[1267] “The only thing that justice demands is the payment of debt; beyond that we have no right to impose any obligation whatsoever.” (Bourgeois, op. cit., pp. 45 and 56.)
[1268] “Thanks to this fact, rivals need not seek to eliminate one another, but may well be content to exist side by side. Specialisation is undertaken, our author thinks, not with the idea of producing more, as the economists seem to teach, but merely with a view to enabling us to exist under the new conditions of life which await us.” (Division du Travail.)
[1269] “Every brook that flows, every lamp that burns, every word spoken, every gesture made, betokens a movement in the direction of the greater uniformity of the universe.” (Lalande, La Dissolution.)
[1270] This is the sense in which solidarity has been understood by the Lausanne philosopher Charles Secrétan, in his book La Civilisation et la Croyance, and the same point of view has been adopted by M. Alfred Fouillée. “Solidarity,” writes Fouillée, “has all the practical value of an ideal force. The recognition of the profound identity which pervades humanity and the adoption of an ideal of perfect unity as the supreme object of rational desire must assume the form of a duty in the eyes of every human being. We should anticipate the unity of the human race, which is as yet far from being realised, and which will never be perfect perhaps, by acting as if we were already one.” (Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1901.)
[1271] Auguste Comte, in his usual authoritative manner, declared that solidarity rests upon the fact that men can represent one another, and consequently may be held responsible for one another.
[1272] See a collection of addresses by various authors published under the title of Les Applications sociales de la Solidarité (1904).
[1273] These laws of public assistance are among the most remarkable practical manifestations of the solidarist movement. They are quite a new feature in French public life, and until their appearance relief, whether given by the State, the department, or the commune, was purely optional (except in a few isolated cases, such as in that of waifs and strays). To mention only the principal ones in France, the law of July 15, 1893, made relief in the form of medical attendance for all destitute invalids obligatory upon the communes. The law of July 14, 1905, extended a similar benefit to all invalids and to all persons over seventy years of age in the form of pensions varying in amount from 60 to 240 francs per annum (360 in Paris). Finally, the law of April 5, 1910, secures a pension to all workmen at the age of sixty, the charge being divided between the State, the employers, and the workmen themselves. It is a kind of payment made by the members of the present generation to the survivors of a past one. This relief is clearly of the nature of a social debt, and justifies us in treating it as the outcome of a quasi-contract, for on the one hand it constitutes an obligation fixed by law on the part of the commune, the department, or the State, as the case may be—an obligation which they cannot escape—and on the other hand a right on the part of the beneficiary, as in the case of a creditor in an action for the recovery of debt.
[1274] A very curious application of this national solidarity has come to light quite recently. Formerly the French Government would only sanction foreign loans if the borrowing country promised to apply some part of its funds to French industry. That meant linking the rentier and the French manufacturers by a forced kind of solidarity, the first being unwilling to lend money unless that money in some way returned to the second person for goods purchased. This is just where the claim of the workers, who justly demand a minimum wage, comes in.
[1275] The doctrine of quasi-contract might lead to the one conclusion as well as to the other. M. Bourgeois himself seems to incline rather in the direction of associationism. “The Radical party has a social doctrine, a doctrine that might be summed up in one word—association.” (Preface to M. Buisson’s La Politique radicale.)
[1276] “The Apotheosis of Solidarity,” printed in large type, recently appeared as a headline in one of the French morning papers. The reference was to a banquet of 30,000 mutualists.