On the Prince, or, on the Institution of the Social Powers, and on Their Balance.

Men who, reduced to their individual efforts, found themselves unable to contend with the powers of nature, obtained more happiness and more security by associating together. The spirit of association distinguishes the species, and the essence of their reciprocal engagements, whether tacit or expressed, has always been to aim at one common end, and to submit their reason, their will, their power, to that general will, in which they all concur. As soon as men begin to unite and act on a common plan, we see the same beings who before were the slaves of the elements, and of all their inclemency, subdue nature, and change the face of the earth. Men associated together in their labours have, by opening the inundations of the Nile, created Egypt; by forming dikes against the ocean they have created Holland. Countries now infected by pestilential vapours, will, by the spirit of association, be restored to salubrity, and become populous and rich; the vast regions which are watered by the Orinoco, and. the Maranon, will one day rise from beneath the waters; whilst despotism, which isolates man, has changed into a desert Asia Minor and Greece: it has made the vegetating earth of mountains disappear, it has covered with gravel the loam of the plains in countries once famed for their fertility; everywhere nature is stronger than isolated man, whilst human society can always subdue nature. Of all associations, that which constitutes nations is the most vast, and the most energetic; it has more strength, it has more wealth, it has more duration, it has more stability, than any of those created by individual interests; the opinion of all is of more value than that of each one. If government were only the expression of this general will , if its power were only the national power, and acted without any obstacle, we should be astonished at the wonders which it would be able to accomplish. Then we should without fear confide to the government all that is most precious to us, even to the care of our own reason, the direction of the education of our children, the worship of our churches, the employment of all our faculties. Now we suspect, not without reason, that what it would have us do, is for its own interest; but how strong would the human species become, if it executed in common what it willed in common, and what wonderful progress would it be seen to make, if it was not necessary to distinguish between confidence in its government and confidence in itself!

It has ever been one of the first principles of constitutive policy, that all absolute power becomes tyrannical, to whatever hands it may be confided. In fact, what is called the will of all is always a fiction, since this expression supposes in the first place that all have a will, which is very far from being the case; afterwards, that all these wills are unanimous, which is impossible. Wherever it is thought that the expression of the public will can be found, it is always supposed that the majority bind the minority, and still more that all those who have not given themselves the trouble to reflect on the question which is submitted to them, or who cannot comprehend it, are bound, and even bind others, by their formal or tacit assent to the wi'll which is expressed in their name. Nevertheless, the majority may impose upon the minority the most unjust and most cruel sacrifices, and those who give a vote of confidence may, if they allow themselves to be deceived, fatally sacrifice their own rights and those of others. Thus, even should all the members of a community vote, and the majority alone make the law, this community itself would not be secure from tyranny.

The community would not only fail to secure itself against tyranny, if, instead of throwing upon goverment the charge of willing for it, it were to attempt to govern itself; it would soon perceive the ignorance, the carelessness of many members of the community to whom it could not refuse equal rights, consequently its own incapacity, the imprudence of its resolutions, the precipitation of a numerous assembly, and if the community is really powerful, the impossibility of assembling all its members. Thus, even should the nation (which has very rarely happened) be formed calmly, without opposition, without danger, still it would find itself reduced to seek the expression of the general will elsewhere than in the majority of all the members of the community; to consult different interests, different classes, instead of every individual; but the more indirect is the manner in which this will is expressed, the greater becomes the chance that this will, supposed to be general, should not be so in fact; that those who have the charge of willing for all, would consider their own advantage, and not that of the community; that they would endeavour, perhaps, to oppress this community, and that those who really do will would tyrannize over those who are supposed to will.

When it is thought desirable to confide the sovereignty to the general will, it is supposed that nothing is more simple than to know it, that it is sufficient to propose the question to be decided on, then to count the voices: this is a mistake. Three quarters of those who answer yes or no, are incapable of well understanding the question, have not thought about it, have no will respecting it; to save even themselves from their precipitation, it is necessary to give the minority the means of resisting the majority for some time, that those who are consulted may have time to enlighten themselves, and to form a distinct conception of that which they decide upon before they command, or are obeyed.

Such is the origin of that system, of a balance of power, which has been established with so much care in countries where less than a thousand individuals under the names of king, of ministere, of peers, and of deputies are supposed to express the will of many millions of citizens. The more difficulty these citizens experience in speaking for themselves, in their own persons, and in setting right the will ascribed to them, the more necessary is it to demand the coneurrenoe of many constiuted wills, for the purpose of changing what exists, because what exists is supposed to have obtained general assent. If the citizens can only manifest what they think of the labours or of the poliey of their representatives by a general election, and this only returns every seven years, the more necessary is it that a double security, should he given to what has been done in past times, and all change made so much the more difficult, the more it is doubtful whether this change is brought about by the general will.

Above all, it was important for a community to choose him, or those, who were to act in the name of all, or to direct the action of all, for their common defence, whether against the enmity of nature, or that of men. It was important to find in these, vigour, secrecy, promptitude, prudence, economy. Society depended on them for her defence against whatever is foreign and may become hostile, and for the security of the community against all private interests. To these first proxies has been given the name of Prince, either in regard to rank as the first of all; of government, as taking part for the whole; lastly, of Executive Power, because administration was regarded as the execution of the will of the whole community.

But all the qualifies which society sought for in the Prince, contributed to separate him from the nation, and to make him dangerous to her if he once came to have a different will from hers. It was required that he should be vigorous, but only against the enemies of order; secret, but to foreigners alone; prompt, but only to execute the national will; economical, but not to amass treasures except for the nation. The Prince was subjected to the surveillance of a body of men, who were to represent the people, and always to continue to belong to the people, who should declare the national will, but who, not exereising power, should not be eorrupted by flattery. It was required that these representatives should express the variable will of the moment, and the national interest at the time of their election. But as this variable will is not the only one which ought to be eonsulted, and as besides the interest of the day there is also in nations a permanent interest, which may be in opposition to that, recourse will be had to divers artifices, to combine a representation of the past with that of the present, to make other voices speak besides those of the people, to'whose deputies will be given only a share either in the legislative power, or in the body charged with the expression of the national will, to which the prince must conform.

From this watchfulness ascribed to the deputies of the people, from the remembrance also of the ancient struggle which in almost every place has successively wrested national securities from the depositories of power, has arisen a dangerous prejudice, which all the polemical writers of Europe at this time have a tendency to confirm: it is that executive power is an enemy against which it is necessary to contend; it is that there is a constant opposition between the government and the people, between the Prince and liberty. Legislators never having created power, that power has never been the true organ of the national will, the true representative of the people; all the friends of liberty have constantly laboured, if not to destroy, at least to counteract and limit it. Its action has been unceasingly restrained, retarded, reduced to indirect means; “even its existence has been often compromised, and the depositories of power, their will thwarted, their safety threatened, their self-love humiliated, have felt as much hatred of the friends of liberty, as the latter have had distrust of them; if they cannot crush them at home, they fight against them in every other part of the world; they end by having interests opposed to those of the nation, and passions still more opposed to it; and the struggle which difference of position had begun, is envenomed by every kind of animosity.

Government, however, must go on; of all the necessities of the social state, this is the first. This necessity preponderates over distrust and discontent. Hence it is concluded that the struggle between the prince and the people is the essence of free government; that an opposition is necessary to watch over administration, to criticise it, to keep it active, in order either to prevent it through shame from going too far, or to arrest in their birth culpable projects; but that it is also necessary that the administration should constantly triumph over this opposition till the moment when it is overthrown; that it should have sufficient force to resist these daily attacks; that it should be surrounded by riches, pomp, and an immense patronage, not to attain the objects required by the nation, but that it may not yield under the first attacks of the deputies of the nation. In the system of modem legislators, States maintain a kind of parliamentary gladiators, whose combats no more serve to change the constitution than those of the circus formerly did to defend Rome.

When a thing has existed for a certain time, man soon arrives at the belief that it exists necessarily. He always presents to himself ingenious masons, plausible reasons, to persuade himself that those effects of chance which are always before his eyes, are equivalent in advantages to the sublimest combinations of human intelligence. All modern publicists have regarded government as the born enemy of liberty; but they have not seen the evil of so regarding it. They have directed, with more or less ardour, attacks against this government, and they have sanctioned the opinion that the less a state is governed the more it will prosper; that whenever the citizen can act without being influenced by government, it is a conquest for liberty; that government in short, is a necessary evil, like taxes, and that every effort of the liberal party ought to tend to having as little of it as possible. Others, at the same time, to save the administration from annihilation, justify in turn its vast patronage, the ministerial influence which is exercised over opinion, and even parlimentary corruption.

Nevertheless, antiquity has shown us States, we have seen them in the middle ages, and we may see them afresh among the Anglo-American, where executive power is only an emanation of popular sovereignty, where the will of the prince is one with that of the people; where no opposition is organized, and no distrust would be legitimate; where no public strength is spent in struggles not even known; where the government, having no separate interests from those of the nation, has no arms of its own; where its power, in short, is equal to that of the nation to do what the nation wills, and null to do what it does not will.

We should not consider ourselves as refuted, should it be denied that such governments as we have supposed have ever existed. In the science which we are entering upon, facts, still more than theories, are subject to the empire of passion, and perverted by the eyes of those who observe them. It is enough that the imagination may conceive a constitution where the prince always obeys the national will, in order to prefer such a constitution to those whose essence it is that he should always contend against it. The continual struggle in which the representatives of the prince and those of the people are engaged, by nourishing intestine hatred, preparing resistance to the legitimate action of all power, and paralysing national strength, which is consumed in the opposition of one power against another, is the abuse of constitutions founded on the system of balance. The same observations apply to the contest of the press against social power, to its criticism on all persons and things, to its outrages against whoever commands. There may be a social state in which such an evil is necessary, but it is a strange error to take this evil for a good. The system of balance in the degree even in which its inventors have conceived it, that is to say, as a means of ripening deliberations, of guaranteeing existing rights, and of giving each power the means of defending itself, rests entirely on the supposition that the established order is sufficient to secure the welfare of all, and that it has general assent; that tyranny, on the contrary, can only be introduced by innovations, and that the door to these should always be opened with extreme difficulty, since they have always against them the prejudice of not having been brought forward by the general will. Thus there is a sort of absurdity in beginning a revolution by establishing a system of balance; it is putting drags to the four wheels at the moment of starting the carriage on its career. When a nation determines on a revolution, it proclaims loudly enough by that, that the order which has been long established has not general assent, that it fears tyranny from its institutions, not from innovations, and that far from willing what is, it submits to immense dangers and immense sacrifices, that what is, may cease to be. More than one European nation has not perceived that in adopting British institutions, they were transporting defences which had been raised to preserve the rights of a free people, to surround abuses which an enfranchised people wished to destroy.

Still more, the system of balance must be considered at a time of danger as employing the strength of a nation to a complete loss. Distrust is already too much excited by a foreign attack; and at the moment when a new constitution is established, at the moment of a revolution, if the foreigner joins one of the parties which will not fail to be formed in _e interior, the public and legal struggle of the constituted powers will leave no force to oppose to the enemy without. When a nation is aiming at establishing its independence, and at shaking off a yoke which all the creatures of power throughout the universe will think it their interest to strengthen, it has need of all its force: the slowness of parliamentary discussion, the resistance of hereditary interests which are opposed to the interests of the day, the habitual mistrust excited by power, and the struggle of patriots against the administration, will be so many auxiliaries in the enemy's camp. At such a moment, all struggle must cease; the national will, which has decided on the revolution, must execute it, the representation must emanate from the people, and power must emanate from the representation; the government, in short, must be only the accomplishment of that will which the deputies of the people have manifested.

It is then, especially, that a man is necessary to the revolution, a man who, identifying himself with it, puts his will in the place of that which the nation cannot yet express; a man who brings every thing to a common centre, who foresees, who combines, who keeps every thing secret, who orders without discussion, without rendering any account, and who by rapidity of thought compensates for all the disadvantages of his position. Monarchy is born of revolutions. It is in the midst of the dangers of a mortal struggle that it becomes the refuge of nations; whether it be a chief of barbarian warriors, called by the talent which he has displayed in battle to be the sole director of the conquerors he leads, as the Germanic founders of the monarchies which now cover Europe; or whether it be a hero, who having snatched a free people from the yoke, has been constituted the representative of the will of that people by his glory or his talent. Sweden, crushed to the earth, had no time to combine a legitimate representation when she acknowledged Gustavus Vasa for her organ; Scotland was enslaved when she committed her destinies to William Wallace, or to Robert Bruce; Holland was almost annihilated when she called upon William of Orange to be her liberator.

It is true, that the more the power of a man is energetic and prompt, the more dangerous is it for the liberty which he has undertaken to found. He is not an ordinary hero who, having united all power in his own hands, for the national defence, consents to lay down whatever is not necessary for this defence as soon as the danger is past; he, who raised to the place of despots, listens to nothing which would recall despotism, and remains deaf to the suggestions of his own vanity and to the servility of courtiers. Too often the defender of the people thinks only of defending his own rank, and he turns against those who had raised him the arms which had been entrusted to him to fight for them.

Thus revolution is the foundation of monarchy only when time is wanting for combinations; because the people, called to defend themselves at the moment when they are beginning to exist, can only choose their representative by a sort of acclamation, because national confidence, acquired by a popular name and acknowledged talents, is the only possible manifestation of the will of all. If the nation is already represented, if an assembly of deputies freely elected is already in possession of the confidence of all, she will take care not to relinquish a power which will be indubitably turned against her: whilst the revolution lasts, whilst the struggle and the danger are prolonged, social power ought to be administered by it, or by its delegates which are only one with it.

The crimes of the Committee of Public Safety, sullying the name of liberty, endangered her cause; it is, notwithstanding, to the close union of the Committee of Public Safety with the Convention that France owed all her means of defence. In the crisis she was experiencing, with Europe armed against her without, and so many enemies within, she would have yielded, if the executive power had been anything but an emanation of the power of the Convention; if one had not been blended with the other; if the legislature had been ever seen to command the ministry in vain, to resist them, or to experience any resistance from them.

But, it will be said, this is to establish that absolute power which becomes tyranny, in whatever hands it may be lodged; and if we must bend under tyranny, we may as well keep what we had before. “It is true; and the example which we have chosen makes us conceive all the danger of it. But war is itself a tyranny; and when existence is compromised, the rights and enjoyments of life may be sacrificed to its preservation. During a calm, it is in the combination of different voices that the national will should be sought; during the storm, one only is listened to, and that one speaks in the name of the nation. The struggle for existence calls for dictatorship, the character of which is, that it is not the less an emanation of the legislature because it is raised above the laws.

In short, when these same principles are applied to periods of repose, it is not strictly true that the security of liberty can only he found in the balance and opposition of constituted powers. Antiquity, the middle ages, modern times, have seen governments really free; where opposition was not constituted, where there was no struggle between the legislative and executive powers, where the magistracy only fulfilled what councils had willed, where one mind, one way of thinking, seemed to animate the prince and the representatives of the people. What secured liberty in such circumstances was, that the whole of the governing powers were always in the presence of the people, who had a prompt and efficacious action on them. It was not that a balance was established between the constituted powers, but that they were all and wholly in the hands of the people who reigned as the true sovereign. In the republics of Greece, or in the monarchies of Germany, the people, not numerous, and always armed in the face of a government without arms, assembled altogether on the public place; they were directly informed, viva voce, of all their dearest interests, and the strength was so evidently in their hands, that the archons of Athens in Greece, the kings of the Franks in Germany, would never for a moment have thought of resisting their will.

It was only a very small nation, easily assembled on the public place or the Champ de Mars, which could exercise this continual influence on its government: thus liberty was formerly considered as the peculiar privilege bf nations whose city was their country, or where the heriban, the convocation of the army, was equivalent to a general assembly, the comitia. The invention of the representative system extended to larger states the prerogatives of free men, and allowed the union of national power with the greatest dignity of man.

The representative system required a balance among the representatives for the safety of the represented; from it sprung opposition among the constituted bodies and the balance of their reciprocal rights. But a new progress in civilization, a progress which dates only from our own times, has placed, as formerly, the government in presence of the whole nation: with the diffusion of intelligence by printing, by newspapers, and by the complete publicity of all adminstration, the servants of the nation may become as completely dependent on the nation,—even when it covers an immense space, as in America for instance, was they formerly were on the people of Athens. Henceforward, opposition is only a means of discussion; separation of the different powers does not suppose resistance: the president or the temporary king may be without pomp, without treasure, without patronage, without means of corruption; the senate without an aristocracy, without territorial power; the elections of deputies may be annual, or every two years, and suffrage universal; the judges may be removeable; it is no longer their independence which constitutes liberty; it is wholly found in their constant and necessary submission to the general will.

However, the more the other guarantees of liberty seem to be depressed, to be, as it were, annihilated by this guarantee of publicity, the latter may, on the other hand, present dangers which were not suspected before its introduction. The English speak sometimes jokingly, sometimes with real anxiety, of this fourth estate of the gentlemen of the press- —the newspaper editors. They know, they have first taught us that a nation cannot attain to true liberty but by developing national intelligence; that to do this it is necessary that individual ideas should be brought forward, should be enlightened one by another, should be matured by discussion; that there is no power in the state to whom can be confided the right of putting bounds to thought, whilst, on the contrary, thought must control all other power. Such are the principles of the liberty of the press; but by the side of the elaboration of thought, which is a right and a necessity, is placed journalism, which is a trade. All power which is exercised with a view to lucre should excite distrust, for it is in the way of being corrupted. The daffy press is a power, and its object is not public good but to get the largest number of subscribers. It is not for the advantage of the country, it is that it may be read, that a newspaper attacks the institutions of the country, lessens consideration for those in power, plants thorns on every public career, drives from it all those who have not by intrigue acquired a front of brass, spies out the secrets of the state, proclaims its weakness or its irresolution, and reveals its projects to the enemies of the country as well as to its readers. Publicity is no doubt an immense progress in social science, but venal publicity is often an advantage obtained by crime.

In endeavouring to discover what is the most advantageous manner of constituting executive power, we are brought to ask first, whether it is better to confide it to one man or to many. If to one man, what are the comparative advantages of elective royalty, hereditary royalty, or royalty for a fixed time or presidentship? If to many, is it better to preserve the advantages of individuality by placing at the head of government two colleagues, two cousuls for example? or, on the contrary, is it best for the man to disappear, and only a council, a directory, or a seigniory (body of nobles), to appear? Again, should the executive power be one or divided? Should it act alone or be subordinate to legislative councils? We shall endeavour to collect, with fidelity, the different solutions which history offers to these questions; and perhaps we shall arrive at the conclusion, that there are a thousand ways of being free for those who are worthy of freedom.