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Why should I persist in this arid science, Political Economy?

Why? The question is reasonable. All work is sufficiently repellent by nature for us to have the right to ask where it is leading.

So let us examine the matter.

I am not addressing the philosophers who make a profession of adoring destitution, if not in their own name at least in the name of humanity.

I am speaking to those who consider Wealth as something worthwhile. Let us understand by this term, not the opulence of a few but the prosperity, well-being, security, independence, education and the dignity of all.

There are only two ways of acquiring the things that are necessary for the preservation, improvement and betterment of life: PRODUCTION and PLUNDER.

Some people say: “PLUNDER is an accident, a local and transitory abuse, stigmatized by moral philosophy, condemned by law and unworthy of the attentions of Political Economy.”

But whatever the benevolence and optimism of one’s heart one is obliged to acknowledge that PLUNDER is exercised on too a vast scale in this world, that it is too universally woven into all major human events, for any social science, above all Political Economy, to feel justified in disregarding it.

I will go further. What separates the social order from a state of perfection (at least from the degree of perfection it can attain) is the constant effort of its members to live and progress at the expense of one another.

So that, if PLUNDER did not exist, society would be perfect and the social sciences would be superfluous.

I will go even further. When PLUNDER has become the means of existence of a large group of men mutually linked by social ties, they soon contrive to pass a law that sanctions it and a moral code that glorifies it.

You need name only a few of the most clear-cut forms of Plunder to show the place it occupies in human affairs.

First of all, there is WAR. Among savage peoples, the victor kills the vanquished in order to acquire a right to hunt game that is if not incontestable, at least uncontested.

Then there is SLAVERY. Once man grasps that it is possible to make land fertile through work, he strikes this bargain with his fellow: “You will have the fatigue of work and I will have its product.”

Next comes THEOCRACY. “Depending on whether you give me or refuse to give me your property, I will open the gates of heaven or hell to you.”

Lastly, there is MONOPOLY. Its distinctive characteristic is to allow the great social law, a service for a service,¹⁹³ to continue to exist, but to make force part of the negotiations and thus distort the just relationship between the service received and the service rendered.

Plunder always carries within it the deadly seed that kills it. Rarely does the majority plunder the minority.¹⁹⁴ In this case, the minority would immediately be reduced to the point where it could no longer satisfy the greed of the majority, and Plunder would die for want of sustenance.

It is almost always the majority that is oppressed, and Plunder is also destined in this case as well to receive a death sentence.

For if the use of Force is Plunder’s agent, as it is for War and Slavery, it is natural for Force to go over to the side of the majority in the long run.

And if the agent is Fraud, as in Theocracy and Monopoly, it is natural for the majority to become informed on this score, or intelligence would not be intelligence.

Another providential law that has planted a second deadly seed in the heart of Plunder is this:

Plunder does not only redistribute wealth, it always destroys part of it.

War annihilates many things of value.

Slavery paralyses a great many human abilities.

Theocracy diverts a great deal of effort to puerile or disastrous purposes.

Monopoly also moves wealth from one pocket to another but a great deal is lost in the transfer.

This law is admirable. In its absence, provided that there were a stable balance of power between the oppressors and the oppressed, Plunder would have no end. Thanks to this law, the balance always tends to be upset, either because the Plunderers become aware of the loss of so much wealth, or, where this awareness is lacking, because the harm constantly grows worse and it is in the nature of things that constantly deteriorate to come to an end.

In fact, there comes a time when, in its gradual acceleration, the loss of wealth is so great that Plunderers are less rich than they would have been if they had remained honest.

An example of this is a nation for which the cost of war is greater than the value of its booty;

A master who pays more for slave labor than for free labor;

A Theocracy that has so stupefied the people and sapped their energy that it can no longer wring anything out of them;

A Monopoly that has to increase its efforts to suck consumers dry as there is less to be sucked up, just as the effort needed to milk a cow increases as the udder dries up.¹⁹⁵

As we see, Monopoly is a Species of the Genus, Plunder. There are several Varieties of it, including Sinecure, Privilege and Trade Restriction.

Among the forms it takes, there are some that are simple and naïve. Such were feudal rights. Under this regime the masses were plundered and knew it. It involved the abuse of force and perished with it.

Others are highly complex. In this case, the masses are often plundered unaware. It may even happen that they think they owe everything to Plunder; what is left to them, as well as what is taken from them and what is lost in the operation. Further than that I would propose as time goes on, and given the highly ingenious mechanism of custom, many Plunderers are plunders without knowing it and without wishing it. Monopolies of this type are generated through Fraud and they feed on Error. They only disappear with Enlightenment.

I have said enough to show that Political Economy has an obvious practical use. It is the flame that destroys this social disorder which is Plunder, by unveiling Fraud and dissipating Error. Someone, I believe it was a woman¹⁹⁶ and she was perfectly right, defined political economy thus: It is the safety lock on popular savings.

Comments

If this small volume were intended to last for three or four thousand years, to be read, reread, meditated upon and studied sentence by sentence, word by word and letter by letter by one generation after another like a new Koran, if it were bound to attract avalanches of annotations, explanations and paraphrases in all the libraries around the world, I would be able to abandon to their fate the foregoing thoughts with their slightly obscure precision. But because they need to be commented upon, I consider it prudent to do this myself.

The true and just law governing man is “The freely negotiated exchange of one service for another.”¹⁹⁷ Plunder consists in banishing by fraud or force the freedom to negotiate in order to receive a service without offering one in return.

Plunder by force is exercised as follows: People wait for a man to produce something and then seize it from him at gun point.

This is formally condemned by the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not steal.

When it takes place between individuals, it is called theft and leads to prison; when it takes place between nations, it is called conquest and leads to glory.

Why is there this difference? It is useful to seek its cause. It will show us an irresistible power, Opinion, which, like the atmosphere, envelops us so completely that we no longer notice it. For Rousseau never spoke a truer word than when he said “A great deal of philosophy is needed to observe facts that are too close to us.”¹⁹⁸

A thief, by the very fact that he acts alone, has public opinion against him. He alarms everyone who surrounds him. However, if he has a few accomplices, he brags to them of his achievements and we start to see in this the force of Opinion, for he needs only the approval of his accomplices to free him of any feeling of shame for his wicked acts and even to make him proud of his ignominy.

A warrior lives in another environment. The Opinion that reviles him is elsewhere, in the nations that have been conquered; he does not feel pressure from them. However, the Opinion that is around him approves and supports him. His companions and he feel keenly the solidarity that binds them. The fatherland, which created enemies and dangers for itself, needs to exalt the courage of its children. It confers on the boldest of these, those who extend its frontiers and bring back the most plunder to it, honors, renown and glory. Poets sing of their exploits and women weave them wreaths. And such is the power of Opinion that it removes the idea of injustice from Plunder and strips away the very awareness of their wrongs from plunderers.

Opinion which rejects military plunder is not located among those doing the plundering but among those being plundered, and therefore exercises very little influence. However, it is not totally ineffective, and still less when nations have relations with one another and understand each other more. From this angle, we see that a study of languages and free communication between peoples tends to lead to the predominance of opinion against this type of plunder.

Unfortunately, it often happens that the nations surrounding the plundering people are themselves plunderers whenever they can and are henceforth imbued with the same preconceived ideas.

If this is so, there is only one remedy, time. Nations have to learn by hard experience the huge disadvantage there is in plundering each other.

Another brake may be mentioned: raising moral standards. However, the aim of raising moral standards is to increase the number of virtuous actions. How then will it restrict acts of plunder when such acts are raised by Opinion to the rank of the highest virtues? Is there a more powerful means of raising the moral standards of a nation than Religion? Has there ever been a Religion more disposed toward peace and more universally accepted than Christianity? And yet, what have we seen in the last eighteen centuries? We have seen men fighting, not only in spite of Religion but in the very name of Religion.

A conquering nation does not always carry out an offensive war. It also has bad times. Its soldiers then defend their homes and hearths, property, families, independence and freedom. War takes on an aura of sanctity and greatness. The flag, blessed by the ministers of the God of Peace, represents all that there is sacred on earth; people adhere to it as to the living image of the fatherland and honor, and warlike virtues are exalted above all the other virtues. But once the danger has passed, Opinion remains, and the spirit of revenge (which is often confused with patriotism) gives rise to the natural response of people who love to parade their beloved flag from city to city. It appears that it is in this way that nature might have prepared the punishment of the aggressor.

It is the fear of this punishment and not the progress of philosophy that keeps weapons within arsenals for, it cannot be denied, the most advanced and civilized nations make war and take little notice of justice as long as they have no reprisals to fear. Examples of this are the Himalayas¹⁹⁹, the Atlas mountains²⁰⁰ and the Caucasus²⁰¹.

If Religion has been powerless, if philosophy is powerless, how will we put an end to war?

Political Economy shows that, even when you consider only the victors, war is always waged in the interest of a minority and at the expense of the masses. All that is needed therefore is that the masses see this truth clearly. The weight of Opinion, which is still divided, will come down totally in favor of peace.²⁰²

Plunder exercised by force takes yet another form. People do not wait for a man to have produced something to snatch it from him. They take hold of the man himself; he is stripped of his own personality and forced to work. Nobody says to him “If you take this trouble on my behalf, I will take this trouble for you” but instead “You will have all of the fatigue of labor and I will have all the enjoyment of its products”. This is Slavery, which always involves the abuse of force.

Well, it is a profound question to ascertain whether or not it is in the nature of an incontestably dominating force to always take advantage of its position. As for me, I do not trust it, and would as much expect a falling stone to to have the power to halt its own fall as entrust coercion to set its own limit.

I would like at least to be shown a country or an era in which Slavery has been abolished by the free and gracious will of the masters.

Slavery supplies a second and striking example of the inadequacy of religious and philanthropic sentiments in the face of a powerful sense of self-interest. This may appear a source of regret to certain modern Schools that seek the reforming principle of society in self-denial. Let them begin then by reforming the nature of man.

In the Antilles,²⁰³ the masters have professed the Christian religion from father to son from the time slavery was instituted. Several times a day, they repeat these words, “All men are brothers; loving your neighbor is to fulfill the law in its entirety.” And yet they have slaves. Nothing seemed to them to be more natural and legitimate. Do modern reformers hope that their moral principles will ever be as universally accepted, as popular, with as much authority and as often heard on everyone’s lips as the Gospel? And if the Gospel has been unable to pass from lips to hearts over or through the great defensive wall of self-interest, how do they hope that their moral principles will accomplish this miracle?

What then! Is Slavery therefore invulnerable? No, what founded it will destroy it; I refer to Self-Interest, provided that, in order to reinforce the special interests that created the wound, the general interests that have to cure it are not thwarted.

Another truth demonstrated by Political Economy is that free labor is essentially dynamic and slave labor is of necessity static. For this reason, the triumph of the former over the latter is inevitable. What has happened to the cultivation of indigo by black people?²⁰⁴

Free labor applied to the cultivation of sugar will make the price decrease more and more. As this happens, slaves will be less and less profitable for their masters. Slavery would have collapsed a long time ago of its own accord in America, if the laws in Europe had not raised the price of sugar artificially. We therefore see the masters, their creditors and delegates actively working to maintain these laws, which now form the pillars of the edifice.

Unfortunately, they still have the sympathy of the populations within which slavery has disappeared, which shows us once again that Opinion is still sovereign here.

If it is sovereign, even in the context of power, it is even more so in the world of Fraud. To tell the truth, this is its real domain. Fraud is the abuse of knowledge; the progress of Opinion is the progress of knowledge. The two powers are at least of the same nature. Fraud by a plunderer involves credulity in the person being plundered, and the natural antidote to credulity is truth. It follows that to enlighten minds is to remove the sustenance from this type of plunder.

I will review briefly a few of the forms of plunder that are exercised by Fraud on a grand scale.

The first to come forward is Plunder by theocratic fraud.

What is this about? To get people to provide real services, in the form of foodstuffs, clothing, luxury, consideration, influence and power, in return for imaginary ones.

If I said to a man “I am going to provide you with some immediate services”, I would have to keep my word, otherwise this man would know what he was dealing with and my fraud would be promptly unmasked.

But if I told him “In exchange for your services, I will provide you with immense services, not in this world but in the next. After this life, you will be able to be eternally happy or unhappy and this all depends on me; I am an intermediary between God and his creation and can, at will, open the gates of heaven or hell to you.” Should this man believe me at all, he is in my power.

This type of imposture has been practiced widely since the beginning of the world, and we know what degree of total power Egyptian priests achieved.

It is easy to see how impostors behave. You have to only ask yourself what you would do in their place.

If I came, with ideas like this in mind, amongst an ignorant clan and succeeded by dint of some extraordinary act and an amazing appearance to be taken for a supernatural being, I would pass for an emissary of God with absolute discretion over the future destiny of men.

I would then forbid any examination of my titles. I would go further; since reason would be my most dangerous enemy, I would forbid the use of reason itself, at least when applied to this awesome subject. I would make this question, and all those relating to it, taboo, as the savages say. To solve them, discuss them or even think of them would be an unpardonable crime.

It would certainly be the height of skill to set up a taboo as a barrier across all the intellectual avenues that might lead to the discovery of my deception. What better guarantee of its longevity is there than to make doubt itself a sacrilege?

However, to this fundamental guarantee I would add ancilliary ones. For example, in order that enlightenment is never able to reach down to the masses, I would grant to my accomplices and myself the monopoly of all knowledge. I would hide it under the veils of a dead language and a hieroglyphic script and, so that I would never be taken by surprise by any danger, I would take care to invent an institution which would, day after day, enable me to enter into the secret of all consciences.

It would also not be a bad thing for me to satisfy some of the genuine needs of my people, especially if, by doing so, I was able to increase my influence and authority. Given that men have a great need of education and moral instruction, I would take it upon myself to dispense this. Through this, I would direct the minds and hearts of my people as I saw fit. I would weave morality and my authority into an indissoluble chain; I would represent them as being unable to exist without each other, so that if a bold individual attempted to raise a question that was taboo, society as a whole, unable to live without a moral code, would feel the earth tremble beneath its feet and would turn in anger against this daring innovator.

Should things reach this pass, it is clear that this people would belong to me more surely than if they were my slaves. Slaves curse their chains, while my people would bless theirs, and I would have succeeded in imprinting the stamp of servitude not on their foreheads, but in the depths of their conscience.

Opinion alone is capable of tearing down an edifice of iniquity like this, but how will it set about this if each stone is taboo? It is a question of time and the printing press.

God forbid that I should wish to undermine here the consoling beliefs that link this life of trials to a life of happiness! No one, not even the head of the Christian church,²⁰⁵ could deny that the irresistible urge which leads us to these beliefs has been taken advantage of. There is, it seems to me, a sign by which we can see whether a people have been duped or not. Examine Religion and priest alike; see whether the priest is the instrument of Religion or Religion the instrument of the priest.

If the priest is the instrument of Religion, if he thinks only of spreading its morals and benefits around the world, he will be gentle, tolerant, humble, charitable and full of zeal. His life will reflect that of his divine model. He will preach freedom and equality among men, peace and fraternity between nations; he will reject the attractions of temporal power, not wishing to ally himself with what most needs to be restricted in this world. He will be a man of the people, a man of good counsel and gentle consolation, a man of good Opinion and a Man of the Gospel.

If, on the other hand, Religion is the instrument of the priest, he will treat it as some people treat an instrument that is altered, bent and turned in many ways so as to draw the greatest benefit for themselves. He will increase the number of questions that are taboo; his moral principles will bend according to the climate, men and circumstances. He will seek to impose it through studied gestures and attitudes; he will mutter words a hundred times a day whose meaning has disappeared and which are nothing other than empty conventionalism. He will peddle holy things, but just enough to avoid undermining faith in their sanctity and he will take care to see that this trade is less obviously active where the people are more keen-sighted. He will involve himself in terrestrial intrigue and always be on the side of the powerful, on the sole condition that those in power ally themselves with him. In a word, in all his actions, it will be seen that he does not want to advance Religion through the clergy but the clergy through Religion, and since so much effort implies an aim and as this aim, according to our hypothesis, cannot be anything other than power and wealth, the definitive sign that the people have been duped is when priests are rich and powerful.

It is very clear that one can abuse a true Religion as well as a false one. The more its authority is respectable, the greater is the danger that it may be improperly used. But the results are very different. Abuse always revolts the healthy, enlightened and independent sector of a nation. It is impossible for faith not to be undermined and the weakening of a true Religion is more of a disaster than the undermining of a false one.

Plunder using this procedure and the clear-sightedness of a people are always in inverse proportion one to the other, for it is in the nature of abuse to proceed wherever it finds a path. Not that pure and devoted priests are not to be found within the most ignorant population, but how do you prevent a swindler from putting on a cassock and having the ambition to don a miter? Plunderers obey Malthus’s law²⁰⁶: they multiply in line with the means of existence, and the means of existence of swindlers is the credulity of their dupes. It is no good searching; you always find that opinion needs to be enlightened. There is no other panacea.

Another type of Plunder by fraud is commercial fraud, a name that I think is too limited since not only are merchants who adulterate their goods and give short measure guilty of this, but also doctors who get paid for disastrous advice, lawyers who overcomplicate lawsuits, etc. In these exchanges of services, one is done in bad faith, but in this instance, as the service received is always agreed upon voluntarily in advance, it is clear that Plunder of this kind is bound to retreat as public clear-sightedness increases.

Next comes the abuse of government services, a huge field of Plunder, so huge that we can only cast a glance at it.

If God had made man to be a solitary animal, each would work for his own benefit. Individual wealth would be in proportion to the services that each person rendered to himself.

However, as man is sociable, services are exchanged for one another, a proposition that you can, if you like, construct in reverse.

In society, there are needs that are so general and universal that its members supply them by organizing government services. An example of this is the need for security. People consult with other and agree to tax themselves in order to pay with various services those who supply the service of watching over common security.

There is nothing in this that is outside the scope of Political Economy: Do this for me and I will do that for you. The essence of the transaction is the same, the procedure of paying for it alone is different, but this difference is of far-ranging importance.

In ordinary transactions, each person remains the judge either of the service he receives or of the service he renders. He can always either refuse the exchange or make it elsewhere, which gives rise to the necessity of bringing into the market only services that will be voluntarily agreed upon.

This is not so with regard to the State, especially before the arrival of representative governments. Whether we need its services or not, whether they are good or bad quality,²⁰⁷ the State always obliges us to accept them as they are supplied and pay for them at the price it sets.

Well, all men tend to see the services they render through the small end of the telescope and the services they receive through the large end,²⁰⁸ and things would be in a fine state if we did not have the guarantee of a freely negotiated price in private transactions.

We do not have or scarcely have this guarantee in our transactions with the government. And yet the State, made up of men (although these days the contrary is insinuated), obeys the universal trend. It wants to serve us a great deal, indeed with more than we want, and make us accept as a genuine service things that are sometimes far from being so, in order to require us to supply it with services or taxes in return.

The State is also subject to Malthus’s Law. It tends to exceed the level of its means of existence, it expands in line with these means and what keeps it in existence is whatever the people have. Woe betide those peoples who cannot limit the sphere of action of the State. Freedom, private activity, wealth, well-being, independence and dignity will all disappear.

For there is one fact that should be noted and it is this: of all the services we require from the State, the principal one is security. In order to guarantee this to us, it has to have a force capable of overcoming all other forces, whether individual or collective, internal or external, which might compromise it. If we link this thought with the unfortunate tendency we have noted in men to live at the expense of others, there is a danger here that leaps to the eye.

This being so, just look at the immense scale on which Plunder has been carried out throughout history by the abuse and excesses of the government? One might well ask what services were provided to the people and what services were exacted by governments in the Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman, Persian, Turkish, Chinese, Russian, English, Spanish and French states! The mind boggles at this huge disparity.

Eventually, the representative system of government was invented, and a priori it might have been thought that the disorder would disappear as though by magic.

In practice, the operating principle of these governments is this:

“The population itself will decide, through its representatives, on the nature and extent of the functions that it considers appropriate to establish as government services and the amount of revenue it intends to allocate to these services.”

The tendency to seize the goods of others and the tendency to defend one’s own were thus brought face to face. It was bound to be thought that the latter would overcome the former.

Certainly I am convinced that in the long run this outcome will prevail. But it has to be said that up to now it has not done so.

Why? For two very simple reasons: governments have understood things only too well and the populace not well enough.

Governments are very wily. They act methodically and consistently according to a plan that has been well thought out and constantly improved by tradition and experience. They study men and their passions. If they see, for example, that they have an inclination to war, they whip up and excite this deadly tendency. They surround the nation with dangers through the actions of their diplomats, and very naturally, as a result, they require the nation to provide soldiers, sailors, arsenals and fortifications; often they have little trouble in having these supplied to them: after all they have honors, pensions and positions to hand out. They need a great deal of money for this, and taxes and loans exist for this purpose.

If the nation is generous, governments take it upon themselves to cure all the ills of humanity. They will revive commerce, they say, they will bring prosperity to agriculture, develop factories, encourage arts and letters, abolish poverty, etc. etc. All that is needed is to create some new government functions and pay for some new functionaries.

In a word, the tactic consists in presenting as real services things that are only hindrances; the nation then pays, not for services but for disservices. Governments take on gigantic proportions and end up absorbing half of the total revenue. And the people are surprised at having to work so hard, at hearing the announcement of astonishing inventions that will infinitely increase the number of products and … to always be like Gros-Jean and never learn.²⁰⁹

This is because, while the government is displaying such skill, the people are showing very little. Thus, when called upon to choose those who will wield authority, those who will have to determine the sphere and remuneration of government action, whom do they choose? Government officials. They make the executive power responsible for setting the limits on its own action and requirements. They imitate the Bourgeois Gentilhomme²¹⁰ who, in choosing the style and number of his suits, relies on the advice of … his tailor.²¹¹

Meanwhile, things go from bad to worse and the people’s eyes are at last opened, not to the remedy (they have not yet reached this stage), but to the illness.

Governing is such a pleasant job that everyone aspires to it. The councilors of the people therefore constantly tell them “We see your suffering and we deplore it. Things would be different if we were governing you.”

This period, normally very long, is that of rebellion and uprising. When the people have been conquered, the cost of the war is added to their burdens. When they are the conquerors, the people in government change and the abuses remain.

And this continues until at last the people learn to recognize and defend their true interests. We therefore always reach this point: The only option lies in the progress of Public Reasoning.

Certain nations appear to be astonishingly well disposed to becoming the prey of government Plunder. They are the ones in which men, totally disregarding their own dignity and energy, think that they would be lost if they were not being administered and governed in every sphere. Although I have not traveled a great deal, I have seen countries in which it is thought that agriculture cannot make any progress if the State did not keep experimental farms, that there would soon be no more horses if the State did not have a stud farm, that fathers would not bring up their children or would have them taught only immoral things if the State did not decide what was fit to be learned, etc. etc. In a country like this, revolutions may follow one another in quick succession and governments fall one after the other. But those being governed will be no less governed to within an inch of their lives (for the disposition I am pointing out here is the very stuff of which governments are made), until the point is reached at which the people finally see that it is better to leave as many services as possible in the category of those that interested parties exchange for a freely negotiated price²¹².

We have seen that society is based on an exchange of services. It ought to be just an exchange of good and honest services. But we have also noted that men had a great interest and consequently an irresistible urge to exaggerate the relative value of the services they rendered. And in all truth I cannot see any other limit to this pretension than leaving the people to whom these services are offered the freedom to accept or refuse them.

From this it results that certain men have recourse to the law to reduce the natural prerogatives of this freedom for others. This type of plunder is called Privilege or Monopoly. Note well its origin and character.

Everybody knows that the services he brings to the general marketplace will be all the more appreciated and remunerated the scarcer they are. Everyone will therefore beg for the law to intervene to remove from the marketplace all those who come to offer similar services or, what amounts to the same thing, if the use of a tool is essential for the service to be rendered, he will demand from the law its exclusive possession.²¹³

Since this type of Plunder is the principal subject of this volume, I will not dwell on it here and will limit myself to one observation.

When monopoly is an isolated occurrence, it is sure to make the person empowered by the law rich. It may then happen that each class of workers claims a similar monopoly for itself, instead of working toward the downfall of this monopoly. This characteristic of Plunder, reduced to a system, then becomes the most ridiculous hoax of all for everyone, and the final result is that each person thinks that he is gaining more from a general market that is totally impoverished.²¹⁴

It is not necessary to add that this strange regime also introduces universal antagonism between all classes, professions and peoples; that it requires constant but uncertain interference from the government; that it abounds in the abuses described in the preceding paragraph; it puts all areas of production into a position of irremediable insecurity and accustoms men to attributing the responsibility for their own existence to the law and not themselves. It would be difficult to imagine a more active cause of social unrest.²¹⁵

Justification

People will say: “Why are you using this ugly word, Plunder? Apart from the fact that it is crude, it is upsetting, irritating and turns calm and moderate men against you. It poisons the debate.”²¹⁶

I will declare loudly that I respect people. I believe in the sincerity of almost all the advocates of Protection and I do not claim the right to suspect the personal probity, scrupulousness and philanthropy of anyone at all. I repeat once more that Protection is the work, the disastrous work, of a common error of which everyone or at least the great majority is both victim and accomplice. After that, I cannot stop things being what they are.

Imagine a sort of Diogenes²¹⁷ sticking his head outside his barrel and saying: “People of Athens, you have yourselves served by slaves. Have you never thought that you are exercising over your brothers the most iniquitous type of plunder?”

Or again, a tribune in the Forum saying: “People of Rome, you have based all of your means of existence on the repeated pillage of all other peoples.”

They would certainly be expressing only an incontrovertible truth. Should we then conclude that Athens and Rome were inhabited only by dishonest people? That Socrates and Plato, Cato²¹⁸ and Cincinnatus²¹⁹ were despicable men?

Who could entertain such a thought? However these great men lived in an environment that robbed them of any awareness of their injustice. We know that Aristotle was unable even to entertain the idea that a society could live without slavery.

In modern times, slavery has existed up to the present time without generating many scruples in the souls of plantation owners. Armies have been the instruments of great conquests, that is to say, great forms of plunder. Is this to say that they are not full of soldiers and officers who are personally just as scrupulous and perhaps more scrupulous than is generally the case in careers in industry, men whom the very thought of theft would cause to blush and who would face a thousand deaths rather than stoop to a base act?

What is condemnable are not individuals but the general milieu that carries them along and blinds them, a milieu for which society as a whole is guilty.

This is the case of Monopoly. I accuse the system and not individuals, society as a whole and not any particular one of its members. If the greatest philosophers have been able to delude themselves over the iniquity of slavery, how much more reason have farmers and manufacturers to be mistaken with regard to the nature and effects of the protectionist regime?

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At the end of the preceding chapter, if the reader has reached that far, I can well hear him cry:

“Well then! Are we mistaken in blaming economists for being dry and cold? What a picture of humanity! If they are right, plunder would be a disastrous force, one that is virtually taken for granted, taking all forms and exercised under all types of pretext, both outside the law and by the law, abusing the holiest of things, exploiting weakness and credulity in turn and advancing as these two sources of nourishment flourish around it! Can a darker picture of this world be painted?”

The question is not to know whether the picture is dark but whether it is true. History is there to tell us this.

It is rather strange that those who decry political economy (or economism, as they like to call this science), because it studies man and the world as they are, take pessimism very much further than it does, at least with regard to the past and present. Open their books and journals and what do you see? Bitterness, a hatred of society to the extent that the very word civilization is in their eyes synonymous with injustice, disorder and anarchy. They have come to curse freedom, so low is their confidence in the development of the human race resulting from its natural organization. Freedom! This is what, according to them, is impelling us inexorably toward the abyss.

It is true that they are optimistic with regard to the future. For if humanity, incapable on its own, has been going the wrong way for six thousand years, a prophet has come to show it the path of salvation, and if only the flock obeys the shepherd’s crook it will be led into this promised land in which well-being is achieved without effort and where order, security and harmony are the easy prize of improvidence.

All humanity has to do is to agree to reformers changing its physical and moral constitution, in the words of Rousseau.²²⁰

Political economy has not taken on the mission of seeking to ascertain what society would be like if God had made man otherwise than it pleased him to do. It is perhaps tedious that Providence forgot to call upon a few of our modern organizers for advice at the beginning.²²¹ And, as celestial mechanics would have been quite different if the Creator had consulted Alphonse the Wise²²² and equally if he had not neglected Fourier’s advice,²²³ social order would bear no resemblance to the one we are forced to breathe, live and move in. But, since we are here, since in eo vivimus, movemur et sumus²²⁴, all we can do is to study it and learn its laws, especially since its improvement essentially depends on this knowledge.

We cannot prevent insatiable desires from springing up in the heart of man.

We cannot arrange things so that no work is required for these desires to be satisfied.

We cannot avoid the fact that man’s reluctance to work is as strong as his desire to have his needs. satisfied.

We cannot prevent the fact that, as a result of this state of affairs, there is a constant effort by men to increase their share of enjoyment while each of them tries by force or by fraud to throw the burden of labor onto the shoulders of his fellows.

It is not up to us to wipe out universal history, to stifle the voice of the past that attests that things have been like this from the outset. We cannot deny that war, slavery, serfdom, theocracy, abuse by government, privileges, frauds of all kinds and monopolies have been the incontrovertible and terrible manifestations of these two sentiments that are intertwined in the hearts of men: attraction to pleasure, avoidance of pain.

“By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread”. But everyone wants as much bread and as little sweat as possible. This is the conclusion of history.

Thank heaven, history also shows that the distribution of pleasures and pains among men tends to occur in an increasingly even way.

Short of denying the obvious, we have to admit that society has made some progress in this regard.

If this is so, society therefore has within it a natural and providential force, a law that increasingly causes the principle of iniquity to retreat and the principle of justice to be realised.

We state that this force is within society and that God has placed it there. If it were not there, we, like the Utopians,²²⁵ would be reduced to seeking it in artificial means, in arrangements that require the prior alteration of the physical and moral constitution of man, or rather we would believe this search to be useless and vain, since we cannot understand the action of a lever if it has no fulcrum.

Let us therefore endeavor to identify the beneficent force that tends to overcome little by little the malevolent force we have called Plunder, whose presence is only too clearly explained by reason and noted by experience.

Any malevolent action has of necessity two components, the source from which it comes and the place at which it ends; the person who carries out the action and the person on whom the action is carried out, or as one might have put it in a grammar class at school, the subject and the object of the sentence.²²⁶

There are therefore two opportunities for a malevolent action to be eliminated: the voluntary abstention of the active being and the resistance of the passive being.

Hence there are two moral philosophies that, far from contradicting each other, work together: a morality based on religion or philosophy or one which I will permit myself to call economic.

A religious moral philosophy addresses the author of a malevolent action, man as the initiator of plunder,²²⁷ in order to eliminate it. It tells him “Reform yourself, purify yourself, stop committing evil and do good. Overcome your passions, sacrifice your personal interest, cease to oppress your neighbor whom it is your duty to love and care for. Be just above all and then charitable.” This moral philosophy will always be the finest, the most touching and the one that reveals the human race in all its majesty, the one that most encourages flights of eloquence and generates the most admiration and sympathy in men.

An economic moral philosophy aspires to achieve the same result but above all addresses men as victims of plunder.²²⁸ It shows them the effects of human actions and, by this simple demonstration, stimulates them to react against the actions that hurt them and honor those that are useful to them. It endeavors to disseminate enough good sense, enlightenment and justified mistrust in the oppressed masses to make oppression increasingly difficult and dangerous.

It should be noted that economic morality cannot help but also act on oppressors. A malevolent act has good and evil consequences, evil consequences for those who suffer it and good consequences for those who carry it out, otherwise it would not occur. But it is a long way from being compensatory. The sum of evil always outweighs the good, and this has to be so, since the very fact of oppression leads to a depletion of strength, creates dangers, provokes retaliation and requires costly precautions. A simple revelation of these effects is thus not limited to triggering a reaction in those oppressed, it rallies to the flag of justice all those whose hearts have not been corrupted and undermines the security of the oppressors themselves.

But it is easy to understand that this moral philosophy, which is more implicit than explicit and which is after all just a scientific demonstration; which would even lose its effectiveness if it changed character; which is not aimed at the heart, but the mind; which does not seek to persuade, but to convince; which does not give advice, but proof; whose mission is not to touch the emotions, but to enlighten and whose only victory over vice is to deprive it of sustenance: it is easy, I say, to understand that this moral philosophy has been accused of being dry and dull.

This objection is true but unjust. It amounts to saying that political economy does not state everything, does not include everything and is not a universal science. But who has ever put forward such an exorbitant claim on its behalf?

The accusation would be well-founded only if political economy presented its procedures as being exclusive and had the effrontery, as we might say, to forbid philosophy and religion from using all their own direct means of working toward the progress of mankind.

Let us accept therefore the simultaneous action of morality proper and of political economy, with the first casting a slur on the motives and evident ugliness of malevolent acts and the second discrediting them in our beliefs by giving a picture of their effects.

Let us even admit that the triumph, when it occurs, of religious moralists is finer, more consoling and more radical. But at the same time it is difficult not to acknowledge that the triumph of economic science is easier and more sure.

In a few lines that are worth more than a host of heavy volumes, Jean-Baptiste Say²²⁹ has already drawn to our attention that there are two ways of stopping the conflict introduced into an honorable family by hypocrisy: correcting Tartuffe or teaching Orgon the ways of the world.²³⁰ Molière,²³¹ a great painter of the human heart, seems to have had the second of these procedures constantly in view as being the more effective.

This is just as true on the world stage.

Tell me what Caesar did and I will tell you what the Romans of his time were like.

Tell me what modern diplomacy is accomplishing and I will tell you what the moral state of nations is like.

We would not be paying nearly two billion in taxes if we did not hand over the power to vote for them to those who are gobbling them up.²³²

We would not have all the problems and expenses of the African question²³³ if we were as fully convinced that two and two are four in political economy just as they are in arithmetic.

Mr. Guizot would not have the opportunity of saying “France is rich enough to pay for its glory”²³⁴ if France had never fallen in love with false glory.

This same Statesman would never have said “Freedom is sufficiently precious for France not to trade it away” if France fully understood that a swollen budget and freedom are incompatible.²³⁵

It is not the monopolizers, as is widely believed, but those who are monopolized who keep monopolies in place.

And, where elections are concerned,²³⁶ it is not because there are corruptors that there are those who can be corrupted. It's the opposite; and the proof of this is that it is those who can be corrupted who pay all the costs of corruption. Would it not be up to them to put a stop to it?

Let religious morality therefore touch the hearts of the Tartuffes, the Caesars, the colonists, sinecurists and monopolists, etc. if it can. The task of political economy is to enlighten their dupes.²³⁷

Which of these two procedures works more effectively toward social progress? Do we have to spell it out? I believe it is the second. I fear that humanity cannot escape the necessity of first learning a defensive moral philosophy.

No matter how much I look, whatever I read or observe and whatever the questions I ask, I cannot find any abuse carried out on anything like a wide scale that has been destroyed through the voluntary renunciation of those benefiting from it.

On the other hand, I have found many that have been overcome by the active resistance of those suffering from them.

Describing the consequences of abuse is therefore the most effective way of destroying it. And how true this is, especially when it concerns abuses like protectionism, which, while inflicting genuine harm on the masses, nurture only illusion and disappointment in those who believe they are benefiting from them.

After all this, will this type of moral persuasion succeed by itself in achieving all the social progress that the attractive nature of the human soul and the noblest of its faculties gives us leave to hope for and foresee? I am far from claiming this. Let us assume the total diffusion of this defensive moral philosophy, which is, after all, nothing other than a recognition of well understood interests that are in accordance with the general good and with justice. A society like this, although certainly well ordered, might well fail to be very attractive, one in which there were no more rascals simply because there were no more dupes, in which vice would be constantly latent, numbed by famine, so to speak, and merely waiting for sustenance to revive it, and in which the prudence of each person would be governed by the vigilance of all, a society in a word, in which reform regulating external acts would be only skin deep, not having penetrated to the depths of people’s consciences. A society like this sometimes appears to us reflected in men who are strict, rigorous, just, ready to reject the slightest encroachment of their rights and skilled in avoiding being undermined in any way. You hold them in esteem and perhaps admire them; you would make them your deputy but not your friend.

Let these two moral philosophies, therefore, work hand in hand instead of mutually decrying one another, and attack vice in a pincer movement. While economists are doing their job, opening the eyes of the Orgons, uprooting preconceived ideas, stimulating just and essential mistrust and studying and exposing the true nature of things and actions, let religious moralists for their part carry out their more attractive but difficult work. Let them engage iniquity in hand-to-hand combat. Let them pursue it right into the deepest fibers of the heart. Let them paint the charms of benevolent action, self-denial and self-sacrifice. Let them open the source of virtues where we can only turn off the source of vice: that is their task, and one that is noble and fine. Why then do they dispute the usefulness of the task that has fallen to us?

In a society that, while not being intrinsically virtuous, is nevertheless well ordered because of the action of economic morality (which is the knowledge of the economy which the society possesses), do the opportunities for progress not open up for religious morality?

Habit, it is said, is a second nature.

A country where for a long time everyone is unaccustomed to injustice simply as a result of the resistance to this of a general public that is enlightened, may still be unhappy. However, in my view, it would be well placed to receive a higher and purer form of education. Being unaccustomed to evil is a great step toward good. Men cannot remain stationary. Once they have turned away from the path of vice, which no longer leads anywhere save to infamy, they would be all the more attracted to virtue.

Perhaps society has to pass through this prosaic state in which people practice virtue through calculation in order to lift itself up to that more poetic region where they would no longer need this motive.