And much worse. Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain not its own, roughly, at greater cost, and with smaller yield than spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which it deems its prerogative, or through its unfair competition, it kills and paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and hence so many precious organs, which, absorbed, curbed or abandoned, are lost to the great social body.—And still worse, if this system lasts, and continues to crush them out, the human community loses the faculty of reproducing them; entirely extirpated, they do not grow again; even their germ has perished. Individuals no longer know how to form associations, how to co-operate under their own impulses, through their own initiative, free of outside and superior constraint, all together and for a long time in view of a definite purpose, according to regular forms under freely-chosen chiefs, frankly accepted and faithfully followed. Mutual confidence, respect for the law, loyalty, voluntary subordination, foresight, moderation, patience, perseverance, practical good sense, every disposition of head and heart, with which no association of any kind is efficacious or even viable, have died out for lack of exercise. Henceforth spontaneous, pacific, and fruitful co-operation, as practiced by a free people, is unattainable; men have arrived at social incapacity and, consequently, at political incapacity.—In fact they no longer choose their own constitution or their own rulers; they put with these, willingly or not, according as accident or usurpation furnishes them: now the public power belongs to the man, the faction, or the party sufficiently unscrupulous, sufficiently daring, sufficiently violent, to seize and hold on to it by force, to make the most of it as an egotist or charlatan, aided by parades and prestige, along with bravura songs and the usual din of ready-made phrases on the rights of Man and the public salvation.—This central power itself has in its hands no body who might give it an impetus and inspiration, it rules only over an impoverished, inert, or languid social body, solely capable of intermittent spasms or of artificial rigidity according to order, an organism deprived of its secondary organs, simplified to excess, of an inferior or degraded kind, a people no longer anything but an arithmetical sum of separate, unconnected units, in brief, human dust or mud.—This is what the interference of the State leads to.

There are laws in the social and moral world as in the physiological and physical world; we may misunderstand them, but we cannot elude them; they operate now against us, now for us, as we please, but always alike and without heeding us; it is for us to heed them; for the two conditions they couple together are inseparable; the moment the first appears the second inevitably follows.

2201 (return)
[ Macaulay, "Essays: Gladstone on Church and State."—This principle, of capital importance and of remarkable fecundity, may be called the principle of specialties. Adam Smith fist applied it to machines and to workmen. Macaulay extended it to human associations. Milne-Edwards applied it to the entire series of animal organs. Herbert Spencer largely develops it in connection with physiological organs and human societies in his "Principles of Biology" and "Principles of Sociology." I have attempted here to show the three parallel branches of its consequences, and, again, their common root, a constitutive and primordial property inherent in every instrumentality.]

2202 (return)
[ Cf. "The Revolution," III., book VI., ch. 2 The encroachments of the State and their effect on individuals is there treated. Here, the question is their effects on corporations. Read, on the same subject, "Gladstone on Church and State," by Macaulay, and "The Man versus the State," by Herbert Spencer, two essays in which the close reasoning and abundance of illustrations are admirable.]

2203 (return)
[ "The Revolution," III, 346. (Laffont II. p 258.)]

2204 (return)
[ Ibid., III. 284 Laff. 213.]

2205 (return)
[ "The Revolution," III., 353, 416. (Laffont II. notes pp 262 and 305 to 308.)]

2206 (return)
[ "The Ancient RÉgime," 64, 65, 76, 77, 120, 121, 292. (Laffont I. pp. 52-53, 60-61, 92 to 94, 218 to 219.)]

2207 (return)
[ "The Revolution," I., 177 and following pages. (Laffont I, pp. 438 to 445.)]

2208 (return)
[ The essays of Herbert Spencer furnish examples for England under the title of "Over-legislation and Representative government." Examples for France may be found in "LibertÉ du Travail," by Charles Dunoyer (1845). This work anticipates most of the ideas of Herbert Spencer, lacking only the physiological "illustrations."]