If we could find this out, we should have an exact measure of the benefit resulting from the law. I confess I can form no idea of this part of the problem. But we must ask, at what price would this benefit, whatever it were, be purchased; and surely little reflection is needed in order to see that the certain inconveniences of legal repression would far exceed its problematical advantages.
In the first place, there are in France thirty-six millions of inhabitants. It would be necessary to exercise over them all a rigorous surveillance, to follow them into their fields, their workshops, to their domestic circles. Think of the number of functionaries, the increase of taxes, etc., which would be the result.
Then, those who are now industrious—and the number, thank God, is great—would be, no less than the idle, subjected to this intolerable inquisition. It is surely an immense inconvenience to subject a hundred innocent people to degrading measures, in order to punish one guilty person whom nature has herself taken it in hand to chastise.
And then, when does idleness begin? In the case of each man brought to justice, the most minute and delicate inquiries would be necessary. Was the accused really idle, or did he merely take [p484] necessary repose? Was he sick, or was he meditating, or was he saying his prayers, etc.? How could we appreciate all those shades of difference? Did he work harder and longer in the morning in order to have a little more time at his disposal in the evening? How many witnesses, judges, juries, policemen, would be needed, how much resistance, espionage, and hatred would be engendered! . . . . .
Next we should have the chapter of judicial blunders. How great an amount of idleness would escape! and, in return, how many industrious people would go to redeem in prison the inactivity of a day by the inactivity of a month!
With these consequences and many others before our eyes, we say, Let natural Responsibility do its own work. And we do well in saying so.
The Socialists, who never decline to have recourse to despotism in order to accomplish their ends—for the end is everything with them—have branded Responsibility under the name of individualism,—and have then tried to annihilate it, and absorb it in the sphere of action of a solidarity extended beyond all natural bounds.
The consequences of this perversion of the two great springs of human perfectibility are fatal. There is no longer any dignity, any liberty, for man. For, from the moment that the man who acts is not personally answerable for the good or bad consequences of his actions, his right to act singly and individually no longer exists. If each movement of the individual is to reflect back the series of its effects on society at large, the initiative of each such movement can no longer be left to the individual—it belongs to society. The community alone must decide all, and regulate all,—education, food, wages, amusements, locomotion, affections, families, etc. Now, the law is the voice of Society; the law is the legislator. Here, then, we have a flock and a shepherd,—less than that even, inert matter, and a workman. We see, then, to what point the suppression of Responsibility and of individualism would lead us.
To conceal this frightful design from the eyes of the vulgar, it was necessary to flatter their selfish passions by declaiming against egotism. To the suffering classes Socialism says, “Do not trouble yourselves to examine whether your sufferings are to be ascribed to the law of Responsibility. There are fortunate people in the world, and in virtue of the law of Solidarity they ought to share their prosperity with you.” And for the purpose of paving the way to the degrading level of a factitious, official, legal, con [p485] strained, and unnatural Solidarity, they erect spoliation into a system, they twist all our notions of justice, and they exalt that individualist sentiment, which they were thought to have proscribed, up to the highest point of power and perversity. Their whole system is thus of a piece,—negation of the harmonies which spring from liberty in the principle,—despotism and slavery in the result,—immorality in the means.