incautious that he endeavors at the outset to seduce an entire people or insult them openly by clear and manifest contempt for the duties to which he has just submitted himself. This would be the sure way to frustrate any plan, and ambitious persons proceed with greater circumspection. What is it, then, that they do? They try to create a large faction, accustom the public to the transgression of the laws, and feign or stir up conspiracies.
It is impossible that a man reduced to his individual strengths could acquire either the prestige or the power necessary to superimpose himself on an entire nation. His intentions and plans will always be mistrusted by the multitude, and they will never have any noteworthy success except with the help of an organized faction that is replicated everywhere, that seizes the voice of the nation, that attacks all who oppose its interests and reduces them to silence and inaction by stirring up
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feelings of fear in those who might take on the faction by the gathering of their forces and the legitimacy of their cause. So, then, the first necessity of an ambitious person is to create a party of this kind.
It is very easy to effect this plan after a revolution lasting many years, in which the belligerent sides have calamitously harassed each other. At that point, the elements necessary to carry out the plan successfully are spread everywhere, and bringing them together does not pose a major difficulty. Many men are left with neither fortune nor employment, and as the overbearing necessity for daily subsistence is greater than all political considerations, they will have no option but to sell themselves to the first one who might purchase them. The fear that all unjust persecution brings with it demoralizes a nation, then destroys the natural generosity of characters, obliges men to lie to themselves and others, to hide their feelings and suppress their ideas through a perpetual and constant contradiction in their speech, and abjectly prostrate themselves before all those from whom, in principle, they hope or fear something. A nation, then, that for many years has traveled this dangerous path and that, moreover, finds itself impoverished because of the accumulation of properties by a small number of citizens, because of its lack of industry and because of the multitude of jobs that encourage aspirationism,1 is a field open to the intrigues of astute and enterprising ambition and offers a thousand means for the organization of audacious factions.
On these foundations, in fact, ambitious persons rise up and, going on from here, make the first attempts at arbitrariness on persons who are little known, and because of their obscurity do not attract public attention or focus the gaze of the multitude. Normally, such transgressors remain hidden, either because of the ignorance of those who tolerate them or because of the lack of means for exposing and denouncing them to public opinion. From the lowest class it goes, rising gradually, battering the resistance that might be opposed, taking breaks that inspire some confidence, make anxiety disappear, and make citizens conceive the possibility of their security being trampled without protests or in spite of them. Here is where the faction comes in to support the one who pays it. It makes accusations that it repeats ceaselessly, exempting itself from ever proving them, feigning ignorance of any response to them, and
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suggesting gratuitously, although constantly, that those targets of persecution are criminals. Sometimes it tramples those who demand social guarantees, punishing them for sedition. Other times it attacks with prohibited weapons, inserting itself even into the sacredness of the domestic sanctuary in order to make their weaknesses public and obvious. If they are not found there, it does not matter; they are suggested, and with this it gets out of its difficulty. In this way, public attention is distracted from the matter at hand; men of probity and merit are obliged to abandon the field; terror imprints itself on almost all citizens, isolating them in their homes; the consolidation of efforts that would make factions tremble is impeded, and an entire people is dominated, as a whole province gives itself over to a gang of bandits. Thus is formed a phantom of public opinion, much clamor is put forward, a great noise is made, and new levels of power are acquired, which lead to the highest levels, and these to the desired end.
One of the means that ambition has most commonly employed and that has never lost its effectiveness despite the frequency with which it has been used is feigning conspiracies or stirring them up so that they serve as a pretext for the expansion and augmentation of the power it seeks. People who have obtained their liberty and independence at the price of blood are very easy to plunge once more into slavery by using their very desire to prevent those evils. Of course, it begins by making a pretext of the existence of powerful and terrible conspiracies. It makes great mystery of them, sparing no effort to make this conviction well known and popular. When this has been achieved, it ventures the distinction between the good of the republic and observance of the laws. Then it goes on to maintain that the former should be preferred to the latter. It assures that the laws are theories insufficient to govern and ends by openly infringing them, seeking their total abolition as its outsized prize.
This insidious attack on public freedoms is the more terrible to the extent that one takes them as a pretext and hides behind the mask of their preservation. Almost never has it been done without the destruction of the government or the republic. If the people allow themselves to be overtaken by fear of conspiracies and permit the system’s principles to be destroyed in order to extinguish or prevent them, they have already fallen into the trap, and they themselves, with their tolerance or positive concessions, have advanced the evil for which they seek a remedy. The
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first thing sought by the one who tries to establish the arbitrary regime is to have the persons of citizens entirely at his disposal. Once attaining this, he moves without hindrance until he arrives at his goal. To achieve it, he suggests the need to increase the strength of the government by suspension of judicial forms, by laws of exception, and by establishment of tribunals that are all loyal to the power and are under his direction and influence. For this, the system of exaggerating risks and dangers serves admirably.
When Bonaparte disbanded the Consulate of France and destroyed the Directory, the talk in Paris was of an immense and intricate conspiracy in favor of royalism, which never existed except in the minds of the people of his faction. Iturbide, in the attacks he made on the national representation on the third of April and the nineteenth of May, when he fell upon some of its members and dissolved it, made no mention of anything other than the conspiracies he supposed had even penetrated the sanctuary of the laws. Nonetheless, time and subsequent events showed with the greatest clarity that the motive of both strategems was not the good of the patria, or devotion to or concern for public safety, but rather the beginnings of ambition, of augmentation of power and personal aggrandizement.
It matters not at all whether this augmentation is obtained by force or by spontaneous concessions; the effect is always the same. Liberty is destroyed by events contrary to principles, whoever might be the agent to whom they owe their origin. Liberty is not a name empty and devoid of meaning that can be applied to any system of government. Liberty is itself the result of a conjunction of cautionary rules that the observation and experience of many centuries have taught men are necessary to avoid the abuses of the powerful and to secure the persons and goods of the members, not only from the oppressions of individuals, but also from those of the power. And although intended to protect them, many or most times the power degenerates into a malefactor, turning weapons against those who put them in its hands so that it might defend them.
Be convinced, then, citizens who have the happiness of belonging to a republic that has adopted free institutions for its rule—be convinced of the importance of putting a brake on a government that goes beyond or tries to go beyond the boundaries that limit its power; destroy by legal means all those who show aversion to the principles of the system and who have the audacity and brazenness to attack them; distrust all
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the demands relative to the augmentation or concession of powers that are extraconstitutional
