To these and many other reasons, whose force I do not dispute, arguments no less forcible may be opposed.  It might first of all be said, that there is a question of distributive justice in it.  Does the right of the legislator extend to abridging the wages of the artisan, for the sake of, adding to the profits of the artist?  M. Lamartine said, “If you cease to support the theatre, where will you stop?  Will you not necessarily be led to withdraw your support from your colleges, your museums, your institutes, and your libraries?  It might be answered, if you desire to support everything which is good and useful, where will you stop?  Will you not necessarily be led to form a civil list for agriculture, industry, commerce, benevolence, education?  Then, is it certain that Government aid favours the progress of art?  This question is far from being settled, and we see very well that the theatres which prosper are those which depend upon their own resources.  Moreover, if we come to higher considerations, we may observe that wants and desires arise the one from the other, and originate in regions which are more and more refined in proportion as the public wealth allows of their being satisfied; that Government ought not to take part in this correspondence, because in a certain condition of present fortune it could not by taxation stimulate the arts of necessity without checking those of luxury, and thus interrupting the natural course of civilisation.  I may observe, that these artificial transpositions of wants, tastes, labour, and population, place the people in a precarious and dangerous position, without any solid basis.”

These are some of the reasons alleged by the adversaries of State intervention in what concerns the order in which citizens think their wants and desires should be satisfied, and to which, consequently, their activity should be directed.  I am, I confess, one of those who think that choice and impulse ought to come from below and not from above, from the citizen and not from the legislator; and the opposite doctrine appears to me to tend to the destruction of liberty and of human dignity.

But, by a deduction as false as it is unjust, do you know what economists are accused of?  It is, that when we disapprove of government support, we are supposed to disapprove of the thing itself whose support is discussed; and to be the enemies of every kind of activity, because we desire to see those activities, on the one hand free, and on the other seeking their own reward in themselves.  Thus, if we think that the State should not interfere by taxation in religious affairs, we are atheists.  If we think the State ought not to interfere by taxation in education, we are hostile to knowledge.  If we say that the State ought not by taxation to give a fictitious value to land, or to any particular branch of industry, we are enemies to property and labour.  If we think that the State ought not to support artists, we are barbarians, who look upon the arts as useless.