Commentary on Filangieri’s Work. Benjamin de Constant
With these guarantees, agriculture, as well as every other sort of industry, can easily do without the authorities’ protection. It is entirely useless for the government to involve itself in encouraging what is necessary. It is enough if it does not hinder it. Necessity will be obeyed. When there is no vicious action by government, production is always in perfect proportion to demand. I except unforeseen cases, sudden calamities, which in any case are pretty rare when one leaves nature free, but which governments by their erroneous measures create more often than one thinks. I will speak about them more in another part of this Commentary. In the usual order of things it is not encouragement but security that agriculture needs. However, security is only to be found in good constitutional institutions. When the farmer himself can be taken away because his neighbor is an informer, or because his enemy is some powerful man’s valet; when the fruit of his work can be greatly diminished by excessive taxes because some landowner, a rich man or a noble, has had himself exempted; when his children, the useful associates of his daily operations, are taken from him to die in far-off wars, do you think that, worried about the present and frightened about the future, he will continue devoting himself to efforts whose profit may be taken from him? It is you
[print edition page 14]
who put despair and discouragement into his soul, and then you claim to encourage him. You torment, you oppress, you bankrupt the entire class, and you imagine that a little charity, or what is even more ridiculous, that a medal you invent and disdainfully confer on some individual your agents protect, will revive this impoverished and despoiled class. Your ineptitude or your despotism has made the soil barren, and you believe that your favors, like the presence of the sun, will return it to its original fertility. You show yourself, you smile, you distribute I don’t know what vain and illusory honors, and this action, to listen to you, is going to be admired for centuries! What strange arrogance! Gross charlatanism, by which in the past some honest dreamers were taken in, but which, thank heaven, is more discredited every day. The emperor of China also deigns to guide a plow with his imperial hand, and to trace a furrow on a holiday. This does not prevent China from being the constant prey of famine, and parents from exposing on the riverbank the children they are incapable of feeding. This is because China is a despotic state, and when farmers are subject to the whip all year long, the honor one thinks one is doing them once a year neither compensates nor consoles them.
I will be forced to return more than once to the system of encouragements when Filangieri discusses industry. Consequently, I postpone further discussion which proves that even from a moral perspective this system is harmful.
[print edition page 15]
CHAPTER FOUR
The cry of reason has finally reached the throne. Rulers have begun to feel … that the real source of greatness does not lie in force and arms.
INTRODUCTION, P. 2.
Is it really true that because reason has reached the throne, rulers have finally recognized that they owe more respect to human life and that true greatness is not in force and arms? I would be only too pleased to adopt this flattering conviction, but I cannot prevent myself from having certain doubts. I imagine myself in the time when Filangieri wrote these lines, and cast my eyes forward over the next forty years. I see the Seven Years’ War end, but the War of the American Revolution soon begins. Joseph II threatens Prussia and attacks the Turks. Sweden launches itself rather foolishly against Russia. Poland is partitioned, and if this does not result in war, it is because the co-partitioners divide three against one. Finally, the kings of Europe form a coalition against France, which wants to give itself a free government. After ten years of ferocious combat, they are defeated, but then the French government gives up moderation and justice, and for another ten years the space from Lisbon to Moscow, and Hamburg to Naples, is again flooded with blood. Are these very satisfactory proofs of the empire of reason?
Nevertheless, there is an element of truth in Filangieri’s assertion, which he disfigures by his well-meaning but little-deserved compliments to power. As I have previously observed (chap. 2), the warlike system is in contradiction with the current state of the human race. The age of commerce has arrived, and the more the commercial tendency dominates, the more the warlike tendency must weaken.
[print edition page 16]
War and commerce are but two different means of arriving at the same end: possessing what one desires. Commerce is nothing but homage rendered to the strength of the possessor by the one who aspires to possession. It is an attempt to obtain by mutual agreement what one no longer hopes to conquer by violence. A man who was always the strongest would never entertain the idea of commerce. It is experience which shows him that war, that is to say the use of his strength against someone else’s, is exposed to various resistances and failures. This leads him to turn to commerce, a gentler and more certain means of engaging others’ interest in consenting to what agrees with his interest.
War thus precedes commerce. One is the impulse of an inexperienced desire, the other the calculation of an enlightened desire. Commerce should therefore replace war, but in replacing war it discredits it, and makes war odious to the world. This is what we see today.
The sole goal of modern nations is rest; with rest, comfort, and as the source of comfort, industry. War daily becomes more inefficient at attaining this goal. Its risks no longer offer, either to individuals or peoples, profits equal to peaceful work and regular exchanges. Among the ancients a successful war increased public wealth in slaves, tribute, and partitioned lands, while among the moderns a successful war infallibly costs more than it brings in.
The situation of modern peoples therefore prevents them from being warlike out of interest, and particular reasons, also derived from the progress of the human species and thus from the difference between periods, add to the general causes that prevent the nations of our day from being warlike by inclination. The new way of fighting, the change in weapons, and artillery, have deprived military life of what was most attractive in it. There is no longer a struggle against danger; there is only fate. Courage must be imprinted with resignation or consist of insouciance. One no longer feels that pleasure of will, of action, of the development of physical and moral faculties which made the old heroes, the knights of the middle ages, love hand-to-hand combat. War has thus lost its charm as well as its utility.
This means that a government which tries to talk about military glory today, and consequently of war as a goal, misunderstands the spirit of nations and of the times. Philip’s son1 would no longer dare propose to his subjects
[print edition page 17]
the invasion of the universe, and Pyrrhus’s speech to Cineas would seem the height of insolence or folly.2
Governments recognize truths as slowly as they can. Despite all their efforts, however, they cannot preserve themselves from the truth forever, and they have noticed the change that has taken place in the peoples’ temperament. They pay homage to it in their public acts and their speeches. They avoid openly confessing the love of conquest, and they take up arms only with a heavy heart. In this respect, as Filangieri observes, reason today has made its way to the thrones. But in forcing governments to change their language, has it, as it pleases the Italian philosopher to hope, enlightened the minds or converted the hearts of those whom chance has invested with authority?
I regret that I do not believe so, for I do not see in their conduct more love of peace. I see only more hypocrisy. When Frederick attacked Austria to take Silesia, he said he only wanted to uphold ancient rights to give his realm an appropriate size. When England exhausted its men and its wealth to subjugate America, it only aspired to return lost children to the protective laws of the metropolis. When it brought devastation to India, it only intended to oversee its interests and assure the prosperity of its commerce. When a coalition of three powers broke up Poland, their only purpose was to return to the troubled Poles the tranquility disturbed by their internal struggles. When those same powers invaded a France which had become free, it was the tottering thrones they proposed to prop up. When today they crush Italy and threaten