any external violence without having infringed any law, or, what is the same, is innocent, the government must be responsible and know to make public amends, for, as nothing more than an agent of the nation, established precisely with the sole and unique objective of ensuring the exercise of public and private rights, to fail by aggression or omission in such duties, as sacred as they are important, is to commit a crime of lèse-nation. Thus it is when highwaymen and murderers have the support of the authority or, at the least, guilty tolerance; when libelers damage the reputation of the honorable citizen with impunity and lack the propriety due to public morality, feeding on and encouraging malicious defamation through publication of private defects, true or supposed, without the authority exercising any restraining methods whatsoever; finally, when the abuse with impunity of men who have no other crime than their birth or the opinions they profess is permitted or tolerated, it is evident that individual security does not exist and that a government that is indifferent to or colludes with such attackers is, at best, a useless burden for the nation that created it and onerous for the people that maintain it, without serving them at all. In effect, from the moment one or several members of society have just and well-founded reasons to fear that they cannot count on the protection of the government, and, so as not to provide that protection, the government shields itself with a lack of energy or with the ridiculous excuse that public opinion is against the persecuted ones and defying that opinion is imprudent, from this point, we repeat, individual security is at an end and the bases of authority are undermined.
This indolent inertia, or this partisan conduct, is not only destructive to those wretched who endure it, it is so for the persecutors themselves and, above all, the government. Nor will those who today attack the rights of others with impunity, riding roughshod over the reputation and persons of their opponents based on the fact that the authority, from complicity or fear that these opponents have instilled in it, cannot or will not curb their excesses, should their fortune be adverse tomorrow and should their misfortune make them a target of persecution, be able to expect, from the agents of power, that they will enjoy security and stability. For the same reasons that it has been a cold spectator to the crimes committed by a faction, it will simultaneously be a cold spectator to all crimes of other factions; and in its shadow the reign of
[print edition page 44]
force and anarchy will be forming, which sooner or later will topple the social edifice, enmeshing in its ruins the depositaries of the authority. France, in its revolution, provides us with conclusive evidence of this truth. From the installation of the Estates General, the spirit of persecution broke loose, which did not end even with the Restoration. In that nation, the destruction of a previously victorious party firmly dragged the government along with it. The constitutionalists banned the royalists; the republicans, the constitutionalists; the Girondists were banned by the committees of public health and public safety; those who made up these bodies went in succession to the guillotine by the orders of Danton and Robespierre. These famous cannibals fell at the stroke of the Thermadorians, and in all these convulsions France was flooded with blood, anarchy devastated everything, and the government, which did not know or did not want to make effective the guarantees protective of personal security, was always the victim of the rush of the factions.
Until now these have been and will always be the deplorable outcomes of the criminal indifference and abandonment with which those who are charged with curbing attacks on individual security view them. A government that deserves that name should shake off fear and not permit itself to be banished; it must remain firm and impassive among the factions. To abandon the principles of justice in order to seek the support of the dominant faction is to be lost, is to commit a crime that is more than atrocious, ineffective, and not conducive to the end it is endeavoring to attain. In effect, when the government does not think about governing, but rather about existing through criminal tolerance, it unfailingly reconciles the hatred of those who suffer with the scorn of those who persecute. The first cannot avoid becoming exceedingly irritated, especially on seeing that they are sacrificed to the existence of an authority that they created to protect their security. The second, inwardly convinced that they owe toleration only to the real or apparent strength of their faction and that tomorrow the same toleration will be owed by another, which at the very moment it replaces them, oppresses them, look with disdainful scorn on a power so debased that it loses the value of a just severity without escaping the odiousness of criminal toleration. Unhappy people entrusted to such a government! Public interests will be meanly sacrificed to the interests of the agents of the power, peaceful citizens will not have a moment of tranquility or rest, becoming obliged to seek in themselves and by preventive measures
[print edition page 45]
owing to their individual strengths, the security that cannot or will not be accorded to them by an authority that does not think about them except to deliver them defenseless to the voracity of their enemies. In vain will they invoke the principles of justice, the natural feelings of compassion for them and for their families, or the just compensation owed for their services. No other recourse remains to them but to endure their suffering and redouble their efforts to place at the proper time the sacred deposit of public liberties in more faithful hands and to entrust the reins of government to expert persons of known probity.
The people have another, much greater, woe to fear from governments, and it is that when these governments, emerging from their indifference, enter into such activity that they themselves commit the crimes they should prevent; to clarify, transforming themselves from protectors to aggressors, they attack individual security and turn against the citizens the same weapons they accepted for their defense. This abuse is the more terrible the more the very nature of the political powers gives way to frequent errors in such a delicate matter. The authority of the government, says the wise Bentham, is nothing but the exception to the general rule that individuals must observe. You will not kill, you will not deprive anyone of his liberty: this is the obligation of an individual. The judge will condemn the murderer to death; he will imprison the criminal; the government will have the sentence executed: here we have the powers of the authority. Although the primary benefit of society is providing individual security for us by curbing the aggressions of others, it is clearly possible to attain this only when the person of each citizen remains subject to the action of the public authority in the event of an attempt against the security of another. This act of submission is precisely where the risk is run. Here is where the government feigns acting as protector when it is actually turning into an aggressor; and as the dividing line between these two acts is so fine as, in general, to be scarcely perceptible to the majority of citizens, it is not strange that it continues to confuse them. So we strive to explain so important a subject through its effects and outcomes.
From the moment in which the government is empowered to arrange the fate of citizens without submission to any rule, all of them are its slaves. The citizen’s state is that of governed, the slave’s that of possessed, and the distance that separates such different conditions is immense. What is it, then, to be possessed? It is to be entirely and absolutely at the disposition of another and dependent on his will. And what is it to
[print edition page 46]
be governed? It is to be protected against all forms of aggression, reprimanded oneself when one commits them, and obliged to concur on the means of preventing them. Any other sacrifice that might be called for on the part of the citizen, and any other influence the government claims to have over his person, is an act of oppression and tyranny. A citizen, then, has no reason to complain when his imprisonment has been provoked by an act committed by him, an act declared criminal by an existing law that assigns a fixed penalty and when the trial directly follows the arrest. These methods can in no way be called undermining of individual security; on the contrary, they contribute to maintaining this precious right and are indispensably necessary to secure it. Such a procedure does not cause alarm or lack of confidence except for malefactors, and this, far from being an evil against which one should guard, is for a society a good for which legislators should always strive.
Those acts of the authority of which citizens complain, and with such justice call oppressive and tyrannical,
