To these people busy with military or civil service, stockbroking, family quarrels, cards, decorations, horses, Robert Owen advocated a different employment of their powers and pointed out the absurdity of their lives. Convince them he could not, but he exasperated them and drew down upon himself all the intolerance of incomprehension. Reason alone is long-suffering and merciful because it understands.
Owen's biographer judged very truly when he said that he destroyed his own influence when he repudiated religion. Really, when he bumped against the Church's fence, he should have stopped ; but he climbed over to the other side and remained there all on his own, with the curses of the devout for company.
But it seems to me that sooner or later he would have remained in just the same way with the wrong end of the shell-alone and an outlaw.32
The only reason why the mob did not flare up against him from the very outset was that the State and the lawcourt are not so popular as the Church and the altar. But the right to punish would a la longue have been upheld by people a trifle better grounded than God-crazed Quakers and newspaper hypocrites.
31 Herzen is referring to the military expedition of 1830 for the seizure of Algeria. (A.S.)
32 'Outlaw' is in English. The reference is to ostracism in ancient Athens. ( R.) For "shell," Americans would say "stick." ( D.M. )
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About the doctrine of the Church and the truths of the catechism no one argues \vho has any self-respect, for he knows beforehand that they will not hold water at all. It is impossible to be in earnest about proving the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, or about affirming that the geological researches of Moses conform to those of Murchison. The secular Churches of civil and criminal law and the dogmas of the juridical catechism stand much more firmly and enjoy, pending scrutinisation, the rights of proven truths and unshakeable axioms.
Men who overturned altars dared not touch the mirror of justice. Anarcharsis Clootz, the Hebertists, who called God by the name of Reason, were just as certain of every salus populi and other civic commandments as \\'ere mediaeval priests of the canon law and the need to burn sorcerers.
It is not long since that one of the most powerful, daring thinkers of our time,33 in order to deal the Church a final blow, secularised it, made of it a tribunal and, snatching from the hands of the priests an Isaac who had been made ready to be sacrificed to God, brought him before a court, that is, as a sacrifi ce to justice.
The eternal controversy, the controversy thousands of years old, about free-will and predestination, is not over. It was not only Owen in our time who doubted man's responsibility for his actions. We shall find traces of this doubt in Bentham and Fourier, in Kant and Schopenhauer, in the natural scientists and physicians and, more important than all, in everyone who interests himself in the statistics of crime. The controversy is not decided, in any case, but that it is ;ust to punish a criminal, and this according to the degree of the crime, on that there is not even any controversy: that's something everyone knows for himself!
On which side, then, is the lunatic asylum?
'Punishment is the inalienable right of the criminal,' said Plato himself.
It is a pity that he himself uttered this quibble, but we at all events are not obliged to keep repeating, with Addison's Cato,
'Plato, thou reasonest well,' even when he says that 'our soul dieth not.'
If to be disembowelled or hanged constitutes the criminal's right, let him bring a complaint himself if it has been violated.
There is no need to force people's rights upon them.
33 P.-J. Proudhon. (A.S.)
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Bentham calls the criminal a miscalculator, and of course, if someone has made a mistake in his reckoning, he must take the consequences of his mistake; but this is not his right, you know.
No one says that, if you have bumped your forehead, you have a right to a bruise, and there is no special official who would send a surgeon's mate to raise a bruise if there is not one. Spinoza speaks still more simply of the possible necessity of killing a man, who prevents others from living, 'as a mad dog is killed.'
That is comprehensible. But lawyers either are so disingenuoJ.Is, or have so dammed up their intelligence, that they utterly refuse to recognise execution as a safeguard or as vengeance, and take it for some kind of moral recompense, 'a restoration of the equilibrium.' In war matters are more direct: the soldier does not speculate about the guilt of the enemy he kills; he does not even say that killing him is just: it is kill who kill can.
'But with these notions all the lawcourts will have to be shut.'
'\Nhy? Basilicas were once made into parish churches; should we not try now to turn them into parish schools?'
'With these notions of impunity not a single government will be able to hold on.'
'Owen might have answered, like the first brother in history,34
"Have I been bidden to strengthen governments?" '
'With governments he was very tractable, and could come to terms with crowned heads, Tory Ministers and the President of the American Republic.'
'But did he get on badly with Catholics or Protestants?'
'What? You think Owen was a republican?'
'I think that Robert Owen preferred that form of government which agreed best with the Church accepted by him.'
'What are you saying? He had no Church.'
'Y au see, then.'
'All the same, one cannot be without a government.'
'No doubt . . . however rotten it is, yet it's necessary. Hegel tells a story of a good old woman who said, "Well, what if it is bad weather? It's better than no weather at all." '
'All right: laugh ; but the State will perish, you know, without a government.'
'And what business is that of mine?'
3 4 Jesus Christ. (A.S.) Cain. (R.) Socrates. (D.M.)
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I V
AT THE TIME of the Revolution the experiment was made of radically altering civic life while preserving the powerful authority of the government.35
Decrees of the government provided for have survived, with their heading:
:f:GALITJ�;
LIBERTE
BoNHEUR CoMMUN,
to which was sometimes added, by way of elucidation: 'Ou la mort!'
The decrees, as indeed one ought to have expected, begin with the police decree.
§ 1 . Persons who do nothing for the fatherland have no political rights: these are foreigners to whom the republic grants hospitality.
§ 2. Nothing is done for the fatherland by those who do "not serve it with useful labour.
§ 3. The law considers useful labour:
Agriculture, stock-breeding, fishing, seafaring.
Mechanical and manual work.
Retail trade.
Carriers' and coachmen's work.
The military profession.
The sciences and instruction.
§ 4. However, the sciences and instruction will not be considered useful if the persons engaged in them do not present, within a given period, evidence of good citizenship (civisme) written in the statutory form.