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the law the right to relief, which is the poor man’s plunder. To
obtain this right, we also should be voters and legislators in order
that we may organize Beggary on a grand scale for our own class,
as you have organized Protection on a grand scale for your class.
Now don’t tell us beggars that you will act for us, and then toss
us, as Mr. Mimerel proposes, 600,000 francs to keep us quiet,
like throwing us a bone to gnaw. We have other claims. And any-
way, we wish to bargain for ourselves as other classes have bar-
gained for themselves!”
And what can you say to answer that argument!
Perverted Law Causes Conflict
As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from
its true purpose—that it may violate property instead of protect-
ing it—then everyone will want to participate in making the law,
either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.
Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-
absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative
Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious. To know
this, it is hardly necessary to examine what transpires in the
French and English legislatures; merely to understand the issue
is to know the answer.
Is there any need to offer proof that this odious perversion
of the law is a perpetual source of hatred and discord; that it
tends to destroy society itself? If such proof is needed, look at
the United States [in 1850]. There is no country in the world
where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the pro-
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tection of every person’s liberty and property. As a consequence
of this, there appears to be no country in the world where the
social order rests on a firmer foundation. But even in the United
States, there are two issues—-and only two—that have always
endangered the public peace.
Slavery and Tariffs Are Plunder
What are these two issues? They are slavery and tariffs.
These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general
spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the
character of a plunderer.
Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff
is a violation, by law, of property.
It is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime—a
sorrowful inheritance from the Old World—should be the only
issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union.
It is indeed impossible to imagine, at the very heart of a society,
a more astounding fact than this: The law has come to be an
instrument of injustice. And if this fact brings terrible conse-
quences to the United States—where the proper purpose of the
law has been perverted only in the instances of slavery and tar-
iffs—what must be the consequences in Europe, where the per-
version of the law is a principle; a system?
Two Kinds of Plunder
Mr. de Montalembert [politician and writer] adopting the
thought contained in a famous proclamation by Mr. Carlier, has
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said: “We must make war against socialism.” According to the
definition of socialism advanced by Mr. Charles Dupin, he
meant: “We must make war against plunder.”
But of what plunder was he speaking? For there are two
kinds of plunder: legal and illegal.
I do not think that illegal plunder, such as theft or swin-
dling—which the penal code defines, anticipates, and pun-
ishes—can be called socialism. It is not this kind of plunder that
systematically threatens the foundations of society. Anyway, the
war against this kind of plunder has not waited for the command
of these gentlemen. The war against illegal plunder has been
fought since the beginning of the world. Long before the Revo-
lution of February 1848—long before the appearance even of
socialism itself—France had provided police, judges, gen-
darmes, prisons, dungeons, and scaffolds for the purpose of
fighting illegal plunder. The law itself conducts this war, and it is
my wish and opinion that the law should always maintain this
attitude toward plunder.
The Law Defends Plunder
But it does not always do this. Sometimes the law defends
plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared
the shame, danger, and scruple which their acts would otherwise
involve. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of
judges, police, prisons, and gendarmes at the service of the plun-
derers, and treats the victim—when he defends himself—as a
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criminal. In short, there is a legal plunder, and it is of this, no
doubt, that Mr. de Montalembert speaks.
This legal plunder may be only an isolated stain among the
legislative measures of the people. If so, it is best to wipe it out
with a minimum of speeches and denunciations—and in spite of
the uproar of the vested interests.
How to Identify Legal Plunder
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply.
See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them,
and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if
the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing
what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil
itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it
invites reprisals. If such a law—which may be an isolated case—
is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and
develop into a system.
The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly,
defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is
obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that
this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry
is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor
workingmen.
Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The
acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a
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