HAPITRE LIV. Des idées rétrogrades contre la propriété. —Conclusion.

CHAP. 54: Of Retrograde Ideas Against Property.—Conclusion.

I have attempted to give, in this work, exact ideas of the properties that are the basis of our existence; but I am far from having given complete ideas of them. The faculty of disposing of things is one of the essential elements of all property; and, in all civilized countries, it has been thought necessary to give to this faculty limits and rules. One cannot therefore flatter oneself with perfectly knowing the subject I have treated, until one possesses the knowledge of these rules and these limits. Even that is not enough; one must know in addition what are the diverse means by the aid of which a thing can be acquired and become the property of such or such a person.

To have a complete knowledge of property, it is therefore necessary to know almost all the branches of the science of law; for most have for their object to regulate or to limit the faculty of enjoying and disposing of the things that belong to us. I make this observation, so that one does not imagine that one can, with the aid of a definition, acquire the knowledge of things that, to be well known, require long studies. The explanation of one of the terms of the definition given by our laws, of the word dispose, has given birth to a number of volumes sufficient to form a library.

If I have left many things to be said on the subject I have treated; if I have spoken neither of the rules nor of the limits given to the faculty of disposing, nor of the diverse means by the aid of which one can divest oneself of one's goods to invest another person with them; if I have even abstained from mentioning some means by the aid of which one can acquire the title of proprietor, it is because it was not possible for me to go further before having treated of persons, and of the relationships that exist between them.

A man who lives in the heart of a civilized nation is not an isolated being like a pyramid in the middle of a desert; he is bound, by a multitude of ties, to the beings of his species who surround him. The power he exercises over the things of which he is proprietor is always more or less limited by the obligations imposed upon him, either by his own nature, or by the conventions he has formed, or by the institutions of the nation to which he belongs. The protection he enjoys for his goods and for his person itself requires that he cannot divest himself of his properties, except by following certain rules. It is therefore necessary, before treating of the diverse ways in which one can dispose of one's goods, and of speaking of the limits placed on this faculty, to have made known what are the relationships that unite men among themselves.The Roman jurists and most modern jurists have thought that before treating of the things that are the object of legislation, it was suitable to treat of persons. I have not shared this opinion; I believed that before speaking of the manner in which families are formed, and of the obligations that result from their formation, I should make known the things that compose the basis of their existence. Most of the obligations that exist between men have a real importance only because they affect the things by means of which they are conserved. If one concerns oneself with the reciprocal duties that result from the conjugal association, whether for the spouses, for the fathers and mothers, or for the children, one perceives that it is always a question of means of existence. It is impossible to speak of guardianship, interdiction, divorce, separation of bodies, and not to concern oneself with the properties of minors, of interdicts, of separated spouses. The dispositions whose principal object is the conservation of goods even often hold the most considerable place in the laws that seem to relate only to persons. Finally, there is not a man endowed with a little foresight who does not think, before forming a new family, of assuring himself the means to make it exist. It was therefore necessary to concern oneself with properties before treating of persons.

I will not end this work without making some observations on certain systems whose object was to displace properties, and to found society on new bases. I had at first proposed to submit these systems to a rigorous and detailed examination; but I did not delay in perceiving that this project was not executable. I have therefore renounced it; I must state the reasons.

The founders or propagators of these systems have attempted to persuade the public, and perhaps have ended by persuading themselves, that they had left far behind them the most enlightened men of their century and those of the last century; intoxicated by the spirit of sect or of proselytism, they have treated the most distinguished scholars of their time with a disdain and an arrogance entirely proper to impose upon the most ignorant part of the multitude.

However, it is impossible to read what they have written without at once perceiving that, far from being more advanced than their century, they are far behind; that not only have they seen nothing, observed nothing by themselves, but that they do not even know the first elements of the sciences with which they have the pretension of concerning themselves; that, if they speak of the most distinguished men who have written on these sciences, they judge them only by hearsay, and as young seminarians judge the philosophers whose reading is forbidden to them; that is to say, they limit themselves to reproducing vulgar prejudices that would make a man endowed with the slightest instruction blush.

When one examines with a little attention these marvelous discoveries, which were to put an end to all the calamities with which the human race is afflicted, one finds in them only a bizarre assemblage of ideas borrowed from eras of barbarism, from religious sects that time has destroyed, from some of the least religious philosophers of the 17th century, and from writers of our own age. This mixture, made without intelligence, by disordered imaginations, deserved to suffer the destiny that seems reserved for all that which shocks common sense; it had to show itself under the apparatus of religious forms, and that is, in effect, the fate it has experienced.

How would it have been possible to submit such conceptions to a serious and methodical examination? Would it not have been necessary, to combat ideas formed in times of ignorance and barbarism, to reproduce the facts and observations before which these ideas have disappeared? Would it not have been necessary to remake, or rather to copy, the works that have brought certain sciences to the point where we see them? When backward or retrograde minds come to present to us, as novelties, outdated errors, there is only one way to answer them: it is to refer them to the reading of the writers to whom the sciences owe the progress they have made.

If I had wished to refute the writings of the men who have imagined that it was in their power to have all properties put in common, and to establish society on new bases, I would not only have been obliged to reproduce facts and reasonings that are known to all people with a little instruction; I could not have dispensed with recalling what I myself had written, several years ago, in the work of which this one forms the sequel.

One knows, for example, that there is, for barbarous peoples who wish to pass from the nomadic life to the agricultural life, a state of transition that it is impossible to avoid. All forces must unite to put the land under cultivation; and as there is community in the labor, there is common enjoyment of the products. This state was that in which were found, according to Tacitus, several of the tribes that peopled the forests of Germania, when the Roman legions carried their arms there. It was also that of a certain number of peoples who inhabited the forests of North America, when the Europeans went to seize that country. Several religious sects, and particularly the Jesuits of Paraguay, had adopted a similar kind of life.

If I had wished to combat here this system of community, which has been presented to us as a marvelous invention, and which one has even attempted to put into practice, it would not have been difficult for me to demonstrate that such a system, if it were permanent, would be scarcely less contrary to the nature of man than the most brutalizing slavery; that it would have for its result, not an equality of good habits and well-being, but an equality of ignorance, laziness, misery, and vices; that it would destroy all family affections, and that it would make the mass of the population descend to the level of the slaves of our colonies; but how to prove that, without reproducing the observations I had made elsewhere, in refuting the same system that Abbé Raynal had also found admirable [^323]?.

Montesquieu having claimed that, if a father was bound to feed his children, he was not obliged to leave them his succession, other writers of the last century went further; they claimed that it would be good if the goods a man left upon dying returned to the mass of public goods, and were distributed to the poorest families, or employed to reward virtues, to encourage talents; they wished that the share of each be in proportion to his merit.

“Can a man who has finished his career,” said Raynal, “have rights? In ceasing to exist, has he not lost all his capacities? Has not the great being, in depriving him of light, taken from him all that was a dependency of his last wishes? Can they have any influence on the generations that follow? No. All the time that he lived, he enjoyed and ought to have enjoyed the lands he cultivated. At his death they belong to the first who will seize them and who will wish to sow them. That is nature...

» Among the different possible institutions on the inheritance of citizens after their death,” adds Raynal, “there is one that would perhaps find approvers. It is that the goods of the dead should return to the mass of public goods, to be employed first to relieve indigence, after indigence, to perpetually re-establish a close equality between the fortunes of private individuals; and, these two important points fulfilled, to reward virtues, to encourage talents [^324]. »

The men who, after having announced to us that the philosophers of the eighteenth century had come only to accomplish a work of destruction; that their reign was past, and that the time of the founders had finally arrived, have taken it into their heads to call into question again the right of children to succeed their fathers, have therefore had no other merit than to paraphrase the least sensible conceptions of the writers they had the air of disdaining; they have retreated more than half a century, to give themselves an air of novelty; the epoch of human history most fertile in experiences and in great discoveries has therefore passed before them without being perceived.

If I had wished to combat, in this work, the errors borrowed from Abbé Raynal, on the right of children to receive the goods that their parents leave upon dying, I could not have dispensed with showing that the family spirit is one of the principal causes of the production and conservation of wealth; that a man, to assure the existence of his children, devotes himself to labors and imposes upon himself privations that no other sentiment could obtain from him; that families contract habits conformable to their means of existence, and that if the wealth of a person were not to pass to his descendants, he would have to accustom his children to the harshest privations, and give them the example; that he could not, consequently, derive almost any real advantage from his properties, even during his lifetime; finally, that a nation in which children were excluded from the succession of their parents would descend, in very few years, much lower than the inhabitants of Egypt have descended under the domination of the Mamelukes, the Greeks under the domination of the Turks.

But, to give a complete demonstration of these propositions, I would have needed to recall a multitude of facts and observations that I reported in the Traité de législation, to explain the decadence of several peoples who have fallen from the height of prosperity into the most profound misery and degradation; I could not have dispensed with reproducing a multitude of truths that the science of political economy has demonstrated in such a way as to put them beyond the domain of contestation; finally, it would have been necessary to research and expound what are the laws of our nature that preside over the formation and conservation of families.

This necessity of expounding the elements of a science that a well-educated person is not permitted to ignore, of recalling truths that I have already sufficiently demonstrated, and of treating a matter that must be the object of another work, did not therefore permit me to refute here the errors borrowed from Abbé Raynal; I had, consequently, to abstain from it.

Some writers, in observing what happens within the most civilized nations, have thought they perceived that, among most of them, there are two classes of persons whose existence is not founded on the same means; they have thought they saw that one part of the population, and it is the most numerous, lives by means of the products of its labor, its capitals, its lands, while the other exists only by means of the wealth it has delivered to it by the first, under diverse names; this state has appeared to them vicious, and they have believed that it would be possible to establish a better one; it has seemed to them that, in a well-organized society, the State should pay for the services rendered to it only in proportion to their value.

Our modern reformers, distorting this thought, have also divided society into two classes; they have likewise found it wrong that one part of the population should exist at the expense of the other; but they have put in the class that lives at the expense of all the others, the families that exist only by the revenues of their lands or by the products of their capitals; they have thought that these families of the idle should be suppressed, and that their capitals and their lands should be adjudged to the men most capable of making them productive.

The system borrowed from Abbé Raynal was the partial negation of property; this one is its complete negation. In the first, the proprietor was granted life enjoyment; there was spoliation only for his children or for the other members of the family. In the second, even temporary enjoyment is not admitted; every proprietor must be stripped of his goods, from the moment a man more capable than he of making them productive presents himself.

If I could not show, in this Treatise, the vices of the two preceding systems, it was still less permissible for me to indulge in the examination of the third. How to reason, in effect, with men who have never been able to understand that there can be no industry without capitals, and that capitals are formed only in countries where the enjoyment and disposition of them are assured? To abstain from it, I had not only the reasons I have already made known: there existed a much more serious one. Whatever the subject with which one is concerned, there is a moment at which all controversy must cease: it is that at which one begins to seriously doubt whether the ideas one refutes belong to the domain of logic or to that of therapeutics.

It has been claimed that the inventors, or, rather, the paraphrasers of these diverse systems, had at least rendered a service, in that they had called the attention of enlightened men to the fate of the most numerous and poorest classes of society. This is an error; if this merit, which is very great, could be attributed to a single man, it would belong incontestably to Jeremy Bentham; for it is he who first gave as a fundamental rule of all institutions, the general interest of all classes of the population. Some of his ideas, it is true, seem to have influenced the formation of the systems of which I have just spoken; but they have been so disfigured and so badly applied, that it seems one had no other design than to travesty them, and to render them absurd or criminal.

If the systems that have been imagined on property were addressed only to persons endowed with a little instruction, and accustomed to reflect, they would deserve little attention, for they could not do much harm; but exposed before men who possess no knowledge, who have neither the means nor the time to reflect, and who can procure for themselves only with great difficulty feeble means of existence, they are not without danger; the least harm they can produce is to give to the most numerous and least well-off classes of the population, hopes that cannot be realized; to make them consider the spoliation of families who, by their labors and their economies, have acquired some fortune, as a sure and legitimate means of putting an end to their misery, and thus to bring trouble and anxiety among men who do not have views elevated enough to know the full extent of the power that protects properties.

The false hopes that one sometimes seeks to give to the least intelligent and most energetic part of the population can be employed as a lever by the aid of which one flatters oneself with shaking a power one has the design to overthrow; but this lever is still more dangerous for those who attempt to make use of it, than for the men against whom it is employed. It is impossible to put it into play without immediately rallying around the government all the classes of society that believe themselves threatened in their means of existence; and when these forces are united, there is nothing that can overcome them. If such means had a moment of success, the men who had put them to use would not long enjoy their triumph; unable to realize the hopes they had raised, they would be beaten with the weapons they had employed, and whose legitimacy they would have proclaimed in advance.

There are persons who, without attacking properties, would at least wish to assure to the poorest part of the population a greater share in the annual products that compose a people's revenues. The fate of almost all classes of society has improved by the sole effect of the progress of civilization; and it would be rash to predict what will happen in times more or less distant. I doubt, however, that it is possible to produce, by artificial means, that is to say by legislative measures, a prompt and sensible improvement in the fate of the men who live from the products of their daily labor.

It is not in the power of any government to raise the rate of wages in a permanent manner.

A cultivator, a manufacturer, can, for a few days, pay for labor beyond what it produces for them. The first can, at a given moment, spend the value of ten measures of wheat to produce the value of eight; but he would soon be ruined if such an operation were often repeated. The second can also, in certain circumstances, make the sacrifice of five francs to obtain a commodity that he could not sell for more than four. There is no power that could impose such a sacrifice on him in a permanent manner, unless it made his fortune inexhaustible, and opened for him a source of revenues. The public authority cannot therefore intervene in the fixing of wages, without infringing upon the property of the master or the liberty of the worker. Now, as long as the rate of wages is subject to the laws of competition, it will undergo the influence of all the variations of commerce and of the population.If it were possible for the price, in monetary terms, of labor to be suddenly doubled in all countries, for a day's work worth three francs to be worth six, the lot of the laboring classes would be no happier. A nation's revenues, that is to say, the quantity of food and clothing created each year, are not unlimited. All that is produced is consumed; but there is no way to consume beyond what is produced; one cannot increase the share of one, except on the condition of diminishing by that much the share of another. There exists, in effect, no power that has the means to cause a single grain of wheat to be consumed beyond that which has been produced. If, then, it happened that the price of all day-labor were suddenly doubled, what would be the consequences? One would see the same quantity of commodities arrive on the market, the same number of buyers with the same needs, and the same means to satisfy them. Nothing would be changed in anyone's position: the competition of buyers would raise the price of all things to the level of the price of labor. It would even be unfortunate if it did not have this result; for, if it did not, the first to be supplied would starve the last to arrive.

It is true that this increase in the nominal price of labor could have the effect of bringing about some cutbacks in the consumptions of the classes who live from the revenues of their lands, their houses, their capitals. But one must not exaggerate the advantages that would result from this for the most laboring and least well-off classes. When the richest classes of society are obliged to reduce their expenditures, it is not on necessities that they make the reduction fall. The competition would therefore remain the same relative to these things, and, consequently, there would not be a greater abundance of them for the most numerous classes.

When one compares the number of families who possess a considerable fortune to the number of those who live from the product of their labors, and who possess only the means strictly necessary to exist, one perceives that the former is infinitely small, compared to the latter; the spoliation of the rich for the profit of the poor, if it could ever be effected, might well have the result of condemning the former to destruction: but it would bring to the condition of the latter only a feeble and momentary improvement, and would be followed, even for these, by the most disastrous consequences.

Let there be no mistake as to the purpose of these observations; they do not have for their object to demonstrate that there is nothing to be done in the interest of the classes who exist only by means of their labor, and that a government has no need to concern itself with them; they tend only to show that one has nothing good to hope for from a forced displacement of wealth; that it is not possible to increase the revenues of persons who live from the products of their labor by diminishing the revenues of persons who live from the products of their lands or their capitals, without infringing upon property; that infringements of this kind are even more pernicious for the working classes than for the others; that capitals are no less necessary to production than labor; that it is not in their nature to be immobile; that they always flee countries in which they are threatened; and that, when they disappear, the population whose industry they fed is not long in being mown down by misery and famine.

If these observations are incontestable, and the experience of all centuries and all countries has made the demonstration of them evident, it follows that the classes of the population who live from the products of their daily labor have never had more dangerous enemies than the men whose systems threaten all kinds of properties, and particularly those that serve to feed industry and commerce. These systems, if public common sense had not swiftly dispensed justice upon them, would have been sufficient to bring about the most serious disorders, and to plunge into unprecedented distress all the families in whose interest it was claimed they had been imagined.

But if the public authority has no business meddling in the manner in which a nation's annual products are distributed among the men who contribute to forming them, unless it be to protect each in the enjoyment and disposition of his goods, it does not follow that it is powerless to soften the lot of the most numerous and least well-off classes; it can assure them a greater share in the products of industry, either by the reduction, or by a better use or a more equitable distribution of public charges; it can deliver industry and commerce from the hindrances or ill-conceived taxes that stifle its growth; it can facilitate education, and thus contribute to the well-being of the poorest classes, by the development of their intelligence and the improvement of their morals.

The use of these means will despoil no one of the fruits of his labors or his savings; and, far from causing the desertion of capitals, without which no industry nor any commerce could exist, it will attract capitals that will not find the same guarantees elsewhere.

THE END.

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Notes

[^323]: Traité de législation, volume IV, bk. 5, chap. 23. [^324]: Raynal, Histoire philosophique des établissemens des Européens dans les Deux-Indes, volume VIII, bk. 6, pages 245-247.