Is it, that superiors in office have a right to demand such an account of their subordinates? Not to possess such a right, would be not to be a superior:- not to be subject to the exercise of it, would be not to be a subordinate. In this sense, the proposition is perfectly harmless, but equally nugatory. Is it, that all men not in office have this right with respect to all men, or every man in office? Then comes the question as before — each in his individual capacity, or only altogether in their collective? If in their collective, whatever this article, or any other article drawn up in the same view, does or can do for them, amounts to nothing: whatever it would have them do, it gives them no facilities for doing it, which they did not possess without it. Whatever it would have them do, if one and all rise for the purpose of doing it, bating what hindrance they may receive from one another, there will be nobody to hinder them. But is there any great likelihood of any such rising ever taking place? and if it were to take place, would there be any great use in it?
If the right be of the number of those which belongs to each and every man in his individual capacity, then comes the old story over again of mutual obstruction, and the obstruction of all business, as before.
The right of demanding an account? What means that, too? The right of simply putting the question, or the right of compelling an answer to it and such an answer as shall afford to him that puts it, the satisfaction he desires? In the former case, the value of the right will not be great; in the latter case, he who has it, and who, by the supposition, is not in office, will in fact be in office; and, as everybody has it, and is to have it, the result is, that everybody is in office; and those who command all men are under the command of every man.
Instead of meaning stark nonsense, was the article meant after all simply to convey a memento to those who re superiors in office, to keep a good look-out after their subordinates? If this be the case, nothing can be more innocent and unexceptionable. Neither the child that is learning wisdom in his horn-book, nor the old woman who is teaching him, need blush to own it. But what has it to do in a composition, the work of the collected wisdom of the nation, and of which the object is, throughout and exclusively, to declare rights?
Silly or pestilential—such, as usual, is here the alternative. In the shape of advice, a proposition may be instructive or trifling, wholesome or insipid. But be it the one or the other, the instant it is converted, or attempted to be converted, into a law, of which those called legislators are to be the objects, and those not called legislators to be the executors, it becomes all sheer poison, and of the rankest kind.
ARTICLE XVI.
Every society in which the warranty of rights is not assured, ["la garantie des droits n'est pas assurée"] nor the separation of powers determined, has no constitution.
Here we have an exhibition: self-conceit inflamed to insanity — legislators turned into turkey-cocks— the less important operation of constitution-making, interrupted for the more important operation of bragging. Had the whole human species, according to the wish of the tyrant, but one neck, it would find in this article a sword designed to sever it.
This constitution, — the blessed constitution, of which this matchless declaration forms the base—the constitution of France— is not only the most admirable constitution in the world but the only one. That no other country but France has the happiness of possessing the sort of thing, whatever it be, called a constitution, is a meaning sufficiently conveyed. This meaning the article must have, if it have any: for other meaning most assuredly it has none.
Every society in which the warranty of rights is not assured (toute société dans laquelle la garantie des droits n est pas assurée) is, it must be confessed, most rueful nonsense; but if the translation were not exact, it would be unfaithful: and if not nonsensical, it would not be exact.
Do you ask, has the nation I belong to such a thing as a constitution belonging to it? If you want to know, look whether a declaration of rights, word for word the same as this, forms part of its code of laws; for by this article, what is meant to be insinuated, not expressed (since by nonsense nothing is expressed,) is the necessity of having a declaration of rights like this set by authority in the character of an introduction at the head of the collection of its laws.
As to the not absolutely nonsensical, but only very obscure clause, about a society's having "the separation of powers determined," it seems to be the result of a confused idea of an intended application of the old maxim, Divide et impera: the governed are to have the governors under their governance, by having them divided among themselves. A still older maxim, and supposing both maxims applied to this one subject, I am inclined to think a truer one, is, that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
Yet on the existence of two perfectly independent and fighting sovereignties, or of three such fighting sovereignties (the supposed state of things in Britain seems here to be the example in view,) the perfection of good government, or at least of whatever approach to good government can subsist without the actual adoption in terminis of a declaration of rights such as this, is supposed to depend. Hence, though Britain have no such thing as a constitution belonging to it at present, yet, if during a period of any length, five or ten years for example, it should ever happen that neither House of Commons nor House of Lords had any confidence in the King's Ministers, nor any disposition to endure their taking the lead in legislation (the House of Commons being all the while, as we must suppose, peopled by universal suffrage,) possibly in such case, for it were a great deal too much to affirm, Britain might be so far humoured as to be allowed to suppose herself in possession of a sort of thing, which, though of inferior stuff, might pass under the name of a constitution, even without having this declaration of rights to stand at its head.
That Britain possesses at present anything that can bear that name, has by Citizen Paine, following, or leading (I really remember not, nor is it worth remembering,) at any rate agreeing with this declaration of rights, been formally denied.
According to general import, supported by etymology, by the word constitution, something established, something already established, something possessed of stability, something that has given proofs of stability, seems to be implied. What shall we say, if of this most magnificent of all boasts, not merely the simple negative, but the direct converse should be true? and if instead of France being the only country which has a constitution, France should be the only country that has none! Yet if government depend upon obedience the stability of government upon the permanence of the disposition to obedience, and the permanence of that disposition upon the duration of the habit of obedience. this most assuredly must be the case.
ARTICLE XVII.
Property being an inviolable and sacred right, no one can be deprived of it, unless it be when public necessity, legally established, evidently requires it [i. e. the sacrifice of it,] and under the condition of a just and previous indemnity.
Here we have the concluding article in this pile of contradictions; it does not mismatch the rest. By the first article, all men are equal in respect of all sorts of rights, and so are to continue for evermore, spite of everything which can be done by laws. By the second article, property is of the number of those rights. By this seventeenth and last article, no man can be deprived of his property-no, not of a single atom of it, without an equal equivalent paid-not when the occasion calls for it, for that would not be soon enough, but beforehand: all men are equal in respect of property, while John has £50,000 a-year, and Peter nothing: all men are to be equal in property, and that for everlasting; at the same time that he who has a thousand times as much as a thousand others put together, is not to be deprived of a single farthing of it, without having first received an exact equivalent.
Nonsense and contradiction apart, the topic touched upon here is one of those questions of detail that requires to be settled, and is capable of being settled, by considerations of utility deducible from quiet and sober investigation, to the satisfaction of sober-minded men; but such considerations are far beneath the attention of these creators of the rights of man.
There are distinctions between species of property which are susceptible, and species of property which are not susceptible, of the value of affection; between losses in relation to which the adequacy of indemnification may be reduced to a certainty, and losses in respect of which it must remain exposed to doubt: there may be cases in which a more than equivalent gain to one individual will warrant the subjecting another individual, with or without compensation, to a loss. All these questions are capable of receiving a solution to the satisfaction of a man who thinks it worth his while to be at the pains of comparing the feelings on one side with the feelings on the other, and to judge of regulations by their effect on the feelings of those whom they concern, instead of pronouncing on them by the random application of declamatory epithets and phrases.
Necessity? What means necessity? Does necessity order the making of new streets, new roads, new bridges, new canals? A nation which has existed for so many ages with the stock of water-roads which it received from Nature, — is any addition to that stock necessary to the continuation of its existence? If not, there is an end to all improvement in all these lines. In all changes there are disadvantages on one side, there are advantages on the other: but what are all the advantages in the world, when set against the sacred and inviolable rights of man derived from the unenacted and unrepealable laws of Nature?
CONCLUSION On the subject of the fundamental principles of government, we have seen what execrable trash the choicest talents of the French nation have produced.
On the subject of chemistry, Europe has beheld with admiration, and adopted with unanimity and gratitude, the systematic views of the same nation, supported as they were by a series of decisive experiments and conclusive reasonings.
Chemistry has commonly been reckoned, and not altogether without reason, among the most abstruse branches of science. In chemistry, we see how high they have soared above the sublimest knowledge of past times; in legislation, how deep they have sunk below the profoundest ignorance;— how inferior has the maturest design that be furnished by the united powers of whole nation proved, in comparison of wisdom and felicity of the chance-medley of the British Constitution.
Comparatively speaking, a select few applied themselves to the cultivation of chemistry — almost an infinity, in comparison, have applied themselves to the science legislation.
In the instance of chemistry, the study is acknowledged to come within the province of science: the science is acknowledged to be an abstruse and difficult one, and to require long course of study on the part of those who have had the previous advantage of a liberal education; whilst the cultivation of it, in such manner as to make in it, requires that a man should make it great business of his life; and those who made these improvements have thus applied themselves.
In chemistry there is no room for passion to step in and to confound the understanding to lead men into error, and to shut their eyes against knowledge: in legislation, the circumstances are opposite, and vastly different.
What, then, shall we say of that system of government, of which the professed object is to call upon the untaught and unlettered multitude (whose existence depends upon their devoting their whole time to the acquisition of the means of supporting it,) to occupy themselves without ceasing upon all questions of government (legislation and administration included) without exception important and trivial, — the most general and the most particular, but more especially upon the most important and most general that is, in other words, the most scientific- those that require the greatest measures of science to qualify a man for deciding upon, and in respect of which any want of science and skill are liable to be attended with the most fatal consequences?
What should we have said, if, with a view of collecting the surest grounds for the decision of any of the great questions of chemistry, the French Academy of Sciences (if its members had remained unmurdered) had | referred such questions to the Primary Assemblies?
If a collection of general propositions, put together with the design that seems to have given birth to this performance-propositions of the most general and extensive import, embracing the whole field of legislation were capable of being so worded and put together as to be of use, it could only be on the condition of their being deduced in the way of abridgment from an already formed and existing assemblage of less general propositions, constituting the tenor of the body of the laws. But for these more general proposi tions to have been abstracted from that body of particular ones, that body must have been already in existence: the general and introductory part, though placed first, must have been constructed last;- though first in the order of communication, it should have been last in the order of composition. For the framing of the propositions which were to be included, time, knowledge, genius, temper, patience, everything was wanting. Yet the system of propositions which were to include them, it was determined to have at any rate. Of time, a small quantity indeed might be made to serve, upon the single and very simple condition of not bestowing a single thought upon the propositions which they were to include: and as to knowledge, genius, temper, and patience, the place of all these trivial requisites was abundantly supplied by effrontery and self-conceit. The business, instead of being performed in the way of abridgment, was performed in the way of an ticipation by a loose conjecture of what the particular propositions in question, were they to be found, might amount to.
What I mean to attack is, not the subject or citizen of this or that country-not this or that citizen-not citizen Sieyes or citi. zen anybody else, but all anti-legal rights of man, all declarations of such rights. What I mean to attack is, not the execution of such a design in this or that instance, but the design itself.
It is not that they have failed in their execution of the design by using the same word promiscuously in two or three senses-contradictory and incompatible senses—but in undertaking to execute a design which could not be executed at all without this abuse of words. Let a man distinguish the senses — let him allot, and allot invariably a separate word for each, and he will find it impossible to make up any such declaration at all, without running into such nonsense as must stop the hand even of the maddest of the mad.
Ex uno, disce omnes -from this declaration of rights, learn what all other declarations of rights-of rights asserted as against government in general, must ever be, the rights of anarchy- the order of chaos.
It is right I should continue to possess the coat I have upon my back, and so on with regard to everything else I look upon as my property, at least till I choose to part with it.
It is right I should be at liberty to do as I please it would be better if I might be permitted to add, whether other people were pleased with what it pleased me to do or not. But as that is hopeless, I must be content with such a portion of liberty, though it is the least I can be content with, as consists in the liberty of doing as I please, subject to the exception of not doing harm to other people.
It is right I should be secure against all sorts of harm.
It is right I should be upon a par with everybody else upon a par at least; and if I can contrive to get a peep over other people's heads, where will be the harm in it?
But if all this is right now, at what time was it ever otherwise? It is now naturally right, and at what future time will it be otherwise? It is then unalterably right for everlasting.
As it is right I should possess all these blessings, I have a right to all of them.
But if I have a right to the coat on my back, I have a right to knock any man down who attempts to take it from me.
For the same reason, if I have a right to be secure against all sorts of harm, I have a right to knock any man down who attempts to harm me.
For the same reason, if I have a right to do whatever I please, subject only to the exception of not doing harm to other people, it follows that, subject only to that exception, I have a right to knock any man down who attempts to prevent my doing anything that I please to do.
For the same reason, if I have a right to be upon a par with everybody else in every respect, it follows, that should any man take upon him to raise his house higher than mine, -rather than it should continue so, I have a right to pull it down about his ears, and to knock him down if he attempt to hinder me.
Thus easy, thus natural, under the guidance of the selfish and anti-social passions, thus insensible is the transition from the language of utility and peace to the language of mischief. Transition, did I say?—what transition?-from right to right? The propositions are identical-there is no transition in the case. Certainly, as far as words go, scarcely any: no more than if you were to trust your horse with a man for a week or so, and he were to return it blind and lame: it was your horse you trusted to him-it is your horse you have received again: - what you had trusted to him, you have received.
It is in England, rather than in France, that the discovery of the rights of man ought naturally to have taken its rise: it is wewe English, that have the better right to it. It is in the English language that the transition is more natural, than perhaps in most others: at any rate, more so than in the French. It is in English, and not in French, that we may change the sense without changing the word, and, like Don Quixote on the chanted horse, travel as far as the moon, and farther, without ever getting off the saddle.
One and the same word, right-right, that most enchanting of words-is sufficient for operating the fascination. The word is ours,— that magic word, which, by its single unassisted powers, completes the fascination. In its adjective shape, it is as innocent as a dove: it breathes nothing but morality and peace. It is in this shape that, passing in at the heart, it gets possession of the understanding: - it then assumes its substantive shape, and joining itself to a band of suitable associates, sets up the banner of insurrection, anarchy, and lawless violence.
It is right that men should be as near upon a par with one another in every respect as they can be made, consistently with general security: here we have it in its adjective form, synonymous with desirable, proper, becoming, consonant to general utility, and the like. I have a right to put myself upon a par with everybody in every respect: here we have it in its substantive sense, forming with the other words a phrase equivalent to this, wherever I find a man who will not let me put myself on a par with him in every respect, it is right, and proper, and becoming, that I should knock him down, if I have a mind to do so, and if that will not do, knock him on the head, and so forth.
The French language is fortunate enough not to possess this mischievous abundance. But a Frenchman will not be kept back from his purpose by a want of words: the want of an adjective composed of the same letters as the substantive right, is no loss to him. Is, has been, ought to be, shall be, can, all are put for one another all are pressed into the service all made to answer the same purposes. By this inebriating compound, we have seen all the elements of the understanding confounded, every fibre of the heart inflamed, the lips prepared for every folly, and the band for every crime.
Our right to this precious discovery, such as it is, of the rights of man, must, 1 repeat it, have been prior to that of the French. It has been seen how peculiarly rich we are in materials for making it. Right, the substantive right, is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters, "gorgons and chimæras dire." And thus it is, that from legal rights, the offspring of law, and friends of peace, come anti-legal rights, the mortal enemies of law, the subverters of government, and the assassins of security.
Will this antidote to French poisons have its effect? — will this preservative for the unen-derstanding and the heart against the fascination of sounds, find lips to take it? This, in point of speedy or immediate efficacy at least, is almost too much to hope for. Alas! how dependent are opinions upon sound! Who shall break the chains which bind them together? By what force shall the associations between words and ideas be dissolved-associations coeval with the cradle-associations to which every book and every conversation give increased strength? By what authority shall this original vice in the structure of language be corrected? How shall a word which has taken root in the vitals of a language be expelled? By what means shall a word in continual use be deprived of half its signification? The language of plain strong sense is difficult to learn; the language of smooth nonsense is easy and familiar. The one requires a force of attention capable of stemming the tide of usage and example; the other requires nothing but to swim with it.
It is for education to do what can be done; and in education is, though unhappily the slowest, the surest as well as earliest resource. The recognition of the nothingness of the laws of nature and the rights of man that have been grounded on them, is a branch of knowledge of as much importance to an Englishman, though a negative one, as the most perfect acquaintance that can be formed with the existing laws of England.
It must be so:— Shakspeare, whose plays were filling English hearts with rapture, while the drama of France was not superior to that of Caffraria, Shakspeare, who had a key to all the passions and all the stores of language, could never have let slip an instrument of delusion of such superior texture. No: it is not possible that the rights of man — the natural, pre-adamitical, ante-legal, and anti-legal rights of man — should have been unknown to, have been umeployed by Shakspeare. How could the Macbeths, the Jaffiers, the Iagos, do without them? They present a cloak for every conspiracy — they hold out a mask for every crime;— they are every villain's armoury — every spendthrift's treasury.
But if the English were the first to bring the rights of man into the closet from the stage, it is to the stage and the closet that they have confined them. It was reserved for France—for France in her days of degradation and degeneration — in those days, in comparison of which the worst of her days of fancied tyranny were halcyon ones — to turn debates into tragedies, and the senate into a stage.
The mask is now taken off, and the anarchist may be known by the language which he uses.
He will be found asserting rights, and acknowledging them at the same time not to be recognised by government. Using, instead of ought and ought not, the words is or is not - can or can not.
In former times, in the times of Grotius and Puffendorf, these expressions were little more than improprieties in language, prejudicial to the growth of knowledge: at present, since the French Declaration of Rights has adopted them, and the French Revolution displayed their import by a practical comment, the use of them is already a moral crime, and not undeserving of being constituted a legal crime, as hostile to the public peace.
Footnote: Footnote: By a subsequent decree of the Convention, this silly provision was actually made law, under the notion of favouring liberty. The liberty of doing mischief, it certainly does favour, as certainly as it disfavours the liberty of preventing it. Ask for a reason: a man's house, you are told, is his castle. Blessed liberty! — of sentiments-where epigrams, pass for reasons, house be his castle by night, how comes it not to and poetry gives rule to law! But if a man's be so by day? And if a house be a castle to the owner, why not to everybody else in whose favour the owner chooses to make it so? By day or by night, is it less hardship to a suspected person to have his house searched, than to an unsuspected one? Here we have the mischief and the absurdity of the ancient ecclesiastical asylums, without the reason.
The course of justice in England is still obstructed to a certain degree by this silly epigram, worthy of the age which gave it birth. Delinquents, like foxes, are to have law given them: that is, are to have chances of escape given them on purpose, as if it were to make the better sport for the hunters for the lawyers, by and for whom the hunt is made.