the burden lower down in order to exempt themselves.
To these misfortunes which were, so to speak, legal, let us add the occasional oppressions which resulted from this agricultural class’s isolation, poverty, and defenseless position. These oppressions derived from the immense distance which separated the agricultural class from the supreme power, and which condemned its groans to vanish in the air; from the insolence of the intermediary powers which cut off its complaints; from the ease of oppressing, with or without the law, men equally ignorant of the laws’ threats or their protections; from the rapacity of the treasury which spared the rich, and which had to compensate itself at the expense of the poor. This arbitrariness was all the more unchecked because it was exercised individually on obscure victims, and spread among a crowd of lesser agents, viziers of the village, pursuing their evil in the shadows. It was in such a situation, and as a remedy for such a situation, that Filangieri proposed encouragements for agriculture and honors for farmers. But agriculture had been struck at the root. The means of reproduction had been taken from it. Farmers were little islets, stripped of all their rights, burdened with all the work, condemned to all manner of privation. Even with good intentions, the government could not heal this incurable wound. Nature is stronger than the government, and nature wills that every cause have its effect, that every tree produce its fruit. All philanthropical projects are chimeras when they are not founded on constitutional freedom. They can serve as a text for the oratorical flights of well-intentioned rhetoricians; they can offer clever ministers the means of occupying their master’s leisure in a new and amusing manner; they can, by fooling that master, assuage his guilt, should the spectacle of public misery create some remorse in him. But neither the agricultural class nor agriculture will profit at all from any of these impotent palliatives.
The situation of the agricultural class will be deplorable everywhere that class does not have, through agents of its own choice, certainty of legal and public redress. The situation of the agricultural class in France was deplorable before the Revolution. I call to witness the taille, the corvée, the militia, the vingtièmes, the head-taxes, the aides, the tithe, the perpetual mortgages, the
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transfer taxes, the alcohol taxes, and all those innumerable burdens, both monetary and personal, whose many and bizarre names would uselessly fill entire pages.3 I attest to the not less numerous exemptions, so scandalously demanded and so easily obtained by the upper classes, as if their duties toward society were in inverse proportion to the advantages which society guarantied them. I attest to the impoverished and badly cultivated lands, bordered by sumptuous parks, and the huts, covered in thatch, which surrounded superb chateaus—silent protests, but which ended up acting only too energetically against such a social order.
Filangieri and the writers who followed him should have immersed themselves in these truths. Instead of dreaming about special encouragements, of vain distinctions tossed from the height of the throne—inevitably at random—and distributed according to the caprices of untrustworthy agents, they should have demanded the guaranties that every country owes the citizen who inhabits it, the guaranties without which all governments are illegitimate.
With these guarantees, agriculture, as well as every other sort of industry, can easily do without the authorities’ protection. It is entirely useless for the government to involve itself in encouraging what is necessary. It is enough if it does not hinder it. Necessity will be obeyed. When there is no vicious action by government, production is always in perfect proportion to demand. I except unforeseen cases, sudden calamities, which in any case are pretty rare when one leaves nature free, but which governments by their erroneous measures create more often than one thinks. I will speak about them more in another part of this Commentary. In the usual order of things it is not encouragement but security that agriculture needs. However, security is only to be found in good constitutional institutions. When the farmer himself can be taken away because his neighbor is an informer, or because his enemy is some powerful man’s valet; when the fruit of his work can be greatly diminished by excessive taxes because some landowner, a rich man or a noble, has had himself exempted; when his children, the useful associates of his daily operations, are taken from him to die in far-off wars, do you think that, worried about the present and frightened about the future, he will continue devoting himself to efforts whose profit may be taken from him? It is you
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who put despair and discouragement into his soul, and then you claim to encourage him. You torment, you oppress, you bankrupt the entire class, and you imagine that a little charity, or what is even more ridiculous, that a medal you invent and disdainfully confer on some individual your agents protect, will revive this impoverished and despoiled class. Your ineptitude or your despotism has made the soil barren, and you believe that your favors, like the presence of the sun, will return it to its original fertility. You show yourself, you smile, you distribute I don’t know what vain and illusory honors, and this action, to listen to you, is going to be admired for centuries! What strange arrogance! Gross charlatanism, by which in the past some honest dreamers were taken in, but which, thank heaven, is more discredited every day. The emperor of China also deigns to guide a plow with his imperial hand, and to trace a furrow on a holiday. This does not prevent China from being the constant prey of famine, and parents from exposing on the riverbank the children they are incapable of feeding. This is because China is a despotic state, and when farmers are subject to the whip all year long, the honor one thinks one is doing them once a year neither compensates nor consoles them.
I will be forced to return more than once to the system of encouragements when Filangieri discusses industry. Consequently, I postpone further discussion which proves that even from a moral perspective this system is harmful.
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CHAPTER FOUR
The cry of reason has finally reached the throne. Rulers have begun to feel … that the real source of greatness does not lie in force and arms.
INTRODUCTION, P. 2.
Is it really true that because reason has reached the throne, rulers have finally recognized that they owe more respect to human life and that true greatness is not in force and arms? I would be only too pleased to adopt this flattering conviction, but I cannot prevent myself from having certain doubts. I imagine myself in the time when Filangieri wrote these lines, and cast my eyes forward over the next forty years. I see the Seven Years’ War end, but the War of the American Revolution soon begins. Joseph II threatens Prussia and attacks the Turks. Sweden launches itself rather foolishly against Russia. Poland is partitioned, and if this does not result in war, it is because the co-partitioners divide three against one. Finally, the kings of Europe form a coalition against France, which wants to give itself a free government. After ten years of ferocious combat, they are defeated, but then the French government gives up moderation and justice, and for another ten years the space from Lisbon to Moscow, and Hamburg to Naples, is again flooded with blood. Are these very satisfactory proofs of the empire of reason?
Nevertheless, there is an element of truth in Filangieri’s assertion, which he disfigures by his well-meaning but little-deserved compliments to power. As I have previously observed (chap. 2), the warlike system is in contradiction with the current state of the human race. The age of commerce has arrived, and the more the commercial tendency dominates, the more the warlike tendency must weaken.
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War and commerce are but two different means of arriving at the same end: possessing what one desires. Commerce is nothing but homage rendered to the strength of the possessor by the one who aspires to possession. It is an attempt to obtain by mutual agreement what one no longer hopes to conquer by violence. A man who
