part of the human race? Do they consider that they are composed
of different materials from the rest of mankind? They say that society,
when left to itself, rushes to inevitable destruction, because its
instincts are perverse. They pretend, to stop it in its downward course,
and to give it a better direction. They have, therefore, received from
heaven, intelligence and virtues which place them beyond and above
mankind: let them show their title to this superiority. They would be
our shepherds, and we are to be their flock. This arrangement
presupposes in them a natural superiority, the right to which we are
fully justified in calling upon them to prove.

You must observe that I am not contending against their right to invent
social combinations, to propagate them, to recommend them, and to try
them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk; but I do dispute
their right to impose them upon us through the medium of the law, that
is, by force and by public taxes.

I would not insist upon the Cabetists, the Fourierists, the
Proudhonians, the Universitaries, and the Protectionists renouncing
their own particular ideas; I would only have them renounce that idea
which is common to them all,--viz., that of subjecting us by force to
their own groups and series to their social workshops, to their
gratuitous bank to their Graeco-Romano morality, and to their commercial
restrictions. I would ask them to allow us the faculty of judging of
their plans, and not to oblige us to adopt them, if we find that they
hurt our interests or are repugnant to our consciences.

To presume to have recourse to power and taxation, besides being
oppressive and unjust, implies further, the injurious supposition that
the organiser is infallible, and mankind incompetent.

And if mankind is not competent to judge for itself, why do they talk so
much about universal suffrage?

This contradiction in ideas is unhappily to be found also in facts; and
whilst the French nation has preceded all others in obtaining its
rights, or rather its political claims, this has by no means prevented
it from being more governed, and directed, and imposed upon, and
fettered, and cheated, than any other nation. It is also the one, of all
others, where revolutions are constantly to be dreaded, and it is
perfectly natural that it should be so.

So long as this idea is retained, which is admitted by all our
politicians, and so energetically expressed by M. Louis Blanc