What other course could it pursue? Can it
prohibit a legally established commercial association? Can it
oblige neighbors to destroy each other? Can it forbid them to
reduce their expenses? Can it establish a maximum? If power
should do any one of these things, it would overturn the
established order. Power, therefore, can take no initiative: it
is instituted to defend and protect monopoly and competition at
once, within the limitations of patents, licenses, land taxes,
and other bonds which it has placed upon property. Apart from
these limitations power has no sort of right to act in the name
of society. The social right is not defined; moreover, it would
be a denial of monopoly and competition. How, then, could power
take up the defence of that which the law did not foresee or
define, of that which is the opposite of the rights recognized by
the legislator?
Consequently, when the miner, whom we must consider in the events
of Rive-de-Gier as the real representative of society against the
mine- owners, saw fit to resist the scheme of the monopolists by
defending his wages and opposing combination to combination,
power shot the miner down.
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