For, under such an administration, every one would feel that he possessed all the fulness, as well as all the responsibility of his existence.  So long as personal safety was ensured, so long as labour was free, and the fruits of labour secured against all unjust attacks, no one would have any difficulties to contend with in the State.  When prosperous, we should not, it is true, have to thank the State for our success; but when unfortunate, we should no more think of taxing it with our disasters, than our peasants think of attributing to it the arrival of hail or of frost.  We should know it only by the inestimable blessing of Safety.

It may further be affirmed, that, thanks to the non-intervention of the State in private affairs, our wants and their satisfactions would develop themselves in their natural order.  We should not see poor families seeking for literary instruction before they were supplied with bread.  We should not see towns peopled at the expense of rural districts, nor rural districts at the expense of towns.  We should not see those great displacements of capital, of labour, and of population, which legislative measures occasion; displacements, which render so uncertain and precarious the very sources of existence, and thus aggravate to such an extent the responsibility of Governments.

Unhappily, law is by no means confined to its own department.  Nor is it merely in some indifferent and debateable views that it has left its proper sphere.  It has done more than this.  It has acted in direct opposition to its proper end; it has destroyed its own object; it has been employed in annihilating that justice which it ought to have established, in effacing amongst Rights, that limit which was its true mission to respect; it has placed the collective force in the service of those who wish to traffic, without risk, and without scruple, in the persons, the liberty, and the property of others; it has converted plunder into a right, that it may protect it, and lawful defence into a crime, that it may punish it.

How has this perversion of law been accomplished?  And what has resulted from it?

The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different causes—­bare egotism and false philanthropy.

Let us speak of the former.

Self-preservation and development is the common aspiration of all men, in such a way that if every one enjoyed the free exercise of his faculties and the free disposition of their fruits, social progress would be incessant, uninterrupted, inevitable.

But there is also another disposition which is common to them.  This is, to live and to develop, when they can, at the expense of one another.  This is no rash imputation, emanating from a gloomy, uncharitable spirit.  History bears witness to the truth of it, by the incessant wars, the migrations of races, sacerdotal oppressions, the universality of slavery, the frauds in trade, and the monopolies with which its annals abound.  This fatal disposition has its origin in the very constitution of man—­in that primitive, and universal, and invincible sentiment which urges it towards its well-being, and makes it seek to escape pain.