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The Summary Cause for the
Stability or Downfall of Human Societies

CHAPTER 4

Continuation: the first political criterion applied to the two fundamental laws governing civil society:
the law governing ownership and
the law governing marriage

21. The examples given above belong to an era when the constitutions of nations had already been written (at least in part, for they were never entirely written), and to the outstanding period of political societies when legislators appeared.

22. But we need to go further back in time, to a period of darkness which, it would seem, lacked splendour. This moment preceded the outstanding period, and is the time when nations did what the legislators afterwards said: What had to be done was first shown in act and later turned into law. It is this period, not that of the legislators, which marks social origins; it is the period of the founders, when the rule we have formulated is not a theory in the minds of thinkers, but an inevitable necessity confronting those who elaborate and lay the foundations of communal living, that is, of political societies.

23. We need to study this first period carefully. If we go back in imagination to the primitive state of human affairs, we easily see how nature suggests to those who wished to associate and preserve their association that they `concentrate on matters involving the existence of their association, and neglect its accidental refinement’.

To illustrate this, I will give only two examples. They are drawn from the two great laws which, as necessary conditions of human community, had first to be present in the foundations of communal living,(11) at least from the time it began to extend. The two laws are those governing ownership and marriages.

24. I. Godwin, following Morelly and others(12) who took the new theory of human rights to its ultimate consequences, proposed a system of absolute equality, even in the case of possessions. The Sansimonians themselves recently came to the same conclusion. This equality is, at first sight, surprising and seductive:

25. Such imaginary happiness enchants, and finds no obstacle in our phantasy where it is completely simple and exists entirely in isolation. Trouble arises as soon as we consider it in practice, where it is necessarily surrounded by other heterogeneous objects and many circumstances, all demanding their place. This kind of happiness, considered in the midst of all these factual circumstances, becomes an impossible chimera. I need indicate only one of these circumstances and facts present in nature which render inexecutable the vague design to exclude private ownership. The fact is the natural law according to which every population grows. The human race increases naturally by geometrical progression, whereas subsistences, the produce of the earth, can increase only by arithmetical progression. However, even this progression cannot continue, as that of population does. A point must be reached, after which the earth no longer increases its produce, although the human race`s faculty for multiplication never ends. The author of the Saggio sulla Popo-lazione(13) has, in my opinion, performed an excellent service by indicating a very obvious truth whose consequences, however, easily escape us.

26. He argues as follows:

27. We see here the source of the universal laws which have always governed society: their sanction is absolute necessity. Let us imagine that they have been abolished, and private ownership removed. The rapidly increasing population soon outstrips the food supply, causing extreme need; bread is cruelly lacking. The most active, open spirits would turn their mind to some expedient to obviate so serious a condition. If they met together to discuss the matter, we might hear them say that during the time of abundance it did not matter if one individual worked less than another and all received equal portions. No one lacked anything. In the present situation, however, it was not a question of whether people were ready to give benevolently from what was useful to them, but from the necessities of life. If in these circumstances the land were not divided and the fruits of a person’s labour not protected, the whole society would suffer; the food of the weak and hard-working would be stolen and consumed by the strong, lazy and vicious.

28. The argument could be countered by appealing to an increase in land fertility and similar accidents; for example, some portions could eventually far exceed the owner’s need. Again this kind of division would initiate exclusive self-love and personal interest: the rich would refuse to give freely from their superfluity and would therefore lord it over the needy. The objection however has no force: the new institution would indeed contain an evil, but an inevitable evil which would be much less than that which left possession open to all. Others would add that although the capacity of the stomach limits the amount of food consumed, people are not likely to give away what they have over when hunger has been satisfied. Instead, they will exchange it for the labour of other members of society, for whom work would be better than death by hunger. In this way, laws of ownership would be established similar to those accepted by all civil peoples. Such laws would be seen not as a means devoid of problems but as the only bulwark against the great evils threatening society.

29. Without considering the law of ownership in its moral aspect, dire necessity would inevitably force it on us; either we accept it or devour one another. However, the human race has lived a long time with the benefit of this law, and we must not be surprised at our having eventually lost sight of its importance and meaning for the sake of theories of perfect equality which censure this law as forbidden and harmful — As Godwin and the Code de la Nature have done. Guided by our feelings, we note the present minor evils resulting from the law, but ignore the evils from which the law has protected us and to which the law itself has for so long made us insensitive.

30. It will be helpful to pause here for a moment.

I am not ignorant of the objections which can be and are brought against my argument. I appreciate the need to investigate any objections and show that, although attractive, they lack solidity.

31. The first objection denies the continuous growth of population that I have supposed: `Lack of food is the term posited by nature to the increase of population. If the population doubles in 25 years, the food supply must also double in the same period. In the second or third 25-year period the population will be static because the food supply cannot increase.’(17) Although the multiplication of the human race does indeed diminish with lack of food, extreme misery would be required to render life impossible and suppress the natural power and law governing the multiplication of the species; normal misery should in fact be sufficient to reduce and check that power. Indeed, where private ownership exists with its inequality of goods, many other causes hold people back from marriage. One such cause is the desire to accumulate wealth and exalt one’s family. But when a family has no hope of ever outstripping other families in possessions, and all families hold equal possessions, the income of a large family increases rather than diminishes because the father acquires more right to goods from the community for each of his children. In this case, multiplication is limited only when misery has become universal and extreme. In such a wretched state, the same thing must certainly happen to mankind at large as happens today among the poor classes: multiplication is prevented not so much by the low number of marriages but by hardship, famine, hereditary diseases, so common among the poor, and vice.

Unless we blind ourselves, we can easily see what a vile state the earth would be in, home to such wretched and squalid poverty! This would be the inescapable consequence if the law of private ownership, were to be abolished for a long time. It could indeed happen, but only during those brief moments of madness to which God sometimes abandons the nations he wishes to punish; it could never last. Before these extreme consequences came about, we would sense their full horror as they approached. And if any mad men obstinately supported such a bizarre theory they would become victims of the mob.

32. A second objection has been brought forward by Romagnosi, a respected publicist:(18)

I do not see how people can generally claim that nature has not provided for the balance between human life and the means of subsistence.(19)

Romagnosi’s `I do not see’ clearly has no force to change the laws of nature. We are dealing with a law of fact: nature cannot be called unwise if someone does not see reasons for the law. It is more reasonable to suppose nature endowed with hidden wisdom, deeper than we can plumb.

Let us grant that the imbalance between the means of subsistence and the reproductive force of the species gives the impression that the imbalance comes directly from nature, not from a disorder produced in nature by the human will. In this case, it is religion which explains this and many other mysteries found in the present state of things.

Thirdly, provident nature has been able to compensate for the disorder caused by guilty human beings. In the beginning, nature did not insert in us only a reproductive force (in which case reproduction would have been mechanical, or rather animal); it united reason and freedom to our reproductive force. These are the sublime faculties which have to rule all the other inferior faculties, with the consequent direction, moderation and limitation of our reproductive force.(20) Furthermore, the Creator of nature, by means of our spiritual regeneration through a new force called `grace’, rehabilitated our injured reason, as it were, so that it could exercise its sovereign rights, and made possible dominion over our lower faculties in our fallen state. This exercise, which had always been a natural duty, was not matched in our unregenerated state by the power to carry it out although this the only satisfactory solution to the great problem of the celibacy of the poor lies here.(21)

33. This provides the answer to Romagnosi’s second objection which follows from his first. He says:

The kingdom of God on earth consists in the universal observance of justice. Can this justice be exercised with greed, pride and inhumanity rather than with affability, fellowship and the practice of sincere civil sociality? It is precisely in the latter conditions that the kingdom of God and his justice is found. Under such conditions the increase of population can never become fearful or require excessive moral constraint.(22)

34. Romagnosi is appealing to Jesus Christ. We must therefore interpret carefully what Jesus Christ says (`Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you’) in accordance with the spirit of the God-Man and the whole of his teaching. Affability, fellowship, and true civil society are indeed conditions of the kingdom of God on the earth, but they are certainly not the only conditions demanded by the kingdom of God preached by Jesus Christ. They alone could not be a remedy for the natural law of reproduction, nor for the imbalance between population which increases in geometric progression, and the means of subsistence which increase in arithmetical progression, unless we wanted to posit a miracle, or supposed that human beings would abstain from excessive reproduction through affability, fellowship and love of sociality. Romagnosi however is not disposed to grant this kind of moderation. On the contrary, he says that the kingdom of God cannot require excessive moral constraint. We must note therefore that this teaching of Romagnosi (that the kingdom of God does not require the most difficult act of moral constraint) scarcely accords with Christ’s saying that `men of violence take the kingdom of God by force’;(23) it has little in common with teaching of the greatest generosity which declares continence (something unheard of on earth!) to be sublime virtue and numbered among the counsels to be followed by those who wish to be perfect.

35. We fully agree that those who seek first the kingdom of God and his justice will certainly never lack what is necessary even in this life. But this is due not to any absence of highly difficult moral constraint, as Romagnosi evidently believes. The opposite is true: the just will apply the constraint to themselves, and will obtain the power to do so. This constraint will become incredibly easy for them and be compensated by interior delights of the spirit much more satisfying than those of the flesh. In short, the just will not practise Malthus’ moral restraint nor the legal restraint imposed arbitrarily by the strong on the weak,(24) but Christian celibacy, that is, a spontaneous continence, holy and blessed for all who practise it, more valuable than any treasure and far more delightful than every pleasure; a continence which transforms people into angels not by an extraordinary miracle — it occurs every day, everywhere and all the time in the Church of Jesus Christ — but nevertheless by a stupendous miracle, unbelievable to those who do not know the power of the grace of the Redeemer. They do not believe in this grace, although it is visible to them every day; they deride it because they neither can, nor wish to believe in it! [App., no. 1]

36. II. Let us now consider the law governing marriages, which, as we have said, is the second constitutive law of society.

History shows that the law of marriage is as old as human society, and that whenever a population wanted to rise to a state of community from the barbaric, errant state to which it had fallen, a necessary first step was to subject the union of the sexes to stable regulations, and in this way to institute true, inviolable marriages.

But while this is true, only a sound philosophy can reveal its intimate reason and absolute necessity. Today, there are some who fail to see this reason and necessity because, at such a distance from social beginnings, they no longer appreciate the supreme need which, as I have said, confronted the founders of communities, the legislators or, so to speak, the helmsmen.

37. If the law which stabilised and sanctified marital unions were not rooted in moral dictates, social necessity alone, it seems to me, would have given rise to it. This necessity is of many kinds: the necessity founded in the indivisible nature of love; the necessity according to which human beings wish to ensure that they see themselves and their own reflection mirrored in their children; the necessity that urges human beings to safeguard the life they themselves have given to their children. Some nations might break the sacred bonds which make marriage human and secure so that the will of imprudent people, desirous of some accidental advantage uppermost in their thoughts, might prevail. Such people could indeed be blind to everything that a law regulating marriage ought to contain, necessarily and indispensably, for the existence of a human, civil association. Very soon, the disorder afflicting family society (the foundation of civil society) and the confusion resulting from this disorder would make the members aware that the new measures had affected and removed one of the firmest foundations of human communal living. The evils they experienced would teach them once more to recognise the wisdom of those who first enacted and sanctioned the marital laws.

In the imaginary assembly we spoke about earlier, fathers of families would propose the absolute need to return to the ancient institution; the more prudent would add `that the certainty of seeing children supported by social benevolence detracts from the effort to make the land produce enough for the increasing population. Even if this certainty did not induce laziness, and all applied themselves intently to their work, the population could still increase infinitely more quickly than the increase in produce. It would be necessary therefore to apply some restraint to human reproduction, and the simplest, most natural would be, it seems, to oblige each father to acknowledge and feed his own children.

Such a law would inevitably act as a regulator and curtailer of the population, because no one would wish to bring unfortunate creatures into the world whom he would be unable to feed. But if anyone did so, it would be just for him to bear the evils of his inconsidered action, and the complaints of his starving children (if they were capable of complaining) would have to be borne solely by the improvident author of their wretched existence. Hence, generally speaking, anyone who loved work, would obtain the right to multiply his own kind, a right which would never be disturbed; the indolent and imprudent, in usurping such a right, would be punished by their own sloth.’

38. From all this we can rightly conclude that the great error of the inventors of the empty theories we have discussed is `to attribute to human institutions all the vices and calamities which upset society. — The facts however demonstrate that the evils caused by human institutions (and some of the evils are indeed real) must be seen as minor and superficial in comparison with those arising from the laws of limited nature and from human passions.’(25)

Notes

(11) This does not mean that there was a time when society did not exist. Family society existed at the beginning, but not civil society. The laws of ownership and of marriages however were also present in family society, and indeed were its foundation. But this is history. `Communal living' therefore is concerned with the pure theory of society.

(12) Prior to these, Campanella in Italy had proposed a similar concept in his political novel, La Città del Sole.

(13) Bk. 3, c. 1.

(14) The principal obstacles to the growth of population are two: 1. the absence of the means of subsistence in the poor classes; 2. the fear of sharing their patrimony in the rich classes. In Godwin's hypothesis both these obstacles would be removed.

(15) Out of the 32,342,400 acres of land in England, it is calculated that 25,632,000 are cultivated, leaving 7,710,400 uncultivated, that is, little more than a fifth of the total land. But a half of this uncultivated land is completely sterile, so that the uncultivated ground capable of production is about a tenth of the whole.

(16) Pasture is about a third more than the land under cultivation. Cultivated land and gardens cover 10,252,100 acres; pasture, 15,379,200 acres.

(17) This was indeed Mr. Godwin's objection: `There is in human society a principle by which the population is continuously maintained at the level of the means of subsistence.' Malthus replies, `I agree, and I know full well that the millions of excessive population I am speaking about are never static. But the whole question is reduced to knowing what principle holds the balance between population and the means of subsistence. Is it a hidden, vague cause, or a mysterious intervention from heaven that at certain times removes the fruitfulness of marriage? Surely, it is wretchedness, or the fear of wretchedness, the inevitable consequences of natural laws which although tempered, not aggravated by human institutions are not overcome by them.' Romagnosi, in his paper sulla crescente Popolazione, did not note this solid reply.

(18) Romagnosi is fully justified in opposing the opinion of those who would like to abolish charitable homes for illegitimate children under the pretext that such a measure would reduce illegitimate offspring. Even if this were true, it would never suffice to justify such action, cruel and contrary as it is to the Gospel. Romagnosi also opposes those who censure governments that help the poor. But here we must distinguish. Normally charity is a private matter; in my opinion a government may not take money from my pocket to distribute it to the poor. The situation is different, however, in the case of England where the laws themselves make the workers' condition burdensome. The government therefore must compensate with the poor tax which, considered as a form of governmental restitution, becomes a necessary remedy and a kind of satisfaction. Romagnosi after referring to the oppressive English laws affecting workers and dating from as long ago as Henry VII, says with great acumen: `Surely this condition of the English workers constitutes a real servitude in factories, exactly the same as that of the glebe? They were supported by a poor tax, just as the slave of the glebe, tied with the ox and horse to the soil, had to be maintained' (Del trattamento dei poveri della libertà commerciale, etc., Milan, 1829). Thirdly, Romagnosi opposed the enforced prohibition of marriage among the poor. I too have shown the injustice and unreasonableness of this in Discorso sul Celibato, reprinted many times.

Although I agree fully or partially with Romagnosi in all this, I must point out that these questions differ from the fundamental problem of the increase of population and the need for a radical solution. Romagnosi, confusing this question with the other three, arms himself with all that is repulsive in the first three when settled in a Malthusian way. The last question, for which alone we praise the merits of Saggio sulla Popolazione, suffers as a consequence.

(19) Sulla crescente Popolazione, Memoria di G. D. Romagnosi, Milan, 1830.

(20) Hence the following words of Romagnosi have no sense: `These gentlemen suppose...that the Supreme Ordainer and Ruler of nature has disposed things in such a way that creatures are born without provision for the means to preserve them during the possible course of their life.' These words would have some meaning if God had ordained that every human being should reproduce. And this does seem what Romagnosi intends. He goes on: `I say that a new-born baby can be suffocated according to the same right by which, with necessity as our excuse, we forbid a fellow human being to obey the natural and divine precept to reproduce another human being.' But these words must surely have a meaning other than their literal meaning, spoken as they are by a celibate!

(21) Cf. above, my Discorso sul Celibato, where I show how the spirit of the Church gently and caringly regulates and orders the question of celibacy to the advantage of human society.

(22) Sulla crescente Popolazione.

(23) Mt 11: [12].

(24) Among the strangest constraints imaginable for preventing the propagation of the species, nothing is more ridiculous than that proposed recently by Weinhold, doctor of philosophy, medicine and surgery, and professor at the university of Halle in Prussia. In a work entitled Dell'eccessa di popolazione nell'Europa, Halle, 1827, he suggests a physical instrument, a kind of castration to be carried out on all the poor by public decree and reinforced by an official seal to prevent every act of procreation. I do not know if it was a serious proposal or just a joke! But we are bound to descend to such folly, or more accurately, such depravity, once we desert the only social and human system, that is, the Catholic system.

(25) Malthus, Essai sur la Population, bk. 3, c. 1.

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