I. Liberté compatible avec la manière de vivre des peuples purement industrieux.

CHAP. 11: I. Liberty compatible with the way of life of purely industrious peoples.

§ 1. The word industry is a nearly literal translation of the Latin word INDUSTRIA. Etymologists suppose that the latter must have been formed from two others, INDU for INTUS, within, and STRUO, I arrange, I set up, I construct. Thus one would have said INDUSTRIA from INTUS-STRUO, INTUS-STRUERE, to construct within, an action exercised in things or on things to arrive at a certain end.

This word, according to its etymology, would thus express at once the idea of action and that of action exercised with intelligence, the idea of action appropriate to a certain goal. It is clear, in effect, that these two ideas are equally comprised in the active verb that serves as its base. STRUERE, to build, to construct, is first to act; but, moreover, it is to act with design, it is to arrange things in view of some object. Thus it appears that the Romans used the word industria equally to designate the activity, the care, the application that one put into doing things, and to express the dexterity, the skill with which one did them. In Latin, an industrious man, industrius, is first an active man, and, secondly, a skillful man. The word, in passing into our language, has scarcely retained but the latter of these two meanings; it still implies the idea of action, since we can show our dexterity only in our acts; but what it signifies more particularly is the intelligence with which we act.

The word industry, awakening in its primitive sense only the idea of a certain skill, must have been applied at first to all actions done with art, executed with skill, of whatever kind they might be, that is to say, whether they were good or bad, useful or pernicious, whether they had a moral or immoral character. Thus one has said an honest industry, and a dishonest industry; one has said the industry of an intriguer, of a swindler, just as one has said the industry of a plowman, of an artisan. It even seems that at first the name of industry was given preferably to actions of little honor; and when one wished to say of a man deprived of fortune that all means were good for him to get rich, to get out of a scrape, one said that this man lived by his wits; one called knights of industry, knights of the industry, men distinguished in the art of fraud, men fecund in shameful expedients.

However, while extending the word industry to the detestable skill of knaves, one has not failed to use it also to designate the art of men devoted to honest and licit labors; but, in conformity with its etymological sense, it was at first applied only to labors where the spirit of invention or execution, the skill in finding and in doing, was more particularly shown, I mean to the mechanical arts. There is a multitude of persons for whom the word industry, honorably understood, still expresses only the labors of fabrication, and who say industry to designate manufactures, separating them from agriculture and commerce. Others include under this word fabrication and commerce, and exclude only agriculture. Others say indistinctly agricultural, manufacturing, commercial industries, who would not consent to say scientific, literary, religious, political industries. Few people yet, if I am not mistaken, extend this term to all the orders of action that it should naturally embrace.

It is the destiny of words to change with the sciences that make use of them, and to take on, as they are perfected, a better-determined meaning. This is what will infallibly happen to the word industry, in proportion as the science of social economy develops and at the same time becomes fixed. We have just seen that, on the one hand, this term had been extended to many bad actions, while, on the other hand, it was refused application to several orders of useful labors. I think that one will end by extending it to all useful labors, and by withdrawing it from all malevolent actions. This is what cannot fail to take place, as the phenomenon of production is better explained.

It was long ignored that man was capable of producing wealth. The thing may seem strange, and yet it cannot be contested. It was a very general opinion, not yet eighty years ago, that it was impossible to get rich without harming, and that what one man or one people gained was necessarily lost by other men or other peoples. The Abbé Galiani, who was one of the wittiest writers of his time, and one of the most enlightened on matters of public economy, wrote formally, in 1750, that a fortune could not grow without other fortunes being diminished. Is it surprising that with such ideas the name of industry was given by preference to the art of seizing the fortune of others, and that knaves were the industrious par excellence, the knights of industry?

Fortunately, since that time, we have come to know better the true nature of wealth. It has been discovered that it was not matter, not a thing, but a quality of things, that it consisted in their utility, in the diverse uses that could be made of them, in the price that was put on them, by reason of these uses, in a word, in their value, in exchangeable values; and as, if it is not possible for men to create matter, it is more or less in their power to render it proper for their use, to give it utility, to create values; it had to be recognized also that it was in their power to create wealth [^291] .

Thenceforth, it was necessary to distinguish necessarily two very different ways of getting rich: that of the men who produce utilities, who create values, of one kind or another, and that of the men who seize, by cunning or by force, the values created by others; and, as two orders of actions of such a different nature, although requiring more or less skill and ability one and the other, could not however continue to be designated by the same name, it seems to me that, since then, one has begun to reserve exclusively the name of industry for the labors of men who get rich without despoiling anyone, and to leave those of theft, swindling, extortion, pillage, to the unfortunately very diverse and very multiplied arts of the men who found their fortune on the spoliation of others. Today, a man living by industry is not a man indifferent to the means of subsisting, and making a resource of fraud if need be; he is a man occupied with creating utilities of some kind, and, with these utilities, procuring for himself, by loyal and free exchanges, all the other utilities he may need. The word industry, used alone, is no longer taken but in a good sense; and, when one says in a general way industry, one universally understands by it the action of human faculties, applied to some good and useful operation.

Thus, when I go to seek, in this chapter, what is the degree of liberty that is compatible with industry, what I want to know is not, one will understand, I hope, what is the degree of liberty that is possible in a society where one would exercise only mechanical arts, as critics who had not understood me have made me say, rather stupidly; but what is the liberty possible in a social state where each would be occupied with adding to the value of things or of men, and would contribute, by his current labor or by the fruits of a prior industry, to increasing the mass of ideas, of good sentiments, of virtues, of utilities of every kind, of which the wealth and power of the human species are composed.

§ 2. There is no epoch, in the history of civilization, where industry does not enter for something into the means that man uses to satisfy his needs. The anthropophagus does not live only by murder; the nomad, only by rapine: the former engages in hunting, gathers fruits, makes himself a hut, clothes himself in the skin of wild beasts; the latter raises herds, pitches tents, constructs chariots, weaves some coarse fabrics. When man has settled on the soil, peaceful and productive labor contributes to his subsistence in a still more extensive proportion. As he civilizes himself, the number of persons living by inoffensive means becomes gradually more considerable. Finally, whatever may still be, in the human species, the mass of men who found their subsistence on brigandage and spoliation, there are nevertheless countries where the very great majority of the population lives by means largely exempt from violence.

However, although there is always more or less industry in society, it is far from being the case that society can always be qualified as industrial. It is not enough that some men, in a country, live from the fruits of their labor or that of their capital, for one to be able to give the people who inhabit it the name of industrial people. It would not even be enough for that for the universality of the inhabitants to be devoted, as among us, to inoffensive occupations, if besides there were not a class of these inhabitants whose revenues were not, up to a certain point, the fruit of violence, and who did not profit, directly or indirectly, from some privilege, some monopoly, some iniquitous prohibition. Strictly speaking, this title of industrial state, of society founded on industry, is applicable only to the country where one has constitutionally desisted from all unjust pretension; where useful labor is the only avowed means of getting rich; where no man can demand anything from any other by title of lord, of master, of privileged person, of monopolist, but only by title of a freely agreed-upon payment for a product delivered or a service rendered; where the government itself finds itself, in this regard, in the same position as the last of the citizens, and cannot demand an obol beyond what has been voluntarily granted to it for the price of its services; where public service has all the characters of an industrial enterprise, with the sole difference that this enterprise is vaster than another, and that instead of being done for the account of particular persons or associations, it is done by order and for the account of the public person, of the general community, which awards it to men of its choice, and at the prices and on the conditions that are judged most favorable [^292] .

§ 3. If, throughout the course of this work, liberty has appeared to me incompatible with the spirit of domination, there is no lack of writers who have declared it irreconcilable with labor. In the first ages of society, industry was reproached for destroying liberty by deadening the warlike passions, and by leading men to peace [^293] . In more advanced times, it has been reproached for destroying liberty by pushing men to war. A number of modern writers have represented the state of an industrious people as a necessary state of hostility. The misfortune of a commercial State, it has been sententiously written, is to be condemned to make war [^294] . Montaigne devotes a chapter of his Essays to proving that, in industrial society, what makes the profit of one makes the damage of the other [^295] . Rousseau does not believe that, in society, there can exist a common interest. Like Montaigne, he thinks that each finds his account in the misfortune of others, and says that there is no legitimate profit, however considerable it may be, that is not surpassed by the gains one can make illegitimately [^296] . Every day, finally, one still hears it maintained that "the diverse industrial professions have necessarily opposed interests, and that there is no skill that could unite in a single whole the numerous classes that exercise them [^297] ." That is not all: while industry is reproached for being a principle of discord, it is also reproached for being a source of depravity; while it is accused of troubling the peace, it is also accused of corrupting morals [^298] . Finally, as it obtains very great successes only by an extreme division of labor, it has also been reproached for restricting the activity of individuals within extremely narrow circles, and thus limiting the development of their intelligence [^299] ; that is to say, it is accused at once of arresting the flight of our faculties, and of perverting their use, both with regard to ourselves and in our relations with our fellows; whence it would follow that a social state where one founds one's existence on industry is, in every way, unfavorable to liberty.

I believe it little necessary to make a direct response to each of these objections. They will all be sufficiently refuted by the simple exposition of the facts. Let us occupy ourselves only with knowing how things happen, and let us see what are, relative to liberty, the effects of industry.

§ 4. Three conditions, we have said, are necessary for man to dispose freely of his forces: the first, that he has developed them; the second, that he has learned to use them in such a way as not to harm himself; the third, that he has contracted the habit of confining their use within the bounds of what does not harm others.

Doubtless these conditions are not fulfilled by the sole fact that one wishes to give one's faculties an inoffensive direction. A man has not developed his faculties, and learned to regulate their use, because he has conceived the design of henceforth making only a useful and legitimate use of them. It is very possible that at first he may be unskilled in using them; he may very well also be ignorant of the measure in which they must be used so as to do no harm either to himself or to other men. But, if man is not free by the sole fact that he wishes to divert to things the activity he previously directed against his fellows, it is certain that he can become free in this direction, and that it is even only in this direction that he can acquire the degree of power, morality, and liberty, of which he is naturally susceptible.

§ 5. And first, it is evident that it is in the ways of industry that human faculties can take on the most development. The circle of destructive arts is limited by its nature: that of inoffensive labors and useful arts is in a way unlimited. Domination requires a few skillful men and a multitude of instruments: industry has no need of blind men: instruction is incompatible with none of its labors; all its labors, on the contrary, are executed all the better as the men who devote themselves to them have more intelligence and enlightenment. The dominator and his satellites live on a people of victims, whom they keep in misery and brutishness: industry wants no victims; it is all the more flourishing as all men are, in general, richer and more enlightened. The dominator, finally, feeds on pillage, and if all men wished to support themselves by the same means, the species, visibly, would be condemned to perish: industry is essentially productive; it lives on its own fruits, and, far from fearing that industrious men should multiply too much, it would wish to see the whole human race devoted to useful labors, and would be assured of prospering all the more as there were more men usefully occupied.

[^290]: See above, book III, chap. 9, § 7, 6 and 1. [^291]: Traité d'économie politique, by M. Say, vol. I, p. 1. [^292]: See above, book III, chap. 10, § 2. [^293]: Esprit des Lois, book XX, chap. 2. [^294]: De la politique dans ses rapports avec la morale, by M. le prince de Broglie. [^295]: Essais, book I, chap. 21. [^296]: Émile, book IV. [^297]: Du gouvernement représentatif, by M. Guizot. [^298]: Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la décadence des Romains, chap. 10. [^299]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part. IV, sect. 1.Man, in the industrious life, directs his forces precisely as best suits his progress. This way of life is the only one, I beg the reader to note well, where he properly studies the sciences, and where the sciences truly serve to make him powerful. In the countries and times of domination, study is hardly more than an idle contemplation, an amusement, a frivolous exercise, intended solely to satisfy curiosity or vanity [^300]. One brings to research the spirit least suited to acquiring true knowledge. Moreover, one does not think of making useful applications of one’s knowledge. It is held that science demeans itself as soon as it is good for something. The scientist would believe he was degrading it and himself by making it serve to enlighten the processes of art [^301]. The artisan, for his part, cares little for scientific theories. He returns to science all the contempt that the scientist professes for industry; and, while industry is excluded, as plebeian, from the bosom of learned societies, science is cast out of the workshops of industry as futile, vain, and good at most for books.

It is not so in countries devoted to industry, and organized for this manner of living. One does not see there this unfortunate divorce between science and art. Art there is not a routine; science not a vain speculation. The scientist works to be useful to the artisan; the artisan profits from the discoveries of the scientist. Scientific instruction is found to be generally united with technical knowledge. Study is not a simple pastime, intended to charm the leisure of a people of dominators, reigning in peace over a people of docile slaves; it is the serious labor of men all living equally from the conquests they make over nature, and ardently seeking to know its laws, in order to bend them to the service of humanity. One feels that an activity thus directed, studies thus made, supported moreover by all that the desire for fortune, the love of glory, and universal emulation can give them of constancy and energy, must impress upon scientific labors an impulse far more sure and powerful than the aimless speculations of dominators and idlers, given over to the contemplative life. Man is here evidently on the path of all discoveries, all applications, of all useful labors.

Doubtless, the industrial regime cannot make it so that every man is instructed in all things: an essential condition for the development of industry is that its labors be divided, and that each occupy himself with only one or a small number of objects. But this is the fault of our weakness, and not that of industry, nor that of the separation of labors, which is but a more skillful way of putting our industrial faculties to work. The effect of this separation, so suited to increasing the power of the species, is not, as has been said, to diminish the capacity of individuals. Without the separation of labors, the power of the species would have been null, and that of individuals would have remained excessively limited. Each man, as a result of this separation, is incomparably more instructed and more capable than he would have been if, from the origin, each had worked in isolation, and had been reduced to the use of his own individual forces. Each, it is true, exercises only a small number of functions; but, if one knows only one thing well, one commonly has correct ideas about a rather large number of them. Besides, by exercising only a single industry, one can set in motion a multitude of others: it suffices to create a single product to obtain all those one needs; and, by the artifice of the separation of labors, the power of each individual is found to be in some way increased by that of the species.

Does one wish to judge if the industrious life is favorable to the development of our forces? One has only to look at what the world acquires of intelligence, wealth, and power, in proportion as it is more usefully occupied; one has only to compare the progress it makes in countries where they plunder and in those where they work; in epochs of domination and in times of industry. Scotland, in the middle of the last century, was still half-barbarous: how, in less than eighty years, has it become one of the most learned, most ingenious, most cultivated countries of Europe? One word explains this phenomenon: since 1745, pillage, murder, and the struggles of ambition have ceased there; they used to fight there, now they work there; opposing parties disputed power there, now they devote themselves in concert to industry. Whence comes it that North America makes such singular progress, so out of proportion with what is seen in other quarters of the globe? It is because billions in taxes are not levied there; it is because they are not occupied there with binding the populations in order to rob them more at ease; it is because they do not fight there for their spoils; it is because instead of disputing over places there, they universally devote themselves to labor. Suppose that, by a miracle that time will perform, I hope, the same thing happens in Europe; that the opposing parties, instead of remaining face to face, and always ready to come to blows, decide at last to turn upon things the murderous activity they direct against one another; that they convert their instruments of war into tools fit for labor; that the laboring classes thus see themselves delivered from the hindrances and vexations they experience; that they keep the millions that are taken from them; that their enemies become their auxiliaries; that the universality of men, finally, put to work the ardent genius, the sustained application that they have been seen to deploy in harming one another; suppose, I say, such a miracle accomplished, and you will soon see if the industrious life is favorable to the development of human faculties.

§ 6. Not only is industry the path where humanity can give the most development and extension to its forces, but it is also that where it uses them with the most rectitude and morality. Man is naturally instructed in labor to make good use of his faculties with respect to himself. As he works only to satisfy his needs, he forbids himself no honest enjoyment; but as he brings himself to labor only by a virtuous effort, as he increases his fortune only with great difficulty, it seems that he must be naturally disposed to enjoy with moderation the goods that industry gives him.

It goes without saying that I speak here of the true industrious man, and not of the man who gambles; of the slowly amassed fortune, as fortune acquired by labor almost always is, and not of that which intrigue or speculation can give all at once. It is with wealth as with all forces: to use it reasonably, one must have used it for some time; it is an apprenticeship to be made, and this apprenticeship is done well only when one enriches oneself by degrees. Any man whose fortune is very rapid begins by committing follies: it is the ordinary misfortune of parvenus. We see, thank God, enough examples of it; I know the name of a certain tax farmer who lost four hundred thousand francs in one session of écarté; he needed that, he said, to give himself some excitement and get his blood circulating. We have seen, in certain salons, bulls demonstrate mathematically that it was not possible to live on sixty thousand francs of income; and such is the extravagance of the expenditures made by the parvenus of the treasury and the stock exchange, that, if the rich of old give in but a little to the desire for imitation, sixty thousand francs of income will soon indeed be a mediocre fortune. But the men who thus push toward ostentation, those who most give others the example of display, are the men made rich overnight in gambling dens and antechambers, and not the industrious men whom a long and honest labor has enriched.

The industrious life has often been reproached for giving us an unseemly eagerness for gain.

“There is not in the United States,” observes M. de Sismondi, “any American who does not propose to himself an advance in fortune, and a rapid advance. The gain to be made is the first consideration of life; and, in the freest nation in the world, liberty itself has lost its price, compared to profit. The calculating spirit descends even to the children; it subjects territorial properties to constant speculation; it stifles the progress of the mind, the taste for the arts, letters, and sciences: it impresses upon the American character a stain that it will be difficult to efface [^302].”

This excess, supposing it to be founded, could not be justly imputed to the industrious life. From the fact that a people has renounced all brigandage, all unjust means of enriching itself, it in no way follows that it must be sensitive only to the pleasure of increasing its physical well-being. It may well be that this care occupies it too much; but this is surely not because it has given an inoffensive direction to the exercise of its faculties: nothing would prevent it from giving less time to the arts that provide for the needs of the body, and more to those that occupy themselves with the culture and pleasures of the intelligence. The love of the sciences and of poetry can be found united, even in the lowest ranks of society, with the spirit of industry. The peasants of Scotland, observes an English writer, have embellished their rustic life with all the charms of a perfected civilization. A Scottish farmer spends the better part of his modest income so that his sons may acquire what he esteems most in the world, knowledge [^303]. It is not, therefore, an effect of industry to make us touched only by the pleasure of increasing our material enjoyments. Besides, if the first disposition of man, in the industrious life as in all others, is to provide for his physical needs, this mode of existence is incontestably the one that leads him most quickly to the point of desiring pleasures of a higher order.

Industry, which certain moralists affect to represent to us as a source of vices, true industry is the nursing mother of good morals. It is very possible that industrious peoples are less rigid than certain dominating peoples; they surely do not have the austerity of the Spartans and the Romans of the early days of the republic; but if they do not indulge in the rigorism that warlike or monastic associations have so often displayed, they are not subject either to falling into the same excesses; if they deprive themselves of nothing, they have for a principle to abuse nothing; and, keeping equally far from abstinence and debauchery, from parsimony and prodigality, they form themselves in the practice of two eminently useful private virtues, temperance and economy, which are but the well-regulated use of our faculties in relation to ourselves, or the habit of using everything while making an excess of nothing.

It is worthy of remark that the sects of Stoics, that ascetic moralists, have hardly shown themselves except in countries of domination, and in epochs when there remained nothing but to consume in pomp and debauchery the goods that had been acquired by brigandage. Morality becomes at once less lax and less absurdly severe in the country and in the times of industry. One sees there neither Neros, who give themselves over without shame to the foulest debaucheries, nor Senecas who become puerilely indignant against the men who have invented how to preserve ice and to drink cool when it is hot [^304]. One reserves one’s indignation for the vices that enervate men, that degrade them, that destroy their faculties or exhaust their resources; but one otherwise forbids oneself no innocent pleasure, one permits oneself all those from which no harm can result either for oneself or for others. That is how the industrious life acts upon morals.

We have so little studied this mode of existence, that we are still rather clumsy at discerning its effects. An economist, wishing to defend industry against the reproach made against it by ascetic declaimers of corrupting morals, said that there is something profoundly moral in the conquest of nature by man. There is neither morality nor immorality in making conquests over nature; but the man who wishes to enrich himself by this means cannot do without activity, application, order, foresight, economy, frugality, etc.; and that is how industry usefully influences morality.

§ 7. Finally, while industry makes us contract private habits so favorable to the conservation of our forces, it banishes all violence from our mutual relations.

It has been believed until now that it was possible to make peace reign among men by a certain political organization, whatever might be, moreover, the way of life and the economic regime of the society.

The Greek philosophers always began by positing slavery as a principle, and then they sought by what political arrangement one could ensure public order. A city, to be complete and perfect, says Aristotle first, must be composed of free men and slaves. Free men, he adds, must be freed from all the cares required for the satisfaction of primary needs. The only occupations worthy of them, he says further, are the exercise of power and the contemplative life or the study of the liberal sciences [^305]. Then, after having thus founded society on slavery, our philosopher seeks what form of government is most suited to maintaining peace therein. To resolve this problem, he had studied no fewer than one hundred and fifty-eight constitutions, according to some writers, and no fewer than two hundred and fifty, according to others.

Certain political thinkers of our day first posit as fact that all classes of men have necessarily opposed interests; that, by the very nature of things, there is not one that does not found its prosperity on privileges or monopolies contrary to the prosperity of others, and then they claim by their art to make all these enemy classes live in peace. “The subdivision of our modern societies into so many diverse estates and trades produces too many opposed interests,” they say, “for any revolutionary skill to be able to unite them in a solid bundle. Establish freedom of commerce, you will have satisfied the shipowner who wishes to traverse the vast expanse of the sea without hindrance; you will please the consumer who wishes to buy good merchandise cheaply; but how will you make this manufacturer, who founds his sales on the exclusion of foreign competition, share their sentiments? Everywhere liberty and monopoly are in presence in the industrial world, as equality and privilege are in the political world. It is therefore only by illusions, by fables, by mendacious rumors, that one can regiment these contrary interests under a common banner; to become disunited, they have only to look at one another.”

And does one wish to know what remedy the author of these words proposes for this opposition? It is to regiment all analogous interests, to arm them, and to give them the means to defend their exclusive pretensions, which he calls the permanent and general interests of society: he claims to found order by constituting, by rendering permanent and indestructible the anarchy that he himself has just pointed out [^306].

The publicists of the liberal school, unlike those of the monarchical school, do not believe, for their part, in the necessity of this opposition between the interests of the diverse classes, and they maintain that everyone could live without the help of violence and iniquity; however, they do not deny that there are in society many unjust pretensions, many people who wish to get to fortune by bad means; but they think that a skillful organization of power could neutralize all these vices, and make things go as if they did not exist.

In former times, much mockery was made of the alchemists: could one not mock a little the political thinkers who claim to establish peace by forms of government? Did the alchemists propose a more insoluble problem than these political thinkers? Is it more difficult to produce gold with other metals than to succeed, by I know not what combinations, in making peace emerge from slavery, from privilege, or from any other iniquitous way of enriching oneself?

Montesquieu, who so bitterly mocks in his Persian Letters the people who ruined themselves in search of the philosopher's stone, seems to me to have fallen into an error at least as enormous when he claimed to make liberty out of divisions and balances of power [^307]. If the English, in his eyes, are a free people, it is not because of their economic regime, and because one lives among them in general by means exempt from violence. He takes no account of these causes; he does not even seek if they exist; the true reason for him of the liberty of the English is that the legislative power is separated, among them, from the executive, the executive from the judicial; it is that the public power is divided into three branches that mutually obstruct one another, in such a way that none can oppress.

“Here,” he says, “is the fundamental constitution of the English government. The legislative body being composed of two parts, the one will chain the other by its mutual power of prevention. Both will be bound by the executive power, which will itself be bound by the legislative. These three powers should form a repose or an inaction; but as, by the necessary movement of things, they will be constrained to go, they will be forced to go in concert [^308].”This is, according to Montesquieu, by what artifices liberty has been obtained in England. I doubt that Raymond Lulle and Nicolas Flamel ever wrote anything less reasonable on the art of transmuting metals.

Following the example of Montesquieu, most publicists of our age have thought that it was only by a good distribution of public powers that men were prevented from doing mutual violence to each other. Is oppression excessive in Turkey? It is because all powers are confounded there; is power moderate in most of the monarchies of Europe? It is because it is everywhere more or less divided; why did liberty not emerge from the constitution of 1791? It is because the powers were poorly distributed therein; why was the Convention terrorist? It is because it united all powers; why did the Directory carry out the 18 Fructidor? It is because, in the constitution of the Year III, the powers were too separate. Finally, there is not a public disorder, not a political violence, whose cause one is not always ready to show in some organic vice of the established powers.

Certainly, the organization of these powers is of great importance; but certainly also it is not the first thing to consider. The first thing to consider is the manner in which society generally provides for its subsistence. Such, in effect, could be the economic regime of society that the most skillful political organization would not succeed in making peace reign therein. Say, like the Greek philosophers, that one must be fed by slaves; say, like our monarchical writers, that all classes of society want to have privileges, and that each class must have its own; suppose men given over to the spirit of domination, of rapine, of exaction, of monopoly, and I defy any political skill to ever establish a real and durable peace among them.

It is necessary, therefore, above all, to have peace, to agree upon a mode of existence with which it is compatible. Now, I say that it is compatible only with industry. Not only is the industrious life the only one where men can give a great development to their faculties, a true perfection to their personal habits, it is also the only one that allows for good social habits, the only one in which it is possible to live in peace.

In countries where industry is the common resource of men, they can all satisfy their needs without causing each other any mutual damage, without reciprocally infringing upon their liberty. By the very fact that each directs his activity toward things, it is visible that no man is oppressed. One may well devote oneself, each on his own side, to the study of the sciences, to the practice of the arts, yet no one thereby does violence to anyone; one can enter these paths from all sides, and give oneself free rein there without fear of clashing; one does not meet there, one does not create obstacles for each other, even when one competes there. He who exercises an industry other than mine does not trouble me; on the contrary, his labor encourages mine, for it offers me the prospect of a means of exchange, and the possibility of satisfying two orders of needs by creating only a single kind of product. He who devotes himself to the same labor as I do does not trouble me any more; his competition, far from preventing me from acting, stimulates me to do better; and if I have less success than he, I can be afflicted by my incapacity, but not complain of his injustice. There are therefore in the career of the productive arts only innocent rivalries; there is no oppressor, no oppressed, and it is not true to say that one is naturally in a state of war there.

All domination disappears from places where man seeks solely in labor the means to provide for his subsistence; the relations of master and slave are destroyed; artificial inequalities vanish; there remains between individuals no other inequality than that which results from their nature. A man can be happier than another, because he can be more active, more skillful, more enlightened; but no one prospers at the detriment of his fellow man; no one obtains anything except by exchange or production; the happiness of each extends as far as the inoffensive exercise of his forces can carry it, that of no one goes beyond.

If there existed no means of prospering without harming, there would be in this world neither order, nor peace, nor practicable liberty. But the proposition that every man lives at the expense of another, true in domination, is false and absurd in industry. It is very true that in a country of tyrants and thieves, one prospers only by despoiling one another, if indeed one can prosper in such countries. But it is surely not the same in a country of people who work; everyone here can prosper at once. Two plowmen who simultaneously improve their land, two manufacturers, two merchants, two scientists, two artists, who devote themselves with intelligence, each on his own side, to the exercise of their profession, can without a doubt prosper together. What I say of two persons can be said of ten, of a hundred, of a thousand; of all the individuals of a city, of a province, of a kingdom, of the entire world. All the peoples of the earth can prosper at once, and experience attests to it; for the human race, considered in mass, is certainly richer today than it was three hundred years ago, and with all the more reason than it was six centuries, twelve centuries back.

It is therefore true that, in industry, all men can satisfy their needs without doing mutual violence to each other. If it happens that men of the same profession, or of diverse professions, regard each other as enemies, that industrious and commercial peoples make war on each other, it is not, as Montaigne says, because the profit of one is the damage of the other, but because they have the misfortune of not understanding the true accord that nature has placed between their interests; it is not, as Rousseau says, because their interests are opposed, but because they do not see that they are in accord; it is not, as M. de Bonald says, because commerce is a state of hostility, but because they do not have the true spirit of commerce. These are truths that time clarifies every day, and which will soon no longer be contested even by those who believe themselves most interested in disregarding them.

In a word, I do not deny that many unjust pretensions can be formed; but I deny that by the nature of things the interests of men are opposed. I do not deny either that they are opposed there where violence has acted and troubled the natural course of things; but I say that without this trouble they would not have been.

For example, in the current state of things, there are in France and in England cotton spinners whose interests are opposed, that is not doubtful. Our spinners, less skillful than those of England, could not sustain themselves without the aid of monopoly: they must prevent the English spinners from selling us their products, without which they would be forced to close their manufactories. But what has created these two classes of enemy interests? It is precisely the unjust favor that was shown to the Frenchman who undertook to spin cotton. Without the premiums granted to his clumsiness, to his inexperience, to his laziness, he would not have engaged in a career where he could not sustain competition with men more active or more advanced than he; or else he would have engaged in it with the means to struggle, without the shameful aid of injustice. He would have gone to England, he would have instructed himself there with care in the processes of the art he wished to practice, he would have bought machines there, he would have brought back workers from there, and he would have thus succeeded in importing into France a branch of industry capable of maintaining itself there on its own; the spinners of England and of France would not now have opposed interests.

It is believed that it is not possible to naturalize a foreign industry, in a country where it has not yet existed, except by surrounding it in that country, to the prejudice of native consumers and foreign manufacturers, with a multitude of unjust privileges. It is on the contrary by these privileges that one succeeds in preventing it from being naturalized in the country where one wishes to introduce it, and where, in many cases, it would have established itself on its own. Such is, for example, according to the opinion of one of our most distinguished scientists and our most skillful manufacturers [^309], the advantage of France in the price of most of the things necessary for the fabrication of pottery, and notably in the price of plastic clay, kaolin, calcined flint, and in that of various processes and various utensils, that one could easily in France, despite the inferiority of industry, fabricate fine pottery as good as that of England, at a better price than in England itself. However, our fine pottery, much less good than that of England, is more expensive by twenty percent. Whence comes that? Precisely from the fact that one has pretended to make, to encourage it, prohibitions that have been granted to it to the detriment of everyone. Our manufacturers, aided by chemists, and versed in technology, would surely be instructed enough to have things made as well as the English manufacturers, especially with the advantages of position of which I spoke above. But it would be necessary for them to take pains, to make long, sometimes fruitless, always expensive trials. Now, competing only among themselves, and having in France a market that seems sufficient to them, they have no powerful motive to make efforts; they have no fear of foreign competition; the prohibition frees them from it; and the government, which wished to serve industry, has done it a grave wrong by permitting the manufacturers to remain in apathy.

Not only, therefore, is it violence that creates opposed interests, but it is also violence that makes clumsy workers. If things had been left to their natural course, if no one had been able to prosper except by his labor, without any mixture of injustice and violence, not only would the arts be more equally developed everywhere, but the artisans of diverse countries, more capable of competing together, would have less opposed interests: the opposition between the spinners of France and England, for example, would not be stronger than between those of Rouen and Saint-Quentin.

What I say of the inoffensive character of industry is equally true, from whatever aspect one considers it. Whether men, in this mode of existence, act together or in isolation, the effect is always the same, and the collective action of associations is no more hostile therein than are the isolated efforts of individuals.

Whatever the general direction that men give to their forces, they can only derive a great advantage from them by associating, and by establishing a certain subordination among themselves. They need to unite, to form a hierarchy, to subordinate themselves for defense as for attack, and to act upon nature as to exercise oppression. There is therefore, in industry as in war, league, association, union of efforts.

“In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,” says an author, “every man who felt some strength of body and soul, eager to display it, gave himself over, under the slightest pretext, to the pleasure of warring with a small number of companions, sometimes for his own account, sometimes for that of another. The militia was a pure traffic; men of war hired themselves out on one side and the other, according to their caprice and their advantage, and treated for their service as workers for their labor. They engaged themselves, in detached bands and with various ranks, to the first leader of their liking, to him who, by his bravery, his experience, his skill, had known how to inspire their confidence; and this one, for his part, hired himself out with them to a prince, to a city, to whoever had need of him [^310].”

That is how one associates in brigandage.

Very analogous arrangements are made in the industrious life. Every man who feels some activity, some intelligence, some capacity for labor, devotes himself, with a certain number of companions, not to the shameful pleasure of pillaging, but to the noble pleasure of creating something useful. One engages in an enterprise of agriculture, of manufacture, of transport, of teaching, of preaching, etc., as one formerly engaged in an enterprise of war. The farmer, the shipowner, the manufacturer, the head of a literary and scientific enterprise, have on their payroll, like the ancient chiefs of militia, a more or less great number of men. One sometimes sees heads of manufactures employ up to ten thousand laborers. There is established between the workers, the workshop heads, the entrepreneurs, the same subordination as in war, between the superior chief, the subordinate officers, and the soldiers. Finally, one sees forming in the industrial regime associations even more numerous and more varied than in the midst of war and brigandage. Only the object of these associations is entirely different, and the results, consequently, are very different.

The reader knows why one associates in all domination. Let us take for example the regime of privileges: there is not, as has been seen, any aggregation there that does not propose some iniquitous object: these merchants are united to prevent others from conducting the same commerce as they; these nobles, to keep the commoners from public service, and to draw from the people, in the form of tax, what they no longer receive by title of feudal due; all the members of this government, to extend their empire far and wide, and to put more peoples under contribution; these populations in mass, to open by armed force outlets for their commerce, and to enlarge the space from which they can exclude the competition of foreigners: it is a question for all of privileges to obtain, of exactions to exercise, of violences to commit.

It is not so in industry: one is equally associated there, but it is to act upon things, and not to despoil men; it is still to defend oneself, it is no longer at all to oppress. There is not one association whose object is hostile. One is united for the propagation of a doctrine, for the extension of a method, for the opening of a canal, for the construction of a road; one is leagued against the scourges of nature, against the risks of the sea, against the dangers of fire or the ravages of hail; but there is visibly nothing oppressive in all that. It is not a question here, as in the ancient corporations, of monopolizing, of prohibiting, of preventing others from doing: far from such coalitions, thus directed, limiting the faculties of anyone, they add to the power of everyone, and there is not an individual who is not stronger by the fact of their existence than he would be if they did not exist. Also, while the corporations of the regime of privileges were an ever-active cause of irritation, of jealousy, of hatred, of discord, the associations of the industrial regime are a principle of union as much as of prosperity [^311].What I say of the small associations, I must also say of the large ones, and of those that are formed for government, as of those that are formed for some particular object of science, morality, or commerce. The association charged with the public service does not, in the industrial regime, have a more aggressive character than the others. Power is not a patrimony there; those who possess it do not hold it by their sword; they do not reign by title of master; they do not exercise a domination; the tax is not a tribute that is paid to them. Far from the community belonging to them, they belong to the community; they depend on it by the power they exercise; it is from it that they have received this power. The government, in industry, is in reality only a commercial company, backed by the community, and appointed by it to guard public order. The community, in creating it, does not give itself to it; it does not give it authority over itself; it does not confer upon it a power over persons and properties that it does not itself have: it gives it power only against malevolent wills, manifested by offensive acts; it permits it to act against malefactors only by reason of these wills and these acts. For the rest, each man is absolute master of his person, his property, his actions; and the magistrate has no right to meddle in any way in the life of a citizen so long as he does not trouble by any unjust act the existence of any other. As power is not instituted with a view to opening a career to the ambitious, and only to create an industry for those who have none, society does not permit it to extend itself without reason, and to enlarge the sphere of its action in order to be able to multiply the number of its creatures; it watches attentively that it confines itself to its object. On the other hand, it gives it in men and in money only the help it needs to properly fulfill its task. It even regrets having to make such a use of its capital and its activity; not that this expenditure, so long as there are unjust pretensions to reduce, ambitions to contain, or misdeeds to repress, does not seem to it very useful and even very productive; but because it would be still better for it if it were not necessary, and if it could employ in acting upon things the time and resources it consumes in defending itself against certain men. Thus, as all its members learn to make a more inoffensive use of their forces, it diminishes by degrees those of its government, and never leaves it but those that it needs to preserve it from all trouble.

Finally, what I say of the action of the government on society, I can also say of the action of societies with regard to one another. These vast aggregations do not have a more hostile character than all the particular associations of which they are formed. It would be difficult, when individuals generally turn their activity toward labor, for nations to still wish to prosper by brigandage. It is not a question for them in the industrial regime of conquering thrones for their ambitious, places for their intriguers, exclusive markets for their commerce. The time that other peoples spend warring, they employ in developing all their resources and in putting themselves in communication with whoever has useful exchanges to propose to them. They hope for the civilization and prosperity of their neighbors as for their own, because they know that one can have sure relations only with enlightened peoples, nor profitable relations except with rich peoples. They make particular hopes for the civilization of their enemies, because they know also that the only true means of no longer having enemies is for other peoples to become civilized. All their efforts against the outside are limited to preventing the harm that one might attempt to do them; they keep strictly on the defensive; they even deplore the sad necessity to which they are reduced of defending themselves: not, doubtless, that they are insensitive to injury, or that they lack the means to repel it; but because they know how fatal even the most legitimate and most successful wars still are, and how much preferable it would be for them and for the world if they could employ in useful labors the time and resources that the barbarity of their enemies obliges them to sacrifice to their security. Thus they would have, despite the superiority of their power, no greater desire than to be able to lay down their arms, abandon their fortresses, relax the bonds that the necessity of defense has formed, let the local spirit and individual independence act in liberty, and consecrate in peace all their forces to opening new sources of prosperity to the world[^312] .

The facts bear irrefutable witness to these truths. It is impossible not to see that the relations of men everywhere become all the easier and more peaceful as they approach more nearly the industrial life and better understand its true interests. This is especially evident in America. There is no need in the United States, to obtain peace, for either factitious hierarchies or balances of power. One does not seek to establish it either by the opposition of contrary interests, or by the violent submission of all interests to a single will. It is not a question of subordinating the laboring classes to a military aristocracy, this aristocracy to kings, the kings to a pope. It is no more a question of placing in presence democracy, aristocracy, and royalty, and of making these three rival forces hold each other mutually in respect. America leaves to Europe all these marvelous inventions of its politics; it tends to peace by other means. Peace results above all from its economic regime. It suffices, in a way, for it to reign, that the universality of its citizens seek fortune only in labor and free exchanges. By the sole effect of this tendency, millions of individuals, in the midst of the infinite diversity of their movements, act without clashing and prosper without harming each other. They form the most varied associations; but such is the object of these associations and the manner in which they are directed, that they do violence to no one, and could not excite any complaints. The working classes are subordinate to the entrepreneurs who furnish them with labor, the heads of enterprise to the engineers who give them counsel, the engineers to the capitalists who procure them funds; each finds himself placed by his needs in the dependence of the men whose help or support he claims; but this entirely natural subordination does not need for its establishment the assistance of the executioner, that obligatory auxiliary of unnatural subordinations. The citizens, subject to public order, are moreover the subjects of no one. The government, charged with repressing the injustices of individuals, can in its turn be contained by society; it is accountable to it; and as the entirely laborious life of the citizens leaves little to do for the maintenance of order, it is not given enough force that it could free itself from this responsibility, even if it could conceive the thought of evading it. Finally, Anglo-American society as a whole no more affects to dominate other peoples than its governments pretend to dominate the citizens; one does not see it occupied either with invading territories, or with founding distant dependent colonies, or with opening exclusive markets for itself by violence. The union of the States, their subordination to a common center, their militias, their army, their military navy have for their sole object the security of the country. And although, in this deployment of purely defensive forces, America remains far behind what it could do, it still goes far beyond what it would wish. Its most ardent desire would be to be able to be entirely devoted to its affairs, to its labors, to the care of its intellectual culture and its moral perfection; and when one day industrial activity, having become predominant in Europe, will have at last destroyed there the leagues of ambition, it will be happy doubtless to break that which we constrain it to form for its defense, and to be able to offer the world the spectacle of innumerable populations, given over without reserve to the arts of peace.

America, I say, will be happy to relax the bonds that we have constrained it to form. It is indeed scarcely but for its security and because of the dominating spirit of the governments of Europe that it has federated and that it remains united. There are scarcely in industry motives for such vast coalitions; there is no enterprise that demands the union of ten, of twenty, of thirty million men. It is the spirit of domination that has formed these monstrous aggregations or that has rendered them necessary; it is the spirit of industry that will dissolve them. One of its last, its greatest, its most salutary effects will be to multiply the centers of action, and, so to speak, to municipalize the world.

Under its influence, peoples will begin by grouping themselves more naturally; one will no longer see united under the same denomination twenty peoples foreign to one another, sometimes disseminated in the most opposite quarters of the globe, and less separated still by distances than by language and customs. Peoples will draw near, will agglomerate according to their real analogies and following their true interests.

Then, although formed, each on its own side, of more homogeneous elements, they will yet be infinitely less opposed among themselves. No longer having mutually to fear each other, no longer tending to isolate themselves, they will no longer gravitate so strongly toward their centers and will no longer repel each other so violently by their extremities. Their frontiers will cease to be bristling with fortresses; they will no longer be bordered by a double or triple line of customs officers and soldiers. A few interests will still hold together the members of the same aggregation, a more particular community of language, a greater conformity of customs, the influence of capital cities from which one will have contracted the habit of drawing one's ideas, one's laws, one's fashions, one's usages; but these interests will continue to distinguish the aggregations without any enmities remaining between them. It will happen, in each country, that the inhabitants closest to the frontiers will have more communications with neighboring foreigners than with distant compatriots. There will moreover take place a continual fusion of the inhabitants of each country with those of the others. Each will carry his capital and his activity where he sees more means to make them fructify. Thereby, the same arts will soon be cultivated with equal success among all peoples; the same ideas will circulate in all countries; the old national customs, those narrow and petty customs that barbarism had decorated with the name of patriotism, will be effaced more and more; the languages themselves will draw closer, will borrow their vocabularies, and will end in the long run by melting into a common idiom for all cultivated peoples; uniformity of costume will be established in all climates despite the indications of nature: the same needs, a similar civilization, will develop everywhere.

At the same time, a multitude of localities, acquiring more importance, will feel less the need to remain united to their capitals; they will in their turn become centers of activity; the centers of activity will go on multiplying ceaselessly; and finally the vastest countries will end by representing but a single people, composed of an infinite number of uniform aggregations, aggregations between which will be established, without confusion and without violence, the most complicated and at the same time the easiest, the most peaceful, and the most profitable relations.

§ 8. As much, therefore, as the industrial life is proper, on the one hand, to develop our knowledge, and on the other hand, to perfect our morals, so much, in the third place, is it opposed to violence, to antisocial pretensions, and to all that can trouble the peace. One sees, in sum, that this mode of existence is that in which men use their forces with the most variety and extent; where they use them best with regard to themselves; where, in their private, public, and national relations, they do each other reciprocally the least harm. Let us conclude that it is that in which they can become the most free, or rather which is the only one where they can acquire a true liberty.

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Notes

[^291]: Until now, however, a very capital point had been left in obscurity: that we can create wealth by giving value to men, just as we give it to things. See further on, ch. 13. [^292]: Society awarding the direction of public service to men of its choice! What a chimera! Can society act collectively? Would you have it put its government up for auction? Society cannot act collectively; but it can act through delegates, and surely nothing would prevent it, through the intermediary of its delegates, from granting or withdrawing its confidence from a certain party of statesmen, from a certain ministerial coalition currently in possession of power, or aspiring to obtain it. Not only would this be practicable, but it is practiced every day. [^293]: This is the reproach made against it by all the political thinkers of antiquity, and it is by this that they claim to justify the exclusion from the city of most men devoted to industrial professions. [^294]: Bonald, Réflexions sur l'intér. général de l'Europe, p. 46. [^295]: Book 1, ch. 21. [^296]: Disc. on Ineq., the notes, note 9. [^297]: Journal des Débats of December 9, 1820, col. 4. There are few writings of the monarchical school in which this same idea is not found. It serves as the basis for all the arguments by which they have claimed to prove the necessity of dividing society into corporations and orders. [^298]: This is the banal accusation leveled against it by most publicists of the monarchical school, and by many Christian moralists, especially in the Catholic communion. Writers of another order, philosophers, and notably Rousseau, have brought the same charge against it. [^299]: See, in the witty work entitled Raison et Folie, a remarkable piece on the moral influence of the division of labor. See also M. Say, who, in the latest editions of his Traité d'éc. pol., book I, ch. 8, has allowed himself to be carried away by the specious ideas, though ill-founded in my opinion, of M. Lémontey. [^300]: See above, ch. VII, p. 254. [^301]: The study of the sciences, among the ancients, was considered liberal only insofar as one abstained from applying them and making them serve some useful purpose (Aristotle, Polit., book 8, ch. 2, § 3). It appears that in this regard we are not yet well cured of the prejudices of barbarism. It is said that some members of one of the foremost learned bodies of Europe were recently seen to refuse as colleagues men who were very distinguished as scholars, because these men had the misfortune of also being very distinguished as practitioners. [^302]: Nouveau Principes d'Éc. pol., vol. I, p. 457, 2nd ed. [^303]: Rev. Brit., vol. XIV, pp. 38 and 39: life of Robert Burns. [^304]: Quest. Naturelles, book 4, ch. 13. [^305]: Polit., book 1, ch. 2, § 1; book 2, ch. 6, § 2; book 7, ch. 3, § 1, and book 8, ch. 2, § 3; translation by M. Thurot. [^306]: Journal des Débats of December 9, 1820. [^307]: See The Spirit of the Laws. [^308]: The Spirit of the Laws, book 2, ch. 6. [^309]: M. Brongniart, Mémoire au ministre de l'intérieur, unpublished. [^310]: Goethe's periodical collection on art and antiquity, 2nd vol., 3rd issue, examination of the Count of Carmagnola. See this play, translated from the Italian by M. Fauriel. [^311]: The corporations divided the men of all trades, without creating any new force for industry. Associations, on the contrary, create immense forces for labor, without producing any enmity among men. [^312]: From this passion of industrial peoples for peace, it has been concluded that they must be little disposed to repel foreign aggression. The opposite conclusion should have been drawn: the more they feel the need for peace, the more disposed they must be to repel any attack. It is very true that men are less fierce in times of industry than in eras of domination. The savage virtues, as Malthus very rightly observes, appear only where they are necessary. Now, as one provides for one's subsistence by less hostile means, general security becomes greater, and each person can without peril lay aside a part of his ferocity. But does it follow that because one is less exposed to insult in an industrial society, one is more inclined to suffer it? No, without a doubt. Energy is not destroyed; it simply has fewer occasions to be exercised, or, to put it better, it attacks other obstacles.