unjust than that which besets an accidental quality that has no relation to the crime and is enough nonetheless to fulminate atrocious punishment with neither conviction nor any process against an industrious, honorable multitude, whose persecution is more harmful to the nation than to the ones proscribed.
By this the people are deceived, the most absurd calumnies breaking loose, but repeated by a thousand filthy and hired mouths. Blackening the purest reputation, they transform innocence and merit into guilt, for the immorality of the factions cannot pardon them; fantastic dangers are concocted and conspiracies revealed. In the workshop of the faction are created the instruments of death, and in the darkness of their dens are woven the cords in which one wishes to seize virtue. The victims pile up, they are denied all legal resources, they are deprived of all mercy, and the cruelty of their persecutors feeds their torment. Thus
[print edition page 96]
they intend to intimidate all those who are good. Madmen! They do not know that the human heart, raised by virtue, becomes enthusiastic in danger and is triumphant on the scaffold, that the majority of a nation can be calmed by flattery but never subdued by violence.
Fear is always cruel, and tyrants, always trembling from their injustices, stupidly believe they are diminishing their danger. Crowding tortures together, they wish to dominate, not over free men, who make them tremble, but rather over the cold tomb of a nation, so much do they desire its silence and inertia. But the exact opposite happens, because if the clemency and moderation of Caesar did not shield him from the dagger of Brutus, how could Caligula hope that his atrocities were more powerful to save him? To attack guarantees is to call to arms and to incite the indignation of the most gentle citizen; it is the same as saying to the nation, defend yourself from my aggressions; and who would dare say it to whom? A faction, a handful of miserable people, to the powerful and august gathering of millions of citizens who, led by the constitution and the laws, go forward majestically to their happiness, and who will trample those destructive insects who are trying ridiculously to frighten it.
Because a faction never can be made up of illustrious and distinguished men, the sensible, the property owners, never enlist under the tattered banner of demagoguery or band together against the common happiness of which their own is a part, and here we have the third characteristic of the factions. Vagrants who have not dedicated themselves to any industry; those who, fleeing from work and disdaining frugality, have not known how to acquire or preserve an honest fortune; those who have no other wealth than a mind capable of adapting itself to all the whims of the powerful; those who have no other resource than employment, wages of their infamy; those who, without any merit whatsoever, wish to be prominent and stand out; those who, consumed by envy, try to knock down and punish virtue; all of these seek in a faction the support and protection they cannot find in justice and order; the yearning to supplant and substitute themselves in all positions stirs them up; they can only and wish only to live from the substance of the nation. To achieve such patriotic ends, it is necessary to destroy the established system, turn it all upside down, stir up discord, and foment revolutions, whose result might be to leave them masters of the ungodly spoils of the patria.
[print edition page 97]
Those who have produced, through their talents and probity, a merit acknowledged by the public; those who, dedicated to agriculture, the arts, business, have acquired a precious independence; those who truly make up the nation (for a famous author called the rest, with reason, tenants of the state); those who carry out public duties and actually sustain the government with part of their fortunes, acquired by means of zeal, risk, and frugality; those whose wealth cannot grow or be maintained except in the tranquility and security of public order; those, finally, who are the nerve, the hope, and the only power of the republic, will never be agitators, they will never want changes, always hazardous, they will never foster anything but the rule of the laws under whose protection they thrive and progress. The sources, the communication of public abundance that is in their hands, are blocked, are interrupted by disturbances; confidence disappears, and with it all the resources; burdens are increased and products are weakened. Everything redounds against the property owner, while the idlers view the ruin with the coolness of those who lose nothing, or with the complacency of those who see advancement in it.
For that reason, in times of danger, the patria always turns its eyes toward the property owners, who are those with effective means to save it, and it never counts on the egotistical vagrants who will sell themselves to whomever will pay them the most, and who bring their patria and all their duties into their personal interest. The property holders are one and the same with the patria, and thus in the crisis that it suffers they silence resentments, abandon personal aspirations, and emulation consists in looking at who will make the greatest sacrifices for the general happiness. This is patriotism, this the character of the truly free, this the public spirit that must always be generalized among us. Thus, one has seen at various times in England that the Tories and Whigs have alternately ceded their aims and their positions to their rivals when the patria has required it, and it would be for the patria a horrible crime to seize, out of spite, the ministerial seat because of an obstinacy as ridiculous as it is fierce and foolish. The laws in representative governments have prudently and justly anticipated that the destiny of the nation be entrusted only to property owners, whose progress is so intimately tied to it that the speculations of individual interests happily coincide with the general interest; the lack of these laws will frequently compromise us.
Finally, omitting other less important indicators, which can be reduced
[print edition page 98]
to those already expressed, the last is the impudence of violating all forms of legal equality. Neither the right and property of the professions, very effectively supported with clear reasons by Bentham, nor innocence and virtue will be free from violent plundering if persons have not bowed their heads to receive the seal of the horrible mysteries of the faction. Outstanding merit, the most distinguished service, is excluded inexorably from every position, if persons lack the shameful mark; but with it is obtained security to violate the most sacred laws; the impunity of the most atrocious crimes is a consequence of the installation, and, under this protection, the constitution, the public faith, whatever is respectable and holy is abused, not only without fear of punishment but instead certain of reward. The important jobs, the positions of trust, the revenues are concentrated in the hands of the agitators. The press is in their pay and at their service; anarchic writings are financed, bought, lavished profusely with public wealth; those who courageously support social rights are tenaciously pursued. In this way, they want to keep the nation chained in order to devour it in peace.
If factions are always harmful, they are much more so in a people who, just having emerged from slavery and devastated by it, need to see as evident the advantages of the new government in order to become enthusiastic about it and love it sincerely; but if instead of the magnificent promises that were made to them, they see only discord, injustices, maltreatment, disrepute (in a very great way we have fallen compared with all nations), burdens, and misery, results inseparable from the factions, it follows that a sense of emptiness and despair is engendered in spirits, which scorns a system that the unwise common man regards as the source of woes and which gives rise to the natural desire to change it, intending to improve it. So broken laws are viewed with disdain, the authorities, whose prestige consists entirely in observing them, become suspect and distrusted in their handling of things, obedience is undermined, impunity encourages insubordination, and as it progresses, there is not yet energy or resolve that might contain it. The contagion progresses rapidly, and the government, attacked on all sides, succumbs or, what is the same, makes concessions to the troublemakers, and the nation terrifyingly plunges into anarchy.
If the Mexican nation has an enemy that watches it, this is the moment that it awaited to clinch its chains and shackle it, perhaps forever, to its bloody cart. The people, plagued and aggravated by the greatest of
[print edition page 99]
misfortunes, which is anarchy, prefer to be victims of one despot and not of thousands; they prefer to fear one who can never do them as much harm as a swarm of demagogues who humiliate and destroy them in a thousand ways. Although one exhorts them then to take up arms and repel the invader, they will respond indignantly: “Execrable