When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere negation.  They only oblige him to abstain from doing harm.  They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property.  They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others.  They hold themselves on the defensive; they defend the equal right of all.  They fulfil a mission whose harmlessness is evident, whose utility is palpable, and whose legitimacy is not to be disputed.  This is so true that, as a friend of mine once remarked to me, to say that the aim of the law is to cause justice to reign, is to use an expression which is not rigorously exact.  It ought to be said, the aim of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning.  In fact, it is not justice which has an existence of its own, it is injustice.  The one results from the absence of the other.

But when the law, through the medium of its necessary agent—­force, imposes a form of labour, a method or a subject of instruction, a creed, or a worship, it is no longer negative; it acts positively upon men.  It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own will, the initiative of the legislator for their own initiative.  They have no need to consult, to compare, or to foresee; the law does all that for them.  The intellect is for them a useless lumber; they cease to be men; they lose their personality, their liberty, their property.

Endeavour to imagine a form of labour imposed by force, which is not a violation of liberty; a transmission of wealth imposed by force, which is not a violation of property.  If you cannot succeed in reconciling this, you are bound to conclude that the law cannot organise labour and industry without organising injustice.

When, from the seclusion of his cabinet, a politician takes a view of society, he is struck with the spectacle of inequality which presents itself.  He mourns over the sufferings which are the lot of so many of our brethren, sufferings whose aspect is rendered yet more sorrowful by the contrast of luxury and wealth.

He ought, perhaps, to ask himself, whether such a social state has not been caused by the plunder of ancient times, exercised in the way of conquests; and by plunder of later times, effected through the medium of the laws?  He ought to ask himself whether, granting the aspiration of all men after well-being and perfection, the reign of justice would not suffice to realise the greatest activity of progress, and the greatest amount of equality compatible with that individual responsibility which God has awarded as a just retribution of virtue and vice?

He never gives this a thought.  His mind turns towards combinations, arrangements, legal or factitious organisations.  He seeks the remedy in perpetuating and exaggerating what has produced the evil.

For, justice apart, which we have seen is only a negation, is there any one of these legal arrangements which does not contain the principle of plunder?