For, in the first place, to govern another corporate body, for example the Church, the State at one time appoints its ecclesiastical heads, as under the old monarchy after the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction by the Concordat of 1516; at another, as with the Constituent Assembly in 1791, without appointing its heads, it invents a new mode of appointment by imposing on the Church a discipline contrary to its spirit and even to its dogmas. Sometimes it goes further still and reduces a special body into a mere administrative branch, transforming its heads into revocable functionaries whose acts it orders and directs; such under the Empire as well as under the Restoration, were the mayor and common-councilors in a commune, and the professors and head-masters of the University. One step more and the invasion is complete: naturally, either through ambition or precaution, or through theory or prejudice, on undertaking a new service it is tempted to reserve to itself or delegate its monopoly. Before 1789 there existed one of these monopolies to the advantage of the Catholic Church, through the interdiction of other cults, also another to the advantage of each corporation of "Arts et MÉtiers," through the interdiction of free labor; after 1800, there existed one for the benefit of the University through all sorts of shackles and constraints imposed on the establishment and maintenance of private schools.—Now, through each of these constraints the State encroaches on the domain of the individual; the more extended its encroachments the more does it prey upon and reduce the circle of spontaneous initiation and of independent action, which constitute the true life of the individual; if, in conformity with the Jacobin program, it pushes its interference to the end, it absorbs in itself all other lives;2203 henceforth, the community consists only of automata maneuvered from above, infinitely small residues of men, passive, mutilated, and, so to say, dead souls; the State, instituted to preserve persons, has reduced them to nonentities.

The effect is the same with property when the State supports other organizations than its own. For, to maintain these, it has no other funds than those of the taxpayers; consequently, using its collectors, it takes the money out of their pockets; all, indiscriminately, willingly or not, pay supplementary taxes for supplementary services, whether this service benefits them or is repugnant to them. If I am a Protestant in a Catholic State, or a Catholic in a Protestant State, I pay for religion which seems wrong to me and for a Church which seems to me mischievous. If I am a skeptic, a free-thinker, indifferent or hostile to positive religions in France, I pay to-day for the support of four cults which I regard as useless or pernicious. If I am a provincial or a peasant, I pay for maintaining an "OpÉra" which I never attend and for a "SÈvres" and "Gobelins" of which I never see a vase or a piece of tapestry.—In times of tranquility the extortion is covered up, but in troubled times it is nakedly apparent. Under the revolutionary government, bands of collectors armed with pikes made raids on villages as in conquered countries;2204 the farmer, collared and kept down by blows from the butt end of a musket, sees his grain taken from his barn and his cattle from their stable; "all scampered off on the road to the town;" while around Paris, within a radius of forty leagues, the departments fasted in order that the capital might be fed. With gentler formalities, under a regular government, a similar extortion occurs when the State, employing a respectable collector in uniform, takes from our purse a crown too much for an office outside of its competency. If, as with the Jacobin State, it claims all offices, it empties the purse entirely; instituted for the conservation of property, it confiscates the whole of it.—Thus, with property, as with persons, when the state proposes to itself another purpose than the preservation of these, not only does it overstep its mandate but it acts contrary to its mandate.