Our point of departure is that man is fallible, and that God has given him free will; and with the faculty of choosing, that of erring, of mistaking what is false for what is true, of sacrificing the future to the present, of giving way to unreasonable desires, etc. . . . .
Man errs. But every act, every habit has its consequences.
By means of Responsibility, as we have seen, these consequences fall back on the author of the act. A natural concatenation of rewards or punishments, then, attracts him towards good, or repels him from evil.
Had man been destined to a solitary life, and to solitary labour, Responsibility would have been his only law.
But he is differently placed; he is sociable by destination. It is not true, as Rousseau has said, that man is naturally a perfect and solitary whole, and that the will of the lawgiver has transformed him into a fraction of a greater whole. The family, the province, the nation, the human race, are aggregates with which man has necessary relations. Hence it follows that the actions and the habits of the individual produce, besides the consequences which fall back upon himself, other good or bad consequences which extend themselves to his fellow-men. This is what we term the law of Solidarity, which is a sort of collective Responsibility.
This idea of Rousseau that the legislator has invented society—an idea false in itself—has been injurious in this respect, that it has led men to think that Solidarity is of legislative creation, and we [p489] shall immediately see that modern legislators have based upon this doctrine their efforts to subject society to an artificial solidarity, acting in an inverse sense to natural solidarity. In everything, the principle of these great manipulators of the human race is to set up their own work in room of the work of God, which they disown.
Our first task is to prove undeniably the natural existence of the law of Solidarity.
In the eighteenth century they did not believe in it. They adhered to the doctrine of the personality of faults. The philosophers of the last century, engaged above all in the reaction against Catholicism, would have feared, by admitting the principle of Solidarity, to open a door to the doctrine of original sin. Every time Voltaire found in the Scriptures a man bearing the punishment of another, he said ironically, “This is frightful, but the justice of God is not that of man.”
We are not concerned here to discuss original sin. But what Voltaire laughed at is nevertheless a fact, which is not less incontestable than it is mysterious. The law of Solidarity makes its appearance so frequently and so strikingly, in the individual and in the masses, in details and in the aggregate, in particular and in general facts, that to fail to recognise it implies either the blindness of sectarianism or the zeal of embittered controversy.
The first rule of all human justice is to concentrate the punishment of an action on its author, in virtue of the principle that faults are personal. But this law, sacred as regards individuals, is not the law of God, or even the law of society.