The Law

by Frédéric Bastiat

MABLY—(He is supposing the laws to be worn out by time and by the neglect of security, and continues thus):

Under these circumstances, we must be convinced that the
bonds of Government are slack. Give them a new tension (it
is the reader who is addressed), and the evil will be
remedied.... Think less of punishing the faults than of
encouraging the virtues that you want. By this method you
will bestow upon your republic the vigor of youth. Through
ignorance of this, a free people has lost its liberty! But
if the evil has made so much way that the ordinary
magistrates are unable to remedy it effectually, have
recourse to an extraordinary magistracy, whose time should
be short, and its power considerable. The imagination of the
citizens requires to be impressed.

In this style he goes on through twenty volumes.

There was a time when, under the influence of teaching like this, which is the foundation of classical education, everyone was for placing himself beyond and above mankind, for the sake of arranging, organizing, and instituting it in his own way.

CONDILLAC—

Take upon yourself, my lord, the character of Lycurgus or
of Solon. Before you finish reading this essay, amuse
yourself with giving laws to some wild people in America or
in Africa. Establish these roving men in fixed dwellings;
teach them to keep flocks.... Endeavor to develop the social
qualities that nature has implanted in them.... Make them
begin to practice the duties of humanity.... Cause the
pleasures of the passions to become distasteful to them by
punishments, and you will see these barbarians, with every
plan of your legislation, lose a vice and gain a virtue.
All these people have had laws. But few among them have
been happy. Why is this? Because legislators have almost
always been ignorant of the object of society, which is to
unite families by a common interest.
Impartiality in law consists in two things, in
establishing equality in the fortunes and in the dignity of
the citizens.... In proportion to the degree of equality
established by the laws, the dearer will they become to
every citizen. How can avarice, ambition, dissipation,
idleness, sloth, envy, hatred, or jealousy agitate men who
are equal in fortune and dignity, and to whom the laws leave
no hope of disturbing their equality?
What has been told you of the republic of Sparta ought to
enlighten you on this question. No other State has had laws
more in accordance with the order of nature or of equality.

It is not to be wondered at that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should have looked upon the human race as inert matter, ready to receive everything—form, figure, impulse, movement, and life, from a great prince, or a great legislator, or a great genius. These ages were reared in the study of antiquity; and antiquity presents everywhere—in Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their fancy, and mankind to this end enslaved by force or by imposture. And what does this prove? That because men and society are improvable, error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition must be more prevalent in early times. The mistake of the writers quoted above is not that they have asserted this fact, but that they have proposed it as a rule for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Their mistake has been, with an inconceivable absence of discernment, and upon the faith of a puerile conventionalism, that they have admitted what is inadmissible, viz., the grandeur, dignity, morality, and well-being of the artificial societies of the ancient world; they have not understood that time produces and spreads enlightenment; and that in proportion to the increase of enlightenment, right ceases to be upheld by force, and society regains possession of herself.

And, in fact, what is the political work that we are endeavoring to promote? It is no other than the instinctive effort of every people towards liberty. And what is liberty, whose name can make every heart beat, and which can agitate the world, but the union of all liberties, the liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of movement, of labor, and of exchange; in other words, the free exercise, for all, of all the inoffensive faculties; and again, in other words, the destruction of all despotisms, even of legal despotism, and the reduction of law to its only rational sphere, which is to regulate the individual right of legitimate defense, or to repress injustice?

This tendency of the human race, it must be admitted, is greatly thwarted, particularly in our country, by the fatal disposition, resulting from classical teaching and common to all politicians, of placing themselves beyond mankind, to arrange, organize, and regulate it, according to their fancy.