Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [297]
The old legitimist parties none the less assailed the Revolution of 1830 with all the violence which springs from false reasoning. Errors are excellent projectiles. They struck it skilfully just where it was vulnerable, at the defect in its cuirass, its want of logic; they attacked this revolution in its royalty. They cried to it: Revolution, why this king? Factions are blind men who aim straight.
This cry was uttered also by the republicans. But, coming from them, this cry was logical. What was blindness with the legitimists was clear sightedness with the democrats. The year 1830 had become bankrupt with the people. The democracy indignantly reproached it with its failure.
In civilisation such as it is constituted to a small extent by God, to great by man, interests are combined, aggregated, and amalgamated in such a manner as to form actual hard rock, according to a dynamic law patiently studied by the economists, those geologists of politics.
These men who grouped themselves under different appellations but who may all be designated by the generic title of socialists, endeavoured to pierce this rock and to make the living waters of human felicity gush forth from it.
From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their labours embraced everything. To the rights of man, proclaimed by the French Revolution, they added the rights of woman and the rights of childhood.
No one will be astonished that, for various reasons, we do not here treat fundamentally, from the theoretic point of view, the questions raised by socialism. We limit ourselves to indicating them.
All the problems which the socialists propounded, aside from the cos mogonic visions, dreams, and mysticism, may be reduced to two principal problems.
First problem:
To produce wealth.
Second problem:
To distribute it.
The first problem contains the question of labour.
The second contains the question of wages.
In the first problem the question is of the employment of force.
In the second of the distribution of enjoyment.
From the good employment of force results public power.
From the good distribution of enjoyment results individual happiness.
By good distribution, we must understand not equal distribution, but equitable distribution. The highest equality is equity.
From these two things combined, public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity.
Social prosperity means, man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.
England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth wonderfully; she distributes it badly. This solution, which is complete only on one side, leads her inevitably to these two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous misery. All the enjoyment to a few, all the privation to the rest, that is to say, to the people; privilege, exception, monopoly, feudality, springing from labour itself; a false and dangerous situation which founds public power upon private misery, which plants the grandeur of the state in the suf fering of the individual. A grandeur ill constituted, in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters.
Communism and agarian law think they have solved the second problem. They are mistaken. Their distribution kills production. Equal division abolishes emulation. And consequently labour. It is a distribution made by the butcher, who kills what he divides. It is therefore impossible to stop at these professed solutions. To kill wealth is not to distribute it.
The two problems must be solved together to be well solved. The two solutions must be combined and form but one.
Solve the two problems, encourage the rich, and protect the poor, suppress misery, put an end to the unjust speculation upon the weak by the strong, put a bridle upon the iniquitous jealousy of him who is on the road, against