The same statesman never would have said: "Liberty is too precious for France to traffic in it," if France had well understood that liberty and a large budget are incompatible.
Let religious morality then, if it can, touch the heart of the Tartuffes, the Cæsars, the conquerors of Algeria, the sinecurists, the monopolists, etc. The mission of political economy is to enlighten their dupes. Of these two processes, which is the more efficient aid to social progress? I believe it is the second. I believe that humanity cannot escape the necessity of first learning a defensive morality. I have read, observed, and made diligent inquiry, and have been unable to find any abuse, practiced to any considerable extent, that has perished by voluntary renunciation on the part of those who profited by it. On the contrary, I have seen many that have yielded to the manly resistance of those who suffered by them.
To describe the consequences of abuses, is the most efficient way of destroying the abuses themselves. And this is true particularly in regard to abuses which, like the protective system, while inflicting real evil upon the masses, are to those who seem to profit by them only an illusion and a deception.
Well, then, does this species of morality realize all the social perfection which the sympathetic nature of the human heart and its noblest faculties cause us to hope for? This I by no means pretend. Admit the general diffusion of this defensive morality—which, after all, is only a knowledge that the best understood interests are in accord with general utility and justice. A society, although very well regulated, might not be very attractive, where there were no knaves, only because there were no fools; where vice, always latent, and, so to speak, overcome by famine, would only stand in need of available plunder in order to be restored to vigor; where the prudence of the individual would be guarded by the vigilance of the mass, and, finally, where reforms, regulating external acts, would not have penetrated to the consciences of men. Such a state of society we sometimes see typified in one of those exact, rigorous and just men who is ever ready to resent the slightest infringement of his rights, and shrewd in avoiding impositions. You esteem him—possibly you admire him. You may make him your deputy, but you would not necessarily choose him for a friend.
Let, then, the two moral systems, instead of criminating each other, act in concert, and attack vice at its opposite poles. While the economists perform their task in uprooting prejudice, stimulating just and necessary opposition, studying and exposing the real nature of actions and things, let the religious moralist, on his part, perform his more attractive, but more difficult, labor; let him attack the very body of iniquity, follow it to its most vital parts, paint the charms of beneficence, self-denial and devotion, open the fountains of virtue where we can only choke the sources of vice—this is his duty. It is noble and beautiful. But why does he dispute the utility of that which belongs to us?
In a society which, though not superlatively virtuous, should nevertheless be regulated by the influences of economical morality (which is the knowledge of the economy of society), would there not be a field for the progress of religious morality?
Habit, it has been said, is a second nature. A country where the individual had become unaccustomed to injustice, simply by the force of an enlightened public opinion, might, indeed, be pitiable; but it seems to me it would be well prepared to receive an education more elevated and more pure. To be disaccustomed to evil is a great step towards becoming good. Men cannot remain stationary. Turned aside from the paths of vice which would lead only to infamy, they appreciate better the attractions of virtue. Possibly it may be necessary for society to pass through this prosaic state, where men practice virtue by calculation, to be thence elevated to that more poetic region where they will no longer have need of such an exercise.