But, in order that it should fulfil this mission, we must not stretch Solidarity artificially, so as to destroy Responsibility,—in other words, we must respect Liberty.
Should human institutions step in to oppose in this respect the divine laws, evil would not the less flow from error, only it would shift its position. It would strike those whom it ought not to strike. It would be no longer a warning and a monitor. It would no longer have the tendency to diminish and die away by its own [p042] proper action. Its action would be continued, and increase, as would happen in the physiological world if the imprudences and excesses of the men of one hemisphere were felt in their unhappy effects only by the inhabitants of the opposite hemisphere.
Now this is precisely the tendency not only of most of our governmental institutions, but likewise, and above all, of those which we seek to establish as remedies for the evils which we suffer. Under the philanthropical pretext of developing among men a factitious Solidarity, we render Responsibility more and more inert and inefficacious. By an improper application of the public force, we alter the relation of labour to its remuneration, we disturb the laws of industry and of exchange, we offer violence to the natural development of education, we give a wrong direction to capital and labour, we twist and invert men’s ideas, we inflame absurd pretensions, we dazzle with chimerical hopes, we occasion a strange loss of human power, we change the centres of population, we render experience itself useless,—in a word, we give to all interests artificial foundations, we set them by the ears, and then we exclaim that—Interests are antagonistic: Liberty has done all the evil,—let us denounce and stifle Liberty.
And yet, as this sacred word has still power to stir men’s hearts and make them palpitate, we despoil Liberty of its ‹prestige› by depriving it of its name, and it is under the title of ‹Competition› that the unhappy victim is led to the sacrificial altar, amid the applause of a mob stretching forth their hands to receive the shackles of servitude.
It is not enough, then, to exhibit, in their majestic harmony, the natural laws of the social order; we must also explain the disturbing causes which paralyze their action; and this is what I have endeavoured to do in the second part of this work.