If man were perfect, if he were infallible, society would present a very different harmony from that which is the subject of our inquiries. Ours is not the society of Fourier. It does not exclude evil; it admits dissonances; only we assert that it does not cease to be harmony if these dissonances pave the way to concord, and bring us back to it.

Our point of departure is that man is fallible, and that God has given him free will; and with the faculty of choosing, that of erring, of mistaking what is false for what is true, of sacrificing the future to the present, of giving way to unreasonable desires, etc.....

Man errs. But every act, every habit has its consequences.

By means of Responsibility, as we have seen, these consequences fall back on the author of the act. A natural concatenation of rewards or punishments, then, attracts him towards good, or repels him from evil.

Had man been destined to a solitary life, and to solitary labour, Responsibility would have been his only law.

But he is differently placed; he is sociable by destination. It is not true, as Rousseau has said, that man is naturally a perfect and solitary whole, and that the will of the lawgiver has transformed him into a fraction of a greater whole. The family, the province, the nation, the human race, are aggregates with which man has necessary relations. Hence it follows that the actions and the habits of the individual produce, besides the consequences which fall back upon himself, other good or bad consequences which extend themselves to his fellow-men. This is what we term the law of Solidarity, which is a sort of collective Responsibility.

This idea of Rousseau that the legislator has invented society—an idea false in itself—has been injurious in this respect, that it has led men to think that Solidarity is of legislative creation, and we [p489] shall immediately see that modern legislators have based upon this doctrine their efforts to subject society to an artificial solidarity, acting in an inverse sense to natural solidarity. In everything, the principle of these great manipulators of the human race is to set up their own work in room of the work of God, which they disown.

Our first task is to prove undeniably the natural existence of the law of Solidarity.

In the eighteenth century they did not believe in it. They adhered to the doctrine of the personality of faults. The philosophers of the last century, engaged above all in the reaction against Catholicism, would have feared, by admitting the principle of Solidarity, to open a door to the doctrine of original sin. Every time Voltaire found in the Scriptures a man bearing the punishment of another, he said ironically, “This is frightful, but the justice of God is not that of man.”

We are not concerned here to discuss original sin. But what Voltaire laughed at is nevertheless a fact, which is not less incontestable than it is mysterious. The law of Solidarity makes its appearance so frequently and so strikingly, in the individual and in the masses, in details and in the aggregate, in particular and in general facts, that to fail to recognise it implies either the blindness of sectarianism or the zeal of embittered controversy.

The first rule of all human justice is to concentrate the punishment of an action on its author, in virtue of the principle that faults are personal. But this law, sacred as regards individuals, is not the law of God, or even the law of society.

Why is this man rich? Because his father was active, honest, industrious, and economical. The father practised virtue; the son reaps the rewards.

Why is this other man always suffering, sick, feeble, timorous, and wretched? Because his father, endowed with a powerful constitution, abused it by debauchery and excess. To the guilty fall the agreeable consequences of vice, to the innocent fall its fatal consequences.

There exists not a man upon this earth whose condition has not been determined by thousands of millions of facts in which his own determinations have had no part. What I complain of to-day was perhaps caused by the caprice of my great-grandfather, etc.

Solidarity manifests itself on a greater scale still, and at distances which are still more inexplicable, when we consider the [p490] relations of divers nations, or of different generations of the same people.

Is it not strange that the eighteenth century was so occupied with intellectual or material works of which we are now enjoying the benefit? Is it not marvellous that we ourselves should make such efforts to cover the country with railways, on which none of us perhaps will ever travel? Who can fail to recognise the profound influence of our old revolutions on the events of our own time? Who can foresee what an inheritance of peace or of discord our present discussions may bequeath to our children?

Look at the public loans. We make war,—we obey savage passions,—we throw away by these means valuable power; and we find means of laying the scourge of all this destruction on our children, who may haply hold war in abhorrence, and be unable to understand our passions and hatreds.

Cast your eyes upon Europe; contemplate the events which agitate France, Germany, Italy, and Poland, and say if the law of Solidarity is a chimerical law.

There is no need to carry this enumeration farther. In order to prove undeniably the existence of the law, it is enough that the action of one man, of one people, of one generation, exerts a certain influence upon another man, another people, or another generation. Society at large is only an aggregate of solidarities which cross and overlap one another. This results from the communicable nature of human intelligence. Conversation, literature, discoveries, sciences, morals, etc., are all examples of this. All these unperceived currents by which one mind corresponds with another, all these efforts without visible connexion, the resulting force of which nevertheless pushes on the human race towards an equilibrium, towards an average level which is always rising—all that vast treasury of utilities and of acquired knowledge which each may draw upon without diminishing it, or augment without being aware of it,—all this interchange of thoughts, of productions, of services, and of labour, of good and evil, of virtue and vice, which makes the human family one grand whole, and imparts to thousands of millions of ephemeral existences a common, a universal, a continuous life,—all this is Solidarity.

Naturally, then, and to a certain extent, there is an incontestable Solidarity among men. In other words, Responsibility is not exclusively personal, but is shared and divided. Action emanates from individuality; consequences are spread over the community.

We must remark that it is in the nature of every man to desire [p491] to be happy. You may say that I am extolling egotism if you will; I extol nothing; I show, I prove undeniably, the existence of an innate universal sentiment, which can never cease to exist,—personal interest, the desire for happiness, and the repugnance to pain.

Hence it follows that the individual is led so to order his conduct that the good consequences of his actions accrue to himself, while the bad effects fall upon others. He endeavours to spread these bad consequences over the greatest possible number of men, in order that they may be less perceived, and call forth less reaction.

But opinion, that mistress of the world, the daughter of solidarity, brings together all those scattered grievances, and collects all aggrieved interests into a formidable resisting mass. When a man’s habits become injurious to those who live around him, they call forth a feeling of repulsion. We judge such habits severely. We denounce them, we brand them; and the man who gives himself up to them becomes an object of distrust, of contempt, and of abhorrence. If he reap some advantages, they are soon far more than compensated by the sufferings which public aversion accumulates on his head. To the troublesome consequences which a bad habit always entails in virtue of the law of Responsibility, there come to be added other consequences still more grievous in virtue of the law of Solidarity.

Our contempt for the man soon extends to the habit, to the vice; and as the want of consideration is one of our most powerful springs of action, it is clear that solidarity, by the reaction which it brings to bear against vicious acts, tends to restrain and to prevent them.

Solidarity, then, like Responsibility, is a progressive force; and we see that, in relation to the author of the act, it resolves itself, if I may so speak, into repercussive or reflected responsibility; that it is still a system of reciprocal rewards and punishments, admirably fitted to circumscribe evil, to extend good, and to urge on mankind on the road of progress.

But in order that it should operate in this way,—in order that those who benefit or suffer from an action which is not their own should react upon its author by approbation or disapprobation, by gratitude or resistance, by esteem, affection, praise, or blame, hatred or vengeance,—one condition is indispensable; and that condition is, that the connecting link between the act and all its effects should be known and appreciated.

When the public is mistaken in this respect, the law fails in its design. [p492]

An act is hurtful to the masses; but the masses are convinced that this act is advantageous to them. What is the consequence? The consequence is, that instead of reacting against it, in place of condemning it, and by that means restraining it, the public exalt it, honour it, extol it, and repeat it.

Nothing is more frequent, and here is the reason of it:

An act produces on the masses not only an effect, but a series of effects. Now it frequently happens that the primary effect is a local good, visible and tangible, whilst the ulterior effects set a-filtering through the body politic evils which are difficult to discover or to connect with their cause.

War is an example of this. In the infancy of society, we do not perceive all the consequences of war. And, to say truth, in a state of civilisation in which there is a less amount of anterior labour (capital) exposed to destruction, less science and money devoted to the machinery of war, etc., these consequences are less prejudicial than they afterwards become. We see only the first campaign, the booty which follows victory, the intoxication of triumph. At that stage, war and warriors are very popular. Then we see the enemy, having become conqueror in his turn, burning down houses and harvests, levying contributions, and imposing laws. In these alternations of success and misfortune, we see generations of men annihilated, agriculture crushed, and two nations impoverished. We see the most important portion of the people contemning the arts of peace, turning their arms against the institutions of their country, serving as the tools of despotism, employing their restless energy in sedition and civil discord, and creating barbarism and solitude at home, as they had formerly done among their neighbours. Do we then pronounce war to be plunder upon a great scale?... No; we see its effects without desiring to understand its cause; and when this people, in a state of decadence, shall be invaded in its turn by a swarm of conquerors, centuries after the catastrophe, grave historians will relate that the nation fell because the people had become enervated by peace, because they had forgotten the art of war and the austere virtues of their ancestors.

I could point out the same illusions in connexion with the system of slavery.....

The same thing is true of religious errors.....

In our own day, the rÉgime of prohibition gives rise to the same fallacy.....

To bring back public opinion, by the diffusion of knowledge and the profound appreciation of causes and effects, into that [p493] intelligent state in which bad tendencies come to be branded, and prejudicial measures opposed, is to render a great service to one’s country. When public opinion, deceived and misled, honours what is worthy of contempt, contemns what is honourable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is hurtful and discourages what is useful, applauds a lie and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back upon progress, and can only be reclaimed by terrible lessons and catastrophes.

We have indicated elsewhere the gross misuse which certain Socialist schools have made of the word Solidarity.....

Let us now see in what spirit human laws should be framed.

It seems to me that here there can be no room for doubt. Human law should coincide with the natural law. It should facilitate and ensure the just retribution of men’s acts; in other words, it should circumscribe solidarity, and organize reaction in order to enforce responsibility. The law can have no other object than to restrain vicious actions and to multiply virtuous ones, and for that purpose it should favour the just distribution of rewards and punishments, so that the bad effects of an act should be concentrated as much as possible on the person who commits it.....

In acting thus, the law conforms itself to the nature of things; solidarity induces a reaction against a vicious act, and the law only regulates that reaction.....

The law thus contributes to progress: The more rapidly it brings back the bad effect of the act upon the agent, the more surely it restrains the act itself.

To give an example: Violence is attended with pernicious consequences. Among savages the repression of violence is left to the natural course of things; and what happens? It provokes a terrible reaction. When a man has committed an act of violence against another man, an inextinguishable desire of vengeance is lighted up in the family of the injured party, and is transmitted from generation to generation. The law interferes; and what ought it to do? Should it limit itself to stifle the desire for vengeance, to repress it, to punish it? It is clear that this would be to encourage violence, by sheltering it from reprisals. This is not, then, what the law should do. It ought to substitute itself, so to speak, for the spirit of vengeance, by organizing in its place a reaction against the violence. It should say to the injured family, “I charge myself with the repression of the act you complain of.” When the whole tribe considers itself as injured and menaced, the [p494] law inquires into the grievance, interrogates the guilty party, makes sure that there is no error as to the fact and as to the person, and thus represses with regularity and certainty an act which would have been punished irregularly.114. [p495]