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Updated: June 27, 2025
The law wishes all property, that has been legitimately acquired, to be kept inviolate without regard to value, and without respect for persons. The charter demands, it is true, for the exercise of certain political rights, certain conditions of fortune and capacity; but all publicists know that the legislator's intention was not to establish a privilege, but to take security.
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.
His first commission! What an event in the artist's life! A surgeon's first fee, a lawyer's first retainer, a legislator's first speech, a singer's first appearance behind the foot-lights, an author's first book, are not any of them more full of interest to the aspirant for fame than the artist's first commission.
He admits, however, that the religious sanction and the additional sanction of 'benevolence' have the advantage of not requiring that the offender should be found out. But in any case, the 'natural' and religious sanctions are beyond the legislator's power.
It is this submerged idealism which alone, in an age that should have finally learned how to operate in nature and how to conceive her processes, could still win for religion a philosopher's attention or a legislator's mercy. As the Vedas offer a glimpse into the antecedents of Greek mythology, so Hebrew studies open up vistas into the antecedents of Christian dogma.
And so we arrive at the end of the Socialist's dream of "the socialization of the means of production and exchange," of the Positivist's dream of moralizing the capitalist, and of the ethical professor's, legislator's, educator's dream of putting commandments and codes and lessons and examination marks on a man as harness is put on a horse, ermine on a judge, pipeclay on a soldier, or a wig on an actor, and pretending that his nature has been changed.
But to revive it at Rome would have demanded artificial measures, which, attacking as they must have done the monopolies possessed by the Equites, would have defeated the legislator's immediate object and probably proved impracticable, while such a revival would also have accentuated the centralisation, which might be useful to the politician but was deplored by the social reformer.
The communism of Plato, for example, applied only to the "guardians" and soldiers, and not to the productive class on whom they depended; and so completely was he pre-occupied with the former to the exclusion of the latter, that he dismisses in a single sentence, as unworthy the legislator's detailed attention, the whole apparatus of labour and exchange.
The notion that Yorkshire and Middlesex have rights apart from those of their inhabitants, or that Liverpool and Exeter are the proper objects of the legislator's care, in contradistinction the population of those places, is a curious specimen of delusion produced by words.
It has been attempted to place this in an eclectic way on our law books, but this proposition remains a dead letter and is not applied in Italy, because a stroke of legislator's pen is not enough to change the fate of an entire nation. These practical and efficient measures would be taken in the case of lesser criminals.
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