expansive. The nation as a whole needs fixed and constant laws, the minority has need of laws of exception.”
In a free and civilized nation, it is not the same to seize power as to capture opinion; on the contrary, the seizing of power is always guarded against and opposed by those who fear (and that is everyone) the diminishment of their rights. A just government respects this guarding
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and opposition for the advantages that redound to it; but a faction or a factious government that cannot bear the inspection of the public becomes irritated and enraged by its own conscience, for it knows that its errors and crimes are obvious to everyone, and in the inability to stifle the truth it furiously pronounces the maxim of tyrants: Let them hate me, so long as they fear me. Much better would be the love and respect of the people if they changed course. But what about the responsibility of the ministers? How is it possible that they resign themselves to giving up their posts and become objects of contempt and cursing? How to acknowledge themselves defeated in a struggle in which they have prostituted their consciences, sold their honor, assaulted what is most sacred? Will they not then reveal their dreadful secrets, and will there not come to light so many machinations, treacheries, depravities, atrocities . . .?
Thus, they see themselves committed to continuing their maneuvers at any price, to trampling whatever crosses their path, to aiming their guns at whomever might have the courage and ability to oppose them. The first shots hit persons they carefully make loathsome beforehand, suggesting to people that they are their enemies, as the sans-culottes did in France with those they called aristocrats. Distorted equality was the popular idol, and as many as calumny had designated were sacrificed to it. With that name emphatically pronounced, several thousand were dragged to the scaffold, crushing the forms and all rights. It would be easy to cite other examples, but unfortunately we have among ourselves practiced worse trampling underfoot, for there is no proscription more barbarously unjust than that which besets an accidental quality that has no relation to the crime and is enough nonetheless to fulminate atrocious punishment with neither conviction nor any process against an industrious, honorable multitude, whose persecution is more harmful to the nation than to the ones proscribed.
By this the people are deceived, the most absurd calumnies breaking loose, but repeated by a thousand filthy and hired mouths. Blackening the purest reputation, they transform innocence and merit into guilt, for the immorality of the factions cannot pardon them; fantastic dangers are concocted and conspiracies revealed. In the workshop of the faction are created the instruments of death, and in the darkness of their dens are woven the cords in which one wishes to seize virtue. The victims pile up, they are denied all legal resources, they are deprived of all mercy, and the cruelty of their persecutors feeds their torment. Thus
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they intend to intimidate all those who are good. Madmen! They do not know that the human heart, raised by virtue, becomes enthusiastic in danger and is triumphant on the scaffold, that the majority of a nation can be calmed by flattery but never subdued by violence.
Fear is always cruel, and tyrants, always trembling from their injustices, stupidly believe they are diminishing their danger. Crowding tortures together, they wish to dominate, not over free men, who make them tremble, but rather over the cold tomb of a nation, so much do they desire its silence and inertia. But the exact opposite happens, because if the clemency and moderation of Caesar did not shield him from the dagger of Brutus, how could Caligula hope that his atrocities were more powerful to save him? To attack guarantees is to call to arms and to incite the indignation of the most gentle citizen; it is the same as saying to the nation, defend yourself from my aggressions; and who would dare say it to whom? A faction, a handful of miserable people, to the powerful and august gathering of millions of citizens who, led by the constitution and the laws, go forward majestically to their happiness, and who will trample those destructive insects who are trying ridiculously to frighten it.
Because a faction never can be made up of illustrious and distinguished men, the sensible, the property owners, never enlist under the tattered banner of demagoguery or band together against the common happiness of which their own is a part, and here we have the third characteristic of the factions. Vagrants who have not dedicated themselves to any industry; those who, fleeing from work and disdaining frugality, have not known how to acquire or preserve an honest fortune; those who have no other wealth than a mind capable of adapting itself to all the whims of the powerful; those who have no other resource than employment, wages of their infamy; those who, without any merit whatsoever, wish to be prominent and stand out; those who, consumed by envy, try to knock down and punish virtue; all of these seek in a faction the support and protection they cannot find in justice and order; the yearning to supplant and substitute themselves in all positions stirs them up; they can only and wish only to live from the substance of the nation. To achieve such patriotic ends, it is necessary to destroy the established system, turn it all upside down, stir up discord, and foment revolutions, whose result might be to leave them masters of the ungodly spoils of the patria.
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Those who have produced, through their talents and probity, a merit acknowledged by the public; those who, dedicated to agriculture, the arts, business, have acquired a precious independence; those who truly make up the nation (for a famous author called the rest, with reason, tenants of the state); those who carry out public duties and actually sustain the government with part of their fortunes, acquired by means of zeal, risk, and frugality; those whose wealth cannot grow or be maintained except in the tranquility and security of public order; those, finally, who are the nerve, the hope, and the only power of the republic, will never be agitators, they will never want changes, always hazardous, they will never foster anything but the rule of the laws under whose protection they thrive and progress. The sources, the communication of public abundance that is in their hands, are blocked, are interrupted by disturbances; confidence disappears, and with it all the resources; burdens are increased and products are weakened. Everything redounds against the property owner, while the idlers view the ruin with the coolness of those who lose nothing, or with the complacency of those who see advancement in it.
For that reason, in times of danger, the patria always turns its eyes toward the property owners, who are those with effective means to save it, and it never counts on the egotistical vagrants who will sell themselves to whomever will pay them the most, and who bring their patria and all their duties into their personal interest. The property holders are one and the same with the patria, and thus in the crisis that it suffers they silence resentments, abandon personal aspirations, and emulation consists in looking at who will make the greatest sacrifices for the general happiness. This is patriotism, this the character of the truly free, this the public spirit that must always be generalized among us. Thus, one has seen at various times in England that the Tories and Whigs have alternately ceded their aims and their positions to their rivals when the patria has required it, and it would be for the patria a horrible crime to seize, out of spite, the ministerial seat because of an obstinacy as ridiculous as it is fierce and foolish. The laws in representative governments have prudently and justly anticipated that the destiny of the nation be entrusted only to property owners, whose progress is so intimately tied to it that the speculations of individual interests happily coincide with the general interest; the lack of these laws will frequently compromise us.
Finally, omitting other less important indicators, which can be reduced
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to those already expressed, the last is the impudence of violating all forms of legal equality. Neither the right and property of the professions, very effectively supported with clear reasons by Bentham, nor innocence and virtue will be free from violent plundering if persons have not bowed their heads to receive the seal of the horrible mysteries of the faction. Outstanding merit, the most distinguished service, is excluded inexorably from every position, if persons lack the shameful mark; but with
