. The mad are the lost children of humanity.

Brigandage is not organizable. I am wrong, one can organize it, and here is how: put in each commune an authority more jealous of individual law than public law; establish in each arrondissement, in each department hateful magistrates, intolerant and fanatical; put at the top of this hierarchy a supreme head, blinded by the pride of domination and nourished by impious dogmas; give to this man four or five thousand armed men for support, and spoliation as a rallying call and the violation of acquired rights is consummated. But one says to me that this picture is of nothing but administrative organization, founded on the constitution. I avow it, and what follows from it that a malefactor who does not embrace the administration of the State would be nothing to fear. But this also amounts to saying that this administration squashes us in some way, that we are at the complete mercy of anyone bold enough that chance can allow to happen.

Give the people spoliation as a rallying call and this rallying call will encase itself in the probity of numbers.

How this rallying call goes out from the administration, the systematic webs of which embrace all individuals and all the territory, and the supreme thought propagates like electricity to be lost in blood!

Such is the only possible organization of brigandage, and such is, finally, a usage perhaps applied by the government of representative monarchies.

Those that own, do they fear that they might be individually plundered by those who do not? I sympathize with them while being able to condemn them, because by that they tell me themselves what they would be disposed to do if they had nothing.

And, yet, they err; they are more honest people than they think. They reason from the point of view of the needs that their fortune has given them. I understand that if they were suddenly deprived of the satisfaction of these needs, which have become for them, in some way, natural, they would have to suffer, and that it is under this impression that they argue. But there is one thing that they forget, that is, that if they had never had their fortune, they would not have had their needs either.

Is it not, moreover the case, by virtue of the same principle, that he who would come to dispossess me today, could himself be dispossessed tomorrow? And if things go on like that with each dispossessing the other, what is going to become of production?

Can such an absurd state of things perhaps be understood by sensible people, where the day after a revolution where everything is at the discretion of the masses, and where perversity, in the state of emergency, finds itself drowned in public probity?

If the majority, who do not own anything, had an instinct for plunder, it would have been a long time since the minority who owned anything had anything left.

If there are criminals in our communities, let us count them; it is an easy job; and if we find a few or if we do not find any, we are not going to believe that we exercise here the monopoly of equity: people are the same everywhere.

If the domineering and insolent rage of a few men tear to shreds popular magnanimity and bring into disrepute human character, it follows that the dogma of improbity is the rationale of tyrannies, and the security of tyrants is based on the hatred and mistrust of citizens among themselves.

As for me, separated from the parties to remain human, I defend humanity with esprit de corps.

XVII

But here is what I hear said:

If socialism comes into power, it would be able to compel its recognition. That objection, I expect.

It is quite true that as philosophers, as apostles of a doctrine, as teachers, the socialists have are not at all frightening. All of their opinions might therefore be expressed without danger, seeing that these opinions do not at all aspire to government.

Well, so! Do we think that good public sense would make justice of the absurd, and we fear being governed by the absurd? Do we feel thus that one could govern us contrary to good sense? Do we feel thus that one could violate, surprise our religion as soon as one comes to govern us? But, that admitted, we are incessantly in danger of being handed over! What I say is that, being in danger, we have already been handed over; because, in matters of public security, probabilities are certainties.

At the moment when we recognize that one could do violence to us one does violence to us; it is an inevitable law, inescapable and inherent in all states of dependence.

It is therefore not the socialists that it is necessary to fear, that it is necessary to exorcise; it is necessary to fear, it is necessary to exorcise the institution of government, by virtue of the fact that it can strike us. This institution alone is bad, is dangerous, and whoever is put at the head of this institution will immediately be as dangerous as the socialists; first, because he can become the institution, and second, because he can be surprised and conquered by the socialists, and, finally, because his system can be as bad as, or worse than, theirs.

As long as there is no untrammeled freedom of opinion in France, in order for a doctrine to emerge, it will be forced to attempt the overthrow of the government, for its sole means of action will be to become official State doctrine, to govern; and as long as an official State doctrine governs, it will necessarily consider other doctrines as dangerous rivals and proscribe them.

Thus it is that we continue to see these vicious struggles to which society lends its children and its money, these battles of scheming and ambition that I would call ridiculous if they weren’t so atrocious, and of which the outcome—those outcast today to be lauded tomorrow—makes criminality or heroism a mere question of the date.

XVIII

It is therefore shown that socialism is no more to be feared in itself than any other philosophical doctrine. It is established that it can become dangerous only in the condition of governing. That comes down to saying that nothing is dangerous which does not govern; from this it follows that whoever governs is already or can become dangerous—and the strict consequence is still that the nation can have no other public enemy than the government.

That having been said, it is beyond doubt that the only important thing in modern times, as well as the only one against which our representatives have not prepared themselves, consists in simplifying the administrative organism to the degree demanded by individual liberty, which has been without guarantee until this day, and by the reduction of taxation, which will be impossible to do as long as we persist on the path already beaten by the governments with its fat budgets.

The present governmental institution is the same as that of last year, and that of last year resumes all the powers of Louis XIV, with the sole exception that the unity of action of the royal trust finds itself re-divided among six or seven ministerial departments set up by a parliamentary majority. Can we be a free people, as long as our entire existence, from the civil order to the hygienic order, will be so regulated?

If we posit the guarantee of our individual liberty, if we resolve to move ourselves by our own movement, the nation will acquire again that power of which it was relieved or that has been usurped from it; that necessary power, indispensable to the balance of popular prerogatives with governmental initiative.

If the nation recovered its strength, the assembly, which comes from its own ranks, would not soon forget its real master, where true sovereignty lies, and in the contract that would be set forth between France and its stewards, there would remain no means for the latter to make themselves masters of the former.

[to be concluded...]

[Translation by Collective Reason (Robert Tucker, Jesse Cohn, and Shawn P. Wilbur.) Robert did most of the hard work, and I'm responsible for the final choices.]

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

[Part 1]

VII

The representatives at the National Assembly were elected, let us not forget, to create a democratic constitution, to simplify the administration to allow a reduction in tax and allow respect for the individual; they were elected to set up the country.

What have they done, however?

Instead of setting up the country, they have been busy setting themselves up in government; they have deduced consequence before having established principle; then, and without being able to escape the disastrous precedent they had just been establishing, they have only been occupied, as they could only be occupied, with the health and conservation of that government.

They acted thus and they were consistent! The country, did it not, in effect, cease to exist the day the representatives met in the legitimate Palais? Was the Assembly not declared sovereign, absolute sovereign, let us make note thereof! and so absolute that it could do more than us, because it was against us.

It could stay in place indefinitely.

It could, by decree, have us imprisoned or proscribe us individually or all together!

It could sell France bit by bit or as a whole to foreign powers!

You might object that it will not. Certainly that is where we rest our hopes, because I reply that it could; and I add that I do not understand that a free people can be regularly at the discretion of a single national representation which enjoys a modest instrument of action, made up of five hundred and fifty thousand bayonets.

The National Assembly has only the keenness of the kings: the spirit of democracy is a stranger to them.

The Assembly is a government; it should be a notary.

We elected representatives to draft a contract that determined, by specific clauses, the deciding line between where the people end and where the administration begins: it decided, without writing anything down, that the people end everywhere and that government starts everywhere.

If the Assembly was the faithful expression of national sovereignty, the laws or decrees that it makes would apply immediately to safeguard the rights of citizens rather than applying to nothing but its own security. The essence of the law is to express the will and protect the interests of everyone; the law, since everyone is supposed to obey it, well! let us examine all the decrees issued by the Assembly and we do not find one that is not designed to save administrative inviolability by paralyzing civil liberties; we do not find a single one that does not sanction the restriction of society to the benefit of officialdom.

VIII

I do not believe at all in the efficacy of armed revolution and I will state right now why I do not. But, once a revolution of that sort is accomplished, once it is accepted, without contest, by the whole entire country, I can conceive of the possibility of turning it to the benefit of the nation.

What are the conditions for this?

It is necessary that the revolutionary action intervenes in things; it is necessary that it applies itself to the institutions!

The February revolution, like that of 1830, only became of benefit to a few men, because that revolution only abolished some proper names. Then, the machinery of government kept, as it now keeps, the same gears, and I see no change other than the hand that turns the crank.

What did they mean to say when on February 24 they posted in the streets and printed in the newspapers that France had overthrown the government and regained its freedom?

Did this mean simply that the National Assembly had taken the place of the “Journal des débats”?

Has anyone realized that the consequences of this event that shook the world must have the triumph of Monsieur Marrast and his friends as its limit?

It would have been, indeed, much ado about a rather poor job! When the revolutionaries told us: The French people have regained their freedom, we took the revolutionaries at their word and we proclaimed in our hearts the abolition not only of royalty, but of royal government, government that held closely chained in its administrative talons the liberty of France.

Thus, in regaining freedom of thought, freedom of the press and freedom of voting, we have abolished, together with its budget, the government of the interior that was established to spread insecurity to the benefit of the government of king.

Thus, in regaining the freedom of education, we have abolished, with its budget, the government of public instruction, which had been set up to hone our intelligence and to direct our education to the benefit of the government of the king.

Thus, in regaining the freedom of conscience, we have abolished, with its budget, the government of religion, which was established to introduce into the church only men whose influence was gained in the interests of the government of the king.

Thus, in regaining the freedom of trade, we have abolished, with its budget, the government of commerce, which was established to hold public credit continually under the control of the government of the king.

Thus, in regaining liberty of work and industry, we have abolished, with its budget, the government of public works which was set up to provide great benefit to friends of the government.

Thus, in regaining the liberty of transactions and the liberty of the territory, we have abolished, with its budget, the government of agriculture which was set up to keep the owner of the land, that is to say the one on whom rests the overseeing of the alimentation of the people, under the immediate dependence of the government of the king.

Thus, in regaining the right to free existence, we have abolished, with its budget, the government of the barracks, which, in times of peace, have only been used to hold us in political nothingness to the benefit of the government of the king.

Thus, finally, in reclaiming all our freedoms, we have abolished, with their multiple budgets, that complex administration of the illegitimate monarchies, that exorbitant tutelage that arose in the shady days of imperial tyranny, which has lain dead, crushed by discussion, for over thirty years, and whose corrupt cadaver, because we have not known how or where to bury it, stifles our freedom.

If it is true that a revolution abolishes something, here is what we abolished on 24 February.

If it is true that the people who form a revolution do so in order to win their liberties, here are the liberties that we won on 24 February.

IX

The call to democracy of the last revolution was not heard by our representatives.

At that call, truly interpreted, France could have passed the barrier and gone home, that is to say to the commune. The nation thus rendered to its natural domicile, there would only remain in Paris an inoffensive symbol, carrying on diplomacy with the nations of the world, directing the navy, taking on or declaring war, according to events and conditions stipulated, signing peace treaties and trade pacts, keeping watch on the interior, on the implementation of the laws,—always simple and few in number among free people,—nominating, among its responsibilities a minister for foreign affairs, a justice minister, a minister for the navy and the colonies, a minister of war and a finance minister, and managing business with a budget which would reach, taking one year with another, save for the case of hostilities and debt interest, the figure of four to five hundred million.

I am not talking about the debt that remains underneath this scheme. This debt, that France can get to know rather better on returning to the commune when she is again in possession of her own wealth, will incur less interest as a result of the single fact that administrative charges absorb the clearest amount of its revenues. Here I am not liquidating the royal government. I oblige it, by canceling seven budgets, to return annually to the nation twelve hundred million, at least, with which the debt can easily be extinguished in a few years.

But the most immediate benefit that France must gain from the canceling of these budgets is her freedom of action, which must by nature result in confidence among citizens, the cessation of the crisis and the establishment of national credit on the ruins of this feverish credit of the government, credit which rises or falls according to how the government stabilizes or totters.

Apart from the ministerial departments of the navy and war, which are annexes to that of foreign affairs, and apart from the grand judge, on whom rests judicial unity, all other ministries are incompatible with civil liberties, because they are only a dismemberment of the royal despotism that held all social elements in its grasp.

If commerce, if industry, if education, if religion, if agriculture, if, in a word, the French are free can someone tell me what we have to do with the great masters of industry, of commerce, of education, of religion, of agriculture, of home affairs? Since when has great mastery ceased to be the sanction of servitude?

X

The government of France established on the bases that I have just indicated, the parties will disappear, ambitions will become extinguished and the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity will finally leave the domain of interpretation and controversy to go into effect.

I will explain myself and my explanation will be simple:

What is opposed to the establishment of liberty, equality, fraternity among us? Ambition, that is to say the desire to dominate, to govern the people.

Where does ambition reside? In the parties: that is to say, in those who desire to dominate and govern the people.

From where does a party derive its raison d’être? From the certitude that it will have power, victorious, take for itself national freedoms and taxes; that is to say in the possibility of demonstrating mastery in authority over all things and of thus imposing itself on the people and the opposition parties.

How can a party impose itself? By taking control of the administration.

So, what is the administration?

The administration is an I-know-not-what of the abstract, the indefinite, the illogical, the contradictory, the obscure, the incomprehensible, the arbitrary, the absurd, the monstrous.

Something which derives neither from the heart, since it is arid and without sentiment, nor from science, since no one there understands anything.

An instrument without form, without contour and without proportions. A myth, wicked and cowardly, whose ruinous culture occupies a million priests, all as insolent as they are fanatic.

Something blind but that sees everything, deaf but that hears everything, impotent but capable of everything, without weight but crushing everything, invisible but filling everything, impalpable but touching everywhere, impossible to seize hold of but grasping everything, inviolable but violating.

An incandescent nebulosity of lightning, thunder and asphyxia.

A magical, demoniac and infernal invention that strikes out, always strikes out at everything and in all directions in such a way that there is always a bulwark of whirlwinds and moulinets between its officers and the people.

That is the administration!–that by which one governs, the primary cause of the requirement for parties, ambition, tyranny, privileges, hatred! This is the monster in dispute! Here is the Minotaur that drinks blood and devours millions upon millions! Here is the fortress by turns besieged, conquered, resieged, reconquered, and resieged again to be reconquered anew by the parties!

Remove the administration, smother the monster, crush the Minotaur, demolish the fortress, and what is left? Doctrines, nothing more! Individual doctrines having no way to impose themselves! Isolated doctrines, timorous and abashed, that you will see running, and utterly out of breath, throwing themselves, for protection and security, into the bosom of that great human doctrine: EQUITY.

Let us slay this dragon bristling with talons that the nationals want to tame for the benefit of Monsieur Cavaignac, in order to make it bite us.

That the socialists want to tame for the benefit of Monsieur Proudhon, in order to make it bite us.

That the Orleanists want to tame for the benefit of Monsieur de Paris, in order to make it bite us.

That the imperialists want to tame for the benefit of Monsieur Bonaparte, in order to make it bite us.

That the legitamists want to tame for the benefit of Monsieur de Bourbon, in order to make it bite us.

Disperse the nails of the animal in the municipalities; keep them with care so that no one can reunite them in the body, and discord flees with its unique cause; there will be in France only free men, having, for the right of others, due respect for their own rights, and embracing in the fraternal ambition to contribute to common well-being. Mistrust loses, thus, the guarantee of its heinous impulses; capital is attracted to production, production is supported by the capital, and national and individual credit is substantiated.

XI

Having achieved this level of liberation, we will be masters at home to ourselves; no one will be above the rest; no one will be above the common law; national sovereignty will be from then on a fact, and universal suffrage will have a democratic meaning.

Instead of the silly and puerile right to choose our masters, as has just been granted us, we will select delegates who, in turn, instead of being guided by administrative law, as is the practice at the time I write, will be guided by the national law, whose definition will be specified by fact.

From this will emerge a simple administration, and, consequently, a comprehensible one; a true administration, and, consequently, a just one. The program of the accession of the French to all jobs will cease to be a crude lie, an iniquitous delusion whose turpitude is demonstrated by the inability of special studies to educate men to unravel the mechanism of a single section of the formidable administration that rules us.

And, our liberties once safe, the administration once simplified, the government once stripped of its means of aggression, put at its head a Frenchman. Whether he is called Cavaignac, Proudhon, d’Orléans, Bonaparte, Bourbon, to this I attach truly very little importance. As long as they cannot usurp my mastery, as long as they cannot fail in their duty towards me, those in office do not at all seem to me to require serious attention: the names of those who serve me are of little importance to me. If they act badly, I will punish them; if they act well, they have done nothing but their duty; I owe them nothing but that which is agreed as their salary.

What I have said about their name, I also say about their title. That the head of a democratic administration is called president, king, emperor, satrap, sultan; that he is mister, citizen or majesty, is of little importance to me! When the nation is truly sovereign, I am sure of one thing, that is, that the head of state, whatever his name may be, must not be anything other than the first servant of the nation, and that is what will suffice me; for, once he is established, de facto, as a public functionary, salaried by the people, he is nothing but a servant of the people, I know that the people will be protected from the passage of the functionary, who will show himself before the people who pay him, from whom he earns his living, to whom he owes his services, and who, therefore, are his master. This known, there is no more indecision in the city: public law is defined, the nation is queen and the civil servant is no more than a hierarchical member, remunerated by political domesticity, who owes everything to everyone, and to whom no one personally owes anything.

If democracy is the overthrow of a regime unworthy of office;

If democracy is the consecration of the dignity of the citizen;

If democracy is the nonexistence of ambition and crime, and at the same time a source of altruism and its virtues;

If democracy is the government of the people, the government by oneself for oneself;

If democracy is nothing but pure and simple rule and not a tyranny of administration;

It seems to me that I am to the point.

XII

There are only two points among the people on which no divergence of opinion can exist, two points on which converge the good sense of all parties irrespective of details.

Those two points are:

The repression of crime against the person and against property, and the defense of the territory.

Consult in this respect all the sectarians of the social schisms. Ask of the socialists, of the conservatives of this regime without name at the National Assembly, of the Orleanists, of the imperialists, of the legitimists, ask them, I tell you, if it is necessary to punish the assassin and the thief, and if it is necessary to defend the country’s borders. All will respond unanimously in the affirmative; for all, regardless, the person and his belongings are sacred, and the national territory inviolable. These are the common, universal doctrines; before them the parties step aside and fade away; at these supreme points of public rendezvous, every Frenchman is in agreement and fraternally offers his hand.

So, well, why should we seek the guardian spirit of a government outside this reservoir of the common aspirations of all? Why should we permit the introduction of a dose of individual attachments to this potion prepared for the health of all?

Do you want a strong government with the consent of the public? a government whose existence is in no way threatened by the irritation and sudden attacks of minorities? Establish a serious governmental administration, a stranger to the petty squabbling and to the wretched ambitions of individuals; a national administration which includes the parties by their rational and sensible foundations, an administration whose power, though limited, extends to provide assistance in the execution of arrests decreed with a view to repress crimes and offenses against the person and against property, and to regulate the agreements and differences between our country and foreign ones.

A government whose powers are thus defined cannot excite the discontent of anyone without at the same time being condemned by everyone; since it only occupies itself precisely with issues on which everyone is in agreement, whether it acts well or whether it acts badly, it has no opposition. The sanction of its acts is in the conscience of all. To protect a government from revolutions, it must not be permitted to interfere in the real lives of its citizens, it must not be allowed to be able to touch the instincts, the tastes, the private interests of its citizens; because these instincts, these tastes, these interests are varied and changing, while the rules of an administration are uniform and fixed. A democratic government must remain forever in social abstraction.

Let me be enjoined, by a higher authority, to think in one way rather than another, to trade on such a condition rather than some other, to instruct myself in one school or with such a book rather than in another school or with another book; to exercise one profession rather than another; to like this instead of liking that—that is to tyrannize me as much as if I were ordered to eat vegetables rather than meat, and a government that has powers over such inordinate details will not fail to annoy an intelligent people that possesses a sense of human dignity.

If we rest our attention for a moment on the spirit of the institution that preoccupies me, it will be impossible for us to find a ministerial act that does not carry within its flanks the violation of a liberty. A minister (I speak of those whose administration applies to the instincts, to the tastes or to the interests), a minister could only respect the public right—I speak not of the written law—solely on the condition that he did not act; since, acting, he acts for everyone and in the place of everyone, it would be necessary for him to act well and without hurting anyone, that he has an instinct for current trends, a mind for current tastes and an awareness of the current interests of everyone. That being the case, one thing astonishes me: that there are still men sufficiently wicked or so profoundly unfit to not be able to shrink back from accepting a portfolio.

Who then would have suffered from the stripping down of the apparatus of monarchy?

Some civil servants!

Who would have benefited from it? All France!

Who then suffers from the conservation of the full apparatus of monarchy? All France!

Who benefits from it? Some civil servants!

I have said enough to make it understandable, how, by taking the revolution in February at its word, it is possible to attain both sides of the democratic equation: individual freedom and cheap government.

[to be continued...]

[Translation by Collective Reason (Robert Tucker, Jesse Cohn, and Shawn P. Wilbur.) Robert did most of the hard work, and I'm responsible for the final choices.]

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.