the law 1850 essay

Frédéric Bastiat – The Law: Summary and Analysis

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by Frédéric Bastiat

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ISBN: 9781933550145 ( Goodreads )
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The Law is an extended essay by French philosopher Frederic Bastiat on what it means to implement “rule of law” — on what “the law” in this context means, what its intent should be, and how it should be determined. It’s one of the foundational texts of the libertarian, classical liberal philosophy, cited as a key influence by the likes of Milton Friedman and the Federalist Society .

The thesis of the essay is on the law as an instrument of natural rights , universal rights that precede government. Life, liberty, and property existed prior to man-made laws, and were largely the causes of mankind needing to document rights for protection. Bastiat defines “law” this way:

“The collective organization of the individual right to a lawful defense”

All three rights — life, liberty, and property — must be preserved together, because to preserve any one of them, you must preserve the other two. Natural rights are a package deal.

Lamartine in front of the Town Hall of Paris, French Revolution of 1848

But people have a tendency to want prosperity at the expense of someone other than themselves, a natural tendency to free-ride. Thus there’s an inevitable compulsion to pervert the law for personal (or “special interest”) benefit. Bastiat attributes this perversion to 2 primary causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy . He spends much of the first half of the essay on the concept of “plunder”: the act of using perversion (and the protection) of law to circumvent the work required to achieve particular ends. Take from one group and give to another. To protect monopolies. To exclude groups from the right to suffrage.

He groups types of “plunder” into the illegal and legal varieties. The illegal type we’re familiar with: the likes of theft, vandalism, murder. But legal plunder is what Bastiat worries about. Legal plunder is when the law is used as a means to take and give, or benefit one at the expense of another, in a way that would have you in jail if you tried such a thing as an individual. Tariffs, protections, subsidies, guaranteed jobs, minimum wage — each is an example of “legal plunder”, where the state uses the law as a shield to direct society to specific ends, in violation of individuals’ rights.

The law should be seen as a negative concept. Not negative in its typical connotation, but rather negative as in defensive . The law should seek to reduce its footprint to only what needs doing to defend the natural rights of the individual. Justice is something we achieve by removing all of the injustice , not by imposing injustices on one group in compensation for a past injustice to another. This merely perpetuates the problem legislators are seeking to repair in the first place. I’m reminded here of the principle of via negativa , the idea that we can simplify a concept to its basic principles by removing all that’s unnecessary.

The latter half of the essay is a screed against socialism, laying out many of the arguments against the socialist state you see in libertarian or conservative circles today, what he calls “the seductive lure of socialism.” Bastiat says that legislators desire to mold mankind, but that mankind doesn’t need molding. And the act of molding itself requires a perversion of the law in order to permit legislators the scope of rights-violating necessary to impose their worldview on society at large.

Bastiat sees socialism on a continuum, in between protectionism and communism. First there’s an initial budding of an idea that the law may impose a particular direction on society, then in the extreme, communism is complete plunder:

It is to be pointed out, however, that protectionism, socialism, and communism are basically the same plant in three different stages of its growth . All that can be said is that legal plunder is more visible in communism because it is complete plunder; and in protectionism because the plunder is limited to specific groups and industries. Thus it follows that, of the three systems, socialism is the vaguest, the most indecisive, and, consequently, the most sincere stage of development.

This part of the essay spends a lot of time on the intellectuals’ influence on this direction away from open societies and individual rights. Socialist intellectuals (in the mold of Sowell’s “unconstrained vision”) see themselves as the shapers of the ideal society. And the law is an instrument to achieving desirable ends.

In fact, these writers on public affairs begin by supposing that people have within themselves no means of discernment; no motivation to action. The writers assume that people are inert matter, passive particles, motionless atoms, at best a kind of vegetation indifferent to its own manner of existence. They assume that people are susceptible to being shaped—by the will and hand of another person—into an infinite variety of forms, more or less symmetrical, artistic, and perfected.

This whole section is reminiscent of another of my favorite works: Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies . Bastiat calls back to the origins of this worldview in classical antiquity, in particular the works of Plato (whom he doesn’t mention by name, but references the work of).

One of my favorite lines toward the end of the essay demonstrates the danger of abusing the law for utopian ends:

The law is justice—simple and clear, precise and bounded. Every eye can see it, and every mind can grasp it; for justice is measurable, immutable, and unchangeable. Justice is neither more than this nor less than this. If you exceed this proper limit—if you attempt to make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, philanthropic, industrial, literary, or artistic—you will then be lost in an uncharted territory, in vagueness and uncertainty, in a forced utopia or, even worse, in a multitude of utopias, each striving to seize the law and impose it upon you.

Key Takeaways

They do not exist only because man made laws
Life, liberty, and property existed before, and caused people to create laws in the first place
All 3 rights are basic and entwined requirements — the preservation of each is dependent on preservation of the other two
He refers to the concept of “plunder” as any time when man takes the shortest path to avoid pain, suffering, and work
The few plunder the many : limited legal plunder
Everybody plunders everybody : universal legal plunder
Nobody plunders anybody : No legal plunder (Bastiat’s preference)
Illegal plunder has been battled against forever; even the least-free societies have tools by which to fight certain violations of rights (theft, murder)
Legal plunder is when the law takes from one person and gives to another, benefits one person at expense of another; when the law can do what individuals cannot without it being called a crime
Examples from everyday legal systems: tariffs, protections, subsidies, guaranteed jobs, minimum wages
Socialists desire to encode plunder into law; to make the law a weapon against free society
Protectionism, socialism, and communism are “basically the same plant in three different stages of growth”
Communism is complete plunder; protectionism is at least limited to specific groups
Sitting in the middle, socialism is the most vague, and because of this, arguably the most dangerous stage — enough power granted to do enormous damage, but not so much yet that the plunder is openly obvious
Negative in the sense of being defensive — existing to protect and defend, not to encroach or impose
Justice is achieved only by noting the absence of injustice
Politicians take office and notice injustice all around them, but the first thought is to use the law to thumb the scales or violate rights of certain parties with plenty at the moment , treating symptoms not causes
Politicians should ask themselves if inequalities and states of unfairness are the results of past attempts to thumb scales, by previous instances of looting and plunder
“Organized injustice” — setting things right through more curtailing of individual rights
They’re inert, moldable masses that can be shaped to a particular form, and perfected by the anointed class, if only they’d submit to the expert’s instructions to build the ideal society

Just as the gardener capriciously shapes the trees into pyramids, parasols, cubes, vases, fans, and other forms, just so does the socialist writer whimsically shape human beings into groups, series, centers, sub-centers, honeycombs, labor-corps, and other variations. And just as the gardener needs axes, pruning hooks, saws, and shears to shape his trees, just so does the socialist writer need the force that he can find only in law to shape human beings. For this purpose, he devises tariff laws, tax laws, relief laws, and school laws.

Total inertness of mankind
Omnipotence of the law
Infallibility of the legislator (the inverse of Popper’s “fallibilism”, see Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors )
Expecting the law to impose or expand religion, fraternity, unity, philanthropy, the arts — you end up lost in a forced utopia, or worse, a multitude of conflicting utopia-like states

Essays on Political Economy/The Law

Originally published in 1850 as a pamphlet. Bastiat defines the nature of law and the role of government, and strongly criticizes socialism and those he considers its adherents.

The law perverted! The law—and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation—the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check? The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow-citizens.

We hold from God the gift which, as far as we are concerned, contains all others, Life—physical, intellectual, and moral life.

But life cannot support itself. He who has bestowed it, has entrusted us with the care of supporting it, of developing it, and of perfecting it. To that end, He has provided us with a collection of wonderful faculties; He has plunged us into the midst of a variety of elements. It is by the application of our faculties to these elements, that the phenomena of assimilation and of appropriation, by which life pursues the circle which has been assigned to it, are realized.

Existence, faculties, assimilation—in other words, personality, liberty, property—this is man. It is of these three things that it may be said, apart from all demagogue subtlety, that they are interior and superior to all human legislation.

It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist beforehand, that men make laws.

What, then, is law? As I have said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defence.

Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life; elements, each of which is rendered complete by the others, and cannot be understood without them. For what are our faculties, but the extension of our personality? and what is property, but an extension of our faculties?

If every man has the right of defending, even by force, his person, his liberty, and his property, a number of men have the right to combine together, to extend, to organize a common force, to provide regularly for this defence.

Collective right, then, has its principle, its reason for existing, its lawfulness, in individual right; and the common force cannot rationally have any other end, or any other mission, than that of the isolated forces for which it is substituted. Thus, as the force of an individual cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty, or the property of another individual—for the same reason, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes.

For this perversion of force would be, in one case as in the other, in contradiction to our premises. For who will dare to say that force has been given to us, not to defend our rights, but to annihilate the equal rights of our brethren? And if this be not true of every individual force, acting independently, how can it be true of the collective force, which is only the organized union of isolated forces?

Nothing, therefore, can be more evident than this:—The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defence; it is the substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what they have a right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties, and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all.

And if a people established upon this basis were to exist, it seems to me that order would prevail among them in their acts as well as in their ideas. It seems to me that such a people would have the most simple, the most economical, the least oppressive, the least to be felt, the least responsible, the most just, and, consequently, the most solid Government which could be imagined, whatever its political form might be.

For, under such an administration, every one would feel that he possessed all the fullness, as well as all the responsibility of his existence. So long as personal safety was ensured, so long as labour was free, and the fruits of labour secured against all unjust attacks, no one would have any difficulties to contend with in the State. When prosperous, we should not, it is true, have to thank the State for our success; but when unfortunate, we should no more think of taxing it with our disasters, than our peasants think of attributing to it the arrival of hail or of frost. We should know it only by the inestimable blessing of Safety.

It may further be affirmed, that, thanks to the non-intervention of the State in private affairs, our wants and their satisfactions would develop themselves in their natural order. We should not see poor families seeking for literary instruction before they were supplied with bread. We should not see towns peopled at the expense of rural districts, nor rural districts at the expense of towns. We should not see those great displacements, of capital, of labour, and of population, which legislative measures occasion; displacements, which render so uncertain and precarious the very sources of existence, and thus aggravate to such an extent the responsibility of Governments.

Unhappily, law is by no means confined to its own department. Nor is it merely in some indifferent and debatable views that it has left its proper sphere. It has done more than this. It has acted in direct opposition to its proper end; it has destroyed its own object; it has been employed in annihilating that justice which it ought to have established, in effacing amongst Rights, that limit which was its true mission to respect; it has placed the collective force in the service of those who wish to traffic, without risk, and without scruple, in the persons, the liberty, and the property of others; it has converted plunder into a right, that it may protect it, and lawful defence into a crime, that it may punish it.

How has this perversion of law been accomplished? And what has resulted from it?

The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different causes—bare egotism and false philanthropy.

Let us speak of the former.

Self-preservation and development is the common aspiration of all men, in such a way that if every one enjoyed the free exercise of his faculties and the free disposition of their fruits, social progress would be incessant, uninterrupted, inevitable.

But there is also another disposition which is common to them. This is, to live and to develop, when they can, at the expense of one another. This is no rash imputation, emanating from a gloomy, uncharitable spirit. History bears witness to the truth of it, by the incessant wars, the migrations of races, sacerdotal oppressions, the universality of slavery, the frauds in trade, and the monopolies with which its annals abound. This fatal disposition has its origin in the very constitution of man—in that primitive, and universal, and invincible sentiment which urges it towards its well-being, and makes it seek to escape pain.

Man can only derive life and enjoyment from a perpetual search and appropriation; that is, from a perpetual application of his faculties to objects, or from labour. This is the origin of property.

But yet he may live and enjoy, by seizing and appropriating the productions of the faculties of his fellow men. This is the origin of plunder.

Now, labour being in itself a pain, and man being naturally inclined to avoid pain, it follows, and history proves it, that wherever plunder is less burdensome than labour, it prevails; and neither religion nor morality can, in this case, prevent it from prevailing.

When does plunder cease, then? When it becomes less burdensome and more dangerous than labour. It is very evident that the proper aim of law is to oppose the powerful obstacle of collective force to this fatal tendency; that all its measures should be in favour of property, and against plunder.

But the law is made, generally, by one man, or by one class of men. And as law cannot exist without the sanction and the support of a preponderating force, it must finally place this force in the hands of those who legislate.

This inevitable phenomenon, combined with the fatal tendency which, we have said, exists in the heart of man, explains the almost universal perversion of law. It is easy to conceive that, instead of being a check upon injustice, it becomes its most invincible instrument. It is easy to conceive that, according to the power of the legislator, it destroys for its own profit, and in different degrees, amongst the rest of the community, personal independence by slavery, liberty by oppression, and property by plunder.

It is in the nature of men to rise against the injustice of which they are the victims. When, therefore, plunder is organised by law, for the profit of those who perpetrate it, all the plundered classes tend, either by peaceful or revolutionary means, to enter in some way into the manufacturing of laws. These classes, according to the degree of enlightenment at which they have arrived, may propose to themselves two very different ends, when they thus attempt the attainment of their political rights; either they may wish to put an end to lawful plunder, or they may desire to take part in it.

Woe to the nation where this latter thought prevails amongst the masses, at the moment when they, in their turn, seize upon the legislative power!

Up to that time, lawful plunder has been exercised by the few upon the many, as is the case in countries where the right of legislating is confined to a few hands. But now it has become universal, and the equilibrium is sought in universal plunder. The injustice which society contains, instead of being rooted out of it, is generalised. As soon as the injured classes have recovered their political rights, their first thought is, not to abolish plunder (this would suppose them to possess enlightenment, which they cannot have), but to organise against the other classes, and to their own detriment, a system of reprisals,—as if it was necessary, before the reign of justice arrives, that all should undergo a cruel retribution,—some for their iniquity and some for their ignorance.

It would be impossible, therefore, to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this—the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.

What would be the consequences of such a perversion? It would require volumes to describe them all. We must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking.

In the first place, it would efface from everybody's conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law—two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be difficult to choose.

It is so much in the nature of law to support justice, that in the minds of the masses they are one and the same. There is in all of us a strong disposition to regard what is lawful as legitimate, so much so, that many falsely derive all justice from law. It is sufficient, then, for the law to order and sanction plunder, that it may appear to many consciences just and sacred. Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them. If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of these institutions, it is said directly—"You are a dangerous innovator, a utopian, a theorist, a despiser of the laws; you would shake the basis upon which society rests."

If you lecture upon morality, or political economy, official bodies will be found to make this request to the Government:—

"That henceforth science be taught not only with sole reference to free exchange (to liberty, property, and justice), as has been the case up to the present time, but also, and especially, with reference to the facts and legislation (contrary to liberty, property, and justice) which regulate French industry.

"That, in public pulpits salaried by the treasury, the professor abstain rigorously from endangering in the slightest degree the respect due to the laws now in force." [1]

So that if a law exists which sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression or plunder, in any form whatever, it must not even be mentioned—for how can it be mentioned without damaging the respect which it inspires? Still further, morality and political economy must be taught in connection with this law—that is under the supposition that it must be just, only because it is law.

Another effect of this deplorable perversion of the law is, that it gives to human passions and to political struggles, and, in general, to politics, properly so called, an exaggerated preponderance.

I could prove this assertion in a thousand ways. But I shall confine myself, by way of illustration, to bringing it to bear upon a subject which has of late occupied everybody's mind—universal suffrage.

Whatever may be thought of it by the adepts of the school of Rousseau , which professes to be very far advanced , but which I consider twenty centuries behind , universal suffrage (taking the word in its strictest sense) is not one of those sacred dogmas with respect to which examination and doubt are crimes.

Serious objections may be made to it.

In the first place, the word universal conceals a gross sophism. There are, in France, 36,000,000 of inhabitants. To make the right of suffrage universal, 36,000,000 of electors should be reckoned. The most extended system reckons only 9,000,000. Three persons out of four, then, are excluded; and more than this, they are excluded by the fourth. Upon what principle is this exclusion founded? Upon the principle of incapacity. Universal suffrage, then, means—universal suffrage of those who are capable. In point of fact, who are the capable? Are age, sex, and judicial condemnations the only conditions to which incapacity is to be attached?

On taking a nearer view of the subject, we may soon perceive the motive which causes the right of suffrage to depend upon the presumption of incapacity; the most extended system differing only in this respect from the most restricted, by the appreciation of those conditions on which this incapacity depends, and which constitutes, not a difference in principle, but in degree.

This motive is, that the elector does not stipulate for himself, but for everybody.

If, as the republicans of the Greek and Roman tone pretend, the right of suffrage had fallen to the lot of every one at his birth, it would be an injustice to adults to prevent women and children from voting. Why are they prevented? Because they are presumed to be incapable. And why is incapacity a motive for exclusion? Because the elector does not reap alone the responsibility of his vote; because every vote engages and affects the community at large; because the community has a right to demand some securities, as regards the acts upon which his well-being and his existence depend.

I know what might be said in answer to this. I know what might be objected. But this is not the place to exhaust a controversy of this kind. What I wish to observe is this, that this same controversy (in common with the greater part of political questions) which agitates, excites, and unsettles the nations, would lose almost all its importance if the law had always been what it ought to be.

In fact, if law were confined to causing all persons, all liberties, and all properties to be respected—if it were merely the organisation of individual right and individual defence—if it were the obstacle, the check, the chastisement opposed to all oppression, to all plunder—is it likely that we should dispute much, as citizens, on the subject of the greater or less universality of suffrage? Is it likely that it would compromise that greatest of advantages, the public peace? Is it likely that the excluded classes would not quietly wait for their turn? Is it likely that the enfranchised classes would be very jealous of their privilege? And is it not clear, that the interest of all being one and the same, some would act without much inconvenience to the others?

But if the fatal principle should come to be introduced, that, under pretence of organisation, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law may take from one party in order to give to another, help itself to the wealth acquired by all the classes that it may increase that of one class, whether that of the agriculturists, the manufacturers, the ship owners, or artists and comedians; then certainly, in this case, there is no class which may not pretend, and with reason, to place its hand upon the law, which would not demand with fury its right of election and eligibility, and which would overturn society rather than not obtain it. Even beggars and vagabonds will prove to you that they have an incontestable title to it. They will say—"We never buy wine, tobacco, or salt, without paying the tax, and a part of this tax is given by law in perquisites and gratuities to men who are richer than we are. Others make use of the law to create an artificial rise in the price of bread, meat, iron, or cloth. Since everybody traffics in law for his own profit, we should like to do the same. We should like to make it produce the right to assistance , which is the poor man's plunder. To effect this, we ought to be electors and legislators, that we may organise, on a large scale, alms for our own class, as you have organised, on a large scale, protection for yours. Don't tell us that you will take our cause upon yourselves, and throw to us 600,000 francs to keep us quiet, like giving us a bone to pick. We have other claims, and, at any rate, we wish to stipulate for ourselves, as other classes have stipulated for themselves!" How is this argument to be answered? Yes, as long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true mission, that it may violate property instead of securing it, everybody will be wanting to manufacture law, either to defend himself against plunder, or to organise it for his own profit. The political question will always be prejudicial, predominant, and absorbing; in a word, there will be fighting around the door of the Legislative Palace. The struggle will be no less furious within it. To be convinced of this, it is hardly necessary to look at what passes in the Chambers in France and in England; it is enough to know how the question stands.

Is there any need to prove that this odious perversion of law is a perpetual source of hatred and discord,—that it even tends to social disorganisation? Look at the United States . There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain—which is, to secure to everyone his liberty and his property. Therefore, there is no country in the world where social order appears to rest upon a more solid basis. Nevertheless, even in the United States, there are two questions, and only two, which from the beginning have endangered political order. And what are these two questions? That of slavery and that of tariffs ; that is precisely the only two questions in which, contrary to the general spirit of this republic, law has taken the character of a plunderer. Slavery is a violation, sanctioned by law, of the rights of the person. Protection is a violation perpetrated by the law upon the rights of property; and certainly it is very remarkable that, in the midst of so many other debates, this double legal scourge , the sorrowful inheritance of the Old World, should be the only one which can, and perhaps will, cause the rupture of the Union. Indeed, a more astounding fact, in the heart of society, cannot be conceived than this:—That law should have become an instrument of injustice . And if this fact occasions consequences so formidable to the United States, where there is but one exception, what must it be with us in Europe, where it is a principle—a system?

M. Montalembert , adopting the thought of a famous proclamation of M. Carlier, said, "We must make war against socialism." And by socialism, according to the definition of M. Charles Dupin , he meant plunder.

But what plunder did he mean? For there are two sorts— extra-legal and legal plunder .

As to extra-legal plunder, such as theft, or swindling, which is defined, foreseen, and punished by the penal code, I do not think it can be adorned by the name of socialism. It is not this which systematically threatens the foundations of society. Besides, the war against this kind of plunder has not waited for the signal of M. Montalembert or M. Carlier. It has gone on since the beginning of the world; France was carrying it on long before the revolution of February —long before the appearance of socialism—with all the ceremonies of magistracy, police, gendarmerie, prisons, dungeons, and scaffolds. It is the law itself which is conducting this war, and it is to be wished, in my opinion, that the law should always maintain this attitude with respect to plunder.

But this is not the case. The law sometimes takes its own part. Sometimes it accomplishes it with its own hands, in order to save the parties benefited the shame, the danger, and the scruple. Sometimes it places all this ceremony of magistracy, police, gendarmerie, and prisons, at the service of the plunderer, and treats the plundered party, when he defends himself, as the criminal. In a word, there is a legal plunder , and it is, no doubt, this which is meant by M. Montalembert.

This plunder may be only an exceptional blemish in the legislation of a people, and in this case, the best thing that can be done is, without so many speeches and lamentations, to do away with it as soon as possible, notwithstanding the clamors of interested parties. But how is it to be distinguished? Very easily. See whether the law takes from some persons that which belongs to them, to give to others what does not belong to them. See whether the law performs, for the profit of one citizen, and, to the injury of others, an act which this citizen cannot perform without committing a crime. Abolish this law without delay; it is not merely an iniquity—it is a fertile source of iniquities, for it invites reprisals; and if you do not take care, the exceptional case will extend, multiply, and become systematic. No doubt the party benefited will exclaim loudly; he will assert his acquired rights . He will say that the State is bound to protect and encourage his industry; he will plead that it is a good thing for the State to be enriched, that it may spend the more, and thus shower down salaries upon the poor workmen. Take care not to listen to this sophistry, for it is just by the systematising of these arguments that legal plunder becomes systematised. And this is what has taken place. The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other; it is to generalise plunder under pretence of organising it. Now, legal plunder may be exercised in an infinite multitude of ways. Hence come an infinite multitude of plans for organisation; tariffs, protection, perquisites, gratuities, encouragements, progressive taxation, gratuitous instruction, right to labour, right to profit, right to wages, right to assistance, right to instruments of labour, gratuity of credit, &c., &c. And it is all these plans, taken as a whole, with what they have in common, legal plunder, which takes the name of socialism.

Now socialism, thus defined, and forming a doctrinal body, what other war would you make against it than a war of doctrine? You find this doctrine false, absurd, abominable. Refute it. This will be all the more easy, the more false, the more absurd and the more abominable it is. Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting out of your legislation every particle of socialism which may have crept into it,—and this will be no light work.

M. Montalembert has been reproached with wishing to turn brute force against socialism. He ought to be exonerated from this reproach, for he has plainly said:—"The war which we must make against socialism must be one which is compatible with the law, honor, and justice."

But how is it that M. Montalembert does not see that he is placing himself in a vicious circle? You would oppose law to socialism. But it is the law which socialism invokes. It aspires to legal, not extra-legal plunder. It is of the law itself, like monopolists of all kinds, that it wants to make an instrument; and when once it has the law on its side, how will you be able to turn the law against it? How will you place it under the power of your tribunals, your gendarmes, and of your prisons? What will you do then? You wish to prevent it from taking any part in the making of laws. You would keep it outside the Legislative Palace. In this you will not succeed, I venture to prophesy, so long as legal plunder is the basis of the legislation within.

It is absolutely necessary that this question of legal plunder should be determined, and there are only three solutions of it:—

When the few plunder the many.
When everybody plunders everybody else.
When nobody plunders anybody.

Partial plunder, universal plunder, absence of plunder, amongst these we have to make our choice. The law can only produce one of these results.

Partial plunder.—This is the system which prevailed so long as the elective privilege was partial —a system which is resorted to to avoid the invasion of socialism.

Universal plunder.—We have been threatened by this system when the elective privilege has become universal; the masses having conceived the idea making law, on the principle of legislators who had preceded them.

Absence of plunder.—This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, conciliation, and of good sense, which I shall proclaim with all the force of my lungs (which is very inadequate, alas!) till the day of my death.

And, in all sincerity, can anything more be required at the hands of the law? Can the law, whose necessary sanction is force, be reasonably employed upon anything beyond securing to every one his right? I defy any one to remove it from this circle without perverting it, and consequently turning force against right. And as this is the most fatal, the most illogical social perversion which can possibly be imagined, it must be admitted that the true solution, so much sought after, of the social problem, is contained in these simple words— Law is organised Justice .

Now it is important to remark, that to organise justice by law, that is to say by force, excludes the idea of organising by law, or by force any manifestation whatever of human activity—labour, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, instruction, the fine arts, or religion; for any one of these organisations would inevitably destroy the essential organisation. How, in fact, can we imagine force encroaching upon the liberty of citizens without infringing upon justice, and so acting against its proper aim?

Here I am encountering the most popular prejudice of our time. It is not considered enough that law should be just, it must be philanthropic. It is not sufficient that it should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive exercise of his faculties, applied to his physical, intellectual, and moral development; it is required to extend well-being, instruction, and morality, directly over the nation. This is the fascinating side of socialism.

But, I repeat it, these two missions of the law contradict each other. We have to choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free. M. de Lamartine wrote to me one day thus:—"Your doctrine is only the half of my programme; you have stopped at liberty, I go on to fraternity." I answered him:—"The second part of your programme will destroy the first." And in fact it is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary . I cannot possibly conceive fraternity legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice legally trampled under foot. Legal plunder has two roots: one of them, as we have already seen, is in human egotism; the other is in false philanthropy.

Before I proceed, I think I ought to explain myself upon the word plunder. [2]

I do not take it, as it often is taken, in a vague, undefined, relative, or metaphorical sense. I use it in its scientific acceptation, and as expressing the opposite idea to property. When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent, and without compensation, to him who has not created it, whether by force or by artifice, I say that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated. I say that this is exactly what the law ought to repress always and everywhere. If the law itself performs the action it ought to repress, I say that plunder is still perpetrated, and even, in a social point of view, under aggravated circumstances. In this case, however, he who profits from the plunder is not responsible for it; it is the law, the lawgiver, society itself, and this is where the political danger lies.

It is to be regretted that there is something offensive in the word. I have sought in vain for another, for I would not wish at any time, and especially just now, to add an irritating word to our dissensions; therefore, whether I am believed or not, I declare that I do not mean to accuse the intentions nor the morality of anybody. I am attacking an idea which I believe to be false—a system which appears to me to be unjust; and this is so independent of intentions, that each of us profits by it without wishing it, and suffers from it without being aware of the cause. Any person must write under the influence of party spirit or of fear, who would call in question the sincerity of protectionism, of socialism, and even of communism, which are one and the same plant, in three different periods of its growth. All that can be said is, that plunder is more visible by its partiality in protectionism, [3] and by its universality in communism; whence it follows that, of the three systems, socialism is still the most vague, the most undefined, and consequently the most sincere.

Be it as it may, to conclude that legal plunder has one of its roots in false philanthropy, is evidently to put intentions out of the question.

With this understanding, let us examine the value, the origin, and the tendency of this popular aspiration, which pretends to realise the general good by general plunder.

The Socialists say, since the law organises justice, why should it not organise labour, instruction, and religion?

Why? Because it could not organise labour, instruction, and religion, without disorganising justice.

For, remember, that law is force, and that consequently the domain of the law cannot lawfully extend beyond the domain of force.

When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere negation. They only oblige him to abstain from doing harm. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others. They hold themselves on the defensive; they defend the equal right of all. They fulfil a mission whose harmlessness is evident, whose utility is palpable, and whose legitimacy is not to be disputed. This is so true that, as a friend of mine once remarked to me, to say that the aim of the law is to cause justice to reign , is to use an expression which is not rigorously exact. It ought to be said, the aim of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning . In fact, it is not justice which has an existence of its own, it is injustice. The one results from the absence of the other.

But when the law, through the medium of its necessary agent—force—imposes a form of labour, a method or a subject of instruction, a creed, or a worship, it is no longer negative; it acts positively upon men. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own will, the initiative of the legislator for their own initiative. They have no need to consult, to compare, or to foresee; the law does all that for them. The intellect is for them a useless lumber; they cease to be men; they lose their personality, their liberty, their property.

Endeavor to imagine a form of labour imposed by force, which is not a violation of liberty; a transmission of wealth imposed by force, which is not a violation of property. If you cannot succeed in reconciling this, you are bound to conclude that the law cannot organise labour and industry without organising injustice.

When, from the seclusion of his cabinet, a politician takes a view of society, he is struck with the spectacle of inequality which presents itself. He mourns over the sufferings which are the lot of so many of our brethren, sufferings whose aspect is rendered yet more sorrowful by the contrast of luxury and wealth.

He ought, perhaps, to ask himself, whether such a social state has not been caused by the plunder of ancient times, exercised in the way of conquests; and by plunder of later times, effected through the medium of the laws? He ought to ask himself whether, granting the aspiration of all men after well-being and perfection, the reign of justice would not suffice to realise the greatest activity of progress, and the greatest amount of equality compatible with that individual responsibility which God has awarded as a just retribution of virtue and vice?

He never gives this a thought. His mind turns towards combinations, arrangements, legal or factitious organisations. He seeks the remedy in perpetuating and exaggerating what has produced the evil.

For, justice apart, which we have seen is only a negation, is there any one of these legal arrangements which does not contain the principle of plunder?

You say, "There are men who have no money," and you apply to the law. But the law is not a self-supplied fountain, whence every stream may obtain supplies independently of society. Nothing can enter the public treasury, in favour of one citizen or one class, but what other citizens and other classes have been forced to send to it. If every one draws from it only the equivalent of what he has contributed to it, your law, it is true, is no plunderer, but it does nothing for men who want money—it does not promote equality. It can only be an instrument of equalisation as far as it takes from one party to give to another, and then it is an instrument of plunder. Examine, in this light, the protection of tariffs, prizes for encouragement, right to profit, right to labour, right to assistance, right to instruction, progressive taxation, gratuitousness of credit, social workshops, and you will always find at the bottom legal plunder, organised injustice.

You say, "There are men who want knowledge," and you apply to the law. But the law is not a torch which sheds light abroad which is peculiar to itself. It extends over a society where there are men who have knowledge, and others who have not; citizens who want to learn, and others who are disposed to teach. It can only do one of two things: either allow a free operation to this kind of transaction, i.e. , let this kind of want satisfy itself freely; or else force the will of the people in the matter, and take from some of them sufficient to pay professors commissioned to instruct others gratuitously. But, in this second case, there cannot fail to be a violation of liberty and property,—legal plunder.

You say, "Here are men who are wanting in morality or religion," and you apply to the law; but law is force, and need I say how far it is a violent and absurd enterprise to introduce force in these matters?

As the result of its systems and of its efforts, it would seem that socialism, notwithstanding all its self-complacency, can scarcely help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do? It disguises it cleverly from others, and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organisation, association. And because we do not ask so much at the hands of the law, because we only ask it for justice, it supposes that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organisation, and association; and they brand us with the name of individualists .

We can assure them that what we repudiate is, not natural organisation, but forced organisation.

It is not free association, but the forms of association which they would impose upon us.

It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity.

It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility.

Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thing being done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the State—then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion—then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the State—then we are against equality, &c., &c. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.

How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain—prosperity, in a positive sense, wealth, science, religion—should ever have gained ground in the political world? The modern politicians, particularly those of the Socialist school, found their different theories upon one common hypothesis; and surely a more strange, a more presumptuous notion, could never have entered a human brain.

They divide mankind into two parts. Men in general, except one, form the first; the politician himself forms the second, which is by far the most important.

In fact, they begin by supposing that men are devoid of any principle of action, and of any means of discernment in themselves; that they have no moving spring in them; that they are inert matter, passive particles, atoms without impulse; at best a vegetation indifferent to its own mode of existence, susceptible of receiving, from an exterior will and hand, an infinite number of forms, more or less symmetrical, artistic, and perfected.

Moreover, every one of these politicians does not scruple to imagine that he himself is, under the names of organiser, discoverer, legislator, institutor or founder, this will and hand, this universal spring, this creative power, whose sublime mission it is to gather together these scattered materials, that is, men, into society.

Starting from these data, as a gardener, according to his caprice, shapes his trees into pyramids, parasols, cubes, cones, vases, espaliers, distaffs, or fans; so the Socialist, following his chimera, shapes poor humanity into groups, series, circles, subcircles, honeycombs, or social workshops, with all kinds of variations. And as the gardener, to bring his trees into shape, wants hatchets, pruning-hooks, saws, and shears, so the politician, to bring society into shape, wants the forces which he can only find in the laws; the law of customs, the law of taxation, the law of assistance, and the law of instruction.

It is so true, that the Socialists look upon mankind as a subject for social combinations, that if, by chance, they are not quite certain of the success of these combinations, they will request a portion of mankind, as a subject to experiment upon. It is well known how popular the idea of trying all systems is, and one of their chiefs has been known seriously to demand of the Constituent Assembly a parish, with all its inhabitants, upon which to make his experiments.

It is thus that an inventor will make a small machine before he makes one of the regular size. Thus the chemist sacrifices some substances, the agriculturist some seed and a corner of his field, to make trial of an idea.

But, then, think of the immeasurable distance between the gardener and his trees, between the inventor and his machine, between the chemist and his substances, between the agriculturist and his seed! The Socialist thinks, in all sincerity, that there is the same distance between himself and mankind.

It is not to be wondered at that the politicians of the nineteenth century look upon society as an artificial production of the legislator's genius. This idea, the result of a classical education, has taken possession of all the thinkers and great writers of our country.

To all these persons, the relations between mankind and the legislator appear to be the same as those which exist between the clay and the potter.

Moreover, if they have consented to recognise in the heart of man a principle of action, and in his intellect a principle of discernment, they have looked upon this gift of God as a fatal one, and thought that mankind, under these two impulses, tended fatally towards ruin. They have taken it for granted, that if abandoned to their own inclinations, men would only occupy themselves with religion to arrive at atheism, with instruction to come to ignorance, and with labour and exchange to be extinguished in misery.

Happily, according to these writers, there are some men, termed governors and legislators, upon whom Heaven has bestowed opposite tendencies, not for their own sake only, but for the sake of the rest of the world.

Whilst mankind tends to evil, they incline to good; whilst mankind is advancing towards darkness, they are aspiring to enlightenment; whilst mankind is drawn towards vice, they are attracted by virtue. And, this granted, they demand the assistance of force, by means of which they are to substitute their own tendencies for those of the human race.

It is only needful to open, almost at random, a book on philosophy, politics, or history, to see how strongly this idea—the child of classical studies and the mother of socialism—is rooted in our country; that mankind is merely inert matter, receiving life, organisation, morality, and wealth from power; or, rather, and still worse—that mankind itself tends towards degradation, and is only arrested in its tendency by the mysterious hand of the legislator. Classical conventionalism shows us everywhere, behind passive society, a hidden power, under the names of Law, or Legislator (or, by a mode of expression which refers to some person or persons of undisputed weight and authority, but not named), which moves, animates, enriches, and regenerates mankind.

We will give a quotation from Bossuet :—

"One of the things which was the most strongly impressed (by whom?) upon the mind of the Egyptians, was the love of their country........ Nobody was allowed to be useless to the State; the law assigned to every one his employment, which descended from father to son. No one was permitted to have two professions, nor to adopt another...... But there was one occupation which was obliged to be common to all, this was the study of the laws and of wisdom; ignorance of religion and the political regulations of the country was excused in no condition of life. Moreover, every profession had a district assigned to it (by whom?)...... Amongst good laws, one of the best things was, that everybody was taught to observe them (by whom?). Egypt abounded with wonderful inventions, and nothing was neglected which could render life comfortable and tranquil."

Thus men, according to Bossuet, derive nothing from themselves; patriotism, wealth, inventions, husbandry, science—all come to them by the operation of the laws, or by kings. All they have to do is to be passive. It is on this ground that Bossuet takes exception, when Diodorus accuses the Egyptians of rejecting wrestling and music. "How is that possible," says he, "since these arts were invented by Trismegistus ?"

It is the same with the Persians:—

"One of the first cares of the prince was to encourage agriculture...... As there were posts established for the regulation of the armies, so there were offices for the superintending of rural works...... The respect with which the Persians were inspired for royal authority was excessive."

The Greeks, although full of mind, were no less strangers to their own responsibilities; so much so, that of themselves, like dogs and horses, they would not have ventured upon the most simple games. In a classical sense, it is an undisputed thing that everything comes to the people from without.

Fenelon .—Reared in the study and admiration of antiquity, and a witness of the power of Louis XIV , Fenelon naturally adopted the idea that mankind should be passive, and that its misfortunes and its prosperities, its virtues and its vices, are caused by the external influence which is exercised upon it by the law , or by the makers of the law. Thus, in his Utopia of Salentum, he brings the men, with their interests, their faculties, their desires, and their possessions, under the absolute direction of the legislator. Whatever the subject may be, they themselves have no voice in it—the prince judges for them. The nation is just a shapeless mass, of which the prince is the soul. In him resides the thought, the foresight, the principle of all organisation, of all progress; on him, therefore, rests all the responsibility.

In proof of this assertion, I might transcribe the whole of the tenth book of " Telemachus ." I refer the reader to it, and shall content myself with quoting some passages taken at random from this celebrated work, to which, in every other respect, I am the first to render justice.

With the astonishing credulity which characterizes the classics, Fenelon, against the authority of reason and of facts, admits the general felicity of the Egyptians, and attributes it, not to their own wisdom, but to that of their kings:—

Fenelon's idyl on Crete is still more fascinating. Mentor is made to say:—

It is thus that Mentor prepares his scholar to mould and manipulate, doubtless with the most philanthropic intentions, the people of Ithaca, and, to confirm him in these ideas, he gives him the example of Salentum.

It is thus that we receive our first political notions. We are taught to treat men very much as Oliver de Serres teaches farmers to manage and to mix the soil.

Thus the laws are to dispose of all fortunes.

Here, again, we see the equalisation of fortunes by law, that is, by force.

"It is worth our while to pay a little attention to the extent of genius required by these legislators, that we may see how, by confounding all the virtues, they showed their wisdom to the world. Lycurgus , blending theft with the spirit of justice, the hardest slavery with extreme liberty, the most atrocious sentiments with the greatest moderation, gave stability to his city. He seemed to deprive it of all its resources, arts, commerce, money, and walls; there was ambition without the hope of rising; there were natural sentiments where the individual was neither child, nor husband, nor father. Chastity even was deprived of modesty. By this road Sparta was led on to grandeur and to glory .

"The phenomenon which we observe in the institutions of Greece has been seen in the midst of the degeneracy and corruption of our modern times . An honest legislator has formed a people where probity has appeared as natural as bravery among the Spartans. Mr. Penn is a true Lycurgus, and although the former had peace for his object, and the latter war, they resemble each other in the singular path along which they have led their people, in their influence over free men, in the prejudices which they have overcome, the passions they have subdued.

" Paraguay furnishes us with another example. Society has been accused of the crime of regarding the pleasure of commanding as the only good of life; but it will always be a noble thing to govern men by making them happy.

Vulgar infatuation may exclaim, if it likes:—"It is Montesquieu! magnificent! sublime!" I am not afraid to express my opinion, and to say:—"What! you have the face to call that fine? It is frightful! it is abominable! and these extracts, which I might multiply, show that, according to Montesquieu, the persons, the liberties, the property, mankind itself, are nothing but materials to exercise the sagacity of lawgivers."

Rousseau .—Although this politician, the paramount authority of the Democrats, makes the social edifice rest upon the general will , no one has so completely admitted the hypothesis of the entire passiveness of human nature in the presence of the lawgiver:—

And what part have men to act in all this? That of the machine, which is set in motion; or rather, are they not the brute matter of which the machine is made? Thus, between the legislator and the prince, between the prince and his subjects, there are the same relations as those which exist between the agricultural writer and the agriculturist, the agriculturist and the clod. At what a vast height, then, is the politician placed, who rules over legislators themselves, and teaches them their trade in such imperative terms as the following:—

"If the soil is poor and barren, or the country too much confined for the inhabitants, turn to industry and the arts, whose productions you will exchange for the provisions which you require. … On a good soil, if you are short of inhabitants, give all your attention to agriculture, which multiplies men, and banish the arts, which only serve to depopulate the country. … Pay attention to extensive and convenient coasts. Cover the sea with vessels, and you will have a brilliant and short existence. If your seas wash only inaccessible rocks, let the people be barbarous , and oat fish; they will live more quietly, perhaps better, and, most certainly, more happily. In short, besides those maxims which are common to all, every people has its own particular circumstances, which demand a legislation peculiar to itself.

But if Nature is sufficiently invincible to regain its empire, why does not Rousseau admit that it had no need of the legislator to gain its empire from the beginning? Why does he not allow that, by obeying their own impulse, men would, of themselves, apply agriculture to a fertile district, and commerce to extensive and commodious coasts, without the interference of a Lycurgus , a Solon , or a Rousseau, who would undertake it at the risk of deceiving themselves ?

Be that as it may, we see with what a terrible responsibility Rousseau invests inventors, institutors, conductors, and manipulators of societies. He is, therefore, very exacting with regard to them.

Poor human nature! What would become of its dignity if it were entrusted to the disciples of Rousseau?

"It is more especially in the distribution of property that the wisdom of legislation will appear. As a general rule, and in every country, when a new colony is founded, land should be given to each man, sufficient for the support of his family.…

One would think it was a professor of agriculture who was saying to his pupils—"The climate is the only rule for the agriculturist. His resources dictate to him his duties. The first thing he has to consider is his local position. If he is on a clayey soil, he must do so and so. If he has to contend with sand, this is the way in which he must set about it. Every facility is open to the agriculturist who wishes to clear and improve his soil. If he only has the skill, the manure which he has at his disposal will suggest to him a plan of operation, which a professor can only vaguely trace, and in a way that would be subject to the uncertainty of all hypotheses, which vary and are complicated by an infinity of circumstances too difficult to foresee and to combine."

But, oh! sublime writers, deign to remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, this manure, of which you are disposing in so arbitrary a manner, are men, your equals, intelligent and free beings like yourselves, who have received from God, as you have, the faculty of seeing, of foreseeing, of thinking, and of judging for themselves!

Mably . (He is supposing the laws to be worn out by time and by the neglect of security, and continues thus):—

In this style he goes on through twenty volumes.

There was a time when, under the influence of teaching like this, which is the root of classical education, every one was for placing himself beyond and above mankind, for the sake of arranging, organizing, and instituting it in his own way.

"All these people have had laws. But few among them have been happy. Why is this? Because legislators have almost always been ignorant of the object of society, which is, to unite families by a common interest.

"Impartiality in law consists in two things:—in establishing equality in the fortunes and in the dignity of the citizens. … In proportion to the degree of equality established by the laws, the dearer will they become to every citizen. … How can avarice, ambition, dissipation, idleness, sloth, envy, hatred, or jealousy, agitate men who are equal in fortune and dignity, and to whom the laws leave no hope of disturbing their equality?

It is not to be wondered at that the 17th and 18th centuries should have looked upon the human race as inert matter, ready to receive everything, form, figure, impulse, movement, and life, from a great prince, or a great legislator, or a great genius. These ages were reared in the study of antiquity; and antiquity presents everywhere, in Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, the spectacle of a few men moulding mankind according to their fancy, and mankind to this end enslaved by force or by imposture. And what does this prove? That because men and society are improvable, error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition must be more prevalent in early times. The mistake of the writers quoted above, is not that they have asserted this fact, but that they have proposed it, as a rule, for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Their mistake has been, with an inconceivable absence of discernment, and upon the faith of a puerile conventionalism, that they have admitted what is inadmissible, viz., the grandeur, dignity, morality, and well-being of the artificial societies of the ancient world; they have not understood that time produces and spreads enlightenment; and that in proportion to the increase of enlightenment, right ceases to be upheld by force, and society regains possession of herself.

And, in fact, what is the political work which we are endeavoring to promote? It is no other than the instinctive effort of every people towards liberty. And what is liberty, whose name can make every heart beat, and which can agitate the world, but the union of all liberties, the liberty of conscience, of instruction, of association, of the press, of locomotion, of labour, and of exchange; in other words, the free exercise, for all, of all the inoffensive faculties; and again, in other words, the destruction of all despotisms, even of legal despotism, and the reduction of law to its only rational sphere, which is to regulate the individual right of legitimate defence, or to repress injustice?

This tendency of the human race, it must be admitted, is greatly thwarted, particularly in our country, by the fatal disposition, resulting from classical teaching, and common to all politicians, of placing themselves beyond mankind, to arrange, organise, and regulate it, according to their fancy.

For whilst society is struggling to realise liberty, the great men who place themselves at its head, imbued with the principles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, think only of subjecting it to the philanthropic despotism of their social inventions, and making it bear with docility, according to the expression of Rousseau, the yoke of public felicity, as pictured in their own imaginations.

This was particularly the case in 1789. No sooner was the old system destroyed, than society was to be submitted to other artificial arrangements, always with the same starting-point—the omnipotence of the law.

Robespierre .—"The function of Government is to direct the physical and moral powers of the nation towards the object of its institution."

Billaud Varennes .—"A people who are to be restored to liberty must be formed anew. Ancient prejudices must be destroyed, antiquated customs changed, depraved affections corrected, inveterate vices eradicated. For this, a strong force and a vehement impulse will be necessary...... Citizens, the inflexible austerity of Lycurgus created the firm basis of the Spartan republic. The feeble and trusting disposition of Solon plunged Athens into slavery. This parallel contains the whole science of Government."

Men, therefore, are nothing but raw material. It is not for them to will their own improvement . They are not capable of it; according to Saint Just, it is only the legislator who is. Men are merely to be what he wills that they should be. According to Robespierre, who copies Rousseau literally, the legislator is to begin by assigning the aim of the institutions of the nation . After this, the Government has only to direct all its physical and moral forces towards this end. All this time the nation itself is to remain perfectly passive; and Billaud Varennes would teach us that it ought to have no prejudices, affections, nor wants, but such as are authorised by the legislator. He even goes so far as to say that the inflexible austerity of a man is the basis of a republic.

We have seen that, in cases where the evil is so great that the ordinary magistrates are unable to remedy it, Mably recommends a dictatorship, to promote virtue. " Have recourse ," says he, "to an extraordinary magistracy, whose time shall be short, and his power considerable. The imagination of the people requires to be impressed." This doctrine has not been neglected. Listen to Robespierre:—

At what a vast height above the rest of mankind does Robespierre place himself here! And observe the arrogance with which he speaks. He is not content with expressing a desire for a great renovation of the human heart, he does not even expect such a result from a regular Government. No; he intends to effect it himself, and by means of terror. The object of the discourse from which this puerile and laborious mass of antithesis is extracted, was to exhibit the principles of morality which ought to direct a revolutionary Government . Moreover, when Robespierre asks for a dictatorship, it is not merely for the purpose of repelling a foreign enemy, or of putting down factions; it is that he may establish, by means of terror, and as a preliminary to the game of the Constitution, his own principles of morality. He pretends to nothing short of extirpating from the country, by means of terror, egotism, honour, customs, decorum, fashion, vanity, the love of money, good company, intrigue, wit, luxury, and misery . It is not until after he, Robespierre, shall have accomplished these miracles , as he rightly calls them, that he will allow the law to regain her empire. Truly, it would be well if these visionaries, who think so much of themselves and so little of mankind, who want to renew everything, would only be content with trying to reform themselves, the task would be arduous enough for them. In general, however, these gentlemen, the reformers, legislators, and politicians, do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over mankind. No, they are too moderate and too philanthropic for that. They only contend for the despotism, the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law. They aspire only to make the law.

To show how universal this strange disposition has been in France, I had need not only to have copied the whole of the works of Mably, Raynal, Rousseau, Fenelon, and to have made long extracts from Bossuet and Montesquieu , but to have given the entire transactions of the sittings of the Convention. I shall do no such thing, however, but merely refer the reader to them.

It is not to be wondered at that this idea should have suited Bonaparte exceedingly well. He embraced it with ardour, and put it in practice with energy. Playing the part of a chemist, Europe was to him the material for his experiments. But this material reacted against him. More than half undeceived, Bonaparte, at St. Helena , seemed to admit that there is an initiative in every people, and he became less hostile to liberty. Yet this did not prevent him from giving this lesson to his son in his will:—"To govern, is to diffuse morality, education, and well-being."

After all this, I hardly need show, by fastidious quotations, the opinions of Morelly , Babeuf , Owen , Saint Simon , and Fourier . I shall confine myself to a few extracts from Louis Blanc 's book on the organisation of labour .

"In our project, society receives the impulse of power." (Page 126.)

In what does the impulse which power gives to society consist? In imposing upon it the project of M. Louis Blanc.

On the other hand, society is the human race. The human race, then, is to receive its impulse from M. Louis Blanc.

It is at liberty to do so or not, it will be said. Of course the human race is at liberty to take advice from anybody, whoever it may be. But this is not the way in which M. Louis Blanc understands the thing. He means that his project should be converted into law , and, consequently, forcibly imposed by power.

But what is this incline? One indicated by M. Louis Blanc. Does it not lead to an abyss? No, it leads to happiness. Why, then, does not society go there of itself? Because it does not know what it wants, and it requires an impulse. What is to give it this impulse? Power. And who is to give the impulse to power? The inventor of the machine, M. Louis Blanc.

We shall never get out of this circle—mankind passive, and a great man moving it by the intervention of the law. Once on this incline, will society enjoy something like liberty? Without a doubt. And what is liberty?

Thus, liberty is power. In what does this power consist? In possessing instruction and instruments of labour. Who is to give instruction and instruments of labour? Society, who owes them . By whose intervention is society to give instruments of labour to those who do not possess them?

By the intervention of the State . From whom is the State to obtain them?

It is for the reader to answer this question, and to notice whither all this tends.

One of the strangest phenomena of our time, and one which will probably be a matter of astonishment to our descendants, is the doctrine which is founded upon this triple hypothesis: the radical passiveness of mankind,—the omnipotence of the law,—the infallibility of the legislator:—this is the sacred symbol of the party which proclaims itself exclusively democratic.

It is true that it professes also to be social .

So far as it is democratic, it has an unlimited faith in mankind.

So far as it is social, it places it beneath the mud.

Are political rights under discussion? Is a legislator to be chosen? Oh! then the people possess science by instinct: they are gifted with an admirable tact; their will is always right ; the general will cannot err . Suffrage cannot be too universal . Nobody is under any responsibility to society. The will and the capacity to choose well are taken for granted. Can the people be mistaken? Are we not living in an age of enlightenment? What! are the people to be always kept in leading strings? Have they not acquired their rights at the cost of effort and sacrifice? Have they not given sufficient proof of intelligence and wisdom? Are they not arrived at maturity? Are they not in a state to judge for themselves? Do they not know their own interest? Is there a man or a class who would dare to claim the right of putting himself in the place of the people, of deciding and of acting for them? No, no; the people would be free , and they shall be so. They wish to conduct their own affairs, and they shall do so.

But when once the legislator is duly elected, then indeed the style of his speech alters. The nation is sent back into passiveness, inertness, nothingness, and the legislator takes possession of omnipotence. It is for him to invent, for him to direct, for him to impel, for him to organise. Mankind has nothing to do but to submit; the hour of despotism has struck. And we must observe that this is decisive; for the people, just before so enlightened, so moral, so perfect, have no inclinations at all, or, if they have any, they all lead them downwards towards degradation. And yet they ought to have a little liberty! But are we not assured, by M. Considerant , that liberty leads fatally to monopoly? Are we not told that liberty is competition? and that competition, according to M. Louis Blanc, is a system of extermination for the people, and of ruination for trade? For that reason people are exterminated and ruined in proportion as they are free—take, for example, Switzerland , Holland , England, and the United States? Does not M. Louis Blanc tell us again, that competition leads to monopoly, and that, for the same reason, cheapness leads to exorbitant prices? That competition tends to drain the sources of consumption, and urges production to a destructive activity? That competition forces production to increase, and consumption to decrease; —whence it follows that free people produce for the sake of not consuming; that there is nothing but oppression and madness among them; and that it is absolutely necessary for M. Louis Blanc to see to it?

What sort of liberty should be allowed to men? Liberty of conscience?—But we should see them all profiting by the permission to become atheists. Liberty of education?—But parents would be paying professors to teach their sons immorality and error; besides, if we are to believe M. Thiers , education, if left to the national liberty, would cease to be national, and we should be educating our children in the ideas of the Turks or Hindoos, instead of which, thanks to the legal despotism of the universities, they have the good fortune to be educated in the noble ideas of the Romans. Liberty of Labour?—But this is only competition, whose effect is to leave all productions unconsumed, to exterminate the people, and to ruin the tradesmen. The liberty of exchange?—But it is well known that the protectionists have shown, over and over again, that a man must be ruined when he exchanges freely, and that to become rich it is necessary to exchange without liberty. Liberty of association?—But, according to the socialist doctrine, liberty and association exclude each other, for the liberty of men is attacked just to force them to associate.

You must see, then, that the socialist democrats cannot in conscience allow men any liberty, because, by their own nature, they tend in every instance to all kinds of degradation and demoralisation.

We are therefore left to conjecture, in this case, upon what foundation universal suffrage is claimed for them with so much importunity.

The pretensions of organisers suggest another question, which I have often asked them, and to which I am not aware that I ever received an answer:—Since the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the tendencies of organisers are always good? Do not the legislators and their agents form a part of the human race? Do they consider that they are composed of different materials from the rest of mankind? They say that society, when left to itself, rushes to inevitable destruction, because its instincts are perverse. They pretend to stop it in its downward course, and to give it a better direction. They have, therefore, received from heaven, intelligence and virtues which place them beyond and above mankind: let them show their title to this superiority. They would be our shepherds, and we are to be their flock. This arrangement presupposes in them a natural superiority, the right to which we are fully justified in calling upon them to prove.

You must observe that I am not contending against their right to invent social combinations, to propagate them, to recommend them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk; but I do dispute their right to impose them upon us through the medium of the law, that is, by force and by public taxes.

I would not insist upon the Cabetists, the Fourierists, the Proudhonians, the Universitaries, and the Protectionists renouncing their own particular ideas; I would only have them renounce that idea which is common to them all,—viz., that of subjecting us by force to their own groups and series, to their social workshops, to their gratuitous bank, to their Greco-Roman morality, and to their commercial restrictions. I would ask them to allow us the faculty of judging of their plans, and not to oblige us to adopt them, if we find that they hurt our interests or are repugnant to our consciences.

To presume to have recourse to power and taxation, besides being oppressive and unjust, implies further, the injurious supposition that the organised is infallible, and mankind incompetent.

And if mankind is not competent to judge for itself, why do they talk so much about universal suffrage?

This contradiction in ideas is unhappily to be found also in facts; and whilst the French nation has preceded all others in obtaining its rights, or rather its political claims, this has by no means prevented it from being more governed, and directed, and imposed upon, and fettered, and cheated, than any other nation. It is also the one, of all others, where revolutions are constantly to be dreaded, and it is perfectly natural that it should be so.

So long as this idea is retained, which is admitted by all our politicians, and so energetically expressed by M. Louis Blanc in these words—"Society receives its impulse from power;" so long as men consider themselves as capable of feeling, yet passive—incapable of raising themselves by their own discernment and by their own energy to any morality, or well-being, and while they expect everything from the law; in a word, while they admit that their relations with the State are the same as those of the flock with the Shepherd, it is clear that the responsibility of power is immense. Fortune and misfortune, wealth and destitution, equality and inequality, all proceed from it. It is charged with everything, it undertakes everything, it does everything; therefore it has to answer for everything. If we are happy, it has a right to claim our gratitude; but if we are miserable, it alone must bear the blame. Are not our persons and property, in fact, at its disposal? Is not the law omnipotent? In creating the universitary monopoly, it has engaged to answer the expectations of fathers of families who have been deprived of liberty; and if these expectations are disappointed, whose fault is it? In regulating industry, it has engaged to make it prosper, otherwise it would have been absurd to deprive it of its liberty; and if it suffers, whose fault is it? In pretending to adjust the balance of commerce by the game of tariffs, it engages to make it prosper; and if, so far from prospering, it is destroyed, whose fault is it? In granting its protection to maritime armaments in exchange for their liberty, it has engaged to render them lucrative; if they become burdensome, whose fault is it?

Thus, there is not a grievance in the nation for which the Government does not voluntarily make itself responsible. Is it to be wondered at that every failure threatens to cause a revolution?

And what is the remedy proposed? To extend indefinitely the dominion of the law, i.e. , the responsibility of Government. But if the Government engages to raise and to regulate wages, and is not able to do it; if it engages to assist all those who are in want, and is not able to do it; if it engages to provide an asylum for every labourer, and is not able to do it; if it engages to offer to all such as are eager to borrow, gratuitous credit, and is not able to do it; if, in words which we regret should have escaped the pen of M. de Lamartine, "the State considers, that its mission is to enlighten, to develop, to enlarge, to strengthen, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people,"—if it fails in this, is it not evident that after every disappointment, which, alas! is more than probable, there will be a no less inevitable revolution?

I shall now resume the subject by remarking, that immediately after the economical part [4] of the question, and at the entrance of the political part, a leading question presents itself? It is the following:—

What is law? What ought it to be? What is its domain? What are its limits? Where, in fact, does the prerogative of the legislator stop?

I have no hesitation in answering, Law is common force organised to prevent injustice; —in short, Law is Justice.

It is not true that the legislator has absolute power over our persons and property, since they pre-exist, and his work is only to secure them from injury.

It is not true that the mission of the law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our will, our education, our sentiments, our works, our exchanges, our gifts, our enjoyments. Its mission is to prevent the rights of one from interfering with those of another, in any one of these things.

Law, because it has force for its necessary sanction, can only have as its lawful domain the domain of force, which is justice.

And as every individual has a right to have recourse to force only in cases of lawful defence, so collective force, which is only the union of individual forces, cannot be rationally used for any other end.

The law, then, is solely the organisation of individual rights, which existed before legitimate defence.

Law is justice.

So far from being able to oppress the persons of the people, or to plunder their property, even for a philanthropic end, its mission is to protect the former, and to secure to them the possession of the latter.

It must not be said, either, that it may be philanthropic, so long as it abstains from all oppression; for this is a contradiction. The law cannot avoid acting upon our persons and property; if it does not secure them, it violates them if it touches them.

The law is justice.

Nothing can be more clear and simple, more perfectly defined and bounded, or more visible to every eye; for justice is a given quantity, immutable and unchangeable, and which admits of neither increase or diminution .

Depart from this point, make the law religious, fraternal, equalising, industrial, literary, or artistic, and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty; you will be upon unknown ground, in a forced Utopia, or, which is worse, in the midst of a multitude of Utopias, striving to gain possession of the law, and to impose it upon you; for fraternity and philanthropy have no fixed limits, like justice. Where will you stop? Where is the law to stop? One person, as M. de Saint Cricq, will only extend his philanthropy to some of the industrial classes, and will require the law to dispose of the consumers in favor of the producers . Another, like M. Considerant, will take up the cause of the working classes, and claim for them by means of the law, at a fixed rate, clothing, lodging, food, and everything necessary for the support of life . A third, as M. Louis Blanc, will say, and with reason, that this would be an incomplete fraternity, and that the law ought to provide them with instruments of, labour and the means of instruction. A fourth will observe that such an arrangement still leaves room for inequality, and that the law ought to introduce into the most remote hamlets luxury, literature, and the arts. This is the high road to communism; in other words, legislation will be—what it now is—the battle-field for everybody's dreams and everybody's covetousness.

In this proposition we represent to ourselves a simple, immovable Government. And I defy any one to tell me whence the thought of a revolution, an insurrection, or a simple disturbance could arise against a public force confined to the repression of injustice. Under such a system, there would be more well-being, and this well-being would be more equally distributed; and as to the sufferings inseparable from humanity, no one would think of accusing the Government of them, for it would be as innocent of them as it is of the variations of the temperature. Have the people ever been known to rise against the court of repeals, or assail the justices of the peace, for the sake of claiming the rate of wages, gratuitous credit, instruments of labour, the advantages of the tariff, or the social workshop? They know perfectly well that these combinations are beyond the jurisdiction of the justices of the peace, and they would soon learn that they are not within the jurisdiction of the law.

But if the law were to be made upon the principle of fraternity, if it were to be proclaimed that from it proceed all benefits and all evils—that it is responsible for every individual grievance and for every social inequality—then you open the door to an endless succession of complaints, irritations, troubles, and revolutions.

And it would be very strange if it could properly be anything else? Is not justice right? Are not rights equal? With what show of right can the law interfere to subject me to the social plans of MM. Mimerel, de Melun, Thiers, or Louis Blanc, rather than to subject these gentlemen to my plans? Is it to be supposed that Nature has not bestowed upon me sufficient imagination to invent a Utopia too? Is it for the law to make choice of one amongst so many fancies, and to make use of the public force in its service?

And let it not be said, as it continually is, that the law, in this sense, would be atheistic, individual, and heartless, and that it would make mankind wear its own image. This is an absurd conclusion, quite worthy of the governmental infatuation which sees mankind in the law.

What then? Does it follow that, if we are free, we shall cease to act? Does it follow, that if we do not receive an impulse from the law, we shall receive no impulse at all? Does it follow, that if the law confines itself to securing to us the free exercise of our faculties, our faculties will be paralyzed? Does it follow, that if the law does not impose upon us forms of religion, modes of association, methods of instruction, rules for labour, directions for exchange, and plans for charity, we shall plunge eagerly into atheism, isolation, ignorance, misery, and egotism? Does it follow, that we shall no longer recognise the power and goodness of God; that we shall cease to associate together, to help each other, to love and assist our unfortunate brethren, to study the secrets of nature, and to aspire after perfection in our existence?

And it is under the law of justice, under the reign of right, under the influence of liberty, security, stability, and responsibility, that every man will attain to the measure of his worth, to all the dignity of his being, and that mankind will accomplish, with order and with calmness—slowly, it is true, but with certainty—the progress decreed to it.

I believe that my theory is correct; for whatever be the question upon which I am arguing, whether it be religious, philosophical, political, or economical; whether it affects well-being, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, property, labour, exchange, capital, wages, taxes, population, credit, or Government; at whatever point of the scientific horizon I start from, I invariably come to the same thing—the solution of the social problem is in liberty.

And have I not experience on my side? Cast your eye over the globe. Which are the happiest, the most moral, and the most peaceable nations? Those where the law interferes the least with private activity; where the Government is the least felt; where individuality has the most scope, and public opinion the most influence; where the machinery of the administration is the least important and the least complicated; where taxation is lightest and least unequal, popular discontent the least excited and the least justifiable; where the responsibility of individuals and classes is the most active, and where, consequently, if morals are not in a perfect state, at any rate they tend incessantly to correct themselves; where transactions, meetings, and associations are the least fettered; where labour, capital, and production suffer the least from artificial displacements; where mankind follows most completely its own natural course; where the thought of God prevails the most over the inventions of men; those, in short, who realise the most nearly this idea—That within the limits of right, all should flow from the free, perfectible, and voluntary action of man; nothing be attempted by the law or by force, except the administration of universal justice.

I cannot avoid coming to this conclusion—that there are too many great men in the world; there are too many legislators, organisers, institutors of society, conductors of the people, fathers of nations, &c., &c. Too many persons place themselves above mankind, to rule and patronize it; too many persons make a trade of attending to it. It will be answered:—"You yourself are occupied upon it all this time." Very true. But it must be admitted that it is in another sense entirely that I am speaking; and if I join the reformers it is solely for the purpose of inducing them to relax their hold.

I am not doing as Vaucauson did with his automaton, but as a physiologist does with the organisation of the human frame; I would study and admire it.

I am acting with regard to it in the spirit which animated a celebrated traveller. He found himself in the midst of a savage tribe. A child had just been born, and a crowd of soothsayers, magicians, and quacks were around it, armed with rings, hooks, and bandages. One said—"This child will never smell the perfume of a calumet, unless I stretch his nostrils." Another said—"He will be without the sense of hearing, unless I draw his ears down to his shoulders." A third said—"He will never see the light of the sun, unless I give his eyes an oblique direction." A fourth said—"He will never be upright, unless I bend his legs." A fifth said—"He will not be able to think, unless I press his brain." "Stop!" said the traveller. "Whatever God does, is well done; do not pretend to know more than He; and as He has given organs to this frail creature, allow those organs to develop themselves, to strengthen themselves by exercise, use, experience, and liberty."

God has implanted in mankind, also, all that is necessary to enable it to accomplish its destinies. There is a providential social physiology, as well as a providential human physiology. The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organisers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social workshops, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their State religions, their gratuitous or monopolising banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralisations, and their equalisation by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun—reject all systems, and make trial of liberty—of liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work.

↑ General Council of Manufacturers, Agricultural, and Commerce, 6th of May, 1850.
↑ The French word is spoliation .
↑ If protection were only granted in France to a single class, to the engineers, for instance, it would be so absurdly plundering, as to be unable to maintain itself. Thus we see all the protected trades combine, make common cause, and even recruit themselves in such a way as to appear to embrace the mass of the national labour . They feel instinctively that plunder is slurred over by being generalised.
↑ Political economy precedes politics: the former has to discover whether human interests are harmonious or antagonistic, a fact which must have been decided upon before the latter can determine the prerogatives of Government.

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The Law Paperback – January 1, 1850

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The Law was originally published as a pamphlet in 1850 by Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850). Bastiat wrote most of his work in the few years before and after the French Revolution of 1848. The Law is considered a classic and his ideas are still relevant today. The essay was published in French in 1850. This piece was published in English as part of Essays on Political Economy (G.P. Putnams & Sons, 1874) with authoritative translation by British economist Patrick James Stirling.

Print length 46 pages
Language English
Publisher 12th Media Services
Publication date January 1, 1850
Dimensions 6 x 0.11 x 9 inches
ISBN-10 1680920634
ISBN-13 978-1680920635
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ 12th Media Services (January 1, 1850)
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The Compromise of 1850

Map of the states and territories of the United States, showing the panhandle of present-day Oklahoma as disputed (labeled “neutral strip”); Mexico as a small strip of what is currently southern Arizona and southwest New Mexico; territories of Oregon, Utah, New Mexico, Unorganized, and Minnesota; slave states of Texas and those east to the Atlantic and north to Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware; and non-slave states as Iowa and Wisconsin, and all remaining states to the east (and north of the indicated slave states).

Written by: Martin H. Quitt, University of Massachusetts Boston

By the end of this section, you will:.

Explain the similarities and differences in how regional attitudes affected federal policy in the period after the Mexican–American War

Suggested Sequencing

Use this Decision Point with the Thomas Sims and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 Narrative for a comprehensive look at the Compromise of 1850.

When the first session of the 31st Congress opened on December 3, 1849, 30 states were represented: 15 had slaves and 15 prohibited slavery. In the House of Representatives, members from free states outnumbered those from the South 140 to 91. The basis of representation in this Congress was the census of 1840. The enormous flow of European immigrants into the United States in the mid to late 1840s, especially into the North, meant that the next census, in 1850, would widen the already lopsided ratio of free- to slave-state representatives. This growing imbalance in the House heightened the importance to the South of parity in the Senate. That parity was immediately put at risk when President Zachary Taylor called for Congress to act favorably on the imminent application of California for statehood, and his notice that New Mexico would soon follow with its application. Both territories were certain to seek admission as free states. The South feared for its future with slavery if representation in the Senate became imbalanced.

In 1849, sectional division between the South and North was somewhat muted by the presence in each section of two national parties, the Democrats and the Whigs. The Whig President, Zachary Taylor, faced Democratic majorities in each chamber. Each party, however, had representatives and senators from both sections, providing a framework in which a compromise could be forged. But it was not to be easy. Leadership was important, and the 31st Senate had “the Great Triumvirate” of Henry Clay (a Whig representing Kentucky), John C. Calhoun (a Democrat representing South Carolina), and Daniel Webster (a Whig representing Massachusetts). All gave famous speeches at what proved to be the end of their senatorial careers (Calhoun died a few weeks after his speech was read for him; Clay and Webster died in 1852). The debates of 1850 also became a springboard for the national careers of two other Senate giants, William H. Seward of New York, a Whig; and Stephen A. Douglas, Democratic Senator of Illinois. Considering the issues of 1849–1850 from the perspectives of these five men reveals the complexity of the decision-making the national government faced.

The treaty that concluded the Mexican-American War in March 1848 ceded to the United States all of present-day California, Nevada, and Utah, most of Arizona, half of New Mexico, and portions of Colorado and Wyoming. In 1846, the controversial Wilmot Proviso would have prohibited slavery in all this territory. The Proviso passed the House but was defeated in the Senate, where the South had a one-delegate advantage from 1846 to 1848 and parity from 1848 to 1850. If only free states were carved out of the Mexican Cession, southern interests would be overwhelmed in both houses, and their champions, most influentially Calhoun, warned the South would withdraw from a Union that did not protect its interests. If free states had growing majorities in both the House and Senate, they might move to abolish slavery in the South. On the other hand, the North viewed parity as an evil precisely because it provided protection to slavery and gave southern states with smaller populations a significant measure of political equality with vastly larger northern ones.

This map shows the states and territories of the United States as they were from 1850 to March 1853. (credit: modification of “United States 1849-1850” by “Golbez”/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

California had been the big prize President James Polk craved from the Mexican-American War, though by 1848, only about 350 American settlers had traveled to the area. In his last annual message that December, however, Polk confirmed reports that gold had been discovered in California, and some 42,000 people rushed there in 1849, followed by more than 55,000 in 1850. This explosive migration was the reason President Taylor’s address in December 1849 called on Congress to approve California statehood.

After a month of intense debate, Senator Henry Clay offered eight resolutions: that (1) California be admitted without federal determination of the slavery question; (2) Congress not introduce slavery into New Mexico; (3) an imprecise boundary (that disadvantaged slave-owners) be established between New Mexico and Texas; (4) the federal government reimburse Texas for costs incurred in its war for independence and compensate it for territory relinquished to New Mexico; (5) it was inexpedient to abolish slavery in Washington, DC, while retaining it in Maryland unless the people there consented and the slaveholders were compensated; (6) it was expedient to ban the slave trade in the national capital; (7) more effective fugitive slave legislation be enacted; and (8) Congress had no power to abolish slavery in the states, which possessed exclusive authority over the question. Clay followed his resolutions a week later with a two-day speech explaining and defending his package as a comprehensive settlement of outstanding issues that should be voted on as a single bill, an omnibus.

During the first two weeks of March, Senators Calhoun, Webster, Seward, and Douglas delivered four of the most memorable speeches in Senate history. On March 4, Calhoun, too weak from tuberculosis to speak, sat while a colleague read his speech rejecting Clay’s compromise as sacrificing the sectional balance so essential to securing southern interests. “How can the Union be saved?” Calhoun asked in his speech. He called for a constitutional amendment that would preserve “the equilibrium” but did not specify how.

On March 7, Webster began famously, “I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, not as a northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States . . . I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.” He identified grievances of both sections but supported redressing the South’s complaint about runaway slaves with a strong Fugitive Slave Act, thereby incurring lasting condemnation in his own state, the epicenter of abolitionism.

On March 11, New York’s Senator Seward rose to oppose compromise of any kind. In a memorably controversial line, he sought to undercut the Constitutional protection for slavery: “But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The territory is a part—no inconsiderable part—of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe.”

A photograph of Senator William Seward of New York, who died in 1872.

On March 13 and 14, Stephen Douglas spoke as a moderate from the West. He applauded Clay’s omnibus bill for setting “the ball in motion to restore peace and harmony.” Responding both to Seward and Calhoun respectively, he insisted that the Constitution was the highest law in the land and emphasized that it took no notice of sections, only of states. Furthermore, he emphasized that state sovereignty, not congressional legislation, had worked to expand freedom and constrict slavery. States had always decided the issue, and it should be left to their determination in the future under a principle he later called “popular sovereignty.”

The need to reach a decision was heightened by the Calhoun-inspired Nashville Convention, a meeting of delegates from nine southern states that had been called to strategize resistance, including possible secession, if Congress banned slavery from the new territories. It met from June 3 to 12 and took a “wait and see” position regarding the proceedings in Washington, where in June alone, 16 U.S. Senators proposed 28 amendments to the omnibus bill. In the House, 58 members delivered one-hour speeches from May 8 to June 11. Prospects for the omnibus worsened when President Taylor became sick after eating at a hot July 4 celebration and died of severe gastroenteritis five days later. Finally, on July 31, each major section of the omnibus bill was voted down. Clay left Washington in despair.

Stephen Douglas now pushed to have each part of the bill considered separately. During the last two weeks of August, he managed bills through the Senate and then shifted his attention to the House, where he and a few colleagues worked the floor informally to gain support. Finally, on September 9, President Millard Fillmore signed this Compromise of 1850 into law. The compromise included California’s admission as a free state, the organization of New Mexico Territory with a boundary adjustment that required paying Texas $10 million, and the organization of the Utah Territory. New Mexico and Utah were organized into territories with no restrictions of slavery. On September 18 came the new Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed federal warrants to be used to arrest suspected fugitives, provided for federal marshals to capture fugitives, and punished anyone who obstructed the execution of the law. Two days later, another part of the compromise went into effect when Congress abolished the slave trade in Washington, DC. Many northerners thought the slave markets in the nation’s capital compromised the country’s principles and were an embarrassment to foreign visitors.

The Compromise of 1850 failed to settle the tensions that continued to divide the nation during the next decade and did not establish a principle that could be applied unequivocally to territories outside the Mexican Cession. Extremists in both sections were displeased with the Compromise. Over the next decade, the Fugitive Slave Act set off a firestorm of protest and mob violence in the north and caused significant sectional divisions. More sectional conflict resulted from the explosive Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, ironically also initiated by Douglas.

Review Questions

1. What did the South fear most if California and New Mexico were admitted as states?

That Democrats would lose their majorities in both houses of Congress
That Whigs would become a party of the North only
That slave states would be permanently outnumbered in the Senate
That slavery would be banned after 1850

2. What did the final Compromise of 1850 achieve?

A lasting peace between the sections
The end of the slave trade in the national capital
A new parity in the Senate between North and South
An expanded geographic area for Texas

3. Senators Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, William H. Seward, and Stephen Douglas participated in what has been called the “golden age of the Senate” (1820–1850). Choose the reason that best explains why this period earned the name.

Each represented the views of his state and region, participating in a deliberative process of compromise that tenuously held the Union together during the period.
They were the richest among U.S. legislators and spent these years amassing great personal wealth and influence.
They established a principle that was applied to the new states outside the Mexican Cession, silencing extremists and continuing to maintain slave- and free-state parity in the Senate.
Each established his reputation as a great debater during this period and went on to hold high office for many years.

4. How did the Compromise of 1850 try to placate the South for the loss of sectional balance in the U.S. Senate?

By enlarging slave states like Texas
By banning the slave trade in Washington, DC
By making it easier to recapture runaway slaves
By admitting Utah as a slave state

5. That neither the Whigs nor the Democrats had a clear sectional majority in the 1840s allowed for

public disinterest in politics, with low voter turnout
strong public stands by each party on the continuation of slavery
overwhelming support by both parties for war with Mexico
the possibility of compromise

6. In contrast to the provisions of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850

applied to territory within the Mexican Cession
created a new line marking the border between slave and free states at 54°40′
allowed for the possible creation of both slave and free states
did not receive any southern support

Free Response Questions

Explain why the Mexican Cession led to a major political crisis in 1848–1849.
Summarize the goal and outcome of the Compromise of 1850.

AP Practice Questions

“And now the simple, bold, and even awful question which presents itself to us is this: Shall we, who are founding institutions, social and political, for countless millions; shall we, who know by experience the wise and the just, and are free to choose them, and to reject the erroneous and the unjust; shall we establish human bondage, or permit it by our sufferance to be established? Sir, our forefathers would not have hesitated an hour. They found slavery existing here, and they left it only because they could not remove it. There is not only no free state which would now establish it, but there is no slave state, which, if it had had the free alternative as we now have, would have founded slavery. Indeed, our revolutionary predecessors had precisely the same question before them in establishing an organic law under which the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, have since come into the Union, and they solemnly repudiated and excluded slavery from those states forever. I confess that the most alarming evidence of our degeneracy which has yet been given is found in the fact that we even debate such a question.”

Senator William Seward (NY), Higher Law Speech, March 11, 1850

Refer to the excerpt provided.

1. This excerpt was written in response to

the annexation of Texas
President Polk’s request for a declaration of war against Mexico
California’s request for statehood
the Supreme Court’s announcement of the Dred Scott decision

2. In establishing his argument, Seward refers to the legislative precedent established by the

Northwest Ordinance
Missouri Compromise
Indian Removal Act
Compromise of 1850

3. Which event of the 1840s and 1850s would most strongly challenge the views expressed by Seward?

The admission of Oregon to the Union
The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act
The activities of Harriet Tubman
The results of the 1860 election

Primary Sources

Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwcg.html .

Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess. 451–455 (1850).

Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess. 115–127 (1850).

Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess. 244–247 (1850).

Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess. 264–375 (1850).

Cong. Globe, 30th Cong., 2nd Sess. 3–13 (1848).

Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess. 260–269 (1850).

Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess. 69–72 (1849).

Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess. 476–484 (1850).

Suggested Resources

Bordewich, Fergus M. America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union . New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012.

Brands, H.W. Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants. New York: Doubleday, 2018.

Peterson, Merrill D. The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Waugh, John C. On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History . Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003.

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“let it be placed among the abominations”: the bill of rights and the fugitive slave laws, "[a] bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.", -thomas jefferson, letter to james madison, december 20, 1787..

Political cartoon showing four white men in suits wrestling a Black man to the ground. The white men have tied the Black man's arms behind his back and placed a gag in his mouth.

Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library

On December 15, 1791 Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson certified that ten proposed amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, had been ratified. Today marks the 229 th anniversary of that ratification. Drafted by James Madison in 1789 but modified by debate in the House and the Senate, the amendments responded to fears that the new national government might trample on basic liberties. [1] Among other things, the amendments prohibited Congress (but not the states) from limiting freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religious practice, or denying people fair trials and due process of law. For the most part the amendments worked relatively well. However, Congress flagrantly ignored the Bill of Rights in the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1793 and 1850. These laws denied alleged slaves fair trials, due process of law, or even the right prove their freedom in court. The fugitive slave laws clearly violated the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh amendments, as well as the Constitution’s protection of the right to the writ of habeas corpus.

Newspaper reads: "STAMPEDE OF SLAVES. A TALE OF HORROR. An Arrest by the United States Marshall! A DEPUTY...SHOT. A Negro Child's Throat Cut from Ear to Ear by its Father or Mother, and Other Wounded! CORONER'S INQUEST! Writ of Habeas Corpus Taken Out.

Library of Congress

The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right of the people “to be secure in their persons” from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” No search or seizure under the authority of the federal government can take place without a warrant issued by a judge. The warrant has to be based on a sworn statement describing the person or evidence to be seized or the place to be searched. However, the 1793 and 1850 laws authorized private individuals to “seize or arrest” alleged fugitives without any warrant or other judicial scrutiny. In clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, the law allowed slave catchers without warrants to seize blacks in public and to invade private homes or buildings in the search of fugitive slaves. For example, in 1856 a group of Kentucky slave catchers and a federal marshal stormed into the private home of a free African American in Cincinnati without a warrant, to seize Margaret Garner and her family. During this raid, which clearly violated the Fourth Amendment, Garner succeeded in killing her daughter, rather than see her returned to slavery. Garner and the rest of her family were subsequently taken back to Kentucky to be re-enslaved. [2] Storming a private home with weapons drawn in violation of the Fourth Amendment illustrated how the violence of slavery threatened the liberties of the free people, black and white, in the North, while denying fundamental due process to blacks accused of being fugitives, including many free people.

The Fifth Amendment declares that no person can “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” But there was no due process in fugitive slave cases. Under the 1850 law the alleged fugitive was not allowed testify on his or her own behalf, even to assert a case of mistaken identity. Under that law a judge received $5.00 if he decided in favor of freedom, and $10.00 if he decided in favor of the slaveowner. This appeared, to many people, to be a bribe to buy justice for the slaveowner. The Sixth Amendment requires that trials be before an “impartial jury” and that defendants have a right to subpoena witnesses on their behalf and have assistance of counsel. The Seventh Amendment guaranteed jury trials in civil cases. But the fugitive slave laws ignored these constitutional protections. The 1793 law did not provide a jury trial and allowed any magistrate – even a lowly justice of the peace – to order that a black person be turned over to a slave catcher after a summary hearing. In response to this law, some northern states passed “personal liberty laws” to protect free blacks from being kidnapped. [3] In response to growing hostility to the return of fugitive slaves, the 1850 law specifically denied alleged fugitives the right to a jury trial.

Under both laws hearings were summary affairs, often conducted immediately after an alleged slave was seized, giving the person no time to prepare a defense, to find an attorney, or to summon witnesses. For example, in 1854 police in Boston arrested Anthony Burns in the early evening on a phony robbery charge, kept him isolated in jail all night, and brought him before a U.S. commissioner for a summary hearing first thing in the morning. The commissioner hoped to quickly listen to the slave catcher, write out all the papers, and send Burns on his way to Virginia before anyone knew about the case. However, the lawyer Richard Henry Dana walked by the courtroom, saw what was happening, and immediately intervened on behalf of Burns. Dana shamed the commissioner to actually hold a real hearing with evidence and witnesses. Despite conflicting testimony, the commissioner (who was also a part time professor at Harvard Law School) sent Burns back to Virginia. The fame of the case led to people raising money to buy his freedom. The commissioner, Edward G. Loring, who was also a state probate judge, became a pariah in the community. He was stripped of his judgeship and not renewed at Harvard, and eventually moved to Washington, D.C. This famous case demonstrated how the law fundamentally violated the Bill of Rights. [4] The main body of the Constitution protects the right to a writ of habeas corpus. Known in Anglo-American law as “the Great Writ,” habeas corpus ensures that people arrested will be brought before courts for a trial. It prevents the government from throwing people in jail without charges. This right connects to the guarantee of due process in the Fifth Amendment and the jury trial provision of the Sixth Amendment. While not in the Bill of Rights, access to the Writ of Habeas Corpus has always been seen as a basic right. It is fundamental to a free society because it prevents the arbitrary or illegal imprisonment of people. It is truly the great writ of a free society. Thus, the Constitution provides that “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” But the 1850 Law brazenly prohibited the use of the writ – suspended the great writ – in fugitive slave cases. Once a magistrate, commissioner, or judge issued a certificate to remove a slave from a free state, no court could question the right of the slave catcher to take his human “property” to the South. Thus, a justice of the peace, with no legal training, could issue a certificate of removal after a quick and informal hearing, and no judge – not even a state supreme court justice, a United States District judge, or a justice of the United States Supreme Court – could issue a writ of habeas corpus to examine the facts of the case or if the law had been followed. It is hard to imagine a more unjust law or one that so blatantly disregarded the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution.

Book cover page reads "The Fugitive Slave Bill: The History and Unconstitutionality with an account of the Seizure and Enslavement of James Hamlet, and the Subsequent Restoration to Liberty."

The 1850 act is universally considered to be among the most unfair and illegitimate laws ever passed by Congress. Throughout the North black leaders and many white lawyers, ministers, and politicians denounced this statute as a blatant attempt to subvert the Bill of Rights and to buy justice to support slavery. There were hundreds of sermons similar in title and substance to one Rev. Nathaniel Colver’s gave in Boston shortly after the passage of the 1850 law: “The Fugitive Slave Bill; or, God's Laws Paramount to the Laws of Men: a Sermon, Preached on Sunday, October 20, 1850.” [5] This sermon illustrates how many northerners responded to the 1850. In the streets, the law led to riots and rescues in Boston, Syracuse, Milwaukee, Wellington, Ohio, and Christiana, Pennsylvania. [6] Ironically, the 1850 law, which stained the American statute books and made a mockery of the Bill of Rights, did nothing to stop enslaved people from running away – people seeking freedom did not worry about the law, they worried about safely making it to the North, Canada, or Mexico. [7] Thus, Congress not only ignored and trampled on the Bill of Rights, but did so with no meaningful results. The laws also were not very effective in helping southerners regain their slaves. Between 1850 and the beginning of the Civil War fewer than 400 fugitives were returned to the South, even though at least ten thousand slaves ran to the North in that decade alone. [8] The laws infuriated many northerners, embarrassed the national government when it proved incapable of enforcing them, and led to riots and rescues. Rather than protecting the “property” of slaveowners, the laws helped garner support in the North for political candidates who stood up against slavery and stood up for freedom. This shift in northern culture and politics infuriated virtually all white southerners. In 1793 many white northerners were not focused on the existence slavery in the South, even as all the Northern states had either ended slavery, were in the process of gradually ending it, or, in two of them, debating how to end it. By 1804 every northern state had either ended it outright or passed gradual abolition laws to end it gradually. Starting in the 1820s northern legislatures passed “personal liberty laws,” to protect their black neighbors from being arbitrarily removed to the South without a fair hearing. These laws were also designed to prevent the kidnapping of free blacks. In the 1830s the highest courts in New York and New Jersey declared that the 1793 was unconstitutional. When the Supreme Court struck these laws down, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), many northern states refused to cooperate with the return of fugitive slaves, because they were no longer able to prevent the kidnapping of their free black neighbors. [9] The enforcement of the 1793 and the 1850 fugitive slave laws impressed upon northerners that a denial of the liberties in the Bill of Rights threatened all people, white and black, enslaved and free. The laws drove home to northerners that slavery in the South jeopardized their own liberties and their own communities in the North. Hostility to slavery in the North grew each time a fugitive was returned. The 1850 law with its harsher penalties and obvious violations of the Bill of Rights increased opposition to the rendition of fugitive slaves. This story – of fundamental liberties and the Fugitive Slave Laws – reminds us today, more than a century and a half after the end of slavery – of the importance of the Bill of Rights for all people in the United States.

Paul Finkelman, a legal historian, is the president of Gratz College in greater Philadelphia. His most recent books are, Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018) and Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South (Boston: Bedford Books, 2019).

The article takes its title from “The Fugitive Slave Law,” Hartford, CT, 1850, https://www.loc.gov/item/98101767/ .

[1] The primary sources on the adopted of the Bill of Rights are found in Helen E. Veit, Charlene Bangs Bickford, and Kenneth R. Bowling, Creating the Bill of Rights: The Documentary History From the First Federal Congress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). For an analysis of the evolution of the amendments, see Paul Finkelman, “James Madison and the Bill of Rights: A Reluctant Paternity,” 1990 Supreme Court Review (1991): 301-47.

[2] Nikki M. Taylor, Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016).

[3] Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

[4] Paul Finkelman, “Legal Ethics and Fugitive Slaves: The Anthony Burns Case, Judge Loring, and Abolitionist Attorneys,” Cardozo Law Review , 17 (1996): 1793-1858.

[5] Boston: J.M. Hewes and Company, 1850. Available on the website of the Library of Congress: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/rbc/rbaapc/05900/05900.pdf

[6] See for example, H. Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).

[7] The best place to start on the history of enslaved Americans seeking freedom is John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

[8] Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1970) found that only 366 slaves were returned to the South under the law, while an estimated 10,000 escaped in that decade.

[9] Paul Finkelman, Chief Justice Hornblower of New Jersey and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, in Paul Finkelman, ed., Slavery and the Law (Lanham, Md.: Roman and Littlefield, 1998) 113. Paul Finkelman, “ Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Understanding Justice Story's Pro-Slavery Nationalism,” Journal of Supreme Court History, 2 (1997): 51-64.

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The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 by Carol Wilson LAST REVIEWED: 07 June 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 27 February 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0067

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, although in effect less than two decades, was one of the nation’s most controversial federal laws. Designed to provide southern slaveholders with greater assistance in the return of runaway slaves, it angered northern whites and blacks, divided communities, and yet still failed to assuage slaveholders’ concerns. Designed to calm sectional tensions as part of the Compromise of 1850, the law propelled the nation closer to war. Both the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 affirmed the rights of slaveholders to claim enslaved people who escaped into free states or territories. But enslaved people continued to seek freedom, and over time the number of those willing to aid them grew, eventually developing into the loosely organized network known as the Underground Railroad. Slaveholders, especially in the Upper South, annually lost an untold number of slaves to escape. Not all freedom-seekers were successful, but the costs were great nonetheless. To slaveholders, every escaped slave who made it North represented a loss of hundreds of dollars, and perhaps more importantly, spurred others to follow in his or her footsteps. Often associated with states’ rights ideology, white southerners demanded and eventually got what some scholars have called the greatest exercise of federal power before the Civil War. The enhanced federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 expanded on the earlier law in several important ways. It created a new position of commissioner who was appointed, not elected, and was paid ten dollars each time he sent an accused fugitive into slavery, only five dollars if he found the claim to be insufficient and ordered the accused released. The act also strengthened the penalties for helping fugitives escape or interfering with rendition; it explicitly stripped all rights from the accused; and stated that bystanders could be called upon to assist in slave recapture. Response to the law varied. Enslaved people continued to escape bondage. Fugitives living in the North and even free blacks felt threatened and organized for self-defense; thousands left for Canada. Abolitionists, black and white, protested in writing and speeches; some engaged in bold rescues of individuals claimed as fugitives. Many white northerners abided by the law, although for others the idea of being turned into de facto slave catchers pushed them toward opposition. Rather than settle the issue of fugitive slaves, the Law served to divide the nation further.

Several works look at the Fugitive Slave Law from a broad perspective, generally including the political background of its creation, ramifications of the law’s implementation, and the success level of enforcement. Gara 1964 examines the Fugitive Slave Act in political context and finds that as a compromise the act was a failure. Campbell 1970 was the first work to systematically analyze the law’s enforcement and has remained a standard in the field. Harrold 2010 is an important recent work that has helped reorient historians away from a traditional northern free/southern slave geography toward a focus on the borderlands where issues of slavery and race were complex and shifting. Churchill 2014 adapts the borderlands concept using an extensive database of fugitive slave rescues. Blackett 2018 provides the best new overview of the topic, what will undoubtedly become the standard work on the subject. He argues that by running away, freedom seekers challenged not only the law, but the entire system of slavery, and helped bring the nation to a reckoning.

Blackett, R. J. M. The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

DOI: 10.1017/9781108275439

One section covers the law’s passage, first year of operation, and its impact on the abolitionist and free black communities, plus the resurgence of the colonization movement. Seven chapters then examine reaction to the law in different areas of the country. Blackett concludes that the law was inadequate, as more enslaved people escaped than were apprehended and returned.

Campbell, Stanley W. The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Law, 1850–1860 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.

Analyzing the 332 cases reviewed by federal commissioners, Campbell concludes that the Fugitive Slave Act, contrary to southern complaints, was enforced to a great extent, and resulted in a majority of those accused of being returned to slavery. His work has remained the standard on enforcement of the law for decades.

Churchill, Robert H. “Fugitive Slave Rescues in the North.” Ohio Valley History 14 (Summer 2014): 51–75.

A comprehensive examination of fugitive slave rescues, creating a database of 154 cases of which nearly 80 percent were successful. Churchill divides the cases into three regions—free soil (Upper North, where fugitive rendition was systematically challenged), borderland (northern counties adjacent to slave states which saw some rescues but much support for the law), and contested territory (the area in between where opposition to the law grew over time).

Gara, Larry. “The Fugitive Slave Law: A Double Paradox.” Civil War History 10.3 (September 1964): 229–240.

DOI: 10.1353/cwh.1964.0000

As part of a political compromise designed to keep the Union together, Gara states, the law failed miserably. He also argues another paradox: that southern whites, generally associated with states’ rights ideology, were willing to call on the power of federal authority when it suited their needs, in this case to restore their human property.

Harrold, Stanley. Border War : Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Focuses on the states of the Lower North and Upper South as a borderland where issues of race and slavery were constantly debated; this was the real proving ground for the Fugitive Slave Act. Harrold concludes that while the act challenged fugitives and their allies, it did not stop escapes; rather, the number increased, as did defiance of the act.

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The Activist History Review

The Future is Another Country

“Within the Forms of Law”: Politics and Activism, 1850s and Today

Activists have applied political pressure most effectively on the state and local levels. The fugitive slave crisis of the 1850s provides a historical roadmap for embracing formal politics as a means toward activist ends in the United States.

by Evan Turiano

The Trump era has seen popular protest unlike any in half a century. And yet, even in this new age of American protest, the recent fight against the Trump administration’s separation of undocumented migrant families feels unique. Maybe it is because of the moral universality of its message, “Keep Families Together.” Regardless, resistance to immigrant family separation is also unique among Trump-era protests because of the forceful pressure it has applied on electoral politics.

From high profile senators like Elizabeth Warren to local figures such as Michigan’s Brenda Lawrence , scores of politicians flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border this summer. The weekend before New York’s federal primary, Congressional hopeful Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opted to visit West Texas rather than canvass the Bronx and Queens. Importantly, Democrats like Warren and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand have adopted what began as a “radical” element of Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, the call to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (I.C.E.). Hundreds of municipalities and states have changed laws at home to try and avoid complicity in federal immigration enforcement.

merlin_140193540_f546b0d3-6976-401d-9fe2-4f3d86b896f2-jumbo

This buzz of political activity is a response to constituent pressure. Ocasio-Cortez, Gillibrand, and Warren are all up election this fall, and the latter two appear to have presidential ambitions. They are going beyond empty platitudes and providing substantive policy initiatives. Here we see two intertwined relationships that are central to American protest movements: that of activists to electoral politics, and that of local and state policy to federal policy. Activists have applied political pressure most effectively on the state and local levels. The fugitive slave crisis of the 1850s provides a historical roadmap for embracing formal politics as a means toward activist ends in the United States.

Historians and pundits have identified numerous connections between Trump’s xenophobic policies and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. [1] Like Trump’s policies, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act cast a massive imposition of federal policing power on both individual and state rights. The law compelled Northern citizens to participate in the recapture of alleged fugitives from slavery and threatened to jail anyone that aided fugitives. The law prevented the accused from testifying in court or receiving a jury trial. The law defanged Northern courts and effectively stripped black Americans of any legal rights they had managed to previously secure. [2]

Both the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and Trump’s child separation directives reveal tensions in our federal system. Both were federal measures that influenced policy areas that were contested between federal and state jurisdiction. [3] Both laws superseded state and local policies, and both overruled the collective will of communities that had passed those policies. Resistance to Trump’s border policies also mirrors resistance to the 1850 law. Both resistance movements applied electoral pressure on local- and state-level politicians. Activists in both cases successfully pushed for the non-involvement of local law enforcement, courts, and jails.

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and Trump’s child separation policy both spurred immediate activist organization. Within a year of the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, “scores” of community organizations convened across the North to strategize resistance to the law. [4] June 2018 saw more than 600 marches and protests across the United States to protest Trump’s immigration policies, from New York to Appalachia to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Both protest movements turned that immediate response into organized electoral pressure, forcing the hands of politicians who may have preferred to stay quiet and ousting those who failed to match the outrage of their constituents. The descending of candidates on the child detention facilities along border speaks for itself. Politicians rightfully calculated that their precious campaigning hours were more effectively spent in Brownsville, Texas than in front of their constituents.

During Congressional debates over the Compromise of 1850, Northern politicians were universally aware of their constituents’ disdain for the proposed fugitive slave law. Leaders of the New York Whig party had “never seen such unanimity in favor of any one thing, as in favor of the repeal of that fugitive slave law. ” An observer in Boston agreed, declaring the law “repudiated by all parties, by general consent.” [5]

The 1850 law generated such broad outrage—opposition “by general consent”—because it was a site of political convergence. For those Northerners who detested slavery, the new fugitive slave law brought slavery home, all but negating efforts to abolish slavery in the North. As historian James Oakes observes, “So long as southern slaveholders claimed the right to go into the North and enforce the slave codes of their own states, northern soil could never be genuinely free soil.” [6] At the same time, Northerners who were ambivalent about Southern slavery saw the law as a threat to local authority. Scholars of early American law have demonstrated that law enforcement, judicial processes, and citizenship were sites of state sovereignty. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was an attack against that autonomy. [7]

Activist pressure against both federal policies resulted in state and local legislative action. Over the course of the 1850s, state legislatures in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin enacted “Personal Liberty Laws” which promised legal protections to black residents in spite of the provisions of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. [8] Some of these laws specifically forbade the participation of state law enforcement officials, and the use of state jails and courthouses, in the enforcement of the 1850 law.

These restrictions reflect those of modern “sanctuary cities,” or municipalities that have enacted laws requiring that local officials do not cooperate with I.C.E. detentions and deportations. As of May 2018, six states and over 140 cities and counties had enacted these provisions. [9] As during the 1850s, numerous states and municipalities have rushed to cancel jailing and training contracts with I.C.E. as a badge of public noncompliance with Trump’s policies. While these local laws were, in both cases, technically superseded by the federal policies, they cast harsh light on the contradictions in the federal system and put local judges in the difficult position of enforcing contradictory laws. Activists recognized this gray area as an opportunity to apply pressure on local officials.

During the 1850s, constitutional changes made many of these local law enforcement figures more vulnerable to angry constituents. New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin all adopted new state constitutions that changed the elevation of judges, sheriffs, and justices of the peace from governor’s appointments to popular vote. [10] These officials, facing a choice between enforcing contradictory policies on accused fugitives, were now under direct electoral pressure from a public that hated the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.

Marshals, commissioners, and judges who participated in the enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act met scorn in the North. Historian R. J. M. Blackett argues that the ostracism commissioners faced because of the law led to the federal government’s perennial failure to hire a sufficient number of commissioners, as well as widespread resignations among those who did accept the posts. [11] Slave catchers faced even more wrath in the North, occasionally being detained by local law enforcement, having their hounds poisoned, and suffering physical violence. [12] The public shaming of complicit officials in 2018 such as Sarah Sanders , Stephen Miller , and Kirstjen Nielsen are analogous, if somewhat tame in comparison.

Scholars of slavery and emancipation have long debated the degree to which antislavery activism was “in” or “out” of formal politics. When historians view law as static and immovable, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law seems dominant, and abolitionism appears to foment only outside of politics and law. [13] But when we heed E. P. Thompson’s call to embrace our “inheritance of struggle about law, and within the forms of law,” we find activists seizing and enlarging individual power in the federal system, capitalizing on America’s complex layers of sovereignty to empower the will of the people. [14]

Our collected volume of essays, Demand the Impossible: Essays in History As Activism , is now available on Amazon! Based on research first featured on The Activist History Review , the twelve essays in this volume examine the role of history in shaping ongoing debates over monuments, racism, clean energy, health care, poverty, and the Democratic Party. Together they show the ways that the issues of today are historical expressions of power that continue to shape the present. Also, be sure to review our book on Goodreads and join our Goodreads group to receive notifications about upcoming promotions and book discussions for Demand the Impossible!

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[1] See, for example: Judith Giesburg in the Washington Post’s Made by History, H. Robert Baker in Tropics of Meta, Eric Foner in The Nation.

[2] For an overview of the law’s operation, see: Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: Norton, 2015), 124-125.

[3] On the increasing degree of state sovereignty in immigration policy, see: Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Russell Sage/Harvard University Press, 2006), 340.

[4] R. J. M. Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 14-17.

[5] Stephen E. Maizlish, A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 223.

[6] James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Norton, 2014), 32.

[7] The scholarship on state law and state citizenship in early America is rich and evolving, what follows is surely incomplete. See: William J. Novak, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Maeve Glass, “Citizens of the State,” University of Chicago Law Review 85 no.4, June 2018, 865-934; Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Laura F. Edwards The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) .

[8] Ibid., 219-222.

[9] https://cis.org/Map-Sanctuary-Cities-Counties-and-States . While the author finds the Center for Immigration Studies’ anti-immigrant agenda morally abhorrent and politically disastrous, their compilation of sanctuary city laws is the most thorough that was readily available.

[10] Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978), 106-107.

[11] Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom, 56-59.

[12] Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery: 1830-1860 (New York: Harper, 1960) , 202-3

[13] For an excellent analysis of the historiographical separation of politics and antislavery, see: Corey Brooks, “Reconsidering Politics in the Study of American Abolitionists,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8 no. 2 (May 2018) 291-317.

[14] E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975).

0 comments on “ “Within the Forms of Law”: Politics and Activism, 1850s and Today ”

A Law for the People? English Courts and the Law, 1750-1850

In his provocative 1975 essay ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’ Douglas Hay declared: ‘The private manipulation of the law by the wealthy and the powerful was in truth a ruling-class conspiracy, in the most exact meaning of the word. The king, judges, magistrates and gentry used private, extra-legal dealings among themselves to bend the statute and common law to their purposes.’ A doctoral candidate who studied under the direction of E.P. Thompson, architect of the Marxist-oriented ‘Warwick School’ of English social history, Hay’s inflammatory rhetoric narrowed the perspective of the English legal system down to a sweeping generalisation. He echoed his adviser’s belief that eighteenth-century English law ‘favoured those with power and disadvantaged those without.’ This essay presents the work of subsequent historians who disproved his assumption—most notably John Langbein—and which culminated in Peter King’s assessment that during this transitional period ‘the law held different meanings for different people and its pluralistic nature meant that each individual or social group might have a range of often contradictory experiences of legal institutions’.

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This essay describes the journey of Daniel Defoe’s first fictional thief through the “interconnected spheres” of the criminal justice system of her time, following her route along what Peter King describes as the “corridor of connected rooms or stage sets,” from the moment of her arrest, through committal to prison by a Justice of the Peace, to a Grand Jury hearing, arraignment, trial, sentencing and beyond. In each of these rooms, Moll Flanders has to negotiate with men and women from various social backgrounds, each of them empowered to make “deeply discretionary choices,” and she will make repeated attempts to escape, now through doors offering officially accepted ways out, now through “illegal tunnels,” only to find herself thrust on up the corridor towards “criminalization, conviction and punishment.” The route is not always clearly posted, and the “judicial spaces” Moll passes through, besides being contested among those who populate them, are governed by ground rules very different from those that apply in the spaces that make up the English system of justice as it has evolved since the early nineteenth century, so that this journey is often more bewildering to the modern reader than it is to Moll herself. In my attempt to illuminate her way I have drawn heavily on the work of social historians, but also, for closer focus on the experience of people like Moll, on reports of trials for shoplifting celebrated at the Old Bailey during the two years leading up to the publication of Moll Flanders in January 1722.

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This article examines the increasing inclusion of character reports and letters to judges concerning defendants' pasts in trial briefs for property offenders tried by the Western Australian Supreme Court between 1921 and 1951. The life histories presented in these materials offer rich sources for analysing how theft fit into the dynamics of family, employment and social relationships in the early twentieth century. This illuminates an area of criminal justice history little studied in Australian scholarship, which has typically examined property crime in the nineteenth century, particularly the convict period. The production of such documents also points to important changes in the criminal justice process, including the rise of the guilty plea and individualised sentencing, and a shift in focus from the victim and crime to the defendant and criminality. Understanding these production contexts is important to evaluating the motivations behind the narratives presented and what they reveal about how the 'thief', as an identity or persona, was understood and constructed during this period.

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law&history

Arizona's 1864 abortion ban was mostly a result of power struggles, historians say

A man enters the Arizona Supreme Court building, Wednesday, April 10, 2024, in Phoenix.

Attempts to gain power mostly fueled Arizona’s near-total abortion ban in 1864, as male physicians sought to dominate health care over midwives and anti-abortion advocates felt threatened by immigrants, historians said.

The Civil War-era law — which the state Supreme Court this week ruled was enforceable — was enacted at a time when women did not have the right to vote and before Arizona, then a territory, became a state.

Back then, midwives predominantly performed abortions, using herbs or metal instruments, which caused resentment among male physicians, said Karissa Haugeberg, who teaches history at Tulane University in Louisiana.

“Physicians marked midwives as competitors,” Haugeberg said. So they began campaigning to be the authorities on reproductive rights and health care.

In 1847, a small group of physicians formed the American Medical Association, largely to quash competition from midwives and other nonlicensed providers while boosting their standing as a trustworthy and well-regulated guild, said Christopher Griffin, the director of empirical and policy research at the University of Arizona.

Haugeberg said, “A lot of this was this, like, behind-the-scenes battle of physicians trying to corner the market on obstetrical care and put the decision-making power of abortion in their hands.”

At the same time, rising birthrates among an influx of Catholic immigrants, coupled with dramatically falling birthrates among American-born women, sparked “replacement theory” concerns.

“There was a huge fear, a very xenophobic fear,” Haugeberg said. “Part of it was truly to control the fertility of American-born women.”

Some abortion restrictions were already in place at the time Arizona's passed, said Jill Wieber Lens, a University of Arkansas law professor who studies reproductive rights.

Before the state's near-total ban, abortions were illegal there only after women started to feel fetal movement, which Lens said could begin between 16 and 21 weeks' gestation.

But the AMA and other powerful anti-abortion advocates began a crusade against abortion in the late 1850s. And within a decade, a national movement to restrict it gained momentum.

“You can start to see the beginnings of what we now call the right-to-life movement,” Griffin said.

The Arizona law in 1864 made abortion before the detection of fetal movement a felony, punishable by two to five years in prison for anyone who performed an abortion or helped a woman obtain one, except to save the woman’s life.

A wave of similar bans swept the country. By the end of the 19th century, Haugeberg said, every state and territory had criminalized abortion.

Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said, “These laws all passed at the behest of the AMA, which wanted more power and discretion.”

“And that’s what these laws gave them," she said.

The AMA said its stance on abortion has “evolved substantially since its early days in the 1800s.” In the last 50 years, it said, it has been an “advocate in defending the practice of medicine,” and it said it believes the early termination of a pregnancy is a medical matter between a patient and a physician.

And while the ban gave physicians more power in the 1860s, today’s national abortion restrictions leave doctors uncertain about when they can render care without being prosecuted, Ziegler said.

The Arizona Supreme Court said Tuesday it would put its decision on hold for 14 days so a lower court can consider “additional constitutional challenges.” Assuming the 1864 policy once again becomes state law, Arizona would be the latest state to effectively ban abortion care.

“It’s really stunning to uphold a law that at its very heart is so gendered,” Haugeberg said. “It seems to ignore all of the movement we’ve made for equality.”

In the 1860s, birth control and pregnancy tests did not exist, and what would today be considered an early-term abortion was a somewhat common practice. Doctors had a limited understanding of reproductive health, and technology lagged, historical experts said.

It was not for another 60 years that researchers would begin testing for pregnancy by injecting women’s urine into young rats to identify hormone reactions.

“That was the best science we had,” Lens said. “People today can’t even imagine it.”

Melissa Chan is a reporter for NBC News Digital with a focus on veterans’ issues, mental health in the military and gun violence.

Arizona's top court revives 19th century abortion ban

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Arizona's Supreme Court revives a law dating to 1864 that bans abortion in virtual all instances

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Former U.S. President Trump attends a hearing on a criminal case linked to a hush money payment, in New York City

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Guest Essay

I Hope to Repeal an Arcane Law That Could Be Misused to Ban Abortion Nationwide

A photo illustration shows a pill against a white background with a red circle hovering over it.

By Tina Smith

Ms. Smith is a Democratic senator from Minnesota and a former Planned Parenthood executive.

A long discredited, arcane 150-year-old law is back in the news in 2024, and that should terrify anyone who supports reproductive freedom. Last week at the Supreme Court, the Comstock Act of 1873 was referenced on three separate occasions during oral arguments in a case dealing with access to mifepristone, one of two drugs typically used in medication abortions.

Anti-abortion activists like to bring up the Comstock Act because one of its clauses prohibits sending through the mail “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” that could possibly lead to an abortion. Even if the Supreme Court doesn’t take the bait, a newly re-elected President Trump could order his Department of Justice to start interpreting that line to mean that it is illegal to mail mifepristone — a safe, effective, Food and Drug Administration-approved drug — to doctors and pharmacies, as well as to patients directly. The same could go for medical supplies that are used in performing surgical abortions. That could effectively make abortion impossible to access even in places like Minnesota, which has affirmatively protected a woman’s right to choose by passing reproductive freedom laws.

In response, I’m prepared to fight back — including by introducing legislation to take away the Comstock Act as a tool to limit reproductive freedom.

Let me take a step back and explain how ridiculous it is that we’re even talking about this legislative relic today. The Comstock Act hasn’t been broadly enforced since the 1930s. The Biden administration considers it utterly irrelevant. Many legal experts consider it dead letter law. And once you know its back story, it becomes clear why no one has paid much attention to it in nearly a century.

Back in the 1860s, a former Civil War soldier from rural Connecticut named Anthony Comstock moved to New York City for work. He was shocked and appalled by what he found. Advertisements for contraception! Open discussions of sexual health! It all struck Comstock as terribly lewd and anti-Christian.

So he made it his mission to clean up society, creating the loftily named New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and gathering evidence for police raids on places that distributed material he thought was obscene or promoted indecent living. In the early 1870s he took his crusade to Washington, lobbying for federal legislation that would empower the post office to search for and seize anything in the mail that met Comstock’s criteria for being “obscene,” “lewd” or just plain “filthy.” Morality, as determined by Comstock, would be the law of the land, and Comstock himself would be its enforcer, appointed by Congress as a special agent of the post office.

In a fit of Victorian puritanism, Congress passed the Comstock Act into law. But it quickly became apparent that Comstock’s criteria were unworkably vague. In its broad wording, the law not only made it illegal to send pornography through the mail, it also outlawed the sending of medical textbooks for their depictions of the human body, personal love letters that hinted at physical as well as romantic relationships, and even news stories.

The whole thing was very silly and impracticable, and that’s why the Comstock Act was relegated to the dustbin of history.

But conservative activists recently revived it from obscurity as part of their playbook for a potential second Trump term: The 887-page plan nicknamed Project 2025 being promoted by groups like the Heritage Foundation explicitly calls for a newly elected second-term President Trump to use this zombie law to severely ratchet back abortion access in America without congressional action.

Legislation to repeal Comstock could take many forms, and we need to do it the right way. That’s why I’ve begun reaching out to my colleagues in the House of Representatives and the Senate to build support and see what legislation to repeal the Comstock Act might look like. Anti-abortion extremists will continue to exploit any avenue they can find to get the national ban they champion, and I want to make sure my bill shuts down every one of those avenues. Once the Supreme Court has had its say (and many legal analysts speculate that the mifepristone case heard last week should be thrown out on procedural grounds, and may well be), I’ll be ready to have mine.

Here’s the bottom line: We can’t let anyone — not the Supreme Court, not Donald Trump and certainly not a random busybody from the 19th century — take away Americans’ right to access medication abortion. We must protect the ability of doctors, pharmacies and patients to receive in the mail the supplies they need to exercise their right to reproductive care.

As the only former Planned Parenthood executive serving in the Senate, I feel I have a special responsibility to protect not just abortion rights but also abortion access.

Very few Republicans will admit to wanting to see a total, no-exceptions ban on abortion in all 50 states, but the Comstock Act could allow them to achieve that in effect, if not in so many words.

Americans deserve better. The Constitution demands better. And common sense dictates that we stop this outrageous backdoor ploy to eliminate abortion access in its tracks.

Tina Smith is a Democratic senator from Minnesota and a former Planned Parenthood executive.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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COMMENTS

The Law, by Frederic Bastiat
The Law, first published as a pamphlet in June, 1850, is already more than a hundred years old. And because its truths are eternal, it will still be read when another century has passed. Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist, statesman, and author. ... And before you finish reading this essay, amuse yourself by giving laws to some ...
PDF The Law
essay, "The Law." First published in 1850 by the great French economist and journalist, it is as clear a state-ment as has ever been made of the original American ideal of government, as proclaimed in the Declaration of Inde-pendence, that the main purpose of any government is the protection of the lives, liberties, and property of its ...
The Law (Bastiat book)
The Law (French: La Loi) is an 1850 book by Frédéric Bastiat.It was written at Mugron two years after the third French Revolution and a few months before his death of tuberculosis at age 49. The essay was influenced by John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and in turn influenced Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. It is the work for which Bastiat is most famous, followed by the ...
Frédéric Bastiat
The Law, a work written by the French political philosopher and economist Frederic Bastiat in 1850, investigates what happens in a society when the law becomes a weapon used by those in power to control and enslave the population.. What is the Purpose of Law? Laws should be set to prevent certain actions which harm individuals and their property. It should not be used to compel or force people ...
Frédéric Bastiat
The Law (1850) Bastiat's most famous work is The Law, originally published as a pamphlet in 1850. It defines a just system of laws and then demonstrates how such law facilitates a free society. In The ... In his 1850 essay "Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas" ...
The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
Summary. The Law is an extended essay by French philosopher Frederic Bastiat on what it means to implement "rule of law" — on what "the law" in this context means, what its intent should be, and how it should be determined. It's one of the foundational texts of the libertarian, classical liberal philosophy, cited as a key influence by the likes of Milton Friedman and the Federalist ...
Essays on Political Economy/The Law
Frédéric Bastiat 415814 Essays on Political Economy — The Law 1850 Patrick James Stirling ... Before you finish reading this essay, amuse yourself with giving laws to some wild people in America or in Africa. Establish these roving men in fixed dwellings; teach them to keep flocks. …
The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
Bastiat, Frédéric, 1801-1850: Uniform Title: La loi. English Title: The Law Credits: Produced by David Widger from page scans generously provided by the Google Books Project, with a Creative Commons license granted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama Language: English: LoC Class: K: Law in general, Comparative and uniform law ...
The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
More specifically, the problem of law that itself violates law is an insurmountable conundrum of all statist philosophies. The problem has never been discussed so profoundly and passionately as in this essay by Frederic Bastiat from 1850. The essay might have been written today. It applies in ever way to our own time, which is precisely why so ...
The Law
More specifically, the problem of law that itself violates law is an insurmountable conundrum of all statist philosophies.The problem has never been discussed so profoundly and passionately as in this essay by Frederic Bastiat from 1850. The essay might have been written today.
The Law Paperback
The Law. Paperback - January 1, 1850. The Law was originally published as a pamphlet in 1850 by Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850). Bastiat wrote most of his work in the few years before and after the French Revolution of 1848. The Law is considered a classic and his ideas are still relevant today. The essay was published in French in 1850.
The Law, An essay From 1850 Pt. 1
The Law. An essay written by Fredrick Bastiat in 1850. with my interest in history thought it wo... What is Liberty? when is the law perverted to legal Plunder.
The Compromise of 1850
6. In contrast to the provisions of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850. applied to territory within the Mexican Cession. created a new line marking the border between slave and free states at 54°40′. allowed for the possible creation of both slave and free states. did not receive any southern support.
The Law, an essay from 1850 Pt, 2
The Law. An essay written by Fredrick Bastiat in 1850. with my interest in history, thought it w... What is Liberty? when is the law perverted to legal Plunder.
The Compromise of 1850 (article)
Overview. The Compromise of 1850 acted as a temporary truce on the issue of slavery, primarily addressing the status of newly acquired territory after the Mexican-American War. Under the Compromise, California was admitted to the Union as a free state; the slave trade was outlawed in Washington, D.C., a strict new Fugitive Slave Act compelled ...
"Let it be placed among the abominations!": The Bill of Rights and the
The 1850 law with its harsher penalties and obvious violations of the Bill of Rights increased opposition to the rendition of fugitive slaves. This story - of fundamental liberties and the Fugitive Slave Laws - reminds us today, more than a century and a half after the end of slavery - of the importance of the Bill of Rights for all ...
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
Introduction. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, although in effect less than two decades, was one of the nation's most controversial federal laws. Designed to provide southern slaveholders with greater assistance in the return of runaway slaves, it angered northern whites and blacks, divided communities, and yet still failed to assuage ...
"Within the Forms of Law": Politics and Activism, 1850s and Today
The 1850 law generated such broad outrage—opposition "by general consent"—because it was a site of political convergence. For those Northerners who detested slavery, the new fugitive slave law brought slavery home, all but negating efforts to abolish slavery in the North. ... Our collected volume of essays, Demand the Impossible: Essays ...
English Criminal Justice Administration, 1650-1850: A Historiographic Essay
The essay occasionally strays from its chronological borders, as several of the publications surveyed address developments before 1650 or after 1850. 12 12. See Innes, Joanna and Styles, John, ... 1750-1850," Law and History Review 23 (2005): 133 -71CrossRef Google Scholar and ...
Beloved: Historical Context Essay: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
Historical Context Essay: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Beloved was published in 1987, but the context more important for understanding the novel is the historical period in which it takes place, between 1855 and 1873. This period encompasses the American Civil War (1861-1865), which means that the novel takes place both before and after ...
A Law for the People? English Courts and the Law, 1750-1850
Bruce P. Smith, 'English Criminal Justice Administration, 1650-1850: A Historiographic Essay', Law and History Review, 25.03 (2007), p. 608. By igniting a fervour to discover more about the history of England's criminal law, Hay opened the floodgate to a sea of debate and expanded discussion as to whether or not the ruling class and the ...
ArtIII.S1.3 Marbury v. Madison and Judicial Review
Jump to essay-18 See ArtIII.S1.6.4 State Court Jurisdiction to Enforce Federal Law. Jump to essay-19 See, e.g., New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964) (U.S. Supreme Court case involving a First Amendment challenge to a state law libel claim that was originally litigated in the Alabama courts); Lawrence v.
Arizona's 1864 abortion ban was mostly a result of power struggles
Assuming the 1864 policy once again becomes state law, Arizona would be the latest state to effectively ban abortion care. "It's really stunning to uphold a law that at its very heart is so ...
The History Behind Arizona's 160-Year-Old Abortion Ban
The state's Supreme Court ruled that the 1864 law is enforceable today. Here is what led to its enactment. By Pam Belluck Pam Belluck has covered reproductive health for more than a decade. The ...
PDF by Frederic Bastiat
world where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the protection of every person's liberty and property. As a conse-quence of this, there appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests on a firmer foundation." Writing in 1850, Bastiat noted two areas where the United States fell short:
PDF Online Library of Liberty: The Law
firmer foundation." Writing in 1850, Bastiat noted two areas where the United States fell short: "Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property." If Bastiat were alive today, he would be disappointed with our failure to keep the law within its proper domain.
In Photos: What Solar Eclipse-Gazing Has Looked Like Through History
Millions of people on Monday will continue the tradition of experiencing and capturing solar eclipses, a pursuit that has spawned a lot of unusual gear.
Opinion
The REPO Act carries additional risks. The very act of seizing Russian assets would pose dangers to the U.S. economy, because other countries, not just Russia, would view it as an act of brigandage.
Arizona's top court revives 19th century abortion ban
Arizona's top court on Tuesday revived a ban on nearly all abortions under a law from 1864, a half century before statehood and women's suffrage, further restricting reproductive rights in a state ...
Opinion
A long discredited, arcane 150-year-old law is back in the news in 2024, and that should terrify anyone who supports reproductive freedom. Last week at the Supreme Court, the Comstock Act of 1873 ...