Would you, having modified your opinion, seek to build a city in which every man shall possess a roof, a fire, clothes and sufficient to eat? When you have succeeded in endowing every citizen, the good and bad qualities of each will disturb your division and make it an unjust one: this one requires more to eat than that; that one is unable to work as much as this: the economical and industrious will become rich men, the spendthrifts, the idlers, the cripples will relapse into poverty; for you cannot give all men the same temperament: natural inequalities will reappear in spite of your efforts.
And do not think that we should allow ourselves to be tied by the complicated legal precautions demanded by the organization of the family, patrimonial rights, wardships, recaptions by heirs and assigns, and so on, and so on. Marriage is notoriously an absurd oppression: we abolish all that. If the son kills the father, it is not the son, as is easily proved, who commits parricide but the father who, by living, sacrifices the son. Do not therefore let us go confusing our brains with the labyrinth of an edifice which we put down level with the ground; it is unnecessary to linger over those crazy trifles of our grandfathers.
This notwithstanding, there are some among the modern sectarians who, half seeing the impossibility of their doctrines, mix with them, to obtain sufferance for them, words of morality and religion; they think that, pending better things, we might first be brought up to the ideal mediocrity of the Americans; they close their eyes and are good enough to forget that the Americans are landlords and ardent landlords, which alters the question somewhat.
Others, still more obliging, who admit a sort of elegance of civilization, would be content to transform us into "Constitutional" Chinese, all but atheists, free and enlightened old men, sitting in yellow robes for centuries in our flowery seed-plots, spending our days in a state of comfort acquired to the multitude, having invented everything, discovered everything, vegetating peacefully in the midst of our accomplished progress and only going on board a railway-train, like a bale of merchandise, in order to travel from Canton to the Great Wall to chat about a marsh that wants draining or a canal that wants cutting with some other manufacturer of the Celestial Empire. In either supposition, American or Chinese, I shall be glad to have departed before so great a felicity happened to me.
Lastly, one solution remains: it might be that, in consequence of the complete degradation of the human character, the peoples would put up with what they have; they would lose the love of independence, replaced by the love of money, at the same time that the kings lost the love of power, bartered for the love of the Civil List. Hence would result a compromise between monarchs and subjects charmed to crawl promiscuously in a bastard political order of things; they would display their infirmities to one another at their ease, as in the old leper-hospitals or in those mud-baths in which sick people soak nowadays to obtain relief: one would dabble in a common mire like a peaceful reptile.
We misconstrue our times, however, when we desire, in the present condition of society, to replace the pleasures of our intellectual nature by the joys of our physical nature. The latter, we can understand, were able to occupy the life of the old aristocratic nations: masters of the world, they owned palaces, troops of slaves; they absorbed whole regions of Africa in their private possessions. But under what portico would you now air your paltry leisure? In what vast and decorated baths would you shut up the perfumes, the flowers, the flute-players, the courtezans of Ionia? One is not Heliogabalus[434] for the asking. Where will you find the wealth indispensable to those material delights? The soul is thrifty; but the body is extravagant.
Communism.
And now, a few words of a more serious character touching absolute equality. That equality would bring back not only the servitude of bodies, but the slavery of souls; it would be a question of nothing less than destroying the moral and physical inequality of the individual. Our will, administered under the general eye, would see our faculties falling into disuse. The infinite, for instance, is part of our nature: forbid our intellect, or even our passions to think of endless blessings, and you reduce man to the life of the snail, you transform him into a machine. For make no mistake: without the possibility of attaining all, without the idea of living eternally, you have nothingness everywhere; without individual property, none is free; whosoever has no property cannot be independent; he becomes a proletarian or a salaried servant, whether he live under the present condition of separate ownerships or in the midst of a common ownership. Common ownership would make society resemble one of those monasteries at whose door stewards used to stand distributing bread. Hereditary and inviolable property is our personal defense; property is nothing else than liberty. Absolute equality, which presupposes complete submission to that equality, would reproduce the harshest form of servitude; it would turn the human individual into a beast of burden subjected to the action which would constrain him and obliged to walk endlessly in the same path.
While I was arguing thus, M. de Lamennais[435], behind the bolts of his gaol, was attacking the same systems with his logical power, which is enlightened by the brilliancy of the poet. A passage borrowed from his pamphlet entitled, Du Passé et de l'avenir du peuple[436] will complete my arguments; listen to him, it is he now who speaks:
"Of those who put before them this object of strict, absolute equality, the most consistent, in order to establish it and maintain it, agree upon the use of force, despotism, dictatorship, under one form or another.
"The partisans of absolute equality are, at the out-set, compelled to attack the natural inequalities, in order to extenuate and, if possible, destroy them. Unable to affect the primary conditions of organization and development, their work begins at the moment when man is born or when the child leaves its mother's womb. The State then seizes upon it: behold it the absolute master of the spiritual as of the organic being. Mind and conscience, all depends upon the State, all is subject to the State. No more family, no more paternity, no more marriage henceforth; a male, a female, children whom the State handles, with which it does as it pleases, morally, physically: an universal servitude and so profound that nothing escapes it, that it penetrates to the very soul.
"Where material things are concerned, equality can never be established in ever so little a lasting manner by a simple partition. If it be a question of land only, one can understand that it can be divided into as many portions as there are individuals; but, as the number of individuals varies perpetually, it would also be necessary perpetually to vary that primitive division. All individual property being abolished, there is no lawful owner except the State. This mode of ownership, if it be voluntary, is that of the monk bound down by his vows to poverty as to obedience; if it be not voluntary, it is that of the slave, where nothing modifies the harshness of his condition. All human ties, sympathetic relations, mutual devotion, exchange of services, free gift of self, all that constitutes the charm of life and its greatness, all, all has disappeared, disappeared for ever.
"The methods hitherto proposed to solve the problem of the future of the people end in the negation of all the indispensable conditions of existence, destroy, either directly or by implication, duty, right, the family and would produce, if they could be applied to society, instead of the liberty in which all real progress is summarized, only a servitude with which history, however far we go back into the past, can offer nothing to compare."