The pretensions of organisers suggest another question, which I have often asked them, and to which I am not aware that I ever received an answer:—­Since the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the tendencies of organisers are always good?  Do not the legislators and their agents form a part of the human race?  Do they consider that they are composed of different materials from the rest of mankind?  They say that society, when left to itself, rushes to inevitable destruction, because its instincts are perverse.  They pretend, to stop it in its downward course, and to give it a better direction.  They have, therefore, received from heaven, intelligence and virtues which place them beyond and above mankind:  let them show their title to this superiority.  They would be our shepherds, and we are to be their flock.  This arrangement presupposes in them a natural superiority, the right to which we are fully justified in calling upon them to prove.

You must observe that I am not contending against their right to invent social combinations, to propagate them, to recommend them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk; but I do dispute their right to impose them upon us through the medium of the law, that is, by force and by public taxes.

I would not insist upon the Cabetists, the Fourierists, the Proudhonians, the Universitaries, and the Protectionists renouncing their own particular ideas; I would only have them renounce that idea which is common to them all,—­viz., that of subjecting us by force to their own groups and series to their social workshops, to their gratuitous bank to their Graeco-Romano morality, and to their commercial restrictions.  I would ask them to allow us the faculty of judging of their plans, and not to oblige us to adopt them, if we find that they hurt our interests or are repugnant to our consciences.

To presume to have recourse to power and taxation, besides being oppressive and unjust, implies further, the injurious supposition that the organiser is infallible, and mankind incompetent.

And if mankind is not competent to judge for itself, why do they talk so much about universal suffrage?

This contradiction in ideas is unhappily to be found also in facts; and whilst the French nation has preceded all others in obtaining its rights, or rather its political claims, this has by no means prevented it from being more governed, and directed, and imposed upon, and fettered, and cheated, than any other nation.  It is also the one, of all others, where revolutions are constantly to be dreaded, and it is perfectly natural that it should be so.