coercion. Resting thus merely on coercion, therefore, it still more loses the confidence of the people, and losing this confidence it is more and more compelled to have recourse to the seizure of all the activities of national life, and owing to this seizure it inspires greater and greater dissatisfaction.
IV
Power has become invincible, and rests no longer on the higher national foundations of anointed right, election, or representation, but on violence alone. At the same time the people cease to believe in power and to respect it, and they submit to it only because they cannot do otherwise.
Precisely since the middle of the last century, from the very time when power had simultaneously become invincible and lost its prestige, there begins to appear amongst the people the teaching that liberty—not that fantastical liberty which is preached by the adherents of coercion when they affirm that a man who is compelled, under fear of punishment, to fulfill the orders of other men, is free, but that only true liberty, which consists in every man being able to live and act according to his own judgment, to pay or not to pay taxes, to enter or not to enter the military service, to be friendly or inimical to neighboring nations—that such true liberty is incompatible with the power of certain men over others.
According to this teaching, power is not, as was formerly thought, something divine and majestic, neither is it an indispensable condition of social life, but is merely the result of the coarse violence of some men over others. Be the power in the hands of Louis XVI, or the Committee of National Defence, or the Directory, or the Consulate, or Napoleon, or Louis XVIII, or the Sultan, the President, the chief Mandarin, or the first Minister,—wheresoever it be, there will exist the power of certain men over others, and there will not be freedom, but there will be the oppression of one portion of mankind by another. Therefore power must be abolished.
But how to abolish it, and how, when it is abolished, to
