of their authority, to shake off the grip of all responsibility or censure. To the contrary, those who are subject to power, whatever may be its form or name, are concerned to make themselves safe from all arbitrariness so that no one might make use of their persons without rule or measure.
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They are equally concerned to become free and to remain so with respect to everything that does not infringe upon the right and security of another. From those two opposing tendencies results a conflict that must have as its ultimate end either the establishment of despotism, no matter what might be the form of government, or the destruction of all arbitrary power. There will be no rest among the people except when one of those outcomes has come to be so essential and inalterable that every hope of alteration or change has been extinguished in the heart of men.
There is no doubt that people will be free under any form of government if those who rule them, even if they are called kings and are perpetual, are truly powerless to make use of the person of the citizen at their whim and without subjection to any rule; and republican forms will be useless, even if the head of the nation is called president and serves for a fixed time, if the fate of the citizen depends on his omnipotent will.
The wise Montesquieu, who analyzed political powers and, making clear their driving and conserving principles placed the first stone of the edifice consecrated to civil liberty, does not hesitate to assert that, although the form of government has some influence on civil liberty’s existence, it is not its true and essential component. In the judgment of this great man, the liberty of the citizen exists uniquely and exclusively in individual security and in the stillness, repose, and tranquility that the conviction of its existence produces in each of the members. In effect, all these words contain everything that a peaceful man, free of ambition, can desire and ask of society, and when one acts in good faith and with the spirit of doing the right thing, it is easy and simple enough to grant such assurances.
On what, then, are contingent the continuous and bitter complaints that are heard with such frequency against the agents of the power? Why are the terms “indifference,” “indolence,” “arbitrariness,” “despotism,” and “tyranny” applied with such frequency to the acts that emanate from the depositaries of the authority? How is it that they are accused by the very ones who have an extremely lively interest in the repression of crimes that are being committed or can be committed against the individual and public security? To resolve these questions with certainty, it is necessary to assert that all the depositaries of the authority, no matter what the political power may be, have the strictest obligation to prevent
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unjust aggressions among individuals and themselves refrain from committing them. Whenever the citizen suffers or endures any external violence without having infringed any law, or, what is the same, is innocent, the government must be responsible and know to make public amends, for, as nothing more than an agent of the nation, established precisely with the sole and unique objective of ensuring the exercise of public and private rights, to fail by aggression or omission in such duties, as sacred as they are important, is to commit a crime of lèse-nation. Thus it is when highwaymen and murderers have the support of the authority or, at the least, guilty tolerance; when libelers damage the reputation of the honorable citizen with impunity and lack the propriety due to public morality, feeding on and encouraging malicious defamation through publication of private defects, true or supposed, without the authority exercising any restraining methods whatsoever; finally, when the abuse with impunity of men who have no other crime than their birth or the opinions they profess is permitted or tolerated, it is evident that individual security does not exist and that a government that is indifferent to or colludes with such attackers is, at best, a useless burden for the nation that created it and onerous for the people that maintain it, without serving them at all. In effect, from the moment one or several members of society have just and well-founded reasons to fear that they cannot count on the protection of the government, and, so as not to provide that protection, the government shields itself with a lack of energy or with the ridiculous excuse that public opinion is against the persecuted ones and defying that opinion is imprudent, from this point, we repeat, individual security is at an end and the bases of authority are undermined.
This indolent inertia, or this partisan conduct, is not only destructive to those wretched who endure it, it is so for the persecutors themselves and, above all, the government. Nor will those who today attack the rights of others with impunity, riding roughshod over the reputation and persons of their opponents based on the fact that the authority, from complicity or fear that these opponents have instilled in it, cannot or will not curb their excesses, should their fortune be adverse tomorrow and should their misfortune make them a target of persecution, be able to expect, from the agents of power, that they will enjoy security and stability. For the same reasons that it has been a cold spectator to the crimes committed by a faction, it will simultaneously be a cold spectator to all crimes of other factions; and in its shadow the reign of
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force and anarchy will be forming, which sooner or later will topple the social edifice, enmeshing in its ruins the depositaries of the authority. France, in its revolution, provides us with conclusive evidence of this truth. From the installation of the Estates General, the spirit of persecution broke loose, which did not end even with the Restoration. In that nation, the destruction of a previously victorious party firmly dragged the government along with it. The constitutionalists banned the royalists; the republicans, the constitutionalists; the Girondists were banned by the committees of public health and public safety; those who made up these bodies went in succession to the guillotine by the orders of Danton and Robespierre. These famous cannibals fell at the stroke of the Thermadorians, and in all these convulsions France was flooded with blood, anarchy devastated everything, and the government, which did not know or did not want to make effective the guarantees protective of personal security, was always the victim of the rush of the factions.
Until now these have been and will always be the deplorable outcomes of the criminal indifference and abandonment with which those who are charged with curbing attacks on individual security view them. A government that deserves that name should shake off fear and not permit itself to be banished; it must remain firm and impassive among the factions. To abandon the principles of justice in order to seek the support of the dominant faction is to be lost, is to commit a crime that is more than atrocious, ineffective, and not conducive to the end it is endeavoring to attain. In effect, when the government does not think about governing, but rather about existing through criminal tolerance, it unfailingly reconciles the hatred of those who suffer with the scorn of those who persecute. The first cannot avoid becoming exceedingly irritated, especially on seeing that they are sacrificed to the existence of an authority that they created to protect their security. The second, inwardly convinced that they owe toleration only to the real or apparent strength of their faction and that tomorrow the same toleration will be owed by another, which at the very moment it replaces them, oppresses them, look with disdainful scorn on a power so debased that it loses the value of a just severity without escaping the odiousness of criminal toleration. Unhappy people entrusted to such a government! Public interests will be meanly sacrificed to the interests of the agents of the power, peaceful citizens will not have a moment of tranquility or rest, becoming obliged to seek in themselves and by preventive measures
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owing to their individual strengths, the security that cannot or will not be accorded to them by an authority that does not think about them except to deliver them defenseless to the voracity of their enemies. In vain will they invoke the principles of justice, the natural feelings of compassion for them and for their families, or the just compensation owed for their services. No other recourse remains to them but to endure their suffering and redouble their efforts to place at the proper time the sacred deposit of public liberties in more faithful hands and to entrust the reins of government to expert persons of known probity.
The people have another, much greater, woe to fear from governments, and it is that when these governments, emerging from their indifference, enter into such activity that they themselves commit the crimes they should prevent; to clarify, transforming themselves from protectors to aggressors, they attack individual security