Every effort to divert the natural course of responsibility is a blow aimed at justice, at liberty, at order, at civilisation, and at progress.
At justice. An act or a habit being assumed to exist, its good or bad consequences must follow necessarily. Were it possible, indeed, to suppress these consequences, there would doubtless be some advantage in suspending the action of the natural law of responsibility. But the only result to which a written law could lead would be that the good effects of a bad action would be reaped by the author of that action, and that its bad effects would fall back on a third party, or upon the community; which has certainly the special aspect of injustice.
Thus, modern societies are constituted on the principle that the father of a family should rear and educate his children. And it is this principle which restrains within just limits the increase and distribution of population; each man acting under a sense of responsibility. Men are not all indued with the same amount of foresight; and[113] in large towns improvidence is allied with immorality. We have nowadays a regular budget, and an administration, for the purpose of collecting children abandoned by their parents; no inquiry discourages this shameful desertion, and a constantly increasing number of destitute children inundates our poorer districts.
Here, then, we have a peasant who marries late in life, in order not to be overburdened with a family, obliged to bring up the children of others. He will not inculcate foresight on his son. Another lives in continence, and we see him taxed to bring up a set of bastards. In a religious point of view, his conscience is tranquil, but in a human point of view he must call himself a fool. . . . . .
We do not pretend here to enter on the grave question of public [p486] charity, we wish only to make this essential observation, that the more a State is centralized, the more that it turns natural responsibility into factitious solidarity, the more it takes away from consequences (which thenceforth affect those who have no connexion with their cause) their providential character of justice, chastisement, and preventive restraint.
When Government cannot avoid charging itself with a service which ought to remain within the domain of private activity, it ought at least to allow the responsibility to rest as nearly as possible where it would naturally fall. Thus, in the question of foundling hospitals, the principle being that the father and mother should bring up the child, the law should exhaust every means of endeavouring to enforce this. Failing the parents, this burden should fall on the commune; and failing the commune, on the department. Do you desire to multiply foundlings ad infinitum? Declare that the State will take charge of them. It would be still worse if France should undertake to maintain the children of the Chinese, and vice versa. . . . . .
It is, in truth, a singular thing that we should be always endeavouring to make laws to check the evils of responsibility! Will it never be understood that we do not annihilate these evils—we only turn them into a new channel? The result is one injustice the more, and one lesson the less. . . . . .
How is the world to be improved if it be not by every man learning to discharge his duty better? And will each man not discharge his duties better in proportion as he has more to suffer by neglecting or violating them? If social action is to be mixed up in the work of responsibility, it ought to be in order to second it, not to thwart it, to concentrate its effects, not to abandon them to chance.
It has been said that opinion is the mistress of the world. Assuredly, in order that opinion should have its proper sway it is necessary that it should be enlightened; and opinion is so much more enlightened in proportion as each man who contributes to form it perceives more clearly the connexion of causes and effects. Now nothing leads us to perceive this connexion better than experience, and experience, as we know, is personal, and the fruit of responsibility.
In the natural play, then, of this great law of responsibility we have a system of valuable teaching with which it is very imprudent to tamper.