What if I had to sound the consequences of another principle, the sovereign authority which men also seek in these days to set up, the right, I mean, of populations, or of some part of a population, to dissolve the State with which they are connected, and to range themselves under another State, or to constitute themselves into new and independent States? What would become of the existence, or even of the very name of country, if it also were thus left to be dealt with according to the fluctuating wills of men, and the special interests of such or such of its members? There is in the destiny of men, whether of generations or individuals, a great part which they have no share in deciding or disposing of; a man does not choose his family, neither does he select his country; it is the natural state of man to live in the place where he is born, in the society where is his cradle. The cases are infinitely rare which can permit of the bonds being rent asunder by which man is attached to the soil, the citizen to the state; which can justify his leaving the bosom of his country, to order to separate himself from it absolutely, and to strive to lay the foundation of a new country. We have just been spectators of such an attempt; we have seen some of the States which form the nation of the United States of America, abjure this union, and erect themselves into an independent confederation. Wherefore? In order to maintain in their bosom the institution of slavery. By what right? By the right, it is said, of every people, or portion of a people, to change its government at discretion. The States which remained faithful to the ancient American Confederation denied the principle and combatted the attempt. They succeeded in maintaining the federal Union, and in abolishing slavery. I am one of those who think that they had both right and reason on their side. Many years before the struggle commenced, one of the most eminent men in the United States, eminent by his character as well as his talents, a faithful representative of the interests of the States of the South, and an avowed apologist for negro slavery, Mr. Calhoun, did me the honour of transmitting to me all that he had written and said upon the subject. I was struck by the frank and earnest language with which he expressed his convictions, but no less by the futility of the efforts which he made to justify, upon general considerations and by historical necessities, the fact of slavery in his country. He would never have dared to paint it in its actual and living reality, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has done in her romances of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and of "Dred," which have everywhere excited so much sympathy and emotion. I became every day more and more convinced that there was here a radical iniquity and a social wound, of which it was at last time to efface the shame and to conjure the danger. It was with the motive of maintaining the system of slavery that the States of the South undertook to break up the great American State which was their country. Motive detestable for a deplorable act! Our epoch, so unfortunate in many respects, has, in my opinion, been fortunate in this, that it produced a Republic, the greatest of all Republics of ancient or of modern times, which has afforded us the example of an uncompromising resistance to an illegitimate popular desire, and of an unflinching respect for the tutelary principles of the life of States.
So far of the territorial questions, and those which concern the external relations of nations. Let me now speculate upon what the future has in store for those which involve domestic order and the organization of government. I meet here with the same confusion, the same complications, the same fluctuations between ideas and essays incoherent or inconsistent. At the base as at the summit of society, the monarchy and the republic are in collision: the monarchy reigns in events; the republic ferments in opinions.
The proposition is now universally received that society has the right not only to see clearly and to intervene in its own government, but to see so clearly and to intervene in such a manner as to justify the expression that it governs itself. The Constitutional Monarchy and the Republic profess each to attain this object: the one by a national representation, by the monarch's inviolability and his ministry's responsibility; the other by universal suffrage and the periodical elections of the great representatives of public power. But neither the constitutional monarchy nor the republic has as yet succeeded amongst us in obtaining firm possession of opinions and of events, of public confidence and of durable power. After and in spite of thirty-four years of prosperity, of peace, and of liberty, the constitutional power fell. The republic, accepted on its sudden appearance as the form of government which, as was affirmed, divided us least, after a few months of turbulent and sterile anarchy, fell also. In the place of the constitutional monarchy and of the republic there arose another form of government, a mixture of Dictatorship and of Republic, a sort of personal government combined with, universal suffrage. Will the essay have greater success? Events will decide. In the meantime let us be sincere with ourselves; the cause of so many painful and abortive attempts resides rather in the disposition of the people of France than in the acts of its governments: our revolutionary existence since 1789, our ambitious aspirings and disappointments, both equally immense, have left us at once very excited and very fatigued, full of impatience at the same time as of incertitude; we know not very well what we think or what we would have; our ideas are perplexed and confused; our wills vacillating and feeble; our minds have no fixed points, our conduct no determined objects; we often yield ourselves up readily against our better judgment, nay against our very wish, to whatever power extends its hand to seize us; but soon, very soon, we evince towards that power not a whit less exigency or unfairness; as soon as we feel ourselves rid of our most urgent cause for disquietude, our discontent is as precipitate as was our submission in the hour of peril. We are again disposed to be quarrelsome, and demand instant action in the midst even of our doubts and hesitation. Our revolutions have taught us the lesson neither of resistance nor of patience. Yet these are virtues without which it is idle to propose to found any free government.
I pass from political questions to social questions, and from the state of our political institutions to that of the relations existent between the different parts of society. I say the different parts to avoid saying different classes, for we cannot hear the word class pronounced without thinking that we are threatened with the re-establishment of privileges and exclusions, of that entire régime with its narrow compartments and inseparable barriers within which men were formerly enclosed, and ranked according to their origin, their name, their religion, or whatever other factitious or accidental qualification they might possess. In effect, this régime has fallen—fallen completely and definitively; all legal barriers have disappeared; all careers are open; all labour free: by individual merit and by labour every man may aspire to everything, and examples abound in confirmation of the principle. This was the great work, the great conquest of 1789; we celebrate it unceasingly, and we have often the air of forgetting that it ever occurred. The different ancient classes are still full of jealousy, of distrust, and of restless irritation; because they have to struggle for influence in the midst of liberty, they persuade themselves that they are still risking life and limb in defence of their situation and of their right. The Restoration was attacked and undermined on account, it was said, of the evils that the bourgeoisie had to endure, and the risks which it had to run at the hands of the nobles. Under the government of July, the working classes were told incessantly that they were the victims of the privileges and of the tyranny of the middle classes. Facts and actual events gave singularly the lie to such assertions. With what effect? In the hurry of passions and the intoxication of thought, men appealed to theories which had been already often produced on the stage of the world,—theories which have only served to agitate, never to satisfy it. Landed property and capital, labour and wages, the artificial distribution of the means of material happiness amongst men, have served sometimes as the subjects of unjust recrimination, sometimes of chimerical expectations. Attacks were made upon things which the assailants had no right to take; and promises were made to give things which the promisers had not the power to give.
I have heard it remarked by clear-sighted men who are good observers, that this malady of the mind is decreasing, and that even amongst the labouring classes themselves, false notions as to the conflict of capital and labour, as to the artificial settlement of wages, and the intervention of the State in the distribution of the material means of existence, are in discredit, and that the ambitious aspirings of the people, although continuing to be very democratic, have ceased to assume the form of Socialism. I ardently wish it were so: the passionate feelings which find their field in facts affecting the sphere of material subsistence, are the rudest, the most rebellious, and the most recalcitrant to the principles of the moral order: it is easier to deal with the aspirings of political ambition than with the ardent cravings for physical advantages. But I fear, I confess, that errors such as those which presented themselves under the names of Socialism and Communism, and which recently made so much noise, are not so discarded as we might hope them to be; that they are actually without a mouthpiece is not a sufficient proof of their defeat; materialism, and the evil instincts to which it leads or from which it springs, have penetrated very far amongst us, and a long period of social and moral progress in the midst of a society which has been well ordered will be necessary in order to surmount this danger.
Several years ago I put to a great manufacturer of Manchester, who had been Mayor of that immense centre of industry, the following question: "What amongst you is the proportion between the laborious and well-conducted workmen, who live respectably in their homes, set aside money in the savings' bank, and apply for books at the people's library, and the idle and disorderly workmen who pass their time at taverns, and only work so much as is necessary to furnish them with the means of subsistence?" After a moment's reflection, he replied: "The former are two-thirds of the whole number." After congratulating him, I added, "Allow me to put one more question. If you had amongst you great disorders, seditious assemblages, and riots, what would be the result?" "With us, sir," he said without hesitation, "the honest men are braver than the ill-conditioned ones." I congratulated him this time still more.
In these questions I had touched the root of the evil which afflicts us. It is to their shortcomings in morality, to their disorderly lives, that we must attribute the favour with which the working classes receive the fallacious theories that menace social order. The condition of these classes is hard and full of distressing accidents; whoever regards it closely, and with a little fairness and sympathy, cannot fail to be deeply moved by all the sufferings which they have to support, the privations from which they have no chance of escape, and the efforts which they must make to ensure themselves a living at best monotonous and full of hazard. The happy ones of the earth feel sometimes alarm and irritation, when they hear from the pulpit descriptions purer and more true to the life than are to be met with in philanthropical novels, of the precarious state and distresses of the lower orders. Beyond doubt, from pictures of this nature should be scrupulously excluded everything that would seem to excite sentiments of hostility, or that would set one class against another; still as the upper classes must resign themselves to the spectacle, it devolves more especially upon Christian Painters to place it before them. Nothing but strong moral convictions, and the habits of well living amongst the labouring classes, can furnish them with efficacious means of struggling against the temptations and resisting the ambitious yearnings, suggested to them by the spectacle of the world which surrounds them,—a world now at length transparent to all, a world of which the stir, the noise, the accidents, the adventures, penetrate with rapidity even to the workshops of our cities and the remotest recesses of our villages. What influence shall protect the masses of the people from the irritating and demoralizing effect of such a sight, unless it be the influence of religious principles, the moral discipline which religion maintains, and the moral serenity which religion diffuses over the rudest existences and the lives subjected to the greatest privations? And it is precisely religious belief and religious discipline, Christian faith and Christian law, which are now being attacked and undermined, and this far more in the obscurer classes, than in the brilliant regions of society!