1.  When the few plunder the many.

     2.  When everybody plunders everybody else.

     3.  When nobody plunders anybody.

Partial plunder, universal plunder, absence of plunder, amongst these we have to make our choice.  The law can only produce one of these results.

Partial plunder.—­This is the system which prevailed so long as the elective privilege was partial—­a system which is resorted to to avoid the invasion of socialism.

Universal plunder.—­We have been threatened by this system when the elective privilege has become universal; the masses having conceived the idea of making law, on the principle of legislators who had preceded them.

Absence of plunder.—­This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, conciliation, and of good sense, which I shall proclaim with all the force of my lungs (which is very inadequate, alas!) till the day of my death.

And, in all sincerity, can anything more be required at the hands of the law?  Can the law, whose necessary sanction is force, be reasonably employed upon anything beyond securing to every one his right?  I defy any one to remove it from this circle without perverting it, and consequently turning force against right.  And as this is the most fatal, the most illogical social perversion which can possibly be imagined, it must be admitted that the true solution, so much sought after, of the social problem, is contained in these simple words—­LAW IS ORGANISED JUSTICE.

Now it is important to remark, that to organise justice by law, that is to say by force, excludes the idea of organising by law, or by force any manifestation whatever of human activity—­labour, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, instruction, the fine arts, or religion; for any one of these organisations would inevitably destroy the essential organisation.  How, in fact, can we imagine force encroaching upon the liberty of citizens without infringing upon justice, and so acting against its proper aim?

Here I am encountering the most popular prejudice of our time.  It is not considered enough that law should be just, it must be philanthropic.  It is not sufficient that it should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive exercise of his faculties, applied to his physical, intellectual, and moral development; it is required to extend well-being, instruction, and morality, directly over the nation.  This is the fascinating side of socialism.

But, I repeat it, these two missions of the law contradict each other.  We have to choose between them.  A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.  M. de Lamartine wrote to me one day thus:—­“Your doctrine is only the half of my programme; you have stopped at liberty, I go on to fraternity.”  I answered him:—­“The second part of your programme will destroy the first.”  And in fact it is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary.  I cannot possibly conceive fraternity legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice legally trampled under foot.  Legal plunder has two roots:  one of them, as we have already seen, is in human egotism; the other is in false philanthropy.