X. Liberté compatible avec la manière de vivre des peuples chez qui le servage a été remplacé par le

CHAP. 9: X. Liberty compatible with the way of life of peoples among whom serfdom has been replaced by privilege.

§ 1. The crisis that prepared society for the establishment of this new mode of existence was, as I have just said, the very one that brought about the abolition of the preceding regime. This crisis began with the twelfth century, and it was prolonged throughout the course of that century and the two following centuries. At the origin of this immense movement, the laboring classes were everywhere in the semi-servitude that has just been described. However, with regard to their former manner of being, they had surely made great progress. They were, as has just been seen, infinitely more powerful than they had ever been in ancient times; and, favored by some happy circumstances, they believed themselves strong enough to finish emerging from their ancient state of dependence and abasement. The first attempts at deliverance took place in Italy. They were then imitated in France; then in Germany, in England, in Switzerland, in Spain; little by little the same spirit of enfranchisement awoke throughout western Europe; and one saw the men of labor everywhere make more or less energetic and more or less happy efforts to subtract themselves from the domination of the men of war.

One knows what was the immediate effect of this vast revolution. It divided, in a way, the inhabitants of each country into as many aggregations of men as there were towns, communities, professions that undertook to deliver themselves [^257] .

For a long time this organization was purely defensive; it later took on an aggressive character: the men who had leagued together for the independence of labor ended by wanting to make a monopoly of it, and by imitating in their own way the dominating spirit of those who had oppressed them. There were no longer, in a way, any slaves or half-slaves; no class was the material property of any other; but each, to the exclusion of all others, wanted to seize some special mode of activity, some particular branch of functions or labors; and, with time, one saw emerge from this conflict of unjust pretensions a state of things in which the entire mass of individuals found itself divided into a certain number of classes, orders, and corporations which all had their separate interests, their particular laws, their privileges (privatæ leges), and each of which exercised over all the rest some kind of tyranny.

I have arrived all at once at the end of this great revolution. It would be outside my subject to expose here its detail and its sequence. I need only to show its consequences, and to make well known the social state that manifested itself when it was fully accomplished.

§ 2. First, the men of war, seeing the men of industry raised to the condition of free men, had formed themselves into a separate estate under the name of Nobility. The men of the church had isolated themselves in their turn under the name of Clergy. The legists, the officers of justice, the learned, the artisans, all the men devoted to the so-called liberal or mercantile professions, had formed a third estate under the name of Tiers.

Each of these great divisions had then subdivided itself into numerous corporations. The nobility had its military orders; the clergy, its religious orders; the bar, its companies; science, its faculties; industry, its guilds. The general spirit of the three orders was a lively emulation of hatred or contempt for one another; the same spirit had penetrated into the interior of the corporations. Everywhere one had affected to establish factitious hierarchies: science had its degrees like the nobility; industry like science; and just as, among the nobles, one had distinguished oneself by the grades of esquire and knight, so too one had wished to distinguish oneself, among the learned, by those of bachelor and licentiate, and among the artisans, by those of journeyman and master.

Finally, a universal spirit of exclusion had taken hold of all classes, of all aggregations. It was a question of who would obtain the most odious privileges, the most unjust preferences. The nobility had the monopoly of public service; the clergy, that of teaching and of doctrines; the third estate, that of industrial labors. In this third order, the liberal arts had become the appanage of a certain number of companies; various bodies of merchants had invaded commerce; the mechanical arts had fallen into the power of as many communities as one had been able to distinguish different kinds of fabrication.

The kings had favored, for a price in money, all these crying usurpations. They did not cease to sell to designated bodies or individuals what was the natural right of each and of the mass. They sold nobility, that is to say, the aptitude for public service; they sold the right to render justice; they sold even the right to work: labor, which in the preceding ages was disdainfully relegated to the slaves, had become, one knows not how, a prerogative of the crown, a royal and domanial right [^258] , which one exercised only by delegation of the head of the State and for a fee. No one could, without paying, honestly earn his living; and some, by paying, acquired the right to do alone what naturally everyone should have had the right to do.

Finally, this movement had not stopped at individuals, at companies. The towns had wanted to have their privileges like the corporations; the provinces, like the towns; the kingdoms, like the provinces. There were free ports, which had, to the exclusion of all others, the right to freely conduct maritime commerce. Certain manufacturing towns were in possession of fabricating certain products alone. There existed provinces to which belonged, by exclusive privilege, the exploitation of certain branches of commerce. Finally, there was no country that did not wish to have free access to all foreign markets, and which nevertheless did not pretend to exclude all foreign competition from its markets. From the smallest communities to the vastest States, it was a general mania for hoarding, a universal flood of exclusive and iniquitous pretensions.

§ 3. In this new mode of existence, each gave the name of liberty to the privileges he enjoyed to the detriment of all the rest. Thus the nobility called its liberties its exclusive right to the favors of court, its monopoly of honorific functions and of most lucrative functions, its exemptions from tax, its banalities, its rights of the hunt, and a multitude of other more or less oppressive rights, which it had saved from the shipwreck of those ancient tyrannies. The liberties of the clergy were the right to impose beliefs, the right to levy the tithe, the right not to pay taxes, the right to have particular tribunals; those of each community of artisans, the exclusive right to fabricate certain merchandise and to make the law for the merchants; those of each body of merchants, the right to sell certain foodstuffs alone, and to make illegitimate profits from the consumers. There was almost none that did not consist in injustices, in exactions, in violences.

§ 4. It seems that no true liberty could be reconciled with such liberties; and, in effect, we shall soon see that they opposed the greatest obstacle to the development of intelligence and industry; that they were the source of the gravest disorders, and that, in every way, liberty could only suffer much from them. However, compared to the excesses of the preceding age, they were certainly favorable to it, and it is not doubtful that it could take on more extension under the regime of privileges, than it had done under that of slavery or of serfdom properly speaking.By the sole fact that, in this new regime, one half of the population had ceased to be the material property of the other, it is visible that there had to be more liberty. First, human industry could develop more fully there: the former dominators, no longer founding their subsistence solely on the products of war and the labor of vanquished men, had to begin to make some use of their productive faculties; and, on the other hand, the formerly enslaved men, now working for themselves, had to devote themselves to labor with more zeal, consistency, and activity. Each, it is true, still found himself as if imprisoned in the framework where chance had caused him to be born; it was only with the greatest difficulty that one could abandon the station of one's parents to embrace that to which one felt more particularly called. But at least, each, in the condition in which he was born, could, up to a certain point, use his forces for his own account and begin to accumulate the fruits of his labor. To recognize that this social order did not render all development impossible, it suffices to pay attention to the fact that it is at the very heart of this order that there began to extend, to rise, to take on importance, those so diversely laboring classes, to whom the nations of our age are indebted for almost all that they possess of enlightenment and well-being, and whom the nature of things loudly calls to become the first in the political order, as they have long been in all the other branches of civilization [^259] .

It must be added that this mode of existence, more favorable than the preceding ones to the progress of industry and enlightenment, was also so to the progress of morals. The man of war, no longer counting as much on pillage to maintain or increase his fortune, had to feel a little better the necessity of spending it with discernment and moderation. The man of industry, having become more master of himself and of the fruits of his labor, had acquired a greater interest in conducting himself well. Sure of increasing his well-being by application, economy, order, regularity, he was naturally excited to contract the habit of these virtues. He became less intemperate by the very fact that he was less miserable; he was less excited to seek in debauchery a compensation for privations he no longer experienced; his tastes became more delicate, as he had more with which to satisfy them; and, growing in instruction and in riches, he had to grow necessarily in good morals.

Finally, while, in this regime, les hommes learned to make better use of their faculties with regard to themselves, they also made, from one to another, a less violent and less aggressive use of them. Whatever were the rivalries of the corporations and the orders, there could not, by a great deal, reign between them as much animosity as there had been previously between the masters and the slaves. Whatever were the commercial jealousies that divided the nations, their mutual hatreds could not have the energy of those that had existed between peoples bent on pillaging and enslaving one another. In the new social order, the opposition of interests was visibly less strong: intestine and external war therefore had to be less ardent, and, by that very fact, its consequences could not be as fatal to liberty. On the other hand, the spirit of domination being weakened, the social organization did not need to be as tense; the men of war could relax a little the bonds of the old discipline, and give some liberty to their movements; the men of industry acquired, by that very fact, more of it; finally, while power no longer weighed upon the latter with the same intensity, their order intervened in several ways in its action, and could still temper its exercise.

There was therefore, under the regime of privilege, incontestable progress toward liberty. Human faculties took on more development there; men conducted themselves better there toward themselves; they did not do each other mutually as much harm. It suffices, to be convinced of the justness of these remarks, to compare the peoples of this age with those of antiquity who are said to have been the freest. There is not the slightest doubt, for example, that one had in France, before the revolution and under the regime of corporations and orders, infinitely more true liberty than was ever possessed in Sparta or in Rome in the finest times of these republics [^260] .

§ 5. However, if the regime of privilege was favorable to liberty, it was only by comparison with those that had preceded it; for, viewed in itself, it still opposed immense obstacles to it.

§ 6. One could not at first, under this regime, enjoy but very incompletely the liberty that results from the progress of our industrial and productive faculties. It did not permit the full development of these faculties; it rendered it on the contrary impossible, and it retained the arts and sciences in a veritable state of imperfection, comparatively at least to what they can become in a more natural and more reasonable order of things.

The characteristic trait of this social state was that the profession of each was determined by his birth. One was what one was born; one did what one's ancestors had done [^261] . It was not absolutely impossible to change one's station; but that at least was very difficult: the most energetic tendency of every corporation was to push away strangers from its bosom, and to reserve for its own the vacant place.

The employment of human forces, in this state, thus found itself determined by a circumstance absolutely foreign to the true vocation of men. Such a one was a lawyer, whom nature had made a doctor; such another a mason, whom it had destined to be a sculptor. It was in a way only by chance that one was in one's place. A multitude of capacities found themselves diverted from their true application. From this an immense waste of forces, and consequently a very great delay placed on the progress of humanity.

While a considerable mass of forces was poorly employed, a still greater mass perhaps found itself lost for want of employment. This was the entirely natural consequence of the tendency of the bodies to reduce themselves, to diminish in each career the number of competitors. It resulted from this that a multitude of men, especially in the lower ranks of society, remained their whole life without a profession, and languished in a miserable state, where their faculties could take no flight. There was therefore still, in this respect, a loss of talents, of capacities, of forces, from which visibly resulted a new delay in the progress of the faculties of the species.

It was a small thing to diminish the mass of active men; it was a small thing to prevent the men who were occupied from being so with the thing for which they would have had the most aptitude; the system of corporations still had the effect of preventing that in the station one exercised one did all that one would have been capable of doing. I will not say that it destroyed emulation entirely; but who could deny that it did not dampen it in a sensible manner. If it is true that, the more rivals one has in a profession, the more one must work, strive to obtain the preference; it is clear that a system that delivered one from many competitors dispensed, by that very fact, from many efforts, and had to leave many forces inactive. It was therefore, on the part of this system, a new manner of diminishing labors of every kind, and, consequently, of delaying the progress of culture and of liberty.

Before arriving at mastership, in any profession, it was necessary to spend fruitlessly a considerable time and sums. When one had reached it, it was necessary to spend still more to defend against all usurpation the privilege one had acquired. Finally, as every privilege was a crying injustice, and which could not maintain itself on its own, it was necessary, to enjoy it without trouble, to have the support of authority, and authority made this support dearly paid for. It was therefore still a considerable mass of capital, of time, of activity, which was stolen from useful labor, and spent, not only without fruit, but in a manner very prejudicial to the progress of faculties and of liberty.

I have said that the privileges weakened emulation; this is not enough: in a certain respect, they rendered progress impossible. Any discovery relative to an art, made outside the community that had the monopoly of it, remained without application: the community did not suffer the inventor to profit from it to its prejudice [^262] ; and any discovery, made in the very bosom of a corporation, was equally lost: the members to whom it did not belong, feeling that it could only harm the sale of their own products, treated it as a dangerous innovation, and neglected nothing to make it abort [^263] . The employment of any new process thus found itself as if impossible. From then on, one no longer had any interest in seeking the best ones; and, for centuries, the sciences and the arts dragged themselves painfully in the same rut.

I have spoken of the efforts that were made to push away the competition of men; no less were made to get rid of that of things. The communities worked, in rivalry with one another, to repel from their territory the goods from outside merchants. It resulted from this that the action of commerce, like that of fabrication, found itself restricted within the narrowest bounds; that each lived in isolation; that everywhere one was reduced to one's own experience; that a discovery made in one place was of no use to the rest of humanity, and that a good process, to become general, needed in a way to be invented as many times as there were peoples who surrounded themselves with barriers, and who, in repelling the products of the foreigner, took away from themselves the so precious and so convenient resource of imitation.

I would not finish if I wished to show in how many ways the system of privileges harmed the development of intelligence and of industry. The facts, in this regard, say more than all reasonings; the facts show with evidence that, wherever one has been able to discuss and to work without constraint, the sciences and the arts have made rapid progress; while they have remained more or less stationary wherever some men have had the monopoly of doctrines and of industry. The bulk of the population is very ignorant in Spain, where the clergy has for several centuries an unlimited jurisdiction over the labors of the mind; instruction is more common in France, where these labors have enjoyed a greater latitude; and much more common in England, where, for a long time, they are no longer subject to any preventive obstacle. One has seen in England the towns that had guilds grow in a much less prompt manner than those that had none. York, Bristol, Canterbury, submitted to the regime of corporations, have lost, observes M. Say, the rank they formerly held; and, in respect of riches and population, they come only far after the towns of Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool, which were but hamlets, two centuries ago, but which had the advantage of not having any guilds [^264] . In London, the city of the center, where industry is subject to regulations, has diminished in population, while the suburbs, where it is free, have invaded half of the county of Middlesex, and extend themselves every day more [^265] . One knows that in Paris, under the old regime, industry was incomparably more advanced in the part of the city where it was not hindered than in that where it found itself under the yoke of masterships [^266] . There would finally be no exaggeration in saying that industry, despite the troubles and wars of the revolution, has made more progress in France, in the thirty-five years that have passed since the abolition of privileges, than it had made, in several centuries, under the old monarchy.

§ 7. If the regime of privileges harmed the progress of the arts, it was no less contrary to that of morals, and liberty, in this respect, still received grave injuries from it. Morals without doubt had gained much from the abolition of slavery; but how much did they not still have to suffer from the privileges of the orders and the corporations? Without recalling such a privilege, which, in remote times, had made, in certain cases, for certain men, a right of rape and of adultery, there still subsisted some very corrupting ones. Such was notably the privilege of the high classes to preserve nobility in idleness, or rather the privilege that made, for them, of idleness a condition of nobility [^267] ; such, the privilege of those first-born sons of a family, whom their title dispensed, in order to be rich, from all the qualities necessary to acquire a fortune, and whom their particular position often called to spend foolishly and licentiously that which they had; such, the privilege of those owners of entailed estates, who could plunge into debt without running the risk of encumbering these goods, and of impoverishing those who were to inherit them; such again, the privilege of those courtiers who, aiming to increase their fortune, could begin by dissipating it, assured as they were of catching up by gifts and graces still more goods than they destroyed by their profusions [^268] .

But, besides the fact that certain privileges tended immediately to corrupt morals, they all tended to it in a more remote manner, by opposing, as I have said, the development of labor, of wealth, and of enlightenment. All that places an obstacle to the progress of instruction harms essentially morality, which is the fruit of good sense as much as of good sentiments; all that opposes the progress of wealth harms equally good morals, which come in the train of well-being, whereas destitution and misery almost always march escorted by depravation. Morality finally is directly attacked by all that hinders labor, since idleness is the mother of vice, and to the indigent whom one prevents from working there remains only theft or begging for a resource [^269] .

If one wishes to judge to what point morality suffered from the regime of privileges, one has only to consider the number of persons whom it dispensed from all honest occupation in the elevated ranks of society, and the still greater number of those to whom it forbade all industry in the inferior conditions; one has only to look a little at all that it caused to be born in the world of dissipaters, of intriguers, of idlers, of valets, of beggars.

Add that this system did not only deprave the men of the last and of the first classes, but also, although to a lesser degree, those of the intermediate order of citizens. There was in effect in their prosperity something violent and illegitimate; it was not only the fruit of labor, it was also that of monopoly, and a part of their profits always came from what they could reduce, by authority, the number of their competitors. It was even to pushing away rivals, much more than to surpassing them in merit, that their activity was directed, and their mind, in this system, was continually preoccupied with unjust and tyrannical ideas.

§ 10. Finally, while the same regime thus perverted morals, it violently troubled the peace, it set men everywhere at odds, and it was especially by this that it was fatal to the liberty.

I have already said it, from the smallest communities to the vastest States, there was not an aggregation that did not exercise outside of itself some kind of despotism; but there was not one, in return, that did not suffer a multitude of oppressions. If each made the law, each, in his turn, submitted to it. Did such an order of artisans demand the monopoly of such a kind of fabrication? all raised analogous pretensions; and, for wishing to monopolize one industry, one had oneself forbidden all the others. Did such a class of merchants want to have the privilege of such a branch of commerce? all pretended to make their commerce privileged; and, to make more profit in one's sales, one exposed oneself to being overcharged in all one's purchases: it was a society of knaves in which everyone was more or less a dupe. Did you repel the goods from outside merchants? all outside merchants repelled your goods. Did you refuse to suffer the competition of foreigners? no foreigner wanted to suffer your competition. Not only, in this system, did the men placed outside the bodies that had monopolized the diverse modes of activity and industry find themselves unjustly despoiled of the innocent use of their faculties, but, between the monopolizers themselves, there were only vengeances and reprisals, only injustices suffered for injustices exercised: it was a veritable state of war, and of universal war.

In truth, this war did not everywhere entail the effusion of blood. The small corporations, in the bosom of each people, were ordinarily contained by the ascendancy of the great bodies in whose hands resided the public power. But if the rivalries of the low corporations rarely manifested themselves by murders, they did not cease to break out in lawsuits, and the mutual violence that they did to each other by their exclusive rights was perpetually aggravated by judicial quarrels. One has seen communities plead, for entire centuries, against other communities: the tailors, for example, against the second-hand clothes dealers, to establish the line of demarcation between a ready-made suit and an old suit; the shoemakers against the cobblers, to take away from the latter the right to make their shoes and those of their children and their wives [^270] . The communities of Paris, according to a skillful financier, spent nearly a million every year in procedural costs [^271] .

[^259]: Histoire de la législation, by Pastoret, t. IX, p. 284. [^260]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part. III, sect. 2. [^261]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part. III, sect. 2. [^262]: Traité d'économie politique, by M. Say, t. I, p. 238. [^263]: Traité d'économie politique, by M. Say, t. I, p. 238. [^264]: Traité d'économie politique, by M. Say, t. I, p. 238. [^265]: Traité d'économie politique, by M. Say, t. I, p. 238. [^266]: Traité d'économie politique, by M. Say, t. I, p. 238. [^267]: Esprit des Lois, book XX, chap. 22. [^268]: Esprit des Lois, book V, chap. 19. [^269]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part. III, sect. 4. [^270]: Traité d'économie politique, by M. Say, t. I, p. 238. [^271]: Recherches et considérations sur les finances, by Forbonnais.And it was not only thus that the lower bodies fought one another. Each wanted to have the great corporation of the governors as its auxiliary, and strove to make it an accomplice to the iniquity of its pretensions. They asked for nothing better than to receive chains from it, than to pay it tributes, provided that it deigned to concede tyrannical privileges. They exhausted themselves in expenses, in solicitations, in prayers, and all these basenesses they committed to obtain the right to be unjust: et omnia serviliter pro dominatione (and everything servilely for the sake of domination).

“When cotton goods began to be manufactured in France,” says M. Say, “the entire commerce of the cities of Amiens, Reims, and Beauvais rose up in protest, and represented the industry of these cities as destroyed... It was much worse when the fashion for painted cloths was introduced: all the chambers of commerce were set in motion. From all parts there were convocations, deliberations, and much money spread about. Rouen, in its turn, depicted the misery that was about to besiege its gates, the women, the old men, the children, in desolation, the best-cultivated lands of the kingdom remaining fallow, and this beautiful and rich province becoming a desert. The city of Tours showed the deputies of the whole kingdom in lamentation, and predicted a commotion that would occasion a convulsion in the political government. Lyon would not be silent on a project that spread terror in all the factories. Paris had never presented itself at the foot of the throne, which commerce watered with its tears, for a matter so important. Amiens regarded the permission of painted cloths as the tomb in which all the manufactures of the kingdom were to be annihilated. Its memorandum, deliberated in the office of the merchants of the three united bodies, was thus concluded: ‘Besides, it is enough, to proscribe forever the use of painted cloths, that the whole kingdom shudders with horror when it hears it announced that they are to be permitted: vox populi, vox Dei [^272] .’”

These protests, in which folly vied with iniquity [^273] , these odious and ceaselessly renewed demands for privileges for oneself and prohibitions for others, were not always heeded; but one feels what an ascendancy they must have given to authority over the professions that made them heard; one feels how easy it must have been to enslave, to render tributary, bodies that ceaselessly asked to make an exchange of liberty for domination: thus, in granting them abusive rights, one spared them neither charges, nor regulations, nor masters. Each corporation, already oppressed by the privileges of its rivals, oppressed again by the lawsuits it had to sustain for the defense of its particular privileges, was so in a third, a fourth, a fifth manner by the taxes it was made to pay, by the hindrances to which it was subjected, by the abuse that its members in dignity made of a power already vexatious by its nature, finally by the domination that the government exercised over them in dominating the chiefs it had given them.

If the privileges of the bodies of industry and commerce ordinarily led only to lawsuits, those of the superior orders provoked much more serious dissensions. What these orders had to suffer from the general system of corporations was nothing in comparison to the advantages they drew from it. Their share, in this distribution of tyrannies of every kind, was manifestly the best. They received, without doubt, some damage from the privileges of the inferior orders; but the wrong that each community could do them, by favor of the monopoly it enjoyed, was amply compensated by all that they drew from the established order, in seigneurial rights, in pecuniary immunities, in honors, in salaries, in pensions, in gratuities, in court favors of every kind. Thus, in the powerlessness to re-establish their ancient domination, they were great partisans of a system which, confining as it were all the citizens of the inferior and secondary orders to the exercise of private professions, thereby delivered to them the monopoly of public service and of all that it gave of wealth and of luster.

But the greater the privileges of the superior orders were, the more violent was the jealousy they excited. The clergy, the nobility, the judicature, were the object of the universal animadversion of the inferior corporations. These corporations, in which extremely odious rights were enjoyed without scruple, could not suffer that, above them, there should be ones more considerable and more odious still; and such a community of artisans or merchants, such a company of men of letters or of legists, which would have willingly monopolized all that there was in the world of lawsuits, of knowledge, of industry, of commerce, trembled with indignation on seeing a class of men called nobles pretend, for their part, to the monopoly of certain places, to the exemption from certain taxes, etc. One knows well enough, without my saying it, what the rivalries of the nobility and the third estate have produced of troubles and dissensions in most of the countries of Europe, and all that these orders, in their quarrels, have mutually made each other suffer of violences and oppressions. The regime under which they lived was therefore for each of them a fecund source of evils and of servitudes.

This regime, which has been presented as a source of order, because men were arranged in it with a sort of symmetry, thus had at most only the appearances of order, and concealed, in reality, a profound anarchy. From the base of the system to its summit, everyone in it was in a state of hostility; and it is precisely in what is represented as a principle of peace that lay the germ of this universal discord. It is because the place of each was fixed in advance that no one was content with his place; it divided men, because it classed them arbitrarily; it excited them to be jealous of one another, because well-being in it was the fruit of favor, and not of merit; it rendered, at all levels, the inferior ranks enemies of the superior, because it gave everywhere to the superiors the means of being unjust toward the subalterns.

Finally, while this regime thus maintained division among all the orders of society, between the working class and the body of masters, between corporations and corporations, between the inferior orders and the superior classes, it was above all a cause of wars from nation to nation. No one is ignorant of the role that commercial jealousies have played, for three centuries, in the wars of Europe, and the horrible evils that the peoples of this quarter of the globe have done to one another to mutually exclude each other from the fields of commerce and industry, to monopolize, each for its own part, all industrial and commercial activity. For this, as is well known, there have been millions of men slaughtered, rivers of blood shed.

The system of orders and corporations, much preferable to that of slavery, was therefore still, in many respects, excessively contrary to liberty. It opposed the full development of industry, of wealth, and of enlightenment; it maintained a profound corruption in morals; it violently fomented civil war and foreign war... Let us hasten to advance toward a better state.

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Notes

[^257]: It must be recognized, however, that the elements of all this existed beforehand. There had been, notably, in many cities, guilds of arts and trades since Roman times, and it appears that these communities of artisans had never been completely abolished. But the corporate spirit then acted with much more force than it had ever done, and on an infinitely more extended scale. [^258]: Edict of Henry III, of 1581. [^259]: Nothing presents a greater obstacle to the development of the working classes than the lack of political capacity—I do not say the lack of ambition, the reluctance to seek in intrigue a fortune one would not be capable of acquiring through work; but the lack of zeal to occupy oneself with public affairs and of aptitude to judge the operations of government. Men of industry will know only half their trade as long as they are not capable of considering the interests of industrious society from a general point of view, as long as they cannot judge soundly what is favorable or harmful to its various labors, as long as they are not disposed to prevent the established powers from doing anything contrary to it. This capacity is entirely in the order of their professions; it is linked to them in the closest manner; it is one of those that it would be most important for them to have in order to exercise them with success and with fruit. Unfortunately, it is still one of those they possess the least; but it cannot fail to be born after the others; it will be their necessary consequence and at the same time their most powerful vehicle. [^260]: When we speak of the ancient peoples, we never see but the small number of men who formed the political body, that is to say, the citizens, the dominators, the masters; and we take no account of the slaves. The class of slaves is, however, the one we should especially consider when we compare ourselves to the ancient peoples, and when we wish to judge the progress that society has made. This class, in effect, was the one that formed the bulk of the population, the one that fed society, the one that corresponded to the working classes of our modern times and to what we today call the people, the nation. Now, I ask if it was ever as free as the people of our modern societies had become under the regime of privileges? Not only, in the time of privileges, were the people among us much freer than the working classes ever were in antiquity, but they were even, in many respects, freer than the dominating classes had been among the ancients. There was surely in our Third Estate, before the revolution, more knowledge, skill, wealth, morality, and true elements of liberty than there had been in Rome, under the republic, in the body of citizens and free men. Only, on the side of our bourgeois, the political capacity was less great; the Third Estate did not belong to itself as much as the Roman people had belonged to itself; it did not decide the interests of industry as the Roman citizen had decided those of war. One cannot deny that, in this respect, much still remains to be done today by the industrious classes: they have to erase the last traces of the conquest, that is to say, to become completely masters of themselves, to govern themselves in the interests of industry. [^261]: It is entirely in the nature of things that a son should follow his father's career: it is the one to which access is easiest for him, the one where he has the most chances of success. But it does not follow from this that the other paths toward which his natural inclination might draw him should be closed to him. Now, this is what took place under the regime of corporations and privileges. [^262]: See the examples cited by M. Say, in his Traité d'économie politique, vol. I, pp. 246 and 247, fourth ed. [^263]: The means, at a certain period, were not lacking. Colbert subjected most manufactures to rules from which it was strictly forbidden to deviate. No worker could, under penalty of fine and confiscation, permit himself to do better than another. (Ordinance of the month of August 1669.) [^264]: Traité d'écon. pol., vol. I, p. 245, second ed. [^265]: The population of the City, in London, is now only two-fifths of what it was at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Ch. Dupin, Voyage dans la Grande Bretagne, force commerc., vol. II, p. 3). M. Dupin attributes this decrease in population to causes that may have had an influence, but which did not act alone. It is not doubtful that the thirty-two exclusive companies of the central city also contributed to its desertion. V. what an English writer, cited by M. Say, vol. I, p. 246, of his Traité d'économie politique, says on this subject. [^266]: M. Say, ibid. [^267]: For a long time, as is known, the only exercises permitted to the nobility were those proper to domination. It could not, without losing its noble status, exercise any useful profession. It viewed public service as a power, not as a service. Montesquieu, who sees the reason for everything in the form of government, says that it did not engage in commerce because that would have been contrary to the spirit of the monarchy. That is not it. It did not engage in commerce for the same reason that the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans had not done so; for the same reason that the Turks do not do so: because it is not in the spirit of military races; because it is repugnant to barbarism; because it weakens the penchant for war and the love of domination. The reason for its morals in this regard was in its ever so slightly savage origin. We know that the Germans, according to Caesar and Tacitus, had such a fear of acquiring a taste for agriculture and losing that for brigandage, that they made a new division of the soil every year: it was by a remnant of this spirit that the nobility had always abstained from engaging in commerce. [^268]: Montesquieu says, speaking of the nobility: “This entirely warlike nobility, which thinks that in whatever degree of wealth one may be, one must make one's fortune, but that IT IS SHAMEFUL TO INCREASE ONE'S PROPERTY, IF ONE DOES NOT BEGIN BY DISSIPATING IT, etc.” (The Spirit of the Laws, b. 20, ch. 22.) We know where these fine maxims came from: it would not have held it in such high honor to begin by ruining itself, if it had had only the ordinary means to enrich itself. [^269]: If there is one thing that should seem desirable, especially after a revolution that has stirred up many ambitious passions, it would doubtless be to see citizens turn their activity toward industry, to devote themselves to useful and peaceful labors. It is clear that nothing would be so proper to deliver the government from dangerous enemies, to calm effervescent minds, to restore peace, to purify morals, to give rise to general prosperity. What then is one to think of administrations which, far from encouraging so favorable a tendency, would apply themselves from time to time to thwarting it; which, not content with closing access to public functions to the parties opposed to them, would claim to forbid them even the exercise of private professions; which, out of vengeance, would prohibit work, study; which would expel young people from schools; which would forbid taking up a trade; which would prevent one from becoming a doctor, lawyer, solicitor, notary, professor, boarding-school master, printer, bookseller, wine merchant, what do I know? which would, so to speak, reduce a man to the alternative of dying of hunger or living by condemnable means?.... Yet this has been seen, and one does not know how to qualify it. Expressions are lacking to brand, as would be fitting, such a mixture of absurdity and tyranny. All one can say is that there is nothing more irritating than such excesses, except perhaps the spinelessness of a public that would consent to suffer them without complaint. [^270]: M. Say, Cours d'écon. pol. at the Athénée; see a pamphlet by M. Pillet-Will, entitled: Réponse à M. Levacher-Duplessis. [^271]: M. Vital-Roux, Rapport sur les corps d'arts et métiers, 1805, printed by order of the Chamber of Commerce. [^272]: Traité d'écon. pol., vol. I, p. 181 et seq., fourth ed. [^273]: What constituted the foolishness of these complaints was that they were directly contrary to the interest of the very people who made them. In effect, the introduction of any new industry creates new labor, provokes a surplus of wealth and population, gives rise to consumers with means of exchange, and thus opens new outlets for the products of existing industries. The worst service that could have been rendered to the petitioners, in the cases cited by M. Say, would have been to listen to their demands; this is what experience soon showed.