But man is a free agent, and consequently fallible. He is subject to ignorance and to passion. His will, which is liable to err, enters as an element into the play of the economic laws. He may misunderstand them, forget them, divert them from their purpose. As the physiologist, after admiring the infinite wisdom displayed in the structure and relations of our organs and viscera, studies these organs likewise in their abnormal state when sickly and diseased, we shall have to penetrate into a new world—the world of social Disturbances.
We shall pave the way for this new study by some considerations on man himself. It would be impossible for us to give an account of social evil, of its origin, its effects, its design—of the limits, always more and more contracted, within which it is shut up by its own action (which constitutes what I might almost venture to call a harmonic dissonance), did we not extend our investigation to the necessary consequences of Free-Will, to the errors of Self-Interest, which are constantly corrected, and to the great laws of human Responsibility and Solidarity.
We have seen the germ of all the social Harmonies included in these two principles—Property, Liberty. We shall see that all social Dissonances are only the development of these two antagonistic principles—Spoliation, Oppression.
The words Property and Liberty, in fact, express only two aspects of the same idea. In an economical point of view, Liberty is allied to the act of production—Property to the things produced. And since Value has its foundation in the human act, we may conclude that Liberty implies and includes Property. The same relation exists between Oppression and Spoliation.
Liberty! here at length we have the principle of harmony. Oppression! here we have the principle of dissonance. The struggle of these two powers fills the annals of the human race.
And as the design of Oppression is to effect an unjust appropriation, as it resolves itself into and is summed up in spoliation, it is Spoliation that must form the subject of our inquiry.
Man comes into this world bound to the yoke of Want, which is pain. [p319]
He cannot escape from it but by subjecting himself to the yoke of Labour, which is pain also.
He has, then, only a choice of pains, and he detests pain.
This is the reason why he looks around him, and if he sees that his fellow-man has accumulated wealth, he conceives the thought of appropriating it. Hence comes false property, or Spoliation.