Political Psychology and Social Defense

Gustave Le Bon

Political Psychology

The knowledge of the means that make it possible to govern peoples usefully

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Table of Contents

The knowledge of the means that make it possible to govern peoples usefully—that is to say, political psychology—has always constituted a difficult problem. It is far more so today, when new economic necessities, born of scientific and industrial progress, weigh heavily upon peoples and escape the action of their governments.

In present-day politics, .. it is not a matter of seeking the best, but solely the attainable. In our day no despot would be strong enough … to impose free trade or protection upon a country that did not want it. When peoples deceive themselves, so much the worse for them. Experience teaches them so. A few men of genius, aided by circumstances, sometimes manage to swim back up the currents, but their number has always been very small.

The first sign of a science’s progress is that it renounces the simple explanations with which it was content at its outset. What at first seemed easy to understand becomes, later on, very difficult to explain.

The studies relating to the Evolution of the life of nations have undergone the same law. After trying to interpret everything, historians now begin to perceive that they were often discoursing upon illusions born in their own minds.

Social phenomena appear today as extremely complicated mechanisms, closely arranged in hierarchies and in which simplicity is scarcely to be observed. The evolution of peoples is as complex as that of living beings.

Science is still seeking the laws that determine the transformations of species and condition their successive forms. The laws of social evolution remain equally little known. Only a few of them are dimly perceived.

Since the analysis of the various elements whose aggregate constitutes a society has not yet emerged from the phase of vague generalizations and conjectural assertions, the view of things with which the theoreticians of the unknown are content remains very fragmentary still. In the tangle of necessities that direct the trajectory of a people’s life, they select those that strike their minds and neglect the rest. That is why the recital of the deeds of sovereigns, and above all of their battles, seemed bound to constitute the sole interest of History. Everything that concerned the existence of peoples was, until quite recently, disdained or ignored.

Science is no longer content with the summary answers formerly given to the “why” that bristle on every side and with which the political life of nations is filled. Why did so many peoples spring suddenly out of nothingness and fill the world with the din of their greatness? Why did they afterward sink into an oblivion so deep that for centuries all was unknown of them? How are gods, institutions, languages, and arts born, how do they evolve and die? Do they condition human societies, or are they, on the contrary, conditioned by them? Why could certain beliefs, such as Islam, establish themselves almost instantaneously, while others took centuries to take hold? Why did the same Islam survive the political power that served as its support, and why does it still spread, whereas other religions such as Christianity and Buddhism seem to decline and to be nearing their end?

To all these “whys,” and to many others, answers were never lacking. We resemble the child who must always have one. But the explanations with which a very young science could be content, its maturity no longer accepts.

The age is past when the gods conducted history. The benevolent providence that guided our uncertain steps and repaired our errors has vanished without return. Abandoned to himself, man must find his bearings alone amid the frightful chaos of the unknown forces that grip him. They dominate him still, but each day he learns to dominate them in turn. It is this ever more pronounced mastery over nature that the word progress designates.

To master nature is not enough. Living in society, man must learn to master himself and to submit to common laws. It falls to the leaders placed at the head of nations to decree these laws and to have them respected.

The knowledge of the means that make it possible to govern peoples usefully—that is to say, political psychology—has always constituted a difficult problem. It is far more so today, when new economic necessities, born of scientific and industrial progress, weigh heavily upon peoples and escape the action of their governments.

Political psychology shares in the uncertainty of the social sciences indicated above. Yet it must be used just as it is, for events press upon us and do not wait. The decisions they provoke are often of considerable importance, for the consequences of an error may weigh upon several generations. The century that preceded our own furnishes numerous examples of this.

The most important of the rules for the government of men are those relating to action. When to act, how to act, and within what limits to act? The answer to these questions constitutes the whole art of politics.

An attentive analysis of the political faults with which the fabric of history is strewn shows that they generally had errors of psychology for their cause.

The arts and the sciences are subject to certain rules that cannot be violated with impunity. There exist rules just as precise for governing men. Their discovery is doubtless very difficult, since very few of them have thus far been clearly formulated.

The only genuine treatise of political psychology known to us was published more than four centuries ago by an illustrious Florentine whom his work rendered immortal.

The sumptuous marble that shelters his eternal sleep is raised beneath the vaults of the famous church of Santa Croce in Florence. This pantheon of Italy’s glories contains magnificent monuments erected to the memory of the men who made her greatness—Michelangelo, Galileo, Dante, and others. The merits of these demigods of thought are engraved there in letters of gold.

In this gallery of illustrious shades there is scarcely a single tomb upon which long inscriptions were deemed unnecessary. A single indication figures there:

MACHIAVELLI, 1527

Tanto nomini nullum par elogium

(no eulogy equals so great a name)

The work that earned its author an epitaph at once so glorious and so brief is the little volume entitled The Prince, to which I alluded above. In it the illustrious writer formulated precise rules on the art of governing the men of his time.

Of his time, and not of another. It was for having forgotten this essential condition that the book, so much admired at first, was later decried, when, ideas and manners having evolved, it ceased to express the necessities of the newer ages.

Only then did Machiavelli become Machiavellian.

Possessing the sense of realities, the eminent psychologist did not seek the best, but only the possible. To penetrate his genius one must carry oneself back to that brilliant and perverse period, when the life of another counted for little, and when the act of bringing one’s own wine along so as not to be poisoned when going to dine with a cardinal, or simply with a friend, was considered quite natural. To judge the politics of that age with the ideas of our own would be as illogical as to try to interpret the Crusades, the wars of religion, or the Saint Bartholomew’s massacre in the light of present-day conceptions.

Machiavelli was not a mere theoretician. Intimately mingled by his functions in the active politics of his country, he had suffered from the dissensions that convulsed the Italian republics, then in the full grip of a syndicalist regime and ceaselessly troubled by the bloodiest discords. He had seen, in 1502, Florence reduced to creating a gonfaloniership for life, which was nothing but a veritable perpetual dictatorship—that is to say, pure Caesarism. This last form of government appeared to him a fatal phase of the anarchy that popular governments have always engendered. He was scarcely mistaken, since all the Italian republics ended, as moreover did the Athenian and Roman republics, in the same way.

Most of the rules relating to the art of leading men, taught by Machiavelli, have long been unusable; and yet four centuries have passed over the dust of this great dead man without anyone’s having attempted to redo his work.

Political psychology, or the science of governing, is nevertheless so necessary that statesmen cannot dispense with it. They do not, therefore, dispense with it; but, for want of formulated laws, the impulses of the moment and a few very summary traditional rules constitute their only guides.

Such guides frequently lead to costly errors. Napoleon, so conscious of the psychology of the French, was profoundly ignorant of that of the Russians and the Spaniards. This ignorance flung him into wars in which all his genius as a conqueror foundered against an unsuspected patriotism that no force could have vanquished. Very badly advised, the heir of his name accumulated in the Crimea, in Mexico, in Italy, and elsewhere, very grave errors of psychology, which in the end earned us a new invasion.

The great handlers of men are necessarily great psychologists. Without the intimate knowledge of the mentality of individuals and of peoples that Bismarck possessed so well, the superiority of the Germanic armies would certainly not have sufficed to found the unity of Germany.

Political psychology is built up out of diverse materials, the principal of which are individual psychology, the psychology of crowds, and finally that of races.

The masters of our system of instruction evidently consider these branches of knowledge quite useless, since they are mentioned in none of their programs. At the School of Political Sciences one even seems unaware of their existence. Is it not strange that one may be granted the title of “doctor of political sciences” without ever having heard of the very branches of knowledge that are nevertheless the true bases of politics?

A few traditional notions constituting the sole psychological baggage of mediocre statesmen, they find themselves utterly disoriented before certain new problems whose solution routine does not supply. The shifting impulses of parties becoming their guides, the errors then committed are innumerable.

Very long would be the list of them, even limited to these last few years. A dangerous error of psychology, this separation of Church and State, granting the clergy an independence and a power that the most Catholic of our kings would never have tolerated. Fundamental errors of psychology, our principles of education, so different from those that led Germany to achieve all its scientific, industrial, and economic progress. Errors of psychology, the ideas of assimilation to which our colonies owe their decadence. An error of psychology, the measure introducing into the army the apaches formerly confined to special battalions composed of other apaches, and where, consequently, their contact could contaminate no one. An error of psychology just as grave, the government’s capitulation in the first strike of the postal workers. Errors of psychology still, a great number of our so-called humanitarian laws. An error of psychology always, that utopian hope of remaking societies by decree, and the belief that a people can entirely withdraw itself from the influence of its past.

The forces that determine the actions of a people are assuredly complex: natural forces, economic forces, historical forces, political forces, and so on. In the end they produce a certain orientation of our thoughts and, consequently, of our conduct. These forces, so diverse, thus find themselves finally transformed into psychological forces. It is therefore to these last that all the others may be reduced.

Difficulties between peoples are sometimes serious enough to be resolved only by cannon fire. The only right to be invoked then is the law of the stronger. Such were the disputes of Prussia and Austria, of the Transvaal and England, of Japan and Russia. But when it is a matter of secondary questions, psychological influences skillfully handled sometimes succeed in replacing military arguments. Only an adversary very superior in power can disdain them. He will strike the ground with his sword, as Napoleon and Bismarck did, and the adversary will have only to keep silent while awaiting the hour of revenge, which will always sound.

No one today seems strong enough to employ these summary procedures. The tangles of alliances no longer allow any sovereign to speak as though he were the sole master. The Moroccan adventure taught peoples the fate that awaits them if they do not know how to make their weaknesses stand together in mutual defense.

It is therefore between forces roughly equal that the discussions provoked by the incidents of daily life now take place. Then psychology resumes its role, and the action of diplomats may become important.

It is indubitable, however, that this action is no longer today what it once was. Informed by the telegraph, the telephone, and the newspapers, the public passionately debates the slightest political events, while the diplomats slowly exchange their obscure notes. Accustomed formerly to negotiate in the shadows, they must now discuss in full light and follow opinion instead of preceding it.

And yet their role, unjustly disdained, retains a certain usefulness. Recent events have brought it into evidence.

Several important questions were, in fact, settled thanks to diplomatic interventions. The bombardment of English fishing boats by Russian ironclads at the beginning of the war with Japan, the affair of Casablanca, the Austro-Russian dispute over Serbia, and so on. Had we possessed, on the eve of 1870, diplomats less below the most distressing mediocrity, the war would have been postponed to a moment when we might have prepared alliances, and not to the one chosen by the enemy.

It is political psychology again that teaches how to resolve problems posed every day. To discern, for example, when one must yield to popular demands or resist them. According to their temperament, statesmen yield indefinitely or resist always. Detestable principle. According to circumstances, one must know how to resist or, on the contrary, to yield. No part of political psychology is more difficult, and no errors have graver consequences. The French Revolution might perhaps have been avoided, and would surely have been mitigated, if, at the time of the agricultural and financial crisis of 1788, which had increased the misery of the working classes through dearth and unemployment, the aristocratic class had not persisted in refusing fiscal equality.

There resulted from it an intense hatred against the privileged classes, and the riots that engendered the disintegration of a long past.

Struck formerly by the absence of works devoted to political psychology, I always hoped to see this gap filled.

After ten years almost exclusively devoted to the experiments in physics from which my book on the Evolution of Matter emerged, these researches became too costly to be continued. I therefore had to abandon them and resigned myself to taking up my former studies again. Desirous of applying to politics the principles set forth in several of my previous works, I asked my eminent friend, Professor Ribot, to point out to me the treatises of political psychology recently published. His reply informed me that none existed. My astonishment was the same as when, fifteen years earlier, wishing to undertake the study of the psychology of crowds, I found that no writing had appeared on the subject.

It is not, certainly, that political dissertations have ever been lacking. On the contrary, they have abounded since Aristotle and Plato; but their authors were most often theoreticians, strangers to the realities of their time and knowing only the chimerical man begotten of dreams. Neither psychology nor the art of governing has anything to ask of them.

The absence of classic works on such a subject, and the nonexistence of chairs devoted to its teaching, prove that its usefulness does not appear clearly. It was therefore necessary to demonstrate it. This will be one of the aims of this book.

Political psychology is built up, as I said above, upon materials drawn from the study of individual psychology, of that of crowds, of that of peoples, and finally from the teachings of history. Several of these materials are beginning to be known, but they are not the monument itself.

In the present state of our knowledge, politics can be only a daily adaptation of conduct to necessities. Rational or not, it matters little, provided they be necessities. The hereditary prejudices of a people and its religious beliefs may be declared absurd by reason; but a true statesman will never attempt to combat them, knowing that he cannot do so usefully. Only theoreticians, ignorant of realities, believe that pure reason will govern the world and transform men. In reality, intelligence slowly prepares the changes that will, in the long run, transform our souls; but its immediate action is very feeble. Very few things can be changed abruptly by it.

Political psychology is still, as we have said, in the age of uncertainties. Nevertheless, rules—often empirical, yet very sure—emerge each day. It is not by formulating them that their value could be proved, but rather by showing the consequences of ignoring them. This too will be one of the aims I set myself. The development of the principles that have served as my guide would require commentaries that the dimensions of this book do not permit. They will be found, set forth at length, in my earlier works. In this book I have confined myself almost exclusively to the application of the determinable rules of political psychology to contemporary events. Even limited to this very circumscribed period, the subject was still so vast that I have often had to content myself with summary indications. To examine the role of political psychology in the history of peoples, in the formation of their beliefs, and in the armed struggles that form the fabric of their past would have required several volumes. Having to treat subjects somewhat arid, and therefore capable of frightening the reader and easily exhausting his attention, I have sought to avoid overly didactic forms. The most serious propositions often gain by being presented within a not too severe frame. One of the chapters of this work, devoted to describing the factors of persuasion, shows the preponderant role of repetition. It is the conviction of its usefulness that has led me sometimes to repeat the same things in slightly different terms. I regret that lack of space has prevented me from doing so still more. Napoleon did not exaggerate in saying that repetition is the principal figure of rhetoric. One may at least affirm that it constitutes one of the most active factors of convictions.

All the great statesmen have been conscious of its power. It was by means of innumerable repetitions that the Emperor of Germany succeeded in persuading his subjects of the usefulness of the sacrifices necessary for the construction of a great war fleet. The former President of the United States, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, therefore writes very justly: “All the great fundamental truths risk sounding like hackneyed things, and yet, hackneyed as they may be, they need to be reiterated again and again.” If repetitions are necessary to spread known truths, how many are needed to gain acceptance for new ones! I have experienced this more than once. The apostles who, in the course of the ages, transformed our conceptions and our beliefs succeeded only through ceaseless repetitions. This is because the true mechanism of convictions differs profoundly from that which books teach. Very useful for scientific demonstrations, reasoning plays only a very feeble role in the genesis of our beliefs. Ideas by no means impose themselves through their exactness; they impose themselves only when, through the double mechanism of repetition and contagion, they have invaded those regions of the unconscious where the generative motives of our conduct are elaborated. To persuade does not consist merely in proving the soundness of a reason, but rather in making men act in accordance with that reason.

The images evoked in the mind by narratives make only a middling impression, and that is why the differences between past and present never appear very clearly.

One forms a clear representation of abstract things only by comparing them with concrete impressions already felt. Whoever has seen a battle or a shipwreck will always be impressed by the account of similar events.

This representation of the past by way of concrete comparison was rendered very striking to me one day, in the following circumstances:

The chances of an excursion had led me to cross by automobile the bridge thrown over the river that divides into two towns the ancient city of Huy, in Belgium. A fog so intense enveloped it that we had to stop. I got down and leaned upon the parapet.

Beneath the thick mantle of mist enveloping all things, one glimpsed imposing monumental masses. To me it was the unknown. I waited for it to unveil itself.

Suddenly, a clear ray of sunlight dispersed the clouds, and, in an unforeseen vision, there arose, separated by the river, two worlds, two expressions of humanity standing face to face with each other, and which at first glance one divined to be menacing, irreconcilable, and terrible.

On the left bank, an aggregate of ancient buildings.

Dominating them all, a gigantic fortified castle of rigid lines, and a majestic cathedral whose contours the ardent piety of many generations had, over the centuries, slowly festooned.

On the right bank, facing these great syntheses of another age, stretched the sad, bare walls of an immense factory of grayish brick, surmounted by tall chimneys vomiting torrents of black smoke furrowed with flames.

At regular intervals a door opened, discharging into long files men shaggy and covered with sweat, their faces harassed, their eyes somber. Sons of ancestors dominated by the gods and the kings, they had changed masters only to become the servants of iron. And they were indeed two worlds, two civilizations confronting each other, obeying different motives, animated by other hopes. On one side, a past already dead, but whose will we still endure. On the other, a present laden with mysteries and bearing in its flanks an unknown future. They have always existed, these two worlds, and always hostile; but similar sentiments, a common faith, often bridged the abyss that separated them. Today, faith and sentiments have disappeared, leaving standing only the atavistic hostility of the poor against the rich. Gradually freed from the beliefs and the social bonds of the past, the modern workers reveal themselves increasingly aggressive and oppressive, threatening civilizations with collective tyrannies that will perhaps make men regret that of the worst despots. They speak as masters to legislators who servilely flatter them and submit to their every caprice. Day by day the weight of number seeks more and more to substitute itself for the weight of intelligence.

Political life is an adaptation of man’s sentiments to the environment that surrounds him. These sentiments vary little, for human nature transforms itself very slowly, whereas the modern environment evolves rapidly by reason of the continual progress of science and industry. When the external surroundings change too quickly, adaptation is difficult, and there results the general malaise observed today. To make man’s nature square with the necessities of every order that grip him, and of which he is not master, constitutes a problem ceaselessly reborn and ever more arduous. The ancient world and the modern world differ profoundly in their thoughts and their modes of existence. The new elements that lead us do not derive from abstract reasonings and by no means oscillate at the whim of our hopes or our logical conceptions. They are the results of necessities that we undergo and do not create. The present age differs in no way from those that preceded it in respect of rivalries and struggles, for these last are born of passions that scarcely vary. The real difference bears chiefly upon the dissimilarity of the factors that today make peoples evolve. It is this essential point that I shall now try to mark. The true characteristics of this century are, first, the substitution of the power of economic factors for that of kings and laws. In the second place, the interweaving of interests among peoples formerly separate and having nothing to borrow from one another. This latter phenomenon, of relatively recent origin, is of considerable importance. Peoples are no longer, as formerly, isolated and almost devoid of commercial relations. They all live off one another and could not subsist without one another. England would soon be reduced to famine if she were surrounded by a wall preventing the arrival of the foodstuffs she goes to seek abroad and pays for with other goods. These new conditions of existence allow us to foresee that, in all the great industrial and commercial movements that transform the life of nations, creating wealth in one place and poverty in others, the influence of governments, so considerable formerly, becomes weaker each day. Convinced themselves of their impotence, they follow the movements and no longer direct them. The economic forces are the true masters and dictate the popular wills, which are scarcely resisted. Sixty years ago (1850), a sovereign was still powerful enough to decree free trade in his country. None would even dare to attempt it today. Whether protection, condemned by most economists, be good or harmful matters little. It answers to the popular wills of the present hour, and this hour is surrounded by necessities too overwhelming for statesmen to give much thought to the future. They moreover often deceive themselves as to the consequences of their intervention. These docile leaders of very undocile armies always obey and no longer command. In a session of March 11, 1910, Mr. Méline assured the Senate that free trade had ruined English agriculture, whose wheat production had fallen by more than half in half a century, whereas, under the regime of protection, France, which in 1892 had a food deficit of 695 millions, had seen it disappear and be replaced by a surplus of 5 millions, permitting the export of wheat instead of its import. The celebrated economist naturally attributes to the regime of protection, of which he was the apostle, the 700 millions that farmers now draw from the soil. One may nevertheless affirm, without fear of error, that since the origin of the world no law ever had such a creative power. In fact, the new agricultural production results solely from the immense scientific progress achieved by an agriculture that felt itself greatly threatened. And if the English have not accomplished the same progress, it is by no means because free trade prevented them from struggling against foreign competition, but simply because they found it far more remunerative to manufacture industrial products, from the sale of which they draw more money than they need to buy all the wheat necessary. Whether the protectionist regime be useful or harmful is not, moreover, to be considered here. In present-day politics—and this is precisely what I wished to show—it is not a matter of seeking the best, but solely the attainable. In our day no despot would be strong enough, I repeat, to impose free trade or protection upon a country that did not want it. When peoples deceive themselves, so much the worse for them. Experience teaches them so. A few men of genius, aided by circumstances, sometimes manage to swim back up the currents, but their number has always been very small. What precedes shows clearly to what point the factors of the present hour differ from those of the past, and allows us to foresee the slight influence of political theories upon the evolution of peoples. With the progress of science, of industry, and of international relations, there have been born invisible but all-powerful masters whom peoples, and their sovereigns themselves, must obey.

The economic elements of the life of peoples therefore constitute necessities to which they are forced to adapt themselves, since they cannot escape them. To these natural necessities are joined others, very artificial, which the theoreticians of politics and the governments that follow them try to create. Let us study their role. Despite all the resources of their laboratories, biologists have never succeeded in transforming a single living species. The slight external modifications that the breeder’s art manages to create are without durability and without force. Is it any easier to transform a social organism than a living being? The affirmative answer to this question has directed all our politics for more than a century, and directs it still. The possibility of remaking societies by means of new institutions always seemed evident to the revolutionaries of every age, and above all to those of our great Revolution. It appears equally certain to the socialists. All aspire to rebuild societies upon plans dictated by pure reason. But as it advances, science contradicts this doctrine more and more. Resting upon biology, psychology, and history, it shows that our limits of action upon a society are very restricted, that profound transformations are never realized without the action of time, that institutions are the outer envelope of an inner soul. These last constitute a kind of garment capable of adapting itself to an inner form, but powerless to create it; and that is why institutions excellent for one people may be detestable for another. Far from being the point of departure of a political evolution, an institution is simply its term. Certainly, the role of institutions and of men upon events is not nil. History shows it on every page; but it exaggerates their power and does not perceive that they are most often the flowering of a long past. If they do not come at the necessary moment, their action is merely destructive, like that of conquerors. To believe that one modifies the soul of a people by changing its institutions and its laws has remained a dogma that we shall frequently have to combat in this work, and from which one must one day surely turn away. The Latin peoples have not turned away from it yet, and it is this that constitutes their weakness. Their illusions about the power of institutions have cost us the bloodiest revolution that history has known, the violent death of several millions of men, the profound decadence of all our colonies, and the menacing progress of socialism. Nothing has been able to shake it, this terrible dogma, and we never cease to apply it rigorously each day to the unfortunate natives fallen into our hands, whom we thus lead into hatred and revolt. The newspapers recently furnished a new example of this general blindness by reproducing some extracts from a circular of the governor of the Ivory Coast to his administrators. Its final result was the uprising of the country, the massacre of several officers, and the very costly necessity of sending numerous troops from the mother country to reestablish order. If the English or the Dutch governed their colonies on such principles, those colonies would long ago have been lost. This document, of which I shall give the most salient passages, illustrates clearly our irreducible incapacity to understand that the soul of a people is not transformed by decrees, and that institutions excellent for one people may be very bad for another, and, in any case, always inapplicable. “Our subjects,” writes this governor, “will have to come to progress in spite of themselves. It is for authority to obtain what would be refused to persuasion. The black mentality will have to be modified from top to bottom in order to make us understood. What I do not want is that we should make a display of a sensibility without result. Even were we not, at the outset, to seem to take account of the native’s desires, it is important that we follow without weakness the only path capable of leading us to the goal. I by no means believe that we should dread the consequences of our action, even when that action shall not respect usages of which the best that can be thought is that they are opposed to all progress.” It is not the black mentality that it would be urgent to modify (were the matter to depend on our will), but that of the administrators capable of signing the foregoing lines. As for the illusion of the worthy governor “by no means dreading the consequences of his intervention,” events gave him a harsh lesson which, unfortunately, will scarcely profit him. It has always been the property of a belief to be modifiable neither by observation, nor by reasoning, nor by experience. Political beliefs have the same tenacity as religious dogmas, though they do not always possess their durability. This dogma of the transformation of the soul of peoples under the influence of institutions is, moreover, uncontested in France by all parties, including the most conservative.

The progress of modern psychology makes it possible to explain the role played by reason in the organization of societies, their beliefs, and their conduct. It is very feeble, although all governments claim to rely upon it. I showed in another work (Opinions and Beliefs) that, contrary to the teachings of classical philosophy, there exist forms of logic quite distinct from rational logic—mystical logic and affective logic in particular. They are so separate that one can never pass from one to the other, and consequently express one in the language of the other. Upon rational logic are built all the forms of knowledge, the exact sciences in particular. With affective and mystical logic are built our beliefs—that is to say, the factors of the conduct of individuals and of peoples. Rational logic governs the domain of the conscious, where the interpretations of our acts are fabricated. It is in the domain of the subconscious, governed by affective and mystical influences, that their true causes are elaborated. Observation shows that societies are guided above all by affective and mystical logic, and that rational logic can scarcely influence them, still less transform them. The simple soul of reformers is too inaccessible to the genesis of things to understand that institutions are not built up with logical reasonings; but this notion has become evident today to English statesmen. One of their ministers said recently, in the full Parliament, that the great merit of the English Constitution was that it was not rational. That, in fact, is its strength; whereas the weakness of the innumerable constitutions engendered by our revolutions, for a century, in France, is precisely that they are based only on pure reason. This idea remaining incomprehensible to Latin brains, it would be useless to insist upon it here. I shall therefore confine myself to recalling that religions, governments, political acts—in a word, all that constitutes the fabric of the existence of a people—are never founded upon reasons. To know how to handle sentiments in order to influence opinion is the true role of statesmen. Appearances sometimes seem to prove that they often act through the logic of their speeches. Quite otherwise, in reality, as we shall see in this work, is the mechanism of persuasion. Multitudes are never impressed by the logical vigor of a speech, but rather by the sentimental images that certain words and associations of words bring to birth. The propositions linked together by means of rational logic serve only to frame them. Granting that a merely logical speech produces a conviction, it will always be ephemeral and will never constitute a motive of action.

But if it is not rational logic that leads men and makes their beliefs evolve, how are we to explain that, at the moment of the Revolution, theories deduced solely from pure reason produced such rapid and profound upheavals? Before showing that this contradiction is only apparent, let us first recall that the Revolution had, in reality, but a single influential theoretician, Rousseau. The action of Montesquieu, notable at its outset, quickly became very feeble. The latter sought above all to explain social organizations already existing. Rousseau proposed to remake a new society. This gentle visionary believed that man, happy in the state of nature, had been depraved and made wretched by institutions. Reason therefore demanded that they be remade. He was equally convinced that the essential vice of societies is inequality, and that the origin of social evil is the antithesis of wealth and poverty. The necessity, consequently, of changing all that by first establishing popular sovereignty. It is precisely this that his disciples attempted, by the energetic means one knows, as soon as the resistances of the king, the nobility, and the clergy engendered the violence that brought them to power. Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the Jacobins sought only to apply the theories of their master. Rousseau’s influence by no means disappeared with the Revolution. Mr. Lanson justly remarks that “for a century, all the advances of democracy—equality, universal suffrage, the crushing of minorities, the demands of the extreme parties, the war on wealth and property—have been in the direction of his work.” We shall see that in reality he was far less an inspirer than a pretext. The rapidity with which Rousseau’s ideas spread at the moment of the Revolution is striking. We know from the general cahiers of 1789 what the majority of the French then demanded: the abolition of feudal privileges, fixed laws, uniform justice, and so on—that is to say, roughly what Napoleon realized by his Code. Royalty was still universally respected, and no one asked to abolish it. And yet, three years later, the theories set forth above reigned sovereignly, and the Terror suppressed those who did not venerate them. There seems, then, to be an evident contradiction between what we have said of the slight influence of theories deduced from pure reason upon the march of events, and the action, so rapid, that these theories seemed to exert during the Revolution. We shall accentuate this contradiction still further by affirming that the men of every age are governed by a very small number of directing ideas that establish themselves very slowly and become motives of action only after having been transformed into sentiments. In reality, the contradiction, despite its apparent clarity, does not exist. If, indeed, the ideas of the theoreticians of the Revolution implanted themselves easily in the soul of the crowds, it is by no means because they were new, but solely because they were, on the contrary, very old. The revolutionary theories did but lend the support of laws to passions that had never ceased to exist, and to aspirations that social necessities may repress or lull to sleep, but that are never extinguished. The people had accepted royal power and the inequalities of condition because, maintained by an ancient social framework, they seemed indestructible natural necessities. As soon as it heard rulers, on whom supreme power conferred a great prestige, declare that its despotism was to replace that of the kings, that the inequalities of fortune were an injustice, and that it was about to be distributed the goods of its former masters, it was bound fatally to adopt such ideas with enthusiasm and to regard as enemies worthy of the last punishment those who might oppose the realization of its appetites. If, in our day, a government relying on the authority of reputed philosophers were to enact laws authorizing murder and pillage, it would soon count a great number of adherents and would be as applauded as when it proposed to seize the milliard of the congregations in order to distribute it to the workers and to certain friends. Certainly, the practice of such doctrines does not subsist long, for one soon discovers, as happened after a few years of revolution, that anarchy ruins and does not enrich. And then, always as at that period, the nation would seek an energetic dictator capable of extricating it from disorder.

One is often deceived as to the useful role of governments and the limits of that role, because their power, very feeble for good, is on the contrary very great for evil. It has always been easy to destroy and difficult to rebuild. Today we have to defend ourselves not only against the rigid economic necessities of the present hour, but also against the disastrous zeal of legislators legislating at random, as we shall soon show, according to the impulses of the moment. Laws, called social, that hamper industry more and more and enrich no one. Laws hindering apprenticeship to the point of having driven the apprentices from the factories and transformed a great number of them into unemployed men, thieves, and criminals, as the rapid progress of infantile criminality proves. Incessant religious persecutions and expropriations whose final result has been to divide France into two hostile peoples. Customs laws that, by the reprisals they continually provoke, will end by entirely suppressing our trade with foreign countries, and so on. All these laws, created by too short a reason, are artificial calamities that add themselves to the natural ills whose weight we are quite obliged to bear. We had, certainly, no idea here of putting reason on trial, but only those who claim to employ it to modify phenomena that it cannot govern. It is exclusively upon reason that science and all the forms of knowledge are built. It is above all with sentiments and beliefs that men are governed and that history is made.

In political psychology, as moreover in the other sciences, it is facts first, then their interpretation, that make it possible to disengage laws.

In politics, the observation of facts is much easier than their interpretation—that is to say, than the determination of their causes and the foresight of their consequences. Our armies were beaten in 1870. Here is a fact known to everyone. But why were they beaten? What reforms should they undergo in order to avoid a new defeat? Here the difficulties accumulate and the explanations vary considerably. To be convinced of this, it suffices to examine the contradictory theories revealed by the series of military regulations enacted over twenty years, or simply the writings of the specialists. If, moreover, the interpretation of social phenomena were easy, we should be in agreement on everything, whereas in reality we are so on nothing.

Therefore, although the political facts that form part of daily life are easy of observation, the determination of their causes is on the contrary difficult. It is all the more so in that the parts of an event of which we become aware are generally but a very feeble fragment of the event itself.

In such a study, simple intuition cannot suffice. Rigorous methods become necessary. They are of the same order as those employed in the sciences, in natural history in particular.

The psychologist must operate somewhat like the naturalist who, bringing into relief by an attentive analysis the realities hidden beneath deceptive appearances, groups together phenomena of dissimilar aspect. Thus he comes to classify the whale with the mammals instead of considering it a fish. To the superficial observer, the whale evidently appears closer to the shark than to a squirrel, and yet it is with the latter that it must be compared. In politics, likewise, appearances alone strike, and not the hidden relations. The foregoing generalities show that the first difficulty of political psychology is to discover the near or remote factors of events and not to attribute to a single cause, as is generally done, what is the result of several. I cannot insist too much on this difficulty. To prove its importance, I shall take a concrete case relatively rather simple—the extension of socialism—and, by the mere enumeration of a few of the factors that have determined this extension, bring their complexity into evidence.

At the base of socialism one finds first a fundamental element: Hope. The hope of improving one’s lot and of creating for oneself a happy future. Such a factor assuredly possesses a great power. Yet by itself it would furnish but a very incomplete explanation of the problem, the hope of improving one’s destiny having in all ages constituted one of the principal motives of the activity of men. We shall go further in remarking that formerly it was much less necessary than today to improve one’s life, since it was to be improved in a future world of whose reality one retained no doubt, whereas one scarcely believes in it today. What man hoped for from another existence is now sought only here below. The explanation of the extension of socialism thus begins to grow more precise. A new element of interpretation will appear if one observes that socialism, whose humanitarian form is accentuated each day, is becoming a religion replacing those in the way of disappearing. Modern psychology teaches that the religious sentiment—that is to say, the veneration of mystery and the need to submit to a creed capable of orienting our thoughts—is an irreducible tendency of the mind. The socialist apostle is a cleric who has changed the name of his gods. His soul remains saturated with an ardent religiosity. The newspaper L’Humanité of November 30, 1909, informs us that the young professor at the Sorbonne who recently opened the first session of the Socialist School “addressed, as was fitting, an emotional invocation to the goddess Reason.” The psychological factors we have just indicated present a general character that renders them applicable to all peoples. Now, it is evident that socialism takes, from one country to another, various forms. Certain elements of interpretation must therefore be added to the preceding ones. We shall find first of all the role of race—that is to say, of the hereditary dispositions of nations. They differ profoundly, and that is why the word socialism is a common label expressing very dissimilar aspirations. How could they be of the same nature among peoples of opposite instincts—those of the United States, for example, relying exclusively upon their energy and their individual initiative, and those dominated, like the Latins, by the irresistible and perpetual need for the protection of a master? Besides the aptitudes of race, another capital psychological factor still intervenes: the past. It is evident that peoples centralized for centuries under the hand of a State regulating the least details of their social, industrial, commercial, and even religious life, could not possess the same aspirations, the same tendencies, as young nations having behind them only a very short political past, and consequently incapable of weighing heavily upon them. State collectivism, which grips us more and more, was in reality practiced in all ages by our monarchies, and that is why the Latin peoples return to it easily. The minute regulations of Colbert would form an excellent chapter of a treatise on State socialism. The State being regarded today as a protecting divinity, all parties, all classes, were bound naturally to ask it to intervene in their affairs and defend their interests. It was first the industrialists who begged it to protect them, in order to enrich them, by customs duties, bounties, subsidies, and so on. Competition was evidently thereby destroyed, but by paralyzing at the same stroke all initiative and, consequently, all progress. Having become powerful by number, the working classes in their turn demanded the protection of the State, but this time against the masters of industry. In yielding to them, one entered further upon the socialist path opened by protectionism. To satisfy growing demands, the State engaged upon the road of despotic arbitrariness and of spoliations: workers’ pensions obligatorily paid by the employers—that is to say, charity forced at their expense—the buying back of the railways, and the progressive extension of monopolies, so as to transform the workers into functionaries maintained by the State, and so on. But all this costing very dear, and the gearing of repercussions unrolling fatally, the legislators are now led to try to despoil the possessing classes by heavy progressive taxes, without understanding, moreover, that the small number of these privileged persons will render derisory the sums obtained. Their spoliation being bound to have for its ultimate consequence the ruin of the great industries, one will finally arrive only at equality in misery. This will be the leveling dreamed of by so many souls dominated by the hatred of superiorities. Although already long, our enumeration of the factors of socialist evolution does not contain them all. One would still have to inquire how doctrines propagate themselves through the multitudes, why very vague words and formulas sometimes possess so much power. One then finds oneself in the presence of new and important factors created by the special mentality of crowds. But the examination of the causes of the extension of socialism would by no means be terminated by this study, since it rages not only among the illiterate multitudes but also among professors and comfortable bourgeois, satisfied with their lot. It then becomes necessary to bring in other psychological factors, and notably mental contagion by imitation. It is always found at the dawn of the great beliefs and explains their propagation.

If so many factors act in a social phenomenon, it must appear very difficult to gauge their respective influences. The problem is arduous, indeed. How is it to be resolved? It can be by two different methods, the one very simple, the other rather complicated. The simple method—and for this reason one of general use—consists in supposing the phenomena engendered by a single cause, easy to understand. To find apparent remedies for all ills then becomes easy. Do the workers of a country declare themselves discontented with their lot? Let us decree an income tax that will make it possible to despoil the rich in order to enrich the workers. Is the population of a country stationary? Let us establish heavy burdens upon the citizens who do not have enough children. Will they have more of them? Only hardened economists could doubt it. Thus reason the politicians of short mentality, and their simplism, which I have had to condense somewhat in my examples, has earned us detestable laws. Let us now see what method the observer must follow who wishes to make use of the teachings of political psychology. Since any social event whatever results most often from a great number of immediate or remote factors, the first rule is to learn to separate them, the second to evaluate exactly the respective value of each of them. Thus the physicist operates in the presence of a phenomenon that may derive from several causes. His task is relatively easy, because repeated experiments allow him to verify his first deductions. But, for political phenomena, observation alone, and not experiment, constitutes the sole guide. Certainly, social experiments are not lacking. They are even innumerable, but independent of us and of our wills. Being unable to renew them, we are reduced to interpreting them. One knows too well to what divergences these interpretations lead, and into what discredit sociology has for this reason fallen. It becomes truly possible to gauge the value of a given factor only by seeing it act in a similar way in different times and among different peoples, while all the other factors have remained invariable. It is, as one sees, somewhat an application of the method called that of concomitant variations. Being applicable only to very simple cases, one most often disengages from it only banalities of restricted use: anarchy engenders Caesarism, weak peoples are conquered by strong peoples, and so on. The dissociation of the elements generative of an event is, however, facilitated by the observation that each social phenomenon is habitually the result of two very distinct categories of factors: the one permanent, the other transitory. The former act in a constant manner in all phenomena. Such, for example, is race—that is to say, hereditary dispositions. Such also is the social past, which comprises the religious, political, or social sentiments fixed in the soul of peoples and rendered stable by a long past. The transitory factors, on the contrary, change frequently; but, acting upon the little-mobile substratum of the ancestral residue, they always receive its imprint. It is for this reason that peoples of different races subjected at the same time to the same transitory factors react in various ways. Certainly, history often seems to show that a people can, at least in appearance, transform its beliefs, its institutions, and its arts; but beneath the external changes the past always reappears and soon modifies the forms that violent revolutions had momentarily caused to be adopted. The influences of race and of the past, habitually neglected because invisible, are in reality the most necessary to study. They effectively dominate the whole evolution of a people. It is thus, for example, that in France, beneath varied political agitations, we find two fixed principles common to all the Latin peoples and having invariably directed their acts: 1. The belief in the transforming power of the State. 2. The unshakable confidence in the absolute power of laws. From these two principles, which we shall study in several chapters, have been born the extension of Statism and the development of collectivist socialism, which is but its flowering. It appears therefore indispensable, in order to judge the events relating to a people, to know the characters of its race and of its history. As regards race, this study is not very complicated, the fundamental general characteristics being few in number. One already knows much of the Americans of the United States and of their possible future when one has observed a few of their essential characters, such as energy, confidence in one’s own strength, optimism, the need for justice and personal liberty, the habit of initiative supplying the place of governmental intervention. Whereas certain peoples cannot be studied without a prior knowledge of their government, the citizen of the United States must on the contrary be observed above all apart from his government. Reduced to his sole resources, he progresses without any aid; and, by itself, this psychological character would have sufficed to trace his destiny. An analogous examination of the sad Latin republics of America, powerless to emerge from the anarchy in which they vegetate, would likewise show a very small number of fundamental psychological characters dominating their whole history. A people of half-breeds is ungovernable. Thus, the knowledge of the great general factors that determine, or at least orient, the others simplifies somewhat the problem of political psychology. It is still very difficult, however. The transitory factors acting alongside the permanent factors are in fact so numerous that their complication sometimes baffles all logic. How is their role to be determined? By observing that, besides the great irreducible factors whose action I have just marked, there exists for each epoch a small number of directing principles channeling thoughts and acts in one same direction. It is thus, for example, that the politics of the Second Empire was oriented by the principle called that of nationalities, that present-day socialism evolves under the influence of a master idea: the equalization of social situations under the tutelage of the State, and so on.

It results from all these considerations that, in the genesis of an event, there always figure numerous elements, but of unequal importance. The role of political psychology consists precisely in knowing how to gauge this importance, to discern the principal and to eliminate the accessory. The elimination of secondary factors is as difficult in politics as in any science, in physics or astronomy in particular. It is nevertheless just as necessary. With present-day scientific progress, the genesis of every phenomenon appears infinitely complex. The simplicity of causes is created only by the insufficiency of our means of observation. A weight placed on the pan of a balance is not attracted by the earth alone, since the moon and all the other heavenly bodies of the firmament act upon it. But their thousands of attractions are so minute in comparison with that exerted by our planet that no account is taken of them. All the sagacity of the man of science consists in knowing how to disengage the principal factors of a phenomenon and to neglect the others. Kepler succeeded in formulating his laws only by setting aside the accessory perturbations that slightly modify the course of the planets. The true statesman proceeds no differently; but, still like the man of science, he must remember that such and such a factor, of no importance at a given moment, may acquire some at another. The physicist regards Mariotte’s law as true because he neglects elements too accessory to modify it visibly under the habitual conditions of temperature; but he knows also that when gases find themselves in the neighborhood of their critical point, factors precisely neglected at first now become preponderant. The law is then inexact, and another must be substituted for it.

The notion of absolute law, dear to the men of science of the last century, tends gradually to disappear from science. The principles of political psychology could assuredly not lay claim to more fixity than the physical laws. They are, moreover, ceaselessly disturbed by the intervention of unforeseen elements. It is thus that, at certain moments, the influence of the habitual factors disappears before abrupt currents of opinion. If the statesman knows their mechanism, he can bring them to birth, or at least orient them, as Bismarck succeeded in doing in 1870. These sudden movements of opinion constitute a moral force, sometimes so irresistible that no power could dam them up. Napoleon himself knew that certain currents cannot be swum back up. Several of his letters are characteristic on this point. “It is the facts,” he wrote, “that speak. It is the direction of public opinion that carries all before it. I have never been my own master. I have always been governed by circumstances.” The power, as also the mobility, of these popular movements reveals itself on every page of our history. They are numerous in a single century. The Imperial Epic, the monarchical Restoration, romanticism, the Second Empire, the Boulangist adventure, and so on, give as many examples of them. Machiavelli’s Prince is called today the multitude. Its power becomes formidable as soon as all wills orient themselves in a single direction. Such an orientation, moreover, never lasts long, and the statesman must know this too. The popular currents of an epoch are often ill grasped by the men of that epoch. At the beginning of the Revolution, no one foresaw the terrible future that was preparing. It has been said with reason: while the ship was sinking, the passengers congratulated one another on the shipwreck. Madame de Genlis took the princes of Orléans, whose governess she was, to see the demolition of the Bastille. The nobility looked upon all this movement with as much sympathy as our blind bourgeoisie contemplated the first strike of the postal workers. Then, as today, no one understood that psychological phenomena have a necessary chain of sequence, and that each of them becomes in its turn a cause. All these causes, accumulated in the same direction, produce, as in mechanics, a fatal acceleration. We see to what point the present task of the leaders who wish to govern wisely is difficult. It is all the more so in that, having a mentality different from that of the crowd and obeying other motives, they do not always know how to understand it and speak to it. One knows well the men of a class only if one belongs to that class. That is why the leaders of the General Confederation of Labor, sprung from the popular strata, get themselves so perfectly obeyed. Of great principles, of fine humanitarian theories, they take no care, knowing well that the crowds concern themselves with them no more. Inaccessible to all reasoning, the crowds accept without discussion beliefs condensed into brief and violent formulas, and submit without a murmur to the most imperious orders, on condition that these be issued by men or committees clothed with prestige. Certainly, these leaders possess but a very summary psychology, yet admirably adapted to the mentality of the simple souls they have known how to enslave. Their horizon is narrow, but they know it. They know where they are going and what they want. The errors of the politicians do not escape them, and “from the other side of the barrier” their counsels would be very useful to our rulers. It is thus, for example, that at the hour when the government was yielding to the threats of the postal workers, one of the leaders of syndicalism showed very justly, in an article, that the rulers “were committing an unpardonable fault in letting people who scarcely suspected it become conscious of their own strength.”

The union of all these factors—remote or near, stable or transitory—represents what one might call the social equation of an epoch. Upon the correct solution of this equation often depends the future of a people. Necessity would generally suffice to resolve it, if the legislators did not intervene to disturb the play of the factors that natural laws always tend to bring into equilibrium. The enumeration of the elements generative of the evolution of a social phenomenon has shown us their variety. We have seen also that the most active were often the least perceived. Their totality constitutes a bundle of invisible forces that direct the destiny of a people. It bestirs itself; they lead it. Man often resembles the puppet ignorant of the strings that make it move. However powerful these forces may be, we must not, however, submit to them with a dull resignation. Dominated by such a sentiment, humanity would never have emerged from primitive savagery, and could not have vanquished the nature that had at first so closely enslaved it. And this will lead us to another study which also forms part of political psychology. Reduced to a mere science of observation, it would be somewhat vain. But it teaches also the art of foreseeing—that is to say, in mathematical language, the art of extrapolating curves of which one has been able to determine a sufficient number of elements. Political psychology presents yet another advantage. To foresee is useful; to forestall is more so. To foresee is to eliminate the surprises of the future. To forestall is to annul their action. How is this to be attained? Science, confirming the oldest religious traditions of humanity, seems to confine us each day more within a narrow fatalism. We shall see, however, in one of the last chapters of this work, that it is possible to dissociate the elements of which every fatality is composed. Now, to break up the factors of a fatality is to learn to withdraw oneself from it.

Many political events represent the flowering of a small number of principles solidly anchored in men’s souls. The belief in the sovereign power of laws is one of the most active.

One meets in France a host of people who say themselves freed from all religious belief. They no longer believe in the gods, despise superstitions, and scarcely dread anything but the revelations of sleepwalkers or the magic action of the number thirteen.

But in this country of free thought one would find it difficult to meet citizens manifesting the slightest doubt as to the infallible power of constitutions and laws. We are all solidly persuaded that legislative texts can reshape at will the social state of a people. With laws all reforms are possible. It rests only with them to enrich the poor at the expense of the rich, to equalize conditions, and to assure a universal happiness.

This sacred dogma of the power of laws is about the only one left standing that the theoreticians venerate. If the ideal of a political party allowed one to define it, one could say that there exists in France but a single party. All possess, in fact, one same ideal: to reform society by decree and to ask of the State its constant intervention in the social life of the citizens. One does not know, when one meets a Frenchman, whether he is clerical or anticlerical—which moreover often represents the same thing—but one may be quite certain that he is a Statist.

The doctrine of the sovereign action of laws has always constituted one of the most powerful factors of our history. The men of the Revolution were persuaded that a society is remade with institutions, and they ended by deifying the reason in whose name their decrees were promulgated. Many motives have contributed, among peoples whose religious mentality is very developed, to seeking legislatively the means of remedying the ills that afflict them. Being no longer able to ask miracles of heaven, one asks them of the legislator. The power of laws has replaced that of the gods. These legislative miracles appear easy of realization, for, if the remote reasons of things are difficult to perceive, their fictitious causes, very apparent, seem easy to reach. The failure of laws voted under the pressure of popular wills by no means shakes, moreover, the belief in their power. They retain the influence of religious dogmas. The imperative and brief prescriptions of the codes always exert a mysterious prestige. Like the divinities, the laws command and do not explain. Their authors understood very well that a power that is disputed soon ceases to be a power that is respected. True power resides not, in fact, in the strength of him who commands, but in the voluntary submission of him who obeys. This idea, so widespread among the Latin peoples, that social organizations are reformed with laws, is, as we have already said, one of the most disastrous errors that history has recorded. To defend it, millions of men have died wretchedly, flourishing cities have fallen into ruins, and great empires are descending the slope of decadence. The fatal chimera is nevertheless more powerful than it ever was. A few rare philosophers have indeed tried to show the dangerous absurdity of this doctrine; I have myself attempted it in several works, and notably in my book on the Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples. But what can writings do against the shifting impressions of crowds? They scarcely listen to any but the demagogues who servilely flatter their instincts. Let us not weary, however, of ceaselessly repeating the same truths. Ideas sometimes end by meeting the ground where they can germinate.

Persuaded himself of the omnipotence of laws, the legislator legislates to remedy the visible ills whose causes remain hidden from him. He legislates without respite, quite astonished to see the laws voted remain ineffective or produce effects contrary to those hoped for. He then grows irritated, legislates anew, interpellates the ministers, appoints commissions to supervise the execution of the decrees, and intervenes tirelessly in all the workings of the administration. It is thus that the parliamentary regime tends among us to transform itself into a regime recalling that of the Convention. Scarcely out of despotism, the Latin peoples always return to it. Collective despotism progressively replaces among them individual despotism. Everything leads one to believe that it will be just as tyrannical. Our history is filled with the disastrous consequences of laws promulgated with the best intentions. The Republic of 1848 believed it was doing a beneficent work in enacting numerous labor laws and in creating national workshops to give work to all citizens. When the economic necessities, which dominate from a great height the wills of the legislator, obliged the closing of these workshops, there resulted a revolution and appalling massacres. The final consequence was the reestablishment of the Empire and its sequels, including Sedan and the invasion. It is very disastrous, the race of philanthropists. Under their impulse are enacted the so-called humanitarian laws, whose effects are so often disastrous. The legislative measures having produced a result contrary to the one they proposed to attain are innumerable. It is thus, for example, that the laws on bounties to navigation were one of the active causes of the lamentable decadence of our merchant marine. We shall soon show it. It is thus again that, by virtue of the principle of the sovereign power attributed to laws, we claim to impose our institutions upon all the peoples conquered by us, without understanding that such a method was bound soon to determine the ruin of our colonies. The Latin dogma of the transforming power of decrees leads, under the pressure of the shifting wills of the people, to voting the most violent laws without troubling about their injustice. After having dangled before the eyes of the working classes the milliard of the congregations, it was indeed necessary, before the popular rumblings, to enact laws to seize this milliard. This act of savage iniquity, whose injustice did not strike the legislators, has created a fearsome precedent. Should the chances of a vote confer power for a day upon the revolutionary socialists, they will know how to expropriate a new class of citizens for the profit of another, without invoking any other reasons than the sovereign right of the State—that is to say, the right of the stronger. Our society is saved a little from the disorganization produced by the decrees of its legislators only by the impossibility of always applying them. Each law entails the creation of a swarm of functionaries destined to have it executed; but sometimes one must recoil before the enormity of the expense. One has hesitated thus far to institute an army of 500,000 inspectors to have the labor laws observed. This impossibility alone has saved our industry from the profound decadence that the constant meddling of functionaries in the factories would have engendered. The State, moreover, ends by renouncing of its own accord the inapplicable laws, because everyone violates them. A generalized offense soon transforms itself into a right. For this reason, the decrees enacted with the aim of thwarting financial speculations, joint-stock companies, and all the forms of contract born of modern economic evolution, have miserably failed. In studying the true genesis of laws, we shall easily understand why. Shall we conclude from the preceding considerations that one must never promulgate reforms by legislative means, and that one must fold one’s arms? Evidently the legislators of 1848, to whom we alluded above, would have been more useful in folding their arms than in voting laws so dangerous; but this pessimistic conclusion is not applicable to all cases. Many laws are useful when they are born under the influence of certain necessities that we shall now examine, and which are most often foreign to the will of the legislators. To know what must be done, and above all not done, in the matter of laws, one must first try to understand their genesis. Let us be, above all, well convinced that a nation cannot use the constitutions and laws of a people of a different mentality, however perfect they may be. When jurists try to persuade us that Roman law was adopted by certain countries and the English constitution by others, they give proof of a poor psychology. When Roman law was adopted by any people whatever—the Germans, for example—it at once became a German law. Never, without one’s being able to cite a single exception, has the English constitution been practiced by any peoples other than the English, though accepted by several.

Three phases succeeded one another in the genesis of a body of law: 1) custom, 2) jurisprudence, 3) the law. The legislator can intervene usefully only in the last of these phases. The law must confine itself most often to codifying custom. Therein lies its true role. Our Civil Code, which many imagine to have been constructed entirely from scratch by a council of jurists directed by Napoleon, did in reality but condense the customs most generally admitted in the various parts of France. It thus completed a juridical unification begun long before. It was not the code of the present, but that of a past. Custom results from the social, industrial, and economic necessities of each day. Jurisprudence fixes them. The law sanctions them. But what the law sanctions is the social state of the moment. Civilizations, above all today, evolve faster than laws. Jurisprudence then intervenes to modify them according to the new customs that establish themselves. In countries where the judge, lacking independence, seems more accustomed to render services than judgments, the laws must promptly register the custom, and that is why they change quickly. In countries where, as in England, the judge remains very independent, there is no need to touch the laws; it is the magistrate himself who transforms them. But among all nations, and by the sole fact that social needs evolve more rapidly than the codes, the jurisprudence that fixes customs has always been more powerful than the laws. There was never a people as respectful of written texts as the Romans. “Nowhere, however, more than at Rome,” writes Cruet justly, “did the law sanctioned by judicial practice so widely surpass, so widely contradict, the law expressly written in the legislative texts. This does not prevent that law, national to a dead society, from having long been regarded as the prototype of a universal and immortal legislation.” In fact, a society whose law did not evolve and remained crystallized in immutable rules would soon cease to exist. Such a case, moreover, has never presented itself. Muslim law itself, formerly fixed in the Koran, has ended by emerging from it almost entirely. How could a law remain stable when everything changes around it? At a given moment, its application becomes impossible. One may continue to respect its text, but one no longer observes it. The Romans greatly venerated the law of the Twelve Tables, only they did not apply it. The Muslims respect the Koran, but transform it completely by their interpretation. Thus, in consequence of the evolution of customs, jurisprudence evolves outside the law and sometimes even against it. The law has never been powerful enough to struggle against custom. “If family life inclined us to incest,” writes Professor Durkheim, “the prohibitions of the legislator would remain powerless.” Nothing is more evident. What tribunal would dare today to condemn to hard labor for murder, as the law obliges it, the individual who has killed his adversary in a duel? The law forbids abortion, but the jury always acquitting the guilty woman, the judge will end necessarily by no longer prosecuting. He has not, in fact, to impose his law upon us, but to undergo the one that the social sentiment imposes upon him. Without the jurisprudence that follows all the oscillations of custom, the code would end by becoming a tissue of iniquities. It is jurisprudence, notably, that frees the wife of the sailor lost on a distant voyage from the eternal widowhood to which the written law condemns her, in consequence of her impossibility of presenting her husband’s death certificate. It is jurisprudence again that, despite the legal prohibition of paternity searches, now obliges the seducer to indemnify the seduced woman and to maintain her child. Such facts explain the genesis of laws and determine the true role of the legislator. It should consist solely in sanctioning laws when they are already made—that is to say, created by custom and fixed by jurisprudence. Every law that springs up unexpectedly, without having passed through these two stages, is struck with death the very day it is promulgated. As an example of a new body of law in the way of forming itself under the influence of custom and jurisprudence, let us cite the preponderant power, growing each day in colossal proportions, of our Council of State. Formerly a secondary administrative cog confined to rather subordinate functions, it has become progressively, without new regulations, a power that makes all the others bend. It judges without appeal in the most different cases, revokes the decrees of the prefects and the ministers, reinstates retired naval officers, annuls appointments of functionaries, and so on. Whence comes such authority? Always from the same source. From customs created by necessity and fixed by jurisprudence. It is not the Council of State that dreamed of encroaching upon the other powers. It is the public that obliges it to encroach upon them, because it is desirous of limiting ministerial or administrative fancies and of finding some protection in the midst of a universal anarchy. All democracies, moreover, are led to the creation of these superior powers presenting a little independence and fixity. The Supreme Court of the United States plays a role analogous to the one that our Council of State seems bound soon to fulfill. A striking fact in the creation of these spontaneous powers, and one justifying the thesis set forth here on the genesis of law, is that they do not rest upon texts, are often sanctioned by none, and yet acquire a great power, whereas laws clearly formulated possess none. This phenomenon is observed equally in England. The most fundamental principles of the Government by no means repose upon texts; there has been none to divide Parliament into two Chambers, to permit it to vote laws, to oblige the sovereign to govern through the intermediary of responsible ministers, and so on. England has no written constitution, although presenting the type of constitutional government. It has progressively become a veritable republic presided over by a king. Liberty is nevertheless much greater there than in any other republic, that of the United States excepted. The citizens are free to go or not to go to church, without undergoing any persecution, visible or hidden. They may assemble and acquire property without ever being exposed to expropriation. The lettres de cachet that we have taken from the hands of the kings to place in those of petty examining magistrates are unknown there. Everything in such a country clashes with our ideas of order, of reason, and of fine symmetry. Its law is composed of the most disparate elements. “The great merit of the English institutions,” said a minister, Mr. Chamberlain, in the full Parliament, “is that they are not logical.” Profound thought. Laws, in fact, dispense with logic, because they are the daughters of sentiments created by necessities independent of reason. We remain unfortunately, in France, very far from such ideas. Experience does not profit us. Our errors on the genesis of laws have cost a number of revolutions, ruins, and massacres. No one can say what they will yet cost. Our chimera, moreover, is not near to being annihilated, since it finds for its defenders minds very enlightened. An eminent statesman affirmed recently, in the preface of a book, the necessity “of organizing society politically and socially according to the laws of reason.” This, alas, is what we never cease to do with the most tireless obstinacy for a long century past, amid frightful convulsions. Shall we never renounce our wish to legislate, organize, and reform in the name of this blind reason that knows neither natural necessities, nor economic necessities, nor necessities of any sort? Shall we come to understand that societies are not at the mercy of the sentimental fancies of rulers? One does not make law; it makes itself. This brief formula contains its whole history.

To justify the propositions set forth in the preceding chapter, it will not be useless to examine the consequences of a few of these laws improvised by the fanciful brains of legislators.

Xerxes, the legend says, had the sea whipped to punish it for having destroyed his vessels and, doubtless, to remove its inclination to begin again. The mentality of the illustrious king seems a little rudimentary today. It is very close, however, to that of the legislators who claim to transform, at the whim of their dreams, the necessities of all kinds that govern the evolution of societies.

These necessities are nevertheless as immutable as the physical laws. One does not always see them, but one must invariably submit to them; and vainly do we try to oppose to them the codification of our ignorances.

The future alone will show how dangerous are the present attempts at social renovation by the revolutionary collectivists and the legislators who follow them.

Such illusions lose their power only on the day when their consequences appear. It took Sedan to reveal to us the dangers of imperial Caesarism. Analogous experiences will be necessary to unveil those of socialist Caesarism.

In studying the legislative illusions, we have summarily retraced the general lines of the life of law and of the genesis of laws, and shown how these last are born of custom and are modified slowly, each day, according to needs, by jurisprudence. The law appeared to us as a momentary codification of a law ceaselessly evolving. Social existence, contrary to what the metaphysicians of collectivism suppose, does not organize itself by means of improvised decrees, but under the action of economic necessities and of the character of peoples.

Doubtless, one may remark—and the socialist illusion has scarcely any other support—that from Solon to Napoleon there sprang up abruptly in history codes seeming to issue entirely from the brain of a single legislator. The attentive examination of these codes—that of Napoleon, for example—quickly demonstrates that they are on the contrary simply the condensation and simplification of earlier customs fixed by usage. The supposedly new codes sanction and do not improvise. They improvise no more when it becomes necessary to impose upon regions formerly separate general laws destined to replace their particular systems of law. This is what happened for France at the end of the fifteenth century and, much more recently, for Germany and Switzerland. These great countries ended by fusing into a single text the various codes of provinces at first very dissimilar, then drawn together, and finally identified by the similitude of their interests. Since the extension of revolutionary collectivism, the theoreticians appear to have formed a very different conception of law. According to them, a society would be remade with codes. The supernatural power attributed to laws has replaced the one attributed to the gods. Such beliefs were defensible only at the epoch when learned theologians taught that the divinities, intervening ceaselessly in human affairs, revealed to peoples their will through the intermediary of kings. Of inflexible natural laws there could then be no question. Socialist theology takes no more account of them today. The apostles of the new faith are as ignorant of social necessities as the priests of the ancient divinities. Contrary to these chimerical doctrines, we perceive clearly today that the most considerable historical phenomena are engendered by causes remote, numerous, and closely chained together. It is sometimes from the accumulation of small causes that great effects are born. In history, the ponderable often issues from the imponderable. The thousands of small facts, sometimes unnoticed, of which great events are the synthesis, end by orienting themselves in one same direction, by virtue of rigorous laws analogous to those that oblige a heavenly body to follow a certain trajectory or the acorn to become an oak. Thus channeled, all these small daily events engender currents that, very feeble at their origin and easily diverted, become irresistible later on, when their force has increased sufficiently. Then the great social dikes are overturned, and the evolution of a people transforms itself into a revolution. In all the transformations slowly created by time, the role of reason, as we have already said, has always been very feeble. The true masters of history, the founders of great religions and great empires, have moreover all divined this. Never did they try to act upon the reason of men, but rather to influence their sentiments and to conquer their hearts. But this heroic phase of the world seems in the way of vanishing. With the evolution of science and industry upon which humanity has entered, the codes of economic necessities replace the religious codes become powerless. It is important not to resurrect, under the form of a socialist theology, the ancient doctrine showing us peoples governed by divine caprices. The great utopia of the reformers is precisely to attribute to laws the magical power now refused to the Gods. Their dream of social renovation takes no account of natural necessities. But, whereas the old divinities sometimes excused our weaknesses and showed themselves accessible to pity, the natural laws remain inflexible and never pardon. To wish to oppose to them artificial decrees is always a dangerous enterprise. It would be no more vain to try to stop a locomotive with speeches. Such, nevertheless, is the task that we persist in attempting each day with the laws accumulated by imprudent legislators. Experience alone can act upon minds hallucinated by their faith. Now, these experiences multiply, and we perceive better and better the consequences of the hasty measures piled up to remedy the imperfections of the social state. One begins to observe that almost the whole of these measures has done but increase the ills one wished to cure, and that simply because they claimed to hinder the natural course of things. The enumeration of these harmful laws and of their repercussions would fill a volume. I shall therefore confine myself to citing a few of them, with the concision that lack of space imposes on me. It will not be a matter here of contesting the intentions of the legislator, doubtless excellent, but of showing the results of his acts.

Laws on the bounties to the merchant marine: Annual cost at present, 41 millions. Result: rapid acceleration of the decadence of our marine, and considerable dividends served to German companies. The enormity of this double consequence is such that one must enter into certain details. I borrow them from the recent book of Jules Huret on Germany. The competence of his interlocutor, Mr. Platé, is not to be disputed, since he is director of the Norddeutscher Lloyd, one of the two or three greatest navigation companies in the world. I say to Mr. Platé: “You who witness and share in the extraordinary prosperity of the German ports, how do you explain our standstill and your progress?”

“It is very simple,” he replies to me rather brutally, “your system of bounties to navigation—it is death. You give money for doing nothing: so nothing is done.”

“But the most comical result of this system is that the money you thus distribute has profited, up to now, Germans and English.”

“I ought not to say this,” he added, “since it is my compatriots who benefit from your errors. But, since you ask my opinion, I give it to you in all honesty.”

Mr. Platé then explains how foreign groups founded in France shipping companies with German and English capital. The French State paid, as one knows, bounties for the kilometers traversed, even by empty ships. “They therefore made very remunerative round-the-world voyages at the expense of the French budget.” A shipowner told me that in eight years, by thus taking his empty ship for a walk, he had recovered the cost of its construction. Mr. Platé cites ships refusing cargoes so as not to lose time, finding more profit in sailing empty. Mr. Huret having observed that the law had been modified and that the ships now had to be laden in order to draw the bounty, the director of the Lloyd pointed out to him that almost nothing had in reality been changed, since a quarter-load of freight sufficed to profit from the bounty. To counterbalance the French bounties, a few Germans had likewise demanded bounties; but the directors of the great Companies energetically refused them. “It would have been,” said the director of the Lloyd, “the death of our initiative and of our activity, and the beginning of the decline of the German commercial marine. Your example suffices for us. Bounties of encouragement are bounties of death. We receive subsidies only for services rendered: the transport of the post, and so on. We remain in inaction. During this time, the other countries march on, and it is thus that France sees herself each day outdistanced.”

Law of 1900 limiting the labor of the young in factories. Results: 1. Disappearance of apprenticeship and a very menacing coming crisis for the labor force in industry. 2. Increase of infantile criminality, which has doubled since the application of this law. These consequences, Senator Touron recalled very clearly in a recent report to the Senate. “It is universally recognized today,” he writes, “that the application of this law has led a good number of heads of industry to suppress in their factories the employment of young workers.” After observing that in Paris the number of adolescents become apaches has doubled (2,273 instead of 1,174), he adds: “One of the principal causes of this phenomenon resides precisely in the rigors of a regulation of labor which, by keeping the young away from the workshop, has thrown them into the street, abandoned to all the dangers of promiscuity.”

Law on the privilege of the home distillers. This law authorizes proprietor-growers to distill without paying duties. It then remains for them only to dispose of their brandies—an easy operation, permitting them to profit from 220 francs of duty per hectoliter of pure alcohol. Results: 1. Loss for the Treasury evaluated at more than 100 millions per year. 2. Enormous increase of alcoholism in the families that would have recoiled before the cost of commercial brandies.

Law of expropriation of the congregations. Final result still unknown, but easy to foresee. It was to produce a milliard. It appears bound to bring in no more than 10 millions. It has served only to enrich an army of men of law. In compensation, there is the necessity of creating an immense number of schools, hospital establishments, and so on, to replace those maintained by the congregations. Instead of a milliard of receipts, it will surely be hundreds of millions to spend. I do not speak of the social consequences of this very immoral operation: the exasperation of thousands of citizens, the development among the socialists of the idea that the State can, by a mere law, seize private properties or factories, as it did, for example, with that of the Carthusians. This despoiling of a whole class of citizens has provoked a violent indignation among foreign nations and has harmed us more in their minds than the loss of several battles. The subject will be taken up again in another chapter.

Laws on the bounties to sugar manufacturers. Laws abolished after having cost the State hundreds of millions. The results were solely an artificial overproduction of sugar, and this admirable consequence: that the French manufacturers sold their sugar in France four to five times dearer than to the English. They all had, moreover, the time to enrich themselves at the expense of the consumer.

Law decreeing the liberty of cafés, cabarets, and drink-shops. This law has cost the State nothing in appearance, but very dear to the citizens, through the considerable development of alcoholism. By peopling the hospitals and weakening the strength of France, it has been indirectly very onerous. Law of the buying-back of the Western Railways. This law being only at its beginnings, its effects will not make themselves fully felt for a few years. The very day after the vote, the employees assembled to demand increases of salary, but these are not yet accepted. At present, the rise in expenditure—that is to say, the annual loss of the State—amounts for 1910, according to Mr. Doumer’s report, to 50 millions. This, moreover, is only a very small beginning. From the facts observed in the City of Paris, one may judge what becomes of a service whose personnel is transformed into functionaries. “Each time,” Mr. Delombre wrote recently, “that the City has ‘municipalized’ a body of personnel, the yield of the labor has diminished while, on the contrary, the salaries and incidental expenses increased. Has one not seen, in certain services, the sickness expenses triple from one year to the next, simply because the personnel of those services had been assimilated to the municipal personnel?” These costly truths could not, of course, shake the socialist faith. Laws destined to remedy the wine crisis of the Midi. These laws, already innumerable and always powerless, show clearly the incapacity of the legislator to struggle against natural necessities. By the excessively developed cultivation of its vines, the Midi has arrived at an overproduction of wines, of often doubtful quality, whose quantity it still increased by the addition of sugar. What is to be done in such a case? Simply what the cultivators of madder did formerly when alizarin was discovered. They renounced madder and planted something else. Fortunately, one did not have at that distant epoch the same confidence as today in the power of the State; otherwise the manufacture of economical alizarin would have been suppressed to assure the sale of the very costly madder. But we have made progress, and it was of the State that the men of the Midi asked to acquire the wine that the public no longer wanted. They claimed to oblige it to buy it in the form of alcohol or—which comes to exactly the same thing—to give the vine-growers bounties for distillation. The history of the crisis of the Midi will remain in the future as a memorable example of the mentality of a country where Statism has flourished. Needless to add, I think, that an analogous crisis would have been impossible in countries like America and England, where private persons are accustomed to count upon their own initiative and never upon the intervention of the State.

Law on compulsory weekly rest. Results: 1. Increase of at least 10 percent in most articles of consumption. 2. Disturbances so profound in industry and commerce that a host of adjustments had at once to be brought to the law. But it is above all for the workers that it is costly. In most industries there rage annually several months of unemployment, which constituted a quite sufficient rest. These categories of workers now lose their Sunday wage, not to speak of the expense at the tavern. I have heard several of them evaluate at a deficit of three or four hundred francs a year the cost of the new law for them.

Law on workers’ pensions. This law is not yet completely applied, but one may easily foresee its consequences. Rejected by the majority of the working class, it will be the origin of incessant disturbances. The mutual societies due to private initiative sufficed to create these pensions, which they had begun to constitute everywhere. In rendering them obligatory—that is to say, in obliging employers and workers to pay into the Treasury relatively high sums—the legislator has simply established new taxes that will heavily burden our industry, already so overwhelmed. And this without great profit, since it is estimated that only a feeble portion of the workers will reach the age of retirement. The majority will therefore have paid for nothing. With the present forms of mutual societies, on the contrary, a payment always brings in something and is never lost. “To recover the amount of his sacrifices,” writes the Temps, “and to attain that promised land of retirement, the worker will have to fulfill various conditions, of which at least one does not depend upon him. He will have to reach the age of 65. If he happens to die before that age, he will have been despoiled purely and simply of a great part of his savings.” A fine lesson in teaching foresight! To ensure that these provident-in-spite-of-themselves cannot elude the obligation to which they see themselves subjected, the law orders that the employers shall withhold from wages the sums due by the workers. It is the organization of the class struggle. At each payday, the same resistances will arise.

Let us stop in this enumeration, which could be much longer. To the consequences indicated, one would have to add a growing parliamentary unpopularity of which I shall speak in a coming chapter. The sick man scarcely pardons the physician the failure of his remedies. In a general way, one may say that most of the so-called humanitarian laws accumulated by little-enlightened legislators have produced at first disastrous particular effects. They now begin to engender general consequences ever more perceptible, and revealed by indisputable statistics. The industrial ruins provoked by them will fall with all their weight upon the workers, ever more stalked by unemployment and by foreign competition, which possesses another conception of the organization of labor. They will then be the victims of those great natural laws that the narrowness of mind of the legislators does not allow them to understand. Many others besides ourselves have pointed out the misdeeds of these baneful and ruinous laws. “The enormous burdens resulting from what is called social policy,” writes Paul Delombre, “bring about not the least appeasement, and will lead us to bankruptcy before having disarmed the professional wrath of the socialist demagogues. The deputies, elected by the arrondissement ballot, give the measure of the value of the system by squandering public resources without mercy.” “Our parliamentarians have created for this country,” writes Mr. Jules René, “what we shall call the miraculous mentality, the messianic state of mind. And one would greatly astonish the positive minds, which laugh at Lourdes and its prodigies, by demonstrating to them that they await from the State political and social miracles still more astonishing than those of the Virgin of the Pyrenees. In the deep masses, the belief has strengthened and taken root that Parliament has only to will it in order to change water into wine, bronze into gold, bread into cake, and misery into wealth. And if this marvelous transmutation is slow to occur, the thing is due only to the slowness of the Senate and to the negligence of the other Chamber. But let the deputies bring a little more application, and the senators a little more haste, to the making of the texts, and the face of France will at once be changed!” Warnings just, but surely useless. It is not only in the ancient world that Jupiter first blinded those he wished to ruin. The consequences of so many laws voted at random will turn more and more against their instigators. History is filled with these incidences. It is rare, as Bossuet said, that “human thought does not labor for ends that not only surpass it, but that are the very contrary of its design.”

Despite the avowed insufficiency of my knowledge of occultism, I do not think it rash to attempt a classification of phantoms and to seek the laws of their formation.

To catalogue them usefully, one must first delimit their respective power.

One will readily admit, and without demonstration, I think, that most of the great events of the past were realized under the influence of phantoms. Studied from a point of view lofty enough to grasp it as a whole, history appears as the collection of the efforts of peoples to create phantoms or to destroy them. Politics, ancient or modern, is but a struggle of phantoms.

But all these shades do not possess an equal power. They have their hierarchy, and it is here that the necessity of a classification intervenes.

At its summit reigns a small cohort of phantoms very powerful, very redoubtable, against whom all resistance would be vain. Time alone is their master.

These sovereign shades are those of the founders of great beliefs. From the depths of their tombs they imperiously dictate their laws to millions of men. It is to serve them that brilliant civilizations have arisen, that peoples have furiously fought one another, and that quite recently 30,000 Armenians were massacred in a few days.

Below these dreaded masters move the phantoms of heroes. Some of them confine themselves to creating the legends and the myths that frame the ideal of peoples; but there are some strong enough to exert their influence, beneficent or baneful, upon events very distant from them. Such, for example, is the phantom of Napoleon, who had his nephew crowned emperor and earned us Sedan.

At the other extremity of this hierarchy of shades swarms an immense legion of small phantoms, noisy, blustering, and vain, without real power and without durability. They sometimes terrify timorous souls, but vanish like soap bubbles as soon as one is bold enough to approach them.

All these small ephemeral specters, grimacing and futile, are perpetually begotten by another phantom, that one invulnerable and immortal: the colossal phantom of fear. Its power has been exercised since the origins of the world, and time has not yet brushed against it.

I know not whether, as the great poet Lucretius affirmed, the phantom of fear engendered the gods; but I am very certain that if its influence had not constantly dominated peoples and their masters, the course of history would have been quite otherwise. And I know well, too, that if this terrible despot and his innumerable sons did not tirelessly wave their shades over our Parliament, the frightful anarchy in which we are plunged would have given place to the order and the discipline without which no society can subsist.

All these phantoms—that of fear as well as those it engenders—were known to the great statesmen. To know how to use them formed part of their genius. The mere politicians submit to them, but do not use them.

The lamentable history of the postal workers’ strike revealed to what point rulers a little too devoid of genius can be terrified by the least specters. It also showed how these last develop as soon as one neglects to master them, and with what facility they collapse beneath the hand that dares to touch them.

It was at first quite small, the phantom created by the postal workers. Nothing would have been easier—the event proved it, and I had announced it in an article in L’Opinion—than to annihilate it. But the terror of this vain shade had so paralyzed the government that it capitulated quickly, and so humbly that the postal delegates were able to assure publicly that they had seen the ministers “almost on their knees, imploring them to resume their service.”

The humility of this attitude was, moreover, in the end very useful. When, in a State, a class, a caste, a party imagines itself all-powerful, it at once thinks of becoming the master. Stupefied at having intimidated Parliament, the magistracy, and the army, the caste of the postal workers, believing itself invincible, wished to use its little phantom without even leaving it time to grow. Under some pretext or other a new strike was decreed. Unless one admitted that France would in future be governed by a delegation of postal clerks, it was indeed necessary to defend oneself. One defended oneself, and, at the very first shock, the soap bubble vanished. Its annihilation brought about the instantaneous collapse of other phantoms, notably that of the general strike, which the ministers greatly dreaded, one of them having invented it before coming to power. Victors and vanquished, moreover, gave proof of a complete ignorance in the art of handling phantoms. It made them pile up inexcusable faults of psychology. An enormous fault of psychology on the government’s part, to have yielded a first time. A fault of the postal workers, verging on pure imbecility, when, after having, against all likelihood, succeeded in taming the State, they did not understand that such victories could not be repeated and that a defeat then becomes irremediable. A still grosser fault, that of the members of the C.G.T. who, instead of confining themselves to brandishing the specter of the general strike, wished to make use of it and unveiled at the same stroke the greatness of its impotence. The occultists ought to have revealed to them that phantoms, powerful in the shadow, vanish in the light. Certain truths have not the right to be ignored. The very pitiful failure of the postal workers’ strike and of the general strike, solemnly decreed by the General Confederation of Labor, which had ended by believing itself a little committee of public safety, had not for its sole result to teach us the usefulness of resistance. This rather shameful history shows also with what facility the small phantoms grow as soon as they feel that one is afraid of them. The evolution of the language of the postal workers is very typical from this point of view and abounds in teachings that our statesmen should meditate upon. At the beginning of the first strike they were still respectful. The government’s capitulation having given them the illusion of an invincible force, their language transformed itself at once. Suddenly become antipatriots and revolutionaries, they allied themselves with the General Confederation of Labor, whose avowed aim is the violent destruction of society. One will judge of this evolution by the following passage, borrowed from an interview with their minister: “Never had postal functionaries dared to hold, in a public meeting, discourses as plainly revolutionary as those I have had to note. Did not one of the agents under prosecution take the floor, these last days, in a public meeting, to advocate ‘energetic and concerted action against the employers, capital, and the public authorities’? And in this same meeting, do you know to what one pledged oneself? One pledged oneself ‘to propagate antimilitarist ideas, to destroy the last ramparts behind which capitalist exploitation and its accomplice authority, represented by the public powers, conceal themselves.’” The growing progress of anarchy in the masses has always had for its principal cause the weakness of governments. From lessons so often repeated, shall we end by drawing some fruit? Will the Government at last succeed in deploying a little energy against small bands of fanatics, to whom, under the pretext of liberty of opinion, one allows the preaching of sabotage, arson, revolt, and the destruction of the society that tolerates them without daring to apply the laws to them? The repression of all these rebels becomes, moreover, more difficult each day. It is useless to condemn them, since they are immediately amnestied. The very day after the postal workers’ strike, certain trembling parliamentarians proposed the amnesty of the insurgents and brought many deputies to vote with them. I imagine that these last must have blushed somewhat at such pusillanimity. The present-day agitators are dangerous not only through the acts they provoke, but above all through the ideas they hatch in the popular brains, ideas which, sufficiently ripened, end by engendering revolutions. Let us remember the Commune and the burning of a part of the capital, to represent to ourselves what the crowds may become when carried away by insidious discourses. Let us therefore counsel defense, but without hoping too much for it, for the phantom of fear, which has replaced the ancient divinities, has become far more powerful than they. It is above all in troubled epochs that one sees it grow inordinately. It is then capable of transforming peaceful bourgeois into bloodthirsty beasts, of inspiring in Carrier his drownings and in Fouquier-Tinville his indictments. The latter, a magistrate formerly reputed for his gentleness, no longer stopped in the hecatombs as soon as the phantom of fear had fixed him. He became ferocious to the point of proposing to bleed the condemned before conducting them to the scaffold, so as to deprive them of their courage. We are not yet at that point. Let us hope, despite the threats of certain socialists, never to arrive there; but let us remember that the path upon which the specter of fear draws us is very slippery and cannot be climbed back up. At present, the terrible phantom confines itself to suggesting the most absurd laws, the most harmful to the future of industry. It suffices for it, to attain this, to excite a few fanatics hypnotized by formulas and caring very little, moreover, for the general interest. Does one believe, for example, that there was one elector in 100,000 who really wished for the buying-back of the Western railways? In fact the elector concerns himself but middlingly with laws inspired by principles and occupies himself only with his immediate interests. He votes above all for or against persons and cares little for opinions. In the motives of the votes of the legislators there intervene above all promises, watchwords, magical formulas: to give a turn of the helm to the left, to pursue infamous capital, to socialize property, and so on. These fetishes, elaborated in the clubs, the committees, the syndicates, the back rooms of cafés, inspire such fear that the most beloved orator dares not clash with them, so as to avoid unpopularity. All these formulas nevertheless constitute but vain noises. The man possessing the psychology of crowds repeats them sometimes, but never applies them. He knows very well, in fact, that the masses obey an unconscious logic of the sentiments, entirely withdrawn from rational logic. They gladly acclaim Brutus because he killed Caesar, but at once propose to make of Brutus a Caesar. The great agitators divine, or rather follow rather easily, the popular soul of which they are the incarnation. They assimilate its suddennesses and its mobilities, whereas the ordinary politicians lose themselves completely in it. Their narrow Latin rational logic, vigorously goaded by fear, leads these last to fabricate laws deduced from the hallucinating formulas that terrify them. And it is thus that there spring up, with enormous majorities, these ruinous and inapplicable laws beneath whose weight industry, commerce, and the public wealth will end by succumbing. Nothing halts one on this path. The overbidding inspired by the phantom of fear had engendered a first project on workers’ pensions that each deputy knew to be unrealizable, since it would have been impossible to find the 7 or 800 millions annually necessitated by its application. All, however, voted for it, knowing well, moreover, that the Senate would rectify their fancy. “The obligatory pensions established by the Chamber,” wrote P. Delombre, “would have been at once the collapse of the public finances and the ruin of national labor. Such is the truth that one can never make too widely known.” Doubtless; but what use is it to make it known? “Let us always vote,” thinks the deputy dominated by fear; “the others will arrange matters.” The phantom of fear is by itself extremely redoubtable, but it becomes still more so when there join with it those of hatred and of envy. Their triumvirate directs the whole of our present politics. It was above all in the project of the income tax that the simultaneous action of these three phantoms appeared. One would make people smile a little by pretending that the love of equity and an intense need of altruism determined its preparation. Everyone knows that it relieves almost no one, and that those whom it seemed to relieve of trifling sums would be relieved only at the price of the most tyrannical inquisitions. The thirst for justice had, in reality, no part in the genesis of this law. The phantoms of hatred and of envy were used to make people believe that only 500,000 persons would pay the tax. Then, by brandishing the phantom of fear, an immense majority was obtained from the Chamber. But, as we have said, the specters fear the light, and the public ended by understanding with what vexations, with what ruins, it was being threatened, solely to obey the noisy fanaticism of a small socialist minority, exasperated by the prosperity of a few great industrialists. And why did the advanced party hold so much to this income tax? Was it truly the love of the country, a keen desire for equity, an overflowing altruism that inspired it? Alas, such sentiments are professed but scarcely felt. A subtle psychologist, E. Faguet, has brought out very well the true reasons: “It is to be believed that it is precisely because there is, in the income tax, only arbitrary taxation that is practicable, that a certain party holds so much to the income tax. The income tax will be a means of striking whom one dislikes and of sparing whom one likes. It is precisely this that constitutes its merit in the eyes of a certain party. It may have admirable electoral consequences. Here again, what is the defect of the measure is its principle for those who propose it.” No argument was able to impress the deputies upon whom the phantom of fear darted its menacing glances. They voted, knowing perfectly well, as Jules Roche wrote, “that what has been presented to them as a democratic reform is nothing other than the most retrograde project, the most odious, the most dangerous inquisition, placing the fortune of the citizens at the mercy of the arbitrariness of an army of petty functionaries, agents of the political party in power. It is a law of ruin and of civil war.”

Mr. Raymond Poincaré says roughly the same thing:

“The present project constitutes a frightful danger for our public finances. It will bring about the loss of revenue and the oppression of the middle-class taxpayers. It will discourage energies and disfavor our exports. It is a peril for the national fortune and for the Republic.”

Nothing is more certain; but what could the parliamentarians do, terrorized by the immediate menace of the phantoms, when the announced ruin and uprisings appeared very remote? And what, moreover, in case of rejection, would the schoolteachers, the wine merchants, and the socialist committees have thought? I do not speak of the workers’ syndicates, for they affirmed in every tone that they took no interest at all in this tax, evidently destined, moreover, to fall back upon them.

Under the dominant influence of these phantoms, and above all of that of fear, one has governed, for twenty years, almost exclusively for the profit of the working class, ceaselessly irritating the peasantry and above all commerce and industry by vexatious laws and by threats of taxes still more vexatious. It is fear alone that made Parliament legislate ceaselessly for the profit of a single class against those which precisely represent the strength and the glory of the country. Despoiling the ones under pretext of religion, persecuting the others under pretext of acquired wealth, it was always led by the phantom of fear. Fear of the Church, fear of the workers, fear of the revolutionary socialists, to arrive at last at the humiliating terror of the pen-pushers. Has one at least, by so many vexatious laws, won the sympathies of the workers, to whose leaders one yielded each day? No one is unaware that the government has above all reaped their hatreds. Crowds are never grateful for what they obtain by threats. It subsists nevertheless, this government so decried, but simply because one finds nothing and no one to replace it. One of its prefects, Mr. d’Auriac, says it very well in his book France Today: “If our government has kept standing for forty years, it is rather through the weakness of its adversaries than through its own virtue.” This opinion begins to become general. It would therefore be useful to renounce increasing the number of the enemies of the regime by this mixture of weakness, despotism, intolerance, and the spirit of persecution, which end by becoming insupportable to all without rallying anyone. To realize these wise counsels (surely more wise than realizable), the great difficulty will be to free oneself from the terror of the phantoms. It is to be feared that we shall submit to it for a long time yet. It will doubtless be only with the last man that the last phantom will perish.

Statism, of which collectivist socialism is the natural expansion, constitutes the national religion of the Latin peoples, the only one universally respected.

Very strong, very powerful, and very stable, it is not one of those transitory beliefs sensitive to the suggestions of reason or of the sentiments. Fixed by a long heredity in men’s souls, none contests it except a small number of heretics without authority or prestige.

Thanks to its universality, our political parties, of often dissimilar appearances, really form but a single one. The most convinced of the clericals, the most reactionary of the monarchists, the most advanced of the socialists are the faithful worshippers of the State. They differ, doubtless, on the choice of the high priests of the belief, but never dispute its dogmas.

These dogmas are easy to formulate. For the Latin peoples in general, and for the French in particular, the State represents a kind of collective pope who must administer everything, manufacture everything, direct everything, and dispense the citizens from the slightest effort of initiative. It has progressively replaced the ancient providence that our ancestral religiosity could not do without. The vine-grower powerless to sell his harvest rebels if the State-providence refuses to buy it. The shipowner, whose incapacity makes the struggle against foreign rivals difficult for him, demands a pecuniary indemnity from the State. The worker who prefers rest to labor asks it for that rest.

Under the general push, the action of this providence extends each day. Factories, railways, navigation companies, and so on, fall more and more into its hands. Collectivism, the ultimate form of Statism, would even like to make all industries pass into them. Does it not know from a sure source that the all-powerful State can, by its laws, decree happiness?

Statism does not represent merely the modern form of divine right. It has inherited at once the authority of the gods and that of the kings. Its strength lies precisely in the fact that it synthesizes this inheritance. Louis XIV has been dead a long time, but the State has carefully preserved his methods and his principles. A spiritualist questioning the shade of the great king on this point would surely hear it reply that its tradition has been very faithfully followed by all its successors, but that they have ended by exaggerating somewhat its centralization and its autocracy. The illustrious phantom would perhaps give, as one of the proofs of this similitude, the expulsion of the congregations, identical to that of the Protestants and deriving from the same principles. It would have no need of a very close dialectic to demonstrate that, in substituting for the Monarchy, one and absolute, the Republic, one and indivisible, the Jacobins endowed the latter with the omnipotence of the former. The Girondins paid with their heads for the pretension of rendering the State less centralizing and less despotic. One point, however, would perhaps provoke the criticisms of the great king. He would doubtless consider it very difficult to govern with the obligation to obey the capricious oscillations of the multitude, and would remark also that the crowds are the object of adulations more servile than those that surrounded him at the height of his power. Probably he would observe further that the monarchs often pursued the general interest, whereas many representatives of the present-day State seem to trouble themselves little about it, and do not hesitate to vote dangerous laws if these can assure their reelection. One would then reply to him, inviting him to rejoin underground the phantoms of his forefathers, that he understands nothing of progress. The foregoing considerations are, I think, evident enough to dispense with demonstration. The State’s pretension to omnipotence is scarcely contestable. It even comes to shock the most official of its defenders. A prefect, Mr. d’Auriac, already cited, remarked in a recent study that, according to the methods of the Monarchy—continued, moreover, scrupulously by the Convention and all the successive governments—the inhabitants of the provinces “are treated like a conquered country, like a distant colony, like men belonging to a race other than their rulers.” They receive their authorities from the capital and are obliged to ask Paris for permission for the least acts: the construction of a market, the erection of a fountain, and so on. It is, the same writer justly observes, the tradition of the absolute kings having their provinces governed by intendants, the predecessors of our prefects. It is needless to look long about oneself to observe that the absolutism of the State recalls that of the ancient Monarchy, but considerably aggravated. It is aggravated because the modern legislator, feeling his role ephemeral, in no way troubles himself about the consequences of laws enacted under the daily pressure of popular fancies. The decree to be voted is something immediate, satisfying in appearance the interests of the moment. The incidences, remaining remote, will be perceived only later. Esau illustrated himself formerly by teaching simple souls that a present dish of lentils is worth more than a distant birthright. The legislators of the Latin race faithfully follow the example of Esau. However belated, however, the consequences of laws voted inconsiderately may be, they always burst forth with the fatality of the shell exploding at the limit of its trajectory. Oscillating ceaselessly, legislating at random, persecuting whole categories of citizens, the State has ended by becoming so insupportable and so onerous that crowds of the oppressed, each day more numerous, now rise up against it. It violates beliefs, molests interests, robs the thrifty, dupes the people with unrealizable chimeras, and maintains itself only by means of rivalries created or fostered by its care. Its power, immense in appearance, but which no ideal orients, is at the mercy of all chances. The development of Statism is accompanied not only by oppressive tyrannies; it engenders also the disorganization of the services with which the State progressively charges itself. The foregoing psychological generalities will allow us to shed light upon recent facts, inexplicable so long as they remain detached from their roots. Such are the scandals of the National Printing Office and the decadence of our marine. The commissions of inquiry that revealed them still seek their causes in vain. The philosopher no longer seeks them. The reconstruction of the National Printing Office, the need for which by no means made itself felt (except for the architects), was to cost the budget 442,350 francs. According to the official figures furnished by the Commission of Control, about 10,000,000 will have to be spent. The works were to last 4 years. Begun 7 years ago, they are far from finished. The facts pointed out by the Commission bring into evidence the prodigious offhandedness with which the functionaries of the autocratic State administer its funds. No private enterprise would survive such conditions. Example: a staircase is built. Finished, it appears little decorative: it is entirely demolished to be rebuilt. Several thousand meters of reinforced-cement flooring are laboriously laid; the work finished, a rheumatic office chief affirms that contact with the cement chills the feet and exposes one to bronchitis. Immediately the cement flooring is destroyed to replace it with wood, which, being of poor quality, must itself be redone. Cost: a few hundred thousand francs; but the precious feet of the office chief will not be chilled. The most complete fancy presided over all these works. Varied machines had been bought at great expense; but, having forgotten to arrange pits beneath these machines, it was necessary to demolish a part of the edifice. And the millions flowed away beneath the serene eye of a heap of worthy employees whom such carelessness could not touch, since anonymous taxpayers will settle the costs. Innumerable are the analogous examples. They will certainly not prevent the socialists from entrusting such enterprises to the State instead of charging private industry with them, which could not, on pain of bankruptcy, permit itself the distractions and the negligences of functionaries having nothing to lose. The daily wastefulness, of which the history of the construction of the National Printing Office constitutes the type, is nothing beside that which the inquiry into our navy revealed. Fancy again, but under a form in truth quite sinister. The public discovered with stupor that the lamentable state of our marine had, in a few years, made it descend from the second rank to the fifth, as Mr. Doumer showed. “Neither unity of view, nor coordinated efforts, nor method, nor defined responsibility: negligence, disorder, and confusion,” is written in the general report of the Commission. Mr. Ajam, member of this commission, evaluates at 300,000,000 the cost of the wastefulness. This sum would be doubled if one added the 300,000,000 granted in bounties, according to Mr. Caillaux, from 1899 to 1909, to our merchant marine—bounties whose result was, as I proved in a preceding chapter, to precipitate its decadence. “We must have committed errors of principle,” said the minister to the Chamber, reproducing the figures cited above and observing the progressive lowering of our maritime commerce. Grave errors, indeed; but of which the minister who observes them appears entirely ignorant of the causes. He certainly does not suspect them to have issued from the development of Statism. Had he understood it, this little-psychological politician would not have proposed, as he did, to associate the State with the exploitation of our great navigation companies. The facts unveiling the disorder and the indifference of the State’s maritime personnel sometimes attain to improbability. Mr. Ajam cites an ironclad fitted with too heavy an armor. It is changed; it becomes too light. One is forced to replace it again. The ship floats at last. Cost: 3,000,000. The accumulation of these negligences comes to be ruinous: the price of our ironclads is 30 percent higher than in England. And whereas our rivals take two years to build a warship, we employ five. “Our present manner of building,” says Mr. Ajam, “is Statism in all its horror, and the condemnation of the State monopoly.” Analogous facts reveal themselves everywhere. At Toulon it was observed, at the time of the recent arrests of several suppliers of the Arsenal, that in 25 years the goods had not been verified a single time on their entry. The suppliers, delivering what they wished, pocketed millions to the prejudice of the Treasury, without anyone’s having been disturbed by it. “Everyone doesn’t care a jot.” Such is the true formula of Statist administration. Such a motto would be impossible in private industry, for bankruptcy would quickly overtake the heedless and unwatchful employer. The muddle representing a necessary consequence of the Statist spirit is universal. In the colonies, where supervision is nil, it verges on the improbable. Mr. Messimy, in his report, gave sad examples of it. The abuses of the functionaries there are without bounds and have everywhere alienated the populations from us, regarded by them as taxable and subject to forced labor at will. Where does the money extorted in Indochina by swarms of agents, by means of the most odious tyrannies, go? To sumptuary expenditures totally useless. A newspaper summed up in the following way a few pages of Mr. Messimy’s report on this subject.

“The budgets are abandoned to individual fancies. And so more than one extravagant project has seen itself endowed with ample credits, and indemnities of all kinds to the personnel and purely sumptuary expenditures for the administrators abound. Many have automobiles. Most have 5 or 6 carriage-teams. And of the 16,000 men of the native guard, a part is occupied solely in performing the service of domestics. Mr. Messimy cites an inspector of this guard who by himself diverts 19 of them from their employment. He thus procures for himself, without opening his purse, cooks, coachmen, gardeners, two laundresses for madame, and so on. One may judge from this what it may be with the administrator himself. Amid this wastefulness and this luxury, our administrative personnel has taken on habits of softness and indolence. And indeed the unanimity of the testimonies is such on this point that one must indeed, as Mr. Messimy lets it be understood, recognize that all its members are no longer beyond the suspicion of improbity. Its incapacity has betrayed itself by strange facts that would be comical if they were not so sad.”

The same newspaper added, not without some naivety: “The practice of bribes, which doubles the weight of the direct taxes, would disappear if one established their assessment in a rational and equitable manner.” I strongly doubt the power attributed to regulations. It is certainly not they that will be able to remedy a general disorder having sources far more profound.

The principal cause of the disorganization of the marine, of the National Printing Office, and of almost the whole of the State’s enterprises, is solely the one indicated above. Everything the State directs finds itself necessarily bureaucratized—that is to say, that the responsibilities, disseminated among thousands of agents, vanish. These agents, divided into distinct bureaus, possess no initiative, are ferociously jealous of one another, and are guided by no common interest. The armor ordered by one bureau does not fit the hull ordered by another. What can that possibly matter to the employees? The same men, placed in a private enterprise where responsibility is effective, would conduct themselves quite otherwise. The foreign marines have prospered because they resort more and more to private industry, whereas we progressively “Statize” our own. Therein above all lies the secret of their superiority and that of our decadence. The other nations would descend just as low if they let themselves be invaded by the Statist religion. In a very remarkable lecture published by the Revue politique et parlementaire, Mr. Harold-Cox, member of the English Parliament, shows by means of examples and categorical figures that, in the rare circumstances where the English government wished to exploit industries itself, it was always with great losses, whereas, managed by private persons, they were very fruitful. Such was the telegraph industry, directed until 1870 by private Companies that served 6 percent to their shareholders. As soon as the State seized it, the profits changed into a progressive deficit now reaching 25 millions annually. Such results could not surprise us. They are the consequence of very sure psychological laws. A man deprived of initiative and, above all, relieved of responsibility, sees his intellectual and productive value at once fall in enormous proportions. The socialists are right not to wish to understand it, for the day this natural law became evident to them, there would be no more socialism. However that may be, collectivist Statism advances with great strides among the Latin peoples. The ruinous consequences of the buying-back of the Western railways will in no way prevent the buying-back of other lines, as well as the creation of monopolies that will still immensely increase an army of functionaries already so numerous. It seems that a wind of madness directs the ministers of finance brought to power for some time past. One of them proclaimed before the Chamber, to the applause of the socialists become his masters, his intention of proposing to attribute to the State the monopoly of alcohols and of insurance. The Journal des Débats published, on the subject of these measures, the following reflections:

“We must expect, henceforth, to see the financial policy of monopolies hold an ever larger place in the electoral programs, and penetrate one day or another into the legislation. It will doubtless be a policy of madness. Whereas all people endowed with some good sense and a little foresight are terrified by the progress of the centralization that already crushes us and paralyzes all individual initiative; whereas the number of functionaries increases ceaselessly in a population that no longer grows and puts our budgets in deficit, it is senseless to think of charging the State with new attributions and of adding to the innumerable functions it exercises those of seller of drinks and of insurer. Thanks to the machinations of the parliamentary majority, the State, after having intervened in all the branches of human activity in the name of pity, is going to subdivide its economic functions under the forms of various monopolies, in the name of the monopolizing of capital for the profit of the collectivity. Indeed, the income tax will be the beginning of the State’s seizure of capital. How will the socialist State henceforth stop in this march toward legal spoliation? The workers’ pensions will be the beginning of charity organized by the State. How will it stop in this path of social philanthropy? The monopoly of instruction will be the beginning of the centralization of teaching under the aegis of the State. How wilt thou stop in this path of intellectual leveling? When the spirit of initiative, living source of the strength of a nation, shall be dried up, socialism may attempt to raise its social edifice upon the rotten ground of decadence.”

Statism has for its expression and support functionarism. Statism and functionarism are the two faces of one same thing. To reduce the power of Statism, one will have to begin by diminishing that of the functionaries. By reason of the progressive absorption of a host of monopolies and industries, the State has seen itself obliged to increase considerably the importance of the administrations through whose intermediary its action is exercised. These last now form small feudal blocs, each of which becomes strong enough to attempt to impose its will upon the State, as the postal workers recently did. Today, the functionaries demand a statute destined to stabilize a power and privileges already too considerable. Intimidated by their agitators, the Chamber will surely vote the statute demanded. Of all the disastrous measures accepted by it, none will certainly engender sadder consequences. This statute, as a minister of finance—with whom I am in agreement for the first time—has very well explained, would constitute an oligarchy of functionaries that would lead France: “If one listened to certain theories, power would no longer belong to the nation, it would belong to the functionaries; one would have constituted a veritable mandarinate. It would not be worth having made the revolution to fall under such a domination.” To recognize particular rights to agents in revolt, or who have supported by their subscriptions the insurgent employees, is to condemn oneself to having them soon for masters. They are already too much so. The least of the functionaries, under the pretext that he represents a fragment of the State, believes himself a kind of potentate and treats the public according to this conviction. The most eminent man is for him a mere “subordinate person.” In official correspondence he will be styled “the said so-and-so.” Whether he receives him behind a wicket or writes to him, the fragment of a potentate generally marks toward the public an intense contempt. To attenuate a situation from which results the disorganization of which we have cited such lamentable examples, the conduct to hold is diametrically the opposite of the one proposed. Let us take care not to vote a statute that would transform the functionaries into irremovable personages, governing themselves, and upon whom the ministers and the Chamber would remain without action. In order to remain master of its agents, the employer-State has only to imitate the heads of private industries. Does one see a great store or a great factory grant a statute to its employees? They are auxiliaries, carefully kept if they are capable and dismissed as soon as they give proof of incapacity. Let the State act likewise, accepting only auxiliaries without constituting for them any engagement! They will then be exactly in the situation of the auxiliaries of whom the ministry of finance often employs a thousand. It is solely in favor of the technical services—engineers, telegraphists, and so on—that the State could establish a contract of a few years, ten at the most. I hear your objection; do not formulate it. If the State offered its employees no stability, it would find no more of them, or would find only mediocre ones. Reassure yourself. Should your supposition come true, so much the better. The intelligent young men would then turn toward industry or commerce, and a great benefit would result for the country. Unfortunately, this exodus is altogether improbable. The candidates would be almost as numerous as today. The auxiliaries of the ministry of finance cited above earn no more than 5 or 6 francs a day, and yet one counts 50 candidates, holders of the baccalaureate or the licence, for a single vacant place. I do not insist upon this reform; it is too capital to gather many votes. A moment will come, however, when necessity will impose it; but will it still be possible then?

Statism and its incarnation, collectivism, have led us to that state of mental slavery in which man no longer even retains consciousness of his enslavement. The tyranny of the State nevertheless makes itself so oppressive and so costly that it leagues against it a coalition of profoundly injured interests. One begins to understand that the role of government is not to show itself an industrialist, a humanitarian, or a philanthropist; that it has not the right to impose upon citizens its religious affirmations or negations, its morality, and its education. That its true role, in short, is solely to serve as arbiter between the parties, to watch over the security of the citizens—within, by the police; without, by the army. Very banal truths, doubtless, yet little widespread. Let us hope that a slow evolution may free us from Statist tyranny; but let us not count too much upon it. One easily reshapes on paper the laws of a nation; but how is one to transform its soul?

Despite the progress of civilization and the dissertations of certain philosophers, war has never ceased to be one of the principal occupations of peoples. It is doubtful that the discoveries of science will render it less frequent. It is certain that they have rendered it more murderous. Even going back to the great destructions of Genghis Khan and of Attila, one would find it difficult to cite a phase of history in which so many men have lain stretched upon the fields of battle as in the century of electricity and of steam.

When a phenomenon manifests itself with so persistent a regularity, one must indeed admit that it expresses imperious necessities. To protest against its fatality would therefore be as vain as to rise up against old age or death. The struggles of peoples, moreover, have been the source of the most important progress. One does not see how, without them, the first men would have emerged from barbarism and could have founded those magnificent empires in which the arts, the sciences, and industry were born. What great civilization has not been warlike? What is the pacific people that has played a role in history?

But the moment has not come to examine the advantages or the disadvantages of the periodic struggles to which the nations give themselves up. We confine ourselves at present to observing their existence and to seeking their psychological causes.

These causes are various. One may place in the first rank the natural instinct which, throughout the whole animal scale, leads the strong to destroy the weak. Civilization doubtless attenuates it; but what it cannot attenuate is the profound antipathy engendered between races by the divergences of their mental constitution—divergences that lead them to very dissimilar conceptions of life and, consequently, to a different conduct.

Most struggles were born of these divergences. All the great wars of humanity—wars of conquest, of dynasty, of religion, of propaganda—have most often been but wars of races. The conflict between the Persians and the Assyrians, which for the first time passed the empire of the world from the Semites to the Aryans, was a war of races. A war of race likewise, the struggle between the Greeks and the Asiatics, between the Romans and the Barbarians, the Japanese and the Russians. Wars of races again, the religious struggles of the Middle Ages. What were these last, in fact, if not a struggle of races defending individualism and freedom of thought against those which claimed political and religious autocracy with its dependencies: the principle of authority, Latin tradition, and formalism.

To regard these wars as resulting solely from rivalries between sovereigns would be to have a very superficial view of history. They never lasted long, the kings who did not incarnate the ideal of their people, its passions, and its dreams.

Must we hope that the progress of civilization and the frequency of the relations uniting peoples may attenuate the antipathies of psychological origin that divide races? Positive facts allow us to answer. At the recent epoch, still, when communications were rare and difficult and the knowledge of foreign languages little widespread, the psychological differences diversifying races remained almost invisible, masked by the superficial varnish of a civilization analogous in the enlightened strata of Europe. Today the facility of communications and the interweaving of commercial interests, establishing between peoples constant relations, cause their differences of mental constitution, and the disagreement these engender upon most questions, to burst forth each day. Between individuals of different races, agreement is possible on no subject, all being envisaged from different points of view. Prolonged relations between them merely accentuate their dissensions. Thus, while the interests of peoples draw them together, their souls separate them. Instead of advancing toward a greater fraternity, they march toward an antipathy each day more perceptible. It has numerous political and social consequences, this antipathy. After having reduced distances by steam and electricity, the nations now come to exaggerate their armaments and to surround themselves with customs prohibitions that cut off relations and end by raising around each country a veritable Great Wall of China. This wall, most peoples, moreover, do not yet find isolating enough; and the general watchword today among many civilized nations (whether their government be autocratic or liberal) is the expulsion of foreigners. America, after having, as in Australia, voted that of the Chinese, now forbids access to its territory to ships laden with poor emigrants. The English Trades Unions noisily demand the sending back of the foreign workers. The Russian government, obeying popular wishes—often more powerful than the will of the despots—is obliged to expel the Jews from the great cities. Their expulsion is demanded equally in Germany by a party whose adherents become very numerous. The Prussian government expels the Poles and the Italians who worked on its railways. The Swiss government itself, after having rejected in 1892 the project of refusing work to foreign workers, now requires in its treaties with contractors for military supplies the exclusive employment of local workers. The same tendencies are observed, moreover, everywhere, in France also. That the twentieth century should be the age of universal fraternity constitutes a very doubtful proposition. Fraternity between different races is possible only when they are ignorant of one another. To draw peoples together by suppressing distances is to condemn them to know one another better, and, as a consequence, to tolerate one another less. We are, moreover, only at the dawn of the general movement of all nations against foreign encroachment. Governments built upon the most opposite principles—from absolute autocracy to the most liberal republics—arriving at the same measures, one must indeed admit that these answer to some imperious necessities. The hatreds of race would not suffice by themselves to explain them. The instinct that today pushes all governments upon the same path is still rather unconscious, but it has very sure psychological bases. The preponderant influence of foreigners is an infallible solvent of the existence of States. It takes from a people what it has most precious: its soul. When foreigners became numerous in the Roman empire, it ceased to be. Suppose a nation like ours, where the population declines, surrounded by countries where the population increases constantly. The immigration of these foreign peoples, if one tolerates it, is fatal. No military regime to undergo, little or no taxation, work easier and better paid than in their native territory. Hesitation is for them all the less possible in that the choice between various countries is not open to them, all the others repelling them. The invasion of foreign crowds becomes, in this case, very redoubtable, since it is, naturally, the inferior elements, incapable of sustaining themselves at home, that emigrate. Our humanitarian principles condemn us to submit to a growing invasion of foreigners. According to the quantity of emigrants it contains, Marseille might be styled an Italian colony. Italy does not even possess a single colony containing so great a number of Italians. If these invasions are not checked, in a short time a third of the French population will have become Italian and a third African. What can the unity of a people, or simply its existence, be under such conditions? The worst hecatombs of the fields of battle would be infinitely preferable to such invasions. It was a very sure instinct that taught the ancients the fear of foreigners. They knew well that the value of a country is not measured by the number of its inhabitants, but by that of its citizens.

From the foregoing lines we shall conclude that the progress of civilization is powerless to diminish the chances of struggle between peoples. It will diminish them all the less in that, to the psychological causes of dissension described above, civilization comes to add motives of an economic order that we shall have to examine soon. The philosophers and the philanthropists will therefore certainly have to groan for a long time yet over the calamities unleashed by wars. One may, moreover, console them by showing them that a universal peace granted by some magical power would mark the immediate end of all civilization and all progress, the rapid return to the thickest barbarism. “The certainty of peace,” writes Mr. de Vogüé with reason, “would engender, within half a century, a corruption and a decadence more destructive of man than the worst of wars.” Assuredly wars are not without disadvantages. They present even very serious ones; but it is important to establish, once the advantages are set against the disadvantages, on which side the balance inclines. The disadvantages of wars are of three orders: loss of money, loss of men, weakening of the race. The losses of money have but a slight importance. History always shows it to us: peoples too rich disappear before poor peoples. To impoverish a nation is therefore not necessarily to harm it. The statisticians teach that Germany has already had to spend many milliards to keep our conquered provinces, and that all the powers of Europe devote a great number of them annually to their armaments. I see in this only rather feeble disadvantages. Evidently several nations march toward bankruptcy. This will have scarcely any other consequence than to stimulate their energy a little and to accustom them to privations. One must, moreover, regard these inevitable military expenditures as a kind of insurance premium paid by the various countries to avoid invasion and pillage. Does one see in Europe a people—except those whose defeat would profit no one—capable of subsisting a single day without an army? It would be immediately annexed to some powerful nation and crushed with taxes infinitely heavier than those its armament required. Doubtless governments and peoples very loudly vaunt the benefits of peace and make of them the most habitual theme of a host of fine discourses; but no one believes in this peace of which everyone speaks. Everyone knows well, in fact, that at the precise instant when a great nation should present an inferiority, even momentary, of its military power, it would be instantly invaded and pillaged by its stronger neighbors. We had the manifest proof of this on the morrow of the battle of Mukden, which annulled for a long time the military power of Russia, our ally. Without losing an instant, Germany sought with us in Morocco the most niggling disputes, in the hope of pushing us into a war that she hesitated to declare for motives so futile, so as not to alarm Europe too much. The collections of the diplomatic dispatches give proof of the insolence with which we were treated. And if the Emperor of Germany definitively renounced this war, it was solely through the fear of seeing his ports bombarded by England, ranged plainly on our side. At least the lesson served, and immediately the great nations increased their armaments. It was precisely the necessity of raising taxes to meet the expenses of these armaments that brought about the political crisis from which England, obliged to devote more than a milliard a year to her navy, suffers so profoundly. While waiting to fight one another with cannon, peoples fight one another with millions. The second disadvantage of wars mentioned above—the destruction of men—is to be reckoned only by its remote consequences. Napoleon’s battles cost 3,000,000 men. Given that they occupied peoples for 20 years, created a glorious legend for a race, while satisfying the instinct of destruction that is one of the most imperious of human nature, one may envisage this hecatomb with a fair resignation. Its only unfortunate result, and in truth the sole serious disadvantage of wars, is that violent deaths, striking the most robust virile elements of a nation, reduce the future increase of the population and augment its debility. This consequence is really redoubtable, moreover, only for the peoples whose population remains stationary.

In showing us what wars have cost humanity, the statisticians always forget to evaluate what they have brought it. It is nevertheless one of the faces of the problem that must not be neglected. Among the advantages of wars, let us note first the formation of a national soul. Through them this soul can be born and become fixed. Now, without a national soul, no civilization is possible for a people. The national soul, wars consolidate it in case of victory and increase its strength considerably in case of defeat. Jena was, it is said, a disaster for Germany. Nothing is less certain, for without this so-called disaster the unity and the power of the German empire would perhaps have been set back several centuries. If we envisaged events only by their remote consequences, we might even affirm that it was for France, and not for Germany, that Jena was a disaster. Leaving aside these indirect influences of the struggles of races, there are some very immediate and perfectly appreciable, whose importance cannot be misjudged. The last wars have put Europe under arms. What was the result of it? The ruin of the finances, say the statisticians. A serious raising of the character of peoples, the psychologists might reply to these honest bureaucrats. Without the obligatory military regime to which the male population of Europe is today subjected, anarchism, socialism, and all the solvents of modern civilization would have advanced with giant strides. The old religious foundations upon which modern societies were built were falling into ruin, and we had found nothing to replace them. The military regime was the master that taught us a little patience, firmness, the spirit of sacrifice, and procured for us a kind of provisional ideal. It alone has been able to struggle against the egoism and the softness invading peoples. It is a very heavy tax, military service, and one recalling the harshest periods of ancient serfdom. But a tax without which the European societies would rapidly become the prey of the barbarous elements each of them contains. The gods of the old ages cost less dear, doubtless, but their scepter has fallen. This moral influence of the military regime upon the character of peoples has such importance that one cannot insist upon it too much. Marshal von Moltke brought it into evidence in his Memoirs by the following passage, which deserves to be meditated upon:

“The young,” he says, “undergo the beneficent influence of the school only for a relatively short time. Fortunately, among us, at the moment when individual instruction ceases, education properly so called begins; and no nation as a whole has received an education comparable to the one ours has had by means of military service. It has been said that it was the schoolmaster who won our victories. But science alone does not suffice to raise man to a moral level such that he is ready to give his life for an idea, for the accomplishment of a duty, for honor and country; and it is to that that the whole education of man tends. It is not the schoolmaster, it is the true educator, the military state, that has won our battles, that has given, for 16 consecutive years, to our generations their bodily and intellectual training, has trained them in order, in punctuality, in probity, in obedience, in the love of country, in virile energy.”

The usefulness of the military regime is not limited to the raising of character. It is to it, principally, that are due the greatest advances of modern industry, above all in what concerns the working of metals. The researches made to perfect arms have endowed industry with a scientific precision and a boldness absolutely unknown 50 years ago. Likewise, the strategic necessities brought about the extension of the railway networks and were the origin of most of the improvements in the naval art.

Wars, or simply the threats of wars, are therefore a powerful moral and material stimulant of peoples. The military spirit constitutes the last column supporting modern societies, and, for this reason, would deserve the gratitude of the peoples who curse it. If the foregoing arguments remained without action upon the sensitive but little clear-sighted soul of the philanthropists, one might place before their eyes the consequences of forced peace for a people. A single country, India, has enjoyed the benefits of an absolute tranquillity for a century. It is one of the vastest and most populous regions of the globe. The experience made on so large a scale therefore presents a great interest. The consequences of this forced peace, imposed upon 300 millions of men by the powerful hand of England, were not long in producing themselves. Nothing any longer hindering the development of the population, it acquired immense proportions, increasing, according to the statistics, by more than 30 millions during these last 20 years. Its density per square kilometer, for the habitable regions, exceeds by double that of the most populous countries of Europe. There resulted from it—it was inevitable—a misery as general as it was profound. It would be far more intense still if, according to the old law of Malthus, inevitable famines did not come periodically to decimate this frightful anthill. Now, these famines, despite the telegraphs and the railways, are disasters leaving far behind them the bloodiest battles. The province of Orissa alone, in 1866, saw a million men perish of hunger. 1,200,000 died in 1868 in the Punjab. In 1874, 1,300,000 Hindus were carried off by famine in the Deccan. What are our wars compared with such hecatombs? And is death by hunger really so superior to death by cannon that one must avoid the one at all costs to resign oneself to the other?

The dissertations on the advantages or the disadvantages of war present, moreover, but a purely theoretical interest. We have not to choose it, but rather to undergo it; and by that very fact it is better to consider only its advantageous sides, and above all to hold ourselves ready for it. The best means of preparation for possible struggles is to develop that ensemble of sentiments which forms what one calls the military spirit. It constitutes the true power of an army. Without it, and whatever its armament may be, a people is no longer anything but an inconsistent herd without resistance. Let us therefore regard as the worst enemies of the country, as dangerous evildoers, the writers and orators who strive to destroy this spirit in men’s souls. The day it should be annihilated, nothing would remain for us to lose. The most destructive of invasions would put an end to our history. Let us repeat it ceaselessly, and let us always have present to our thought the somber forecasts of the military writers of the various countries on the consequences of the coming war that threatens Europe. Let us not forget that it will be one of those final struggles, of which history has already recorded several, and which bring about the definitive and total disappearance of one of the nations at grips. Formidable mêlees, ignorant of pity, in which whole regions will be methodically ravaged until they contain neither a house, nor a tree, nor a man. Let us have these notions well alive in the soul when we bring up our children and our soldiers, and let us abandon to the rhetoricians the vain discourses on pacifism, fraternity, and other futilities that recall the theological discussions of the Byzantines while Mohammed was penetrating within their walls. Questions otherwise vital solicit us. To avoid, or at least to postpone, the struggle, one must be ready to bear it. If it becomes inevitable, let us remember that victory will not be on the side of the most numerous armies, but on that where the most resistant energies shall coalesce. War is a question of psychology quite as much as of strategy. No great captain has been ignorant of it. “In war,” says Napoleon, “all is moral, and the moral and opinion make more than half of the reality.” Losses matter little. Success remains with him who knows best how to bear them. Lower the character of soldiers and you will have the rabble of Xerxes. Raise this character, and you will have the warriors of Alexander. If it is demonstrated that the value of armies is measured by the level of their character much more than by their number, one sees that war constitutes indeed, as I said a moment ago, a psychological problem. Thus it enters essentially into the frame of this book. A very simple reasoning will make one easily grasp the importance of the role played, in battles, by the psychological factors. All the military writers agree in recognizing that the quantity of men whose loss an army can bear without renouncing the struggle is limited. Secular experiences prove it: as soon as an army leaves on the field of battle 20 percent of its effective strength, it considers itself vanquished. This figure of 20 percent constitutes what one might call the demoralizing limit. The rout is evidently but the result of an impression purely psychological, and by no means an ineluctable necessity, since the army, thus decimated, still possesses four-fifths—that is, the greater part—of its effective strength. Suppose now that a magical power influences the morale of the vanquished army to the point of determining it to an indefinite struggle—which, precisely, was the case of the Japanese. By this fact alone that we shall have modified its mental state, and without transforming either its armament or its tactics, the defeat is going to change into a success. The struggle continuing indefinitely, the victor will necessarily end by losing, in his turn, a fifth of his effective strength, and will then reach what we have called the demoralizing limit. Having passed it, since he does not possess the magical power of resistance with which, by hypothesis, I have endowed his adversary, it is he who will fall into rout. From victor, he will become vanquished. This miraculous power, multiplying tenfold the resistance of armies, is by no means inaccessible. It depends upon the education given to the soldiers, upon the soul one inculcates in them. Certain sentiments may constitute a force more irresistible than number. History furnishes illustrious examples of it. Energy of character is not the only factor of a psychological order intervening in the success of wars. Another exists of equal importance. I mean the community of conduct, or, if one prefers, of doctrine. It represents the fruit of a special education, necessarily very long. Its effects are produced only when it has come to anchor certain notions in the unconscious of all the officers of an army. Then only do these last envisage, with one same mental optic, the most unexpected situations, and behave in them, consequently, in an identical fashion. The reading of Marshal von Moltke’s Memoirs shows the results of this community of doctrine. One sees there, on every page (and the author does not omit to point it out), that when, in the Franco-German war, an unforeseen evolution of the enemy obliged the general staff to prescribe new movements, these were generally begun before the order had arrived. The Memoirs of our generals on the war of 1870 reveal, on the contrary, that they invariably awaited instructions and never moved without having received them. The former possessed the unconscious discipline, the only one permitting initiative. The latter unfortunately knew only that of the body. With a very small army, external discipline suffices. With a large army, internal discipline becomes indispensable. An intelligent education alone can create it.

Armed struggles will doubtless last a long time yet. The hatreds of race and the conflicts of interest, growing as peoples come to know one another better, will fatally sustain them. But with the progress of civilization, they will be complicated by economic struggles, no less murderous, moreover, than those of the fields of battle.

Still more, perhaps, than the bloody wars, these economic struggles will be the necessary resultant of the mental constitution of nations.

In a book published many years ago (The Psychology of Socialism), I showed that the drawing together of the East and the West, under the influence of steam and electricity, would have for its near consequence a gigantic economic conflict between Occidentals and Orientals. Much contested at the time, these predictions began to be realized by the struggle of the Russians and the Japanese.

For a long time, Europe exported its products to the East; but gradually this state of things is being modified.

The East, formerly only a center of consumption, becomes today an immense center of production. It is the East that in its turn invades our markets, with industrial and agricultural products manufactured by skillful workers whose very slight needs make them content with a wage far lower than that of the European worker. Europe tries to raise against these products an immense customs wall. We shall see later on what such a barrier will soon be worth.

The struggle is at present limited to a few industrial and agricultural products, but it will extend rapidly. India, Japan, and soon China threaten us with their competition in all markets. Equipped with our machinery, they manufacture the industrial products of which Europe had the monopoly. India now furnishes England the cotton fabrics that the weavers of Manchester once furnished her. The “cotton yarns,” formerly sent to China from Manchester, today set out from Bombay. The products manufactured by Hindus and Chinese who are content with a very low daily wage are worth those of the European worker, and the competition of the Asiatics is such that America and Australia are reduced to expelling them. Already several strikes—that of the button-makers of Méru, notably—were born of the competition that the Japanese offer us in foreign markets. When Japan, India, and China shall have ended by installing at home, thanks to the coal they possess, numerous factories, and shall inundate the world with their products manufactured at a paltry price, what barrier will halt their commercial extension? The European worker will then see his wage fall to the level of that of a Hindu, a Chinese, or a Japanese. The gain of the Oriental will fix that of the European worker. “The regulator of the economic world will always tend,” it has been said with reason, “whatever one may do, to be the market where labor shall be at the lowest price.”

Despite the socialist dream, the wage of the Europeans, far from increasing, will then fall in notable proportions. When I examined these hypotheses, more than 25 years ago, the English newspapers of India, while recognizing the correctness of my forecasts, replied to me that the Oriental workers would end by having our needs and would consequently become as demanding as their Occidental fellows. From then on the equilibrium would be established. They forgot, as one always does, that the psychological character of most of these races is too stable to transform itself. Experience proves it, moreover, superabundantly. The Chinese have flocked to America for a long time. Has the image of the surrounding luxury ever modified the manner of life of a single one of them? Have the cup of tea and the daily handful of rice ever been replaced by the European diet? Our civilization stands too little in relation with the mental constitution of these peoples to exert the least influence upon them. Whoever has set a Hindu worker to labor knows that, as soon as he has earned the 5 or 6 sous necessary for his daily subsistence, the lure of the most tempting sums remains without action upon him. This profound economic revolution, which will perhaps pass the scepter of production to the races of America and of Asia and may ruin Europe, is now but at its dawn. The hour appears, however, near when Europe will see its exports immensely reduced. As regards the products coming from America, this phenomenon is in the way of accomplishment; but the American workers being Europeans possessing the needs of Europeans, their products will never descend to a very low price. They cannot therefore be very redoubtable for the old continent. If the latter ceases to import anything into America, on the other hand it has not to fear the invasion of the products dispatched by it. Quite otherwise is the question of Japan, China, and India. Like America, these regions will refuse our useless products, but will in addition encumber us with theirs, or, at the least, will create for us a disastrous competition in foreign markets. Already our stocks accumulate. Our industries, having no more than the European clientele, ruin one another mutually. They will one day have to cheapen their prices and, consequently, reduce the wage of their workers. One must not believe that, by isolating itself from the rest of the world by an impassable barrier of customs tariffs, Europe will be able to withdraw itself indefinitely from the competition of the East. Perhaps it would succeed in this by coming to assure its own subsistence; but for a long time its population has taken on an extension that no longer permits it. The economists have calculated, in fact, that most of the States of Europe gradually cease to produce the food necessary for their inhabitants. Isolation would therefore reduce Europe to famine. Naturally, to avoid the unfortunate prospect of dying of hunger, one will lower the customs barriers; but with what shall one pay for the products destined for alimentation when all export shall be impossible? What will become of old Europe, bending beneath its milliards of debts and its heavy taxes? It will perhaps then fall into decadence, the final lot of all worn-out civilizations; and its population, after bloody struggles that will complete its exhaustion, will have to reduce itself to the figure it shall be possible to keep in existence. On that day the most hardened economists will perhaps begin to understand the disadvantages of a too rapid progression of the population and the real superiority of little-populated States. In the economic conflict of races, whose dawn we glimpse, the intellectual superiority of Europe is assuredly not a factor to be neglected. But let us not forget that in the last analysis it remains the lot of a very restricted elite, and that from the point of view of manual labor most peoples are equal, and are superior neither to the Chinese nor to the Japanese. The necessity in which the Americans and the Australians find themselves of expelling them, in consequence of the redoubtable competition they offer their workers, constitutes the proof of it. If the struggle of the East and the West were an intellectual struggle between the superior strata of their populations, its issue would probably not be doubtful. But it is only a matter of an economic conflict between middle strata roughly equal in their mental level, but very unequal in their needs. The final success will doubtless be on the side of the feeblest needs. All these speculations have, moreover, but a remote interest. The problems of the present hour are serious enough for us to be able to abandon to our sons the study of those of the future.

Leibniz said that with education one can transform a people in a hundred years. He might have added also that with an ill-adapted education one deforms the mentality of a people in much less time.

The scientific, industrial, and economic successes of the Germans, born of their university education for a century past, have justified the assertion of Leibniz.

The decadence toward which our classical methods lead us tends to verify equally what I have just said on the consequences of an education ill-adapted to the needs of a people. It is a sad system, the one that creates an immense number of the déclassés and the rebellious, that fabricates so many chattering theoreticians, incapable of being made use of in a laboratory or a factory, and apt only to repeat the demonstrations of their manuals.

The problem of education is above all a problem of psychology. Now, the fundamental principles of our classical education, from the primary schools to the higher schools, repose upon a series of enormous psychological errors. There has resulted from it that our University has become one of the principal causes of the social anarchy that gnaws at us and of the decadence that threatens us.

On a rather somber winter afternoon, I saw enter my house a tall old man, of a fine physiognomy and a piercing eye. He held in his hand my Psychology of Education, of which the ninth edition had just appeared; and, without other preamble, he held to me this discourse:

“Our system of education cannot last. The University would lead France to the last degree of decadence. I am a senator, member of the Academy of Sciences and of the Academy of Medicine, former professor at the Faculty, and possess, consequently, several tribunes. Attention must be drawn to the ideas you have set forth. You must help me in this task by furnishing me with notes, with information, for a documented discourse in the Senate.” I did not then know my interlocutor personally, and knew only that, at the time when he exercised his profession, he passed for the most skillful surgeon of his day. Such an indication suffices to make his name precise. The visit of the illustrious academician was repeated several times. The result of our discussions was that, to change our education, it would be necessary to transform first the soul of the heads of the University, then that of the professors, and finally that of the parents and the pupils. Before this evidence, the eminent senator renounced of his own accord his discourse.

Few questions give rise to as many books, documents, and pamphlets as education. None shows better how tenacious the hereditary ideas of peoples remain, and by what imperious tyranny the past enchains them. The problem of French education gives rise, in fact, to this double observation: the universally recognized necessity of a reform, and the complete impossibility of realizing it. Legislators, professors, men of science, men of letters, are unanimous in finding our system of teaching detestable and in repeating that the time spent at the lycée and at the primary school is time lost. No one is unaware that the man desirous of succeeding in life must remake his whole instruction all by himself, and devote the second part of his existence to destroying the illusions, the errors, and the modes of thinking acquired in the first. The agreement is complete on all these points; and yet, despite the efforts daily attempted, our system of education has realized no progress for 50 years. Each change results, on the contrary, only in accentuating its defects.

It is useful to bring into evidence the causes of this

singular impotence. An erroneous idea necessarily lies at the base of all the reforms so vainly attempted. To reshape programs is not to change the psychological error that inspires them. If we always modify without success the university regulations, it is because it is the methods of teaching, and not the programs, that ought to be changed. Never have our professors been able to arrive at this conviction. They do not realize that, with their mnemonic procedures, their theoretical, abstract reasonings without concrete basis, the pupil could not learn to observe, reflect, reason, judge, and acquire method. To the reader who would wish to study the irreducible impotence of the university men to grasp the causes of the weakness of our education, I recommend the reading of the two discourses on teaching pronounced before the French Association for the Advancement of Sciences, by Mr. Lippmann, professor at the Faculty of Sciences of Paris, and by Mr. Appell, dean of the same Faculty. Mr. Lippmann begins by proving (and on this point he is in agreement with all his colleagues) that teaching, in its various degrees, has fallen in France to an extremely low level. The crushing superiority of the teaching of the German universities and their world-wide influence seem to him demonstrated. Impressed by such facts, the distinguished physicist reflected at length on the causes of the evil and on the remedies. His laborious meditation was not a happy one. His conclusions prove solely to what point great specialists are incapable of observing and reasoning as soon as they depart from their specialty. It would not go far, the country governed by an areopagus of men of science, as candid philosophers formerly proposed. If Mr. Lippmann were not a grave man, speaking before very grave people, one would readily suspect him of having mocked his auditors. What he revealed to them is, in fact, very singular: “Our teaching remains so deplorable,” he says, “only because it comes from China and was imported by the Jesuits.” As for reforming it, nothing is easier. It would suffice to “free the Universities from the yoke of the executive power …” and to “withdraw from it the conferring of degrees.” Strange aberration! Does not all the power of the executive confine itself to signing the diplomas that the University alone delivers? One must close one’s eyes to the evidence to discover such causes for a situation created solely by our methods of teaching.

The conceptions of Mr. Lippmann are, as one sees, of a somewhat excessive naivety. Those emitted by Mr. Appell, in his discourse, deserve to the same degree a like qualification. Every line betrays the uncertainty of the thought. One will judge of it by the following extracts: “The administration sees the evil and actively seeks the remedy. It would consist above all in establishing sustained relations between the primary normal schools and higher education.”

Further on, he proposes as a great reform the suppression of a part of the courses of the Museum and its transformation into a “National Institute of Collections.” The author has ended by feeling the weakness of such ideas. In a recent article he returns to the same subject and assures us that: “The first reform would be the classification of the subjects of the programs by utilitarian value, and the second the application of this ranking in the active University as in its administration: such teaching restricted and such other enlarged, such chairs suppressed and such others created.”

One sees it: none of these eminent specialists has yet arrived at understanding that what must be modified is not the programs, but the methods. To propose to lengthen or to shorten the former, to suppress certain chairs or to found others, represents a vain phraseology, without any directing idea for support. In the very number of the review where the discourse cited above appeared, there was a work by Mr. Le Chatelier, very apt to make the numerous university men, reasoning like Mr. Appell, grasp the difference separating the man whose practical education has formed his judgment from the one who has confined himself to learning manuals and abstract theories. The author supposes—a case, moreover, observed several times—two engineers charged with installing Siemens furnaces with regenerated heat. It is impossible to use the bookish indications, for there exist a hundred models of these furnaces; and it would serve no purpose even to know them all, the management of each of them varying entirely according to the innumerable qualities of coal employed. The man of the manuals is completely lost. He gropes at random, and, after having made his factory spend considerable sums and precious time, is reduced to having recourse to the lights of a specialist. The engineer whose instruction has not been built up solely, as in France, upon memory, and whose scientific judgment has exercised itself upon realities, proceeds in a very different fashion:

“In a series of observations, he will constrain himself to make only one of the conditions of the experiment vary at a time: one day the mode of stoking, another the nature of the coal, or, finally, the quantity of water sent to the ash-pan. These methodical attempts will allow him to judge in each case the results of such or such a modification, and will lead him little by little to obtain a normal working of his gas-producer. The time lost will be minimal and the expense insignificant.”

Each period of the history of peoples calls for a new education, because the environment changes and new necessities are born. The fault of ours is not to have known how to evolve. “French education,” wrote recently a former minister, Mr. Hanotaux, “is purely bookish. Our young men are dragged until the age of 25 upon the benches of the schools where, while their breeches wear out, their minds grow thin. They learn nothing more, in the end, than to repeat verbal and formal lessons that render them remarkably unfit for life. The existence of our elite thus turns into a shuffling of indifferent papers or into the everlasting repolishing of already worn-out formulas. This ignorance, this disdain of realities, this false appreciation of social values is the base of our modern education: it contaminates most of our liberal professions.”

Certain principles formulated in a few lines sometimes have consequences whose exposition would require a volume. The psychological principles, so erroneous, that serve as the base of our higher, secondary, and primary teaching have ended by insinuating themselves even into technical teaching. They are destined to ruin our national industry.

Our University does not give, and has never sought, moreover, to give, the qualities of character that make the true value of man in life. They are very useless, it is true, for the professor or the bureaucrat, but indispensable in all the other professions and all the trades. The English, on the contrary, attach a considerable importance to them. The facts observed in their colonies would have sufficed to show them this importance. The Hindus, endowed with a marvelous memory, succeeded admirably in the examinations leading to the higher employments of the government of India; and yet, after repeated experiences, it was necessary, in consequence of the manifest inferiority of their character, to eliminate them progressively. The following passage from the remarkable work of Mr. Chailley, British India, will make one perfectly grasp the difference established by the English between purely intellectual instruction and character.

“The Hindus never allege anything but talent and cleverness. The English concern themselves above all with character. What is it? It is the moral value of the man: coolness, when it is a matter of deciding, and rapidity when it is a matter of acting. Conscience, to hold one’s ground against whoever tempts. Energy, against whoever threatens. It is the sentiment of duty toward the country and toward oneself. Intelligence, attested by brilliant competitions, eloquent discourses, or ingenious writings, the English make of it only the case that is fitting. These are for them merits of second order.

Lord Lawrence was certainly not, in his time, the civilian most adorned with talents, most endowed with cleverness. He was nevertheless chosen above all to be made a viceroy: it was because he possessed in the supreme degree those incomparable gifts, uprightness and will.”

How are these qualities of character cultivated, of which the most useful are self-command and discipline? I have not to examine it here, having already done so elsewhere.

If the reader desires to know, over against the sad mnemonic procedures and the empty reasonings of our University, methods that fix things definitively in the mind, I might urge him to visit the establishments of teaching of Germany. But he would draw too much humiliation from his voyage. I shall therefore counsel him only the reading of the book of Buyse on the American systems of education, a work upon which the Royal Academy of Belgium has just conferred one of its highest rewards. Here is a brief summary of it, borrowed from Professor Jacquemin:

“The whole of American education and instruction reposes upon personal effort. The system is applied from the very first year of the primary school. With age, the practical exercises are always at the base, even were it a matter of literature. This becomes a laboratory work, for it associates itself intimately with drawing and modeling. Away with teaching by the word of the master! One makes the children act as though they were alone in the world, in full liberty. Just as, in the pure and applied sciences, the pupil wrests from the apparatus and the experimental material the secret of the phenomena and of the laws that govern them, likewise all the branches of teaching, even the most abstract, are presented under concrete forms that require, in order to be assimilated, the skill of the hands as well as the vivacity of the thought. Whatever the pedagogical system, one always finds manual labor at its base, the true foundation of study. This principle of manual labor, the base of education, entered into the American schools by the Froebelian way and by the technical way.”

The same principles in England. I extract from a circular addressed to teachers by the Scotch Education Department the following lines: “The acquisition of a certain number of facts is not the first object of teaching, which must above all aim at implanting in the mind of the child the habit of exact investigation, a method that may become a means of mental discipline of the highest order.

It follows from this that the essential of the work is the study, by each pupil, individually and for himself, of a defined problem in the laboratory, and that the demonstrations of the professor must take a secondary place. The laboratory work may be preceded by the explanations necessary to make the pupils understand the question to be studied; it must be followed by the comparison of the results obtained, the discussion of the divergences, and the establishment of the general conclusions. The demonstration of the professor may be employed to confirm these conclusions, or to illustrate their scope. It is the master’s affair to guide and to direct, to awaken interest, to suggest new problems: he must never content himself with expounding ready-made results.”

These methods do not, certainly, constitute novelties. They are in use almost everywhere, save in the Latin countries, and have powerfully contributed to the scientific and economic prosperity of Germany. We do not adopt them, because one would have to begin, as I said above, by transforming first the soul of the professors, then that of the parents, and finally that of the pupils. That of the professors above all. Educated according to mnemonic methods, could they teach others? All the attempts accomplished in this direction have miserably failed. The mentality of the professors, created by classical teaching, is fixed forever. Formed by books, guided by books, they will die in books. The real world will always remain closed to them. Why should one, after having changed the mentality of the professors, modify also that of the parents and then of the pupils? Simply because both the one and the other ask of the University but one thing: to put the young promptly in a position to pass examinations. Now, to succeed in these, the most rapid procedure evidently consists in learning by heart a series of manuals. These endow one with very ephemeral knowledge, but sufficient for the examination. The rare professors partisans of the experimental method—the only one capable of forming the mind, but useless for the examination—would quickly be eliminated by the great heads of the University. Those who have attempted it were always very ill regarded. It is repeated to them that the time devoted by the pupil to observing would be far more usefully employed in learning books by heart, so as to be able to recite them imperturbably on the day of the examination. The parents, moreover, emit an absolutely identical opinion.

The aim of the University is not at all, moreover, to form men, but to teach them a fine language. It appears very proud of this. Speaking in his discourse of reception at the Academy of “university formation,” Mr. Doumic gives the following explanations:

“We know very well in what it consists and to what it leads: it fashions, by the discipline of antiquity, men of letters who, rendered sensible to the merit of composition and to the artistic value of the classical works, become on their own account capable of ordering their ideas with method and of translating them into an irreproachable language. Much ill has been spoken of this sort of culture, certainly; and it will continue. Only, one does not manage to invent another.”

One does not manage to in France, in fact, and it is this that constitutes precisely the incurable weakness of our University. The reader of this chapter knows that one has managed to elsewhere. Mere schoolteachers have sometimes, on the methods of education, ideas far juster than those of the academicians. One will be able to judge of it by the following passage from a recent manifesto of “the Fellowship of Schoolteachers of the Marne.”

“To teach is not to show, it is to teach how to see. It is not to reveal, it is to suggest. It is not to drag along, it is to orient. It is better than to instruct: it is to render apt to observe, to think, to determine oneself, to act.”

One is often astonished to see the most revolutionary socialism recruit its adepts among the professors, from the normalien to the schoolteacher. L’Opinion published the result of an inquiry demonstrating that a great number of the pupils of the École Normale Supérieure form part of the extreme socialist groups—that is to say, dreaming of the complete destruction of the present state of things. This mentality has nothing surprising, given the ideas inculcated by the University. It establishes as an indisputable dogma that the merit of men is classed solely according to their diplomas. At the bottom, the holder of the baccalaureate; a little higher, the holder of the licence; higher still, the doctor; and, finally, above all the others, the agrégé. The professor possessing these titles readily believes himself of a superior essence. Observing next that, despite this supposed superiority, he enjoys in life but a restricted consideration and rather modest emoluments, the necessity imposes itself upon his mind of building a new society capable of giving him the elevated place due to his merits. A more attentive examination of things would quickly teach him that, in the world, men are classed according to merits very different from memory, the only faculty necessary for the obtaining of diplomas. The facts in no way modify the mentality of our professors; they see in them only injustice, and do but hate the more the society of which they believe themselves the victims. The revolutionary socialism of the intellectuals is in reality a university product. Their rancor, already great, against the social state became ferocious when a new law constrained them to the sojourn of the barracks, under the orders of corporals often little lettered and sometimes rather rough. A society in which the holder of the licence and the doctor may be commanded by ignoramuses is surely ill organized, and one must hasten to remake it! This passage of the intellectuals to the barracks is equally one of the most active causes of the development of antipatriotism and antimilitarism among them. From the higher strata of the University, these sentiments have descended to the schoolteachers, where they have rapidly developed. And it is thus that the professors of every order turn more and more toward the worst anarchist doctrines. In the general laxity, the ministers dare not dam this redoubtable current, which a strong will would quickly have suppressed. What a symbol, that schoolteacher entering upon a lawsuit against the minister of Public Instruction (a mere servant of the democracy, of which he, the schoolteacher, was a master) who, detained by an ambassador, had permitted himself to make him wait a quarter of an hour! What a hypertrophy of egalitarian vanity! What a road the illusions created by university teaching must have traveled in ill-shaped minds to lead them to such a point! Let us not, however, criticize them too much, these modest schoolteachers. They are what higher teaching has made them. The manuals become their Bible are generally drawn up, in fact, by masters of the University, among whom figure academicians and professors at the Sorbonne. Many of these books are unfortunately little recommendable. One is astonished to meet in them so many proofs of a mentality of fanatics. The newspapers least suspect of clericalism have recently pointed out the Jesuitical interpretations of history contained in one of these manuals drawn up by one of the best-known professors of the Sorbonne. One must go back to the epoch of the Inquisition to meet as somber sectarians. If these tedious lucubrations did not give off a mortal boredom, they would influence in the most dangerous fashion the imagination of children and would make for us a generation of antipatriots and rebels.

It is a distressing spectacle to see professors at the Sorbonne, academicians, and so on, reduced, in order to please the masters of the University, to interpreting according to the ideas of the day the historical facts of the past. Some push their fear to the point of no longer daring to pronounce the name of God in their manuals, not hesitating, in order to succeed in this, to disfigure even the fables of La Fontaine. Everyone knows the story of the little fish:

“The little fish will become big

Provided that God lend it life.”

The authors of the new manuals write gravely:

“The little fish will become big

Provided that one lend it life.”

See to what platitudes one comes in order to flatter office chiefs and to obtain subscriptions! The book in which I set forth the psychological principles that ought to be the base of education had many readers, to judge by its numerous editions. Nevertheless, its influence upon the university men has remained very feeble. Confined within rigorous programs, the professors can teach only the subjects of those programs, and teach them necessarily with the methods that served for their own instruction. However, our researches have ended by finding an echo in the very important school destined to form our future generals. I mean the War School, withdrawn entirely, as one knows, from the influence of the University. Learned masters—General Bonnal, yesterday; Colonel de Maud’huy, today; and a few others—inculcate there, in a brilliant elite of officers, the fundamental principles developed in the Psychology of Education. Among the most important is found the one I have chosen as my epigraph: Education is the art of making the conscious pass into the unconscious. As I have already said in another chapter, Commander Gaucher has published, under this title, A Study on the Psychology of the Troops and of Command, a book destined for officers and based upon the methods of education that I have made known. This success, a little unhoped-for, proves that one must never hesitate to say what one ought to say, even when one is alone in saying it.

A great number of teachings emerge from the history of the fruitless attempts accomplished to modify our system of education. If the legislators sometimes sought in experience, and not in immediate interests, their motives of action, they would find in it a new proof of the uselessness of the reforms constantly accumulated without understanding that the soul of a nation is not remade with laws. Laws, I repeat once more, are effective when they express the mentality of a country, but they never create it. It will doubtless take many economic reverses, many upheavals, to engrave in our minds these fundamental notions: that science and industry have led the world to a phase of evolution in which certain faculties play a preponderant role in the life of peoples. The future masters of science, of industry, and of commerce will be men possessing initiative, the spirit of observation, will, judgment, and self-command. Such are the qualities that our official methods have never yet tried to inculcate in us. The president of the parliamentary inquiry on education, Mr. Ribot, has arrived at this conclusion: that our teaching is in great part responsible for the ills of French society. I do not hesitate to say, after having long studied the question, that our University is one of the scourges of France.