De la liberté considérée comme une condition de l'exercice de tous les droits, et de l'accomplisseme

CHAP. 2: On liberty considered as a condition of the exercise of all rights, and of the accomplishment of all duties.

IN observing the effects that political slavery and domestic slavery produce on the various classes of the population, I have ascertained several important truths that I must recall here, because they will serve me as a starting point for undertaking new observations.

Under both of these two regimes, the physical faculties of the slaves degrade or develop only in an imperfect manner; the physical faculties of the masters are generally exercised only to ensure the duration of servitude, or to make new slaves.

Among the masters, violent and cruel passions develop at the same time as the love of sensual pleasures; among the slaves, it is the vile passions; among the ones and the others, benevolent affections remain numb, or extend only to a small number of persons.

Enslaved men exercise their intellectual faculties in the art of deceiving their masters and of evading their violence; the latter exercise theirs above all in the art of strengthening their domination, or of extending it over a greater number of persons.

The former, charged with the execution of all the labors necessary for the existence of man, live in profound misery, and have no means of escaping it; the latter live in idleness, consuming or dissipating almost all that the former have produced.

Industry being unable to develop, nor riches to increase, the size of the population remains stationary; often it decreases in the same proportion as the means of existence.

The slaves, having no crueler enemies than their masters, are the natural allies of all those who give them hope of their emancipation or the loosening of the bonds of servitude: they are therefore always disposed to become the instruments of ambitious men from within or of foreign enemies.

Finally, the vicinity of a people that is divided into masters and slaves is sufficient to corrupt peoples among whom all men are free, and to compromise their independence and their liberty.

From these facts and from the tendency of the human race toward its development and its well-being, I have drawn the consequence that servitude is a state contrary to nature; that it is in direct opposition to the laws that carry nations toward their development and their prosperity, and that a man, and with all the more reason a people, can never be legitimately placed in the rank of properties.

If the infraction of these laws is always followed by grave penalties for those who are guilty of it, and for those who suffer it, and if it is a duty for men to conform to the laws of their nature, it follows that each is bound to respect and to have respected the liberty of all, and that all are bound to have respected the liberty of each.

The existence of a duty supposes a corresponding right: if the laws to which men are submitted by their nature make it my duty to respect the liberty of my fellow men, each has the right to compel me to respect his, and the right that belongs to each belongs to all.

A man cannot, we say, treat another as his property, without violating the laws of his own nature; but neither can he, without violating the same laws, and without making himself an accomplice to the vices and crimes that servitude engenders, permit himself to be made a slave, that is to say, to be placed in the rank of things.

To acknowledge oneself a slave is not only to abdicate one's rights, it is moreover to renounce the accomplishment of one's duties; it is to recognize that one is bound to nothing, neither toward oneself, nor toward others; it is to proclaim a contradiction: for if, by his nature, man is bound to nothing, neither toward himself, nor toward others, how could he be bound to anything toward a master?

One would be no further advanced if, refusing to recognize the duties to which man is submitted by his nature, one claimed that the slave is bound to his master by an express or tacit convention; for, supposing the existence of such an engagement, on what would one found the general duty to execute it, if there existed no duty superior to all kinds of conventions?

To repel servitude, whether it weighs upon oneself or upon others, is therefore not only to exercise a right, it is to fulfill the first and most sacred of duties. The abdication of liberty, even were it an entirely voluntary act, could not be obligatory for anyone; it would be a contradiction to impose upon oneself the duty of recognizing no duty. The laws to which man is submitted by his nature could not make obligatory the engagement to infringe these same laws.

We cannot, therefore, admit that, according to the laws of his nature, a man has duties to fulfill toward himself, toward his parents, toward his wife, toward his children, finally toward humanity, without admitting at the same time that the same laws call him to be free; that, in no case, can he legitimately be reduced to slavery, that is to say, be treated as a property, and that his liberty can be restricted only insofar as is indispensable to ensure the liberty of others.

The idea of duty is, in effect, inseparable from the idea of liberty, since it is impossible to conceive, on the one hand, the existence of a duty to be fulfilled, and, on the other, the right to prevent its accomplishment or to command its violation. Now, if one does not admit this right in the individual one calls a master, there is no longer any obligation toward him in the one who is named a slave; that is to say, slavery is reduced to nothing.

If one claimed that, by their nature, men are submitted to no law, and that, consequently, there exists between them no reciprocal duty, it would still be impossible to admit that one man can be the property of another man. One could not deny the existence of all duties, without denying by that very fact the existence of all rights, for the former necessarily suppose the latter: now, when one denies rights, there is no longer any way to support the existence of property, nor consequently the legitimate possession of one man by another.

The duties and rights of a person, whether toward herself or toward others, are inherent in her nature, and do not result from concessions made by any of her fellow men. If a father has duties to fulfill toward his son, a son toward his father, a husband toward his wife, or a wife toward her husband, these duties derive from certain relations or from a certain order of facts; they are not, as has already been seen, and as will be seen better still hereafter, the products of the power of a government; the laws that engender them have an existence as independent of the wills of the public authority as the laws of the physical world.

The same laws that oppose a human being being placed in the rank of things and treated as a property, oppose, with all the more reason, a people being considered the property of an individual, a family, or a caste. The observation of the effects of political slavery has convinced us, in effect, that, according to the laws of its nature, a nation has duties to fulfill toward itself, toward the various members of which it is composed, and toward other nations, and that it consequently has rights to exercise. These reciprocal rights and duties of a nation toward each of its members or toward other peoples are no less independent of human wills than those that exist between the members of a family. They can no more be destroyed by force or by a voluntary abdication than those of a single person; one can say for a nation what we have said for an individual, that the engagement not to fulfill its duties could not engender any duty. Any obstacle placed in the way of a nation's liberty is therefore illegitimate; it is a duty for each to contribute to making it disappear.

I have observed elsewhere that, whatever the path one proposes to follow in the abolition of domestic slavery, there is one principle that must first be admitted without restriction, because between error and truth there is no middle ground.

It is not necessary, I said, to start from the mendacious fact that a human being is a thing, or a quarter of a thing, or an eighth of a thing; one must frankly recognize what is, that is to say, that he is a person having, according to the laws of his nature, duties to fulfill toward himself, toward his father, his mother, his wife, his children, and all of humanity.

Now, what I have said elsewhere of the person who is called a slave, in comparing him to another person who is called a master, I must say of those collections of persons to which are given the name of peoples or nations, in comparing them to the individuals or families who claim to possess them as one possesses lands or flocks. Whatever the path one proposes to follow to draw a people out of a state in which it is considered a property, there is one truth that must first be recognized: it is that a nation, like an individual, is submitted to laws that it cannot with impunity allow to be infringed, and that it consequently has duties to fulfill and rights to exercise. This truth recognized, it is only a matter of discovering what these rights and duties are; and if they are once established and respected, political slavery is abolished.

Civil liberty and political liberty are therefore essential conditions of the exercise of all duties, and consequently of all rights; domestic servitude and political servitude are, on the contrary, their negation and their ruin. We have seen the indirect demonstration of these two truths in the exposition I have made of the effects of the various kinds of slavery; we will see the direct demonstration of them, in observing the natural relations that exist, whether between persons and things, or between the various individuals of which the human race is composed. If we observe exactly in what consist the rights and duties of every person and of every aggregation of persons, we will know what constitutes civil and political liberty; in observing the various elements that constitute liberty, we will arrive equally at the discovery of the duties and rights that are inherent in our nature.

The observation of the various effects of political slavery and of civil slavery has shown us how peoples remain stationary or degrade; in observing the various elements that constitute liberty, and the consequences it produces, we will see, on the contrary, how nations develop and prosper. It will be necessary, however, never to lose sight of the fact that men are not submitted to the sole influence of slavery or of liberty: I have shown elsewhere that they are placed under the influence of a multitude of causes. There are positions and circumstances where a nation could not prosper even if it enjoyed all imaginable liberty; there are others where a people enjoys a certain prosperity, although it is not free. In this latter case, it is not because of the servitude to which it is submitted that it enjoys some well-being, it is in spite of it; in the former, it is in spite of liberty, and not because of it, that it is miserable [^3].

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Notes

[^3]: See book IV of the Treatise on Legislation.