If, through an
error or oversight of the reason, liberty, blind by nature,
acquires a false and fatal habit, the reason itself will not be
slow to feel the effects; instead of true ideas, conforming to
the natural relations of things, it will retain only prejudices,
as much more difficult to root out of the intelligence
afterwards, as they have become dearer to the conscience through
age. In this state of things reason and liberty are impaired;
the first is disturbed in its development, the second restricted
in its scope, and man is led astray, becomes, that is, wicked and
unhappy at once.
Thus, when, in consequence of a contradictory perception and an
incomplete experience, reason had pronounced through the lips of
the economists that there was no regulating principle of value
and that the law of commerce was supply and demand, liberty
abandoned itself to the passion of ambition, egoism, and
gambling; commerce was thereafter but a wager subjected to
certain police regulations; misery developed from the sources of
wealth; socialism, itself a slave of routine, could only protest
against effects instead of rising against causes; and reason was
obliged, by the sight of so many evils, to recognize that it had
taken a wrong road.
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