The Social Republic promises to solve the difficulty.

“All systems, all governments,” it declares, “have been tried and found wanting. My ideas alone are new, and have not yet been put to the test. My day is come.”

This is a mistake. The ideas propounded by the Social Republic are not new. They are as old as the world. They have risen up in the midst of all the great moral and social crises, whether in the East or the West, in the ancient or the modern world. The second and third centuries in Africa, and especially in Egypt, during the agitations caused by the propagation of Christianity—the middle ages during their confused, stormy fermentation—the sixteenth century in Germany, in the course of the Reformation—and the seventeenth in England during the political revolution,—had their Socialists and their Communists, thinking, speaking, and acting precisely like those of our own day. It is a phase of human nature that reappears at epochs when society is like a boiling caldron, in which every ingredient is thrown to the surface and exposed to view.

Till now, it is true, these ideas had only been enounced on a small scale, obscurely and timidly, and were repelled and execrated almost as soon as they saw the light. But now they boldly exhibit themselves, and put forth all their pretensions before the public. It signifies little whether this is by their own strength, by the fault of the public itself, or from causes inherent in the present state of society. Since the Social Republic is proclaimed aloud, we must look at it steadily and endeavour to fathom its lowest depths.

I wish to avoid all circumlocution, to throw aside all disguises, and to go straight to the heart of the idol. Nor is this impossible. For as all the efforts of the Social Republic tend to one end, so all its ideas are the offspring of one fundamental idea.

This fundamental idea is to be found, explicitly or implicitly, in the language of all the leaders of the Social Republic, though all do not avow, and some are perhaps not even conscious that they entertain it. M. Proudhon appears to me the one among them who knows best what he thinks and what he wishes: he appears to show the firmest and most consistent understanding in his detestable dreams.

It is not, however, so firm nor so consistent as it appears, or probably as he himself thinks it. He has not declared, and I doubt if he have perceived, to what his system leads.

His system, nakedly and rigorously stated, is this:—

All men have a right—and the same right—to happiness.

Happiness is the enjoyment (without any limit but that prescribed by the want and the faculty of enjoying) of all the good things existing or possible in this world; whether natural and primitive, or progressively created by the intelligence and the labour of man.

Certain men, certain families, or certain classes have acquired the exclusive enjoyment of some (indeed the greater part) of the most essential and productive of these good things; or, in other words, these things, or the means of procuring them, are become the special and perpetual property of certain men, families, and classes.

Such a confiscation of a part of the fund common to mankind, for the advantage of a few, is essentially contrary to justice; contrary to the rights of the men of the same generation, who ought all to enjoy it equally; and contrary to the rights of successive generations, each of which, on its entrance into life, ought to find the good things of life equally accessible, and to enjoy them in its turn like its predecessors.

Therefore all special and perpetual appropriation of the good things which confer happiness, and of the means of procuring those good things, must be abolished, in order to insure the universal enjoyment and the equal distribution of them amongst all men, and all successive generations of men.

But how is it possible to abolish property? or, at least, so to transform it, that, as regards its social and permanent effects, it may be as if it were abolished?

Here the leaders of the Social Republic differ greatly among themselves. Some recommend slow and gentle measures; others urge prompt and decisive ones. Some have recourse to political means—for example, a certain organization of existence and labour in common; others try to invent economical and financial expedients—for example, a series of measures designed gradually to destroy the net revenue of property, whether in land or capital, and thus to render property itself useless and illusory. But all these schemes originate in the same design and tend to the same result; the abolition or the nullification of personal, domestic, and hereditary property; and of all institutions, social or political, which are based upon personal, domestic, and hereditary property.

Such, through all the diversity, obscurity, ambiguity, and contradiction of the ideas which circulate among the adherents of the Social Republic, is the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of all these systems; such is the end they pursue, and hope to attain.

But the following truths are forgotten by M. Proudhon and his friends.

Mankind is not merely a series of individuals called men; it is a race, which has a common life, and a general and progressive destiny. This is the distinctive character of man, which he alone of created beings possesses.

And why is this? It is because human individuals are not isolated, nor confined to themselves, and to the point they occupy in space or time. They are connected with each other; they act upon each other, by ties and by means which do not require their presence, and which outlive them. Hence the successive generations of men are linked together in unbroken succession.

The permanent union and progressive development which are the consequences of this unbroken succession of man to man, and generation to generation, characterize the human race. They constitute its peculiarity and its greatness, and mark man for sovereignty in this world, and for immortality beyond it.

From this are derived, and by this are founded, the family and the state, property and inheritance, country, history, glory, all the facts and all the sentiments which constitute the extended and perpetual life of mankind, amidst the bounded appearance and rapid disappearance of individual men.

In the Social Republic all this ceases to exist. Men are mere isolated and ephemeral beings, who appear in this life, and on this earth the scene of life, only to take their subsistence and their pleasure, each for himself alone, each by the same right, and without any end or purpose beyond.

This is precisely the condition of the lower animals. Among them there exists no tie, no influence, which survives the individual, and extends to the race. There is no permanent appropriation, no hereditary transmission, no unity nor progress in the life of the species;—nothing but individuals who appear and then vanish, seizing on their passage their portion of the good things of the earth and the pleasures of life, according to the combined measure of their wants and their strength, which, according to them, constitute their right.

Thus, in order to secure to every individual of the human species the equal and incessantly fluctuating share of the goods and pleasures of sense, the doctrines of the Social Republic bring men down to the level of the lower animals. They obliterate the human race.

They do worse.

There is in the mind of man an imperishable instinct that God presides over his destiny, and that it is not wholly accomplished in this world. Naturally and universally, man believes in God and invokes him as his support in the present, his hope in the future.

According to the doctrines of the Social Republic, God is an unknown imaginary power, upon whom the visible and real rulers of men upon earth throw the weight of their own responsibility, and by thus directing the eyes of the suffering towards another master and another state of existence, dispose them to acquiesce in their afflictions, whilst they secure themselves in the maintenance of their usurpations. According then to this doctrine, God is evil, for it is in his name that men are persuaded to acquiesce in evil. To banish evil from the earth, it therefore is necessary to banish God from the mind of man. Men left alone with their earthly masters, and reduced to an earthly existence, will demand the enjoyments of this life and the equal distribution of these enjoyments; and as soon as those who are without them insist on having them, they will have them, for they are the strongest.

Thus God and the human race will disappear together. In their place will remain animals still bearing the name of men, more intelligent and more powerful than other animals, but having the same condition and the same destiny; and like them seizing, on their passage through life, their portion of the goods of earth and the pleasures of sense, according to the combined measure of their wants and their strength, which constitute their right.

Such is the philosophy of the Social Republic; such, therefore, is the basis of its policy. We have traced its origin and its end.

I will not insult the good sense or the dignity of mankind by dwelling on it longer. It is the degradation of man, and the destruction of society.

Not only of society as at present constituted, but of all human society whatsoever: for all society rests on foundations which it is the object of the Social Republic to overthrow. It is not a mere invasion of the social edifice by intruders, whether barbarian or not; it is the utter ruin of the edifice itself that is contemplated. If M. Proudhon had the absolute disposal of society in its present state, with all that it possesses or enjoys, and were to change the distribution and the possessors of property at his own good pleasure, he would be guilty of great iniquity, and occasion great suffering. He would not, however, destroy society. But if he pretended to give the ideas with which he tries to batter down the present structure of society, as laws to one newly framed, it would infallibly perish. Instead of a State and a People, there would be only a chaos of human beings, without a tie and without repose. Nor would it be possible to reduce that chaos to order without abandoning or evading the ideas of the Social Republic, and returning to the natural conditions of social order.

The Social Republic is then at once odious and impossible. It is the most absurd, and at the same time the most perverse, of all chimeras.

But we must not presume upon this. Nothing is more dangerous than what is at once strong and impossible. The Social Republic is strong; indeed how can it be otherwise? Availing themselves with ardour of every kind of liberty granted for the promulgation of ideas, its advocates are incessantly labouring to diffuse their principles and their promises through the densest ranks of society. There they find masses of men easy to delude, easy to inflame. They offer them rights in conformity with their desires. They excite their passions in the name of justice and truth. For it would be puerile to deny (and for the honour of human nature we must admit) that the ideas of the Social Republic have, to many minds, the character and the force of truth. In questions so complex and so exciting, the smallest gleam of truth is sufficient to dazzle the eyes and inflame the hearts of men, and to dispose them to embrace with transport the grossest and most fatal errors with which that truth is blended. Fanaticism is kindled at the same time that selfishness is awakened; sincere devotedness joins hands with brutal passions; and, in the terrible fermentation which ensues, evil predominates; the portion of good mingled with it acts only as its veil and its instrument.

We have no right to complain, for it is we ourselves who incessantly add fuel to the fire—and this is the most deep-seated of our maladies. It is we who give to the Social Republic its chief strength. It is the chaos of our political ideas and our political morality—that chaos disguised sometimes under the word democracy, sometimes under that of equality, sometimes under that of people—which opens all the gates, and throws down all the ramparts of society before it. We say that Democracy is everything. The men of the Social Republic reply, “Democracy is ourselves.” We proclaim, in language of infinite confusion, the absolute equality of rights and the sovereign right of numbers. The men of the Social Republic come forward and say, “Count our numbers.” The perpetual confusion of the true and the false, the good and the bad, the possible and the chimerical, which prevails in our own policy, our own language, our own acts—this it is which has enfeebled our arm for defence, and given to the Social Republic a confidence, an arrogance, and an influence for attack, which of itself it would never possess.

When this confusion shall be dissipated; when we shall arrive at that period of maturity in which free nations, instead of blindly following their first impressions, whithersoever they may lead, see things as they really are, assign to the different elements of society their just measure, and to words their true meaning, and regulate their ideas as they do their affairs, with that firm moderation which rejects all fantasies, admits all necessities, respects all rights, has regard to all interests, and represses all usurpations;—those from below no less than those from above—those of fanaticism no less than those of selfishness: when we shall have reached this point, although the Social Republic may not entirely disappear, and although we may not have entirely crushed its efforts nor annihilated its dangers (for it derives its ambition and its strength from sources that none can dry up), still it will be controlled by the union and the order of society; all that is most absurd and perverse in its doctrines will be incessantly combated and defeated, and it will in time take its due place in that vast and imposing development of the human race which is passing before our eyes.