Between man and beast there is no society, though there may be affection.Man loves the animals as THINGS,--as SENTIENTTHINGS, if you will,--but not as PERSONS.Philosophy, after having eliminated from the idea of God the passions ascribed to him by superstition, will then be obliged to eliminate also the virtues which our liberal piety awards to him.
Between woman and man there may exist love, passion, ties of custom, and the like; but there is no real society.Man and woman are not companions.The difference of the sexes places a barrier between them, like that placed between animals by a difference of race.Consequently, far from advocating what is now called the emancipation of woman, I should incline, rather, if there were no other alternative, to exclude her from society.
The rights of woman and her relations with man are yet to be determined Matrimonial legislation, like civil legislation, is a matter for the future to settle.
If God should come down to earth, and dwell among us, we could not love him unless he became like us; nor give him any thing unless he produced something; nor listen to him unless he proved us mistaken; nor worship him unless he manifested his power.All the laws of our nature, affectional, economical, and intellectual, would prevent us from treating him as we treat our fellow-men,--that is, according to reason, justice, and equite.
I infer from this that, if God should wish ever to put himself into immediate communication with man, he would have to become a man.
Now, if kings are images of God, and executors of his will, they cannot receive love, wealth, obedience, and glory from us, unless they consent to labor and associate with us--produce as much as they consume, reason with their subjects, and do wonderful things.Still more; if, as some pretend, kings are public functionaries, the love which is due them is measured by their personal amiability; our obligation to obey them, by the wisdom of their commands; and their civil list, by the total social production divided by the number of citizens.
Thus, jurisprudence, political economy, and psychology agree in admitting the law of equality.Right and duty--the due reward of talent and labor--the outbursts of love and enthusiasm,--all are regulated in advance by an invariable standard; all depend upon number and balance.Equality of conditions is the law of society, and universal solidarity is the ratification of this law.
Equality of conditions has never been realized, thanks to our passions and our ignorance; but our opposition to this law has made it all the more a necessity.To that fact history bears perpetual testimony, and the course of events reveals it to us.
Society advances from equation to equation.To the eyes of the economist, the revolutions of empires seem now like the reduction of algebraical quantities, which are inter-deducible; now like the discovery of unknown quantities, induced by the inevitable influence of time.Figures are the providence of history.
Undoubtedly there are other elements in human progress; but in the multitude of hidden causes which agitate nations, there is none more powerful or constant, none less obscure, than the periodical explosions of the proletariat against property.
Property, acting by exclusion and encroachment, while population was increasing, has been the life-principle and definitive cause of all revolutions.Religious wars, and wars of conquest, when they have stopped short of the extermination of races, have been only accidental disturbances, soon repaired by the mathematical progression of the life of nations.The downfall and death of societies are due to the power of accumulation possessed by property.
In the middle ages, take Florence,--a republic of merchants and brokers, always rent by its well-known factions, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, who were, after all, only the people and the proprietors fighting against each other,--Florence, ruled by bankers, and borne down at last by the weight of her debts; in ancient times, take Rome, preyed upon from its birth by usury, flourishing, nevertheless, as long as the known world furnished its terrible proletaires with LABOR stained with blood by civil war at every interval of rest, and dying of exhaustion when the people lost, together with their former energy, their last spark of moral sense; Carthage, a commercial and financial city, continually divided by internal competition;Tyre, Sidon, Jerusalem, Nineveh, Babylon, ruined, in turn, by commercial rivalry and, as we now express it, by panics in the market,--do not these famous examples show clearly enough the fate which awaits modern nations, unless the people, unless France, with a sudden burst of her powerful voice, proclaims in thunder-tones the abolition of the regime of property?
"The strong-box of Cosmo de Medici was the grave of Florentine liberty," said M.Michelet to the College of France.
