Now, who, among the jurisconsults and economists, has ever approached even within a thousand leagues of this magnificent and yet so simple idea?
"I do not think," says M.Troplong, "that the spirit of association is called to greater destinies than those which it has accomplished in the past and up to the present time...; and I confess that I have made no attempt to realize such hopes, which I believe exaggerated....There are well-defined limits which association should not overstep.No! association is not called upon in France to govern everything.The spontaneous impulse of the individual mind is also a living force in our nation and a cause of its originality....
"The idea of association is not new....Even among the Romans we see the commercial society appear with all its paraphernalia of monopolies, corners, collusions, combinations, piracy, and venality....The joint-stock company realizes the civil, commercial, and maritime law of the Middle Ages: at that epoch it was the most active instrument of labor organized in society....From the middle of the fourteenth century we see societies form by stock subscriptions; and up to the time of Law's discomfiture, we see their number continually increase....What! we marvel at the mines, factories, patents, and newspapers owned by stock companies! But two centuries ago such companies owned islands, kingdoms, almost an entire hemisphere.
We proclaim it a miracle that hundreds of stock subscribers should group themselves around an enterprise; but as long ago as the fourteenth century the entire city of Florence was in similar silent partnership with a few merchants, who pushed the genius of enterprise as far as possible.Then, if our speculations are bad, if we have been rash, imprudent, or credulous, we torment the legislator with our cavilling complaints; we call upon him for prohibitions and nullifications.In our mania for regulating everything, even that which is already codified; for enchaining everything by texts reviewed, corrected, and added to; for administering everything, even the chances and reverses of commerce, -- we cry out, in the midst of so many existing laws: `There is still something to do!'"
M.Troplong believes in Providence, but surely he is not its man.He will not discover the formula of association clamored for today by minds disgusted with all the protocols of combination and rapine of which M.
Troplong unrolls the picture in his commentary.M.Troplong gets impatient, and rightly, with those who wish to enchain everything in texts of laws;
and he himself pretends to enchain the future in a series of fifty articles, in which the wisest mind could not discover a spark of economic science or a shadow of philosophy.In our mania, he cries, for regulating everything, EVEN THAT WHICH IS ALREADY CODIFIED!....I know nothing more delicious than this stroke, which paints at once the jurisconsult and the economist.
After the Code Napoleon, take away the ladder!...
"Fortunately," M.Troplong continues, "all the projects of change so noisily brought to light in 1837 and 1838 are forgotten today.The conflict of propositions and the anarchy of reformatory opinions have led to negative results.At the same time that the reaction against speculators was effected, the common sense of the public did justice to the numerous official plans of organization, much inferior in wisdom to the existing law, much less in harmony with the usages of commerce, much less liberal, after 1830, than the conceptions of the imperial Council of State! Now order is restored in everything, and the commercial code has preserved its integrity, its excellent integrity.When commerce needs it, it finds, by the side of partnership, temporary partnership, and the joint-stock company, the free silent partnership, tempered only by the prudence of the silent partners and by the provisions of the penal code regarding swindling." -- Troplong: Civil and Commercial Societies: Preface.
What a philosophy is that which rejoices in the miscarriage of reformatory endeavors, and which counts its triumphs by the negative results of the spirit of inquiry! We cannot now enter upon a more fundamental criticism of the civil and commercial societies, which have furnished M.Troplong material for two volumes.We will reserve this subject for the time when, the theory of economic contradictions being finished, we shall have found in their general equation the programme of association, which we shall then publish in contrast with the practice and conceptions of our predecessors.
A word only as to silent partnership.
One might think at first blush that this form of joint-stock company, by its expansive power and by the facility for change which it offers, could be generalized in such a way as to take in an entire nation in all its commercial and industrial relations.But the most superficial examination of the constitution of this society demonstrates very quickly that the sort of enlargement of which it is susceptible, in the matter of the number of stockholders, has nothing in common with the extension of the social bond.
In the first place, like all other commercial societies, it is necessarily limited to a single branch of exploitation: in this respect it is exclusive of all industries foreign to that peculiarly its own.If it were otherwise, it would have changed its nature; it would be a new form of society, whose statutes would regulate, no longer the profits especially, but the distribution of labor and the conditions of exchange; it would be exactly such an association as M.Troplong denies and as the jurisprudence of monopoly excludes.
