We readily conceive that, in some interest or other, the State, representing the general desire, should command the sacrifice of an industry.
It is always supposed to command it, from the moment that it grants to each the liberty to produce, and protects and defends this liberty against all encroachment.
But this is an extreme measure, an experiment which is always perilous, and which should be accompanied by all possible consideration for individuals.
The State has no right to take from a class of citizens the labor by which they live, before otherwise providing for their subsistence or assuring itself that they will find in some new industry employment for their minds and arms.It is a principle in civilized countries that the government cannot seize a piece of private property, even on grounds of public utility, without first buying out the proprietor by a just indemnity paid in advance.
Now, labor seems to us property quite as legitimate, quite as sacred, as a field or a house, and we do not understand why it should be expropriated without any sort of compensation....
As chimerical as we consider the doctrines which represent government as the universal purveyor of labor in society, to the same extent does it seem to us just and necessary that every displacement of labor in the name of public utility should be effected only by means of a compensation or a transition, and that neither individuals nor classes should be sacrificed to State considerations.Power, in well-constituted nations, has always time and money to give for the mitigation of these partial sufferings.
And it is precisely because industry does not emanate from it, because it is born and developed under the free and individual initiative of citizens, that the government is bound, when it disturbs its course, to offer it a sort of reparation or indemnity.
There's sense for you: whatever M.Léon Faucher may say, he calls for the organization of labor.For government to see to it that every displacement of labor is effected only by means of a compensation or a transition, and that individuals and classes are never sacrificed to State considerations, -- that is, to the progress of industry and the liberty of enterprise, the supreme law of the State, -- is without any doubt to constitute itself, in some way that the future shall determine, the purveyor of labor in society and the guardian of wages.And, as we have many times repeated, inasmuch as industrial progress and consequently the work of disarranging and rearranging classes in society is continual, it is not a special transition for each innovation that needs to be discovered, but rather a general principle, an organic law of transition, applicable to all possible cases and producing its effect itself.Is M.Léon Faucher in a position to formulate this law and reconcile the various antagonisms which we have described?
No, since he prefers to stop at the idea of an indemnity.Power, he says, in well- organized nations, has always time and money to give for the mitigation of these partial sufferings.I am sorry for M.Faucher's generous intentions, but they seem to me radically impracticable.
Power has no time and money save what it takes from the taxpayers.To indemnify by taxation laborers thrown out of work would be to visit ostracism upon new inventions and establish communism by means of the bayonet; that is no solution of the difficulty.It is useless to insist further on indemnification by the State.Indemnity, applied according to M.Faucher's views, would either end in industrial despotism, in something like the government of Mohammed- Ali, or else would degenerate into a poor-tax, -- that is, into a vain hypocrisy.For the good of humanity it were better not to indemnify, and to let labor seek its own eternal constitution.
There are some who say: Let government carry laborers thrown out of work to points where private industry is not established, where individual enterprise cannot reach.We have mountains to plant again with trees, ten or twelve million acres of land to clear, canals to dig, in short, a thousand things of immediate and general utility to undertake.
