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 in these
words--"Society receives its impulse from power;" so long as men
consider themselves as capable of feeling, yet passive--incapable of
raising themselves by their own discernment and by their own energy to
any morality, or well-being, and while they expect everything from the
law; in a word, while they admit that their relations with the State are
the same as those of the flock with the shepherd, it is clear that the
responsibility of power is immense.
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