Part 10 (1/2)

--The law may be tyrannical. It is tyrannical if it is unjust.--

The law has the right to be unjust. Otherwise the sovereignty of the people would be limited and this must not be.

--Fundamental and const.i.tutional laws might be devised to limit this sovereignty of the people in order to guarantee such and such of the liberties for the individual.--

And the people would then be tied! The sovereignty of the people would be suppressed! No, the people cannot be tied. The sovereignty of the people is fundamental and must be left intact.

--Then there will be no individual liberty?--

Only such a measure as the people will tolerate.

--Then there will be no liberty of a.s.sociation?

Still less; for an a.s.sociation is in itself a limitation of the sovereignty of the nation. It has its own laws, which from a democratic point of view is an absurd and monstrous incongruity. The right of a.s.sociation limits the national sovereignty, just as would a free town or sanctuary of refuge. It limits the nation, and pulls it up short in face of its closed doors. It is a State within a State; where there is a.s.sociation, there arises at once a source of organisation other than the great organism of the popular will. It is like an animal which lives some sort of independent life within another animal larger than itself and which, living on that other animal, is still independent of it. In fact there can be only one a.s.sociation, the a.s.sociation of the nation, otherwise the sovereignty of the nation is limited, that is, destroyed.

No liberty of a.s.sociation can then exist.

a.s.sociations of course will exist which the people will tolerate, but their right of existence is always revocable and they are always liable to be dissolved and destroyed. Otherwise the national sovereignty would be held to abdicate and it can never abdicate.

--Ah! but there is one a.s.sociation, at least, which to some extent is sacred, and which the sovereignty of the people is bound to respect. I mean the family. The father is the head of the family, he educates his children and brings them up as he thinks best, till they come to man's estate.--

Nay, that will not pa.s.s! For here again we have a limitation of the sovereignty of the nation. The child does not belong to his father. If this were so, at the threshold of each home the sovereignty of the people would be arrested, which means that it would cease to exist anywhere. The child, like the man, belongs to the people. He belongs to it, in the sense that he must not be a member of an a.s.sociation which might dare to think differently from the people, or perhaps even harbour ideas in contradiction to the thought of the people. It would indeed be dangerous to leave our future citizens for twenty years outside the national thought, which is the same thing as being outside the community. Imagine five or six bees brought up apart, outside the laws, regulations, and const.i.tution of the hive; imagine further that of these groups of bees there were several hundreds in the hive. The result would be the destruction of the hive.

It is _above all things_ in the family that the sovereignty of the people ought to prevail. It ought above all things to refuse to recognise the a.s.sociation of the family, and to wage war against it wherever it finds it. It should leave to parents the right of embracing their children, but nothing more. The right to educate them in ideas perhaps contrary to those of their parents belongs to the people, which, here as well as elsewhere, perhaps even more than elsewhere for the interests at stake are more important, must be absolutely sovereign.

This, then, is what the schoolmaster, with a relentless logic which appears to me to be irresistible, deduces from the principle of the national sovereignty.

From the principle of equality he deduces another point. ”All men are equal by nature and before the law.” That is to say, if there were justice, all men ought to have been equal by nature, and further, if there is to be justice, all men ought to be equal before the law.

Very obviously, however, all men are not equal before the law, and they are not equal by nature. Very well then, we must make them so.

They are not equal before the law. They appear to be so, but they are not. The rich man, even supposing that the magistrates are perfectly and strictly honest, by reason of the fact that he can remunerate the best solicitors, advocates, and witnesses, by reason further of the fact that he intimidates by his influence all those who could appear against him, is not in every respect the equal of the poor man before the law.

Even less does this equality exist in the presence of that union of const.i.tuted social forces which we call society. In this respect the rich man will be the ”influential man”; the ”man well connected,” the man on whom no one depends, but whom no one likes to cross or to contradict. There is, between the rich and the poor man, however equal we may pretend them to be before the law, the difference between the man who gives orders and the man who is obliged to obey. _Real_ equality, in society, in presence of society and even in presence of the law, only exists where there is neither rich nor poor.

But there will always be rich and poor, as long as the inst.i.tution of inheritance remains. Abolish inheritance therefore!

But, even with inheritance abolished, there will still be rich and poor.

The man who can make his fortune rapidly will be a strong man relatively to the man who can not make a fortune, and, I would have you note it, even when we have abolished inheritance, the son of the strong man, during the life of his father, will be strong himself, so that even if we abolish inheritance, a privilege, namely, the privilege of birth will still exist and equality will not exist.

There is only one state of affairs under which equality is possible, that is when no one possesses and no one can acquire anything. The only social policy so devised that no one can possess and no one can acquire anything is the policy of a community of goods, that is Communism or Collectivism. Collectivism is nothing very wonderful. Collectivism is equality; and equality is collectivism, otherwise our equality will be nothing but a phantom and an hypocrisy. Every one who is a convinced and sincere _egalitarian_, and who takes the trouble to think, is forced to be a collectivist. Bonald asked very wittily: ”Do you know what is a deist? It is a man who has not lived long enough to be an atheist.” We in our turn ask: ”Do you know what is an anti-collectivist democrat? It is a man who has not lived long enough to be a collectivist, or who, having lived long enough, has never taken the trouble to think, and to perceive what are the necessary consequences of his own principles.”

But surely collectivism is a chimaera, an utopia, a thing impossible.

Certainly it is impossible in the sense that in the country which adopts it the source of all initiative will be destroyed. No man will make an effort to improve his position, since it must never be improved. The whole country will become one of those stagnant pools to which one of our ministers lately referred. Everyone having become an official, everyone will realise the ideal of the official which the Goncourts have very neatly described. ”The good official,” they say, ”is the man who combines laziness with extreme accuracy.” It is a definitive definition. The country that reformed itself in this way would be conquered at the end of ten years by some neighbouring people more or less ambitious.

That admits of no question; but what does it prove? That collectivism is only impossible because it is only possible if established in every country at once. Very well, and in order to establish it in every country at once, only one thing is needful, namely, that there shall no longer be distinct and separate countries and no longer any nationalities. It surely will not answer to establish collectivism before the abolition of nationalities, since, once established, it will serve no purpose except to bring into prominent relief the vast superiority of countries which have not adopted collectivism. We must, therefore, take our problems in order and abolish nationalities before we can establish collectivism.

Now if nations organise themselves against nature (the nature that, the schoolmaster a.s.sumes, makes all men equal), if instinctively they organise themselves in a hierarchy which is aristocratic, if they have their leaders and their subordinates, their stronger and their weaker members, it is because this arrangement is necessary in a camp, and each nation feels that it is a camp. If each feels that it is a camp, it is simply because there are other nations round it, because it feels and knows that there are others round it. When there are no longer other nations, each nation will organise itself no longer against nature, but naturally, that is to say on _egalitarian_ principles. Nature perhaps strictly speaking is not _egalitarian_, but it tends towards equality in the sense that it produces many more, indeed infinitely more, mediocrities than superior intelligences.

Thus equality demands the abolition of inheritance, and the equality of possessions. Equality of possessions necessitates collectivism, and collectivism requires the abolition of nationalities. We are _egalitarians_, then collectivists, and by logical consequence anti-patriots.