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9	Discourse on the Nature of Factions *

The most perverse have the greatest power to stir up seditions and discords; peace and calm alone are conserved for the virtues.

— Tacitus

Liberal institutions bring with them differences of opinion, because with each person making use of the precious right to express an opinion freely, it would be impossible that all members of society would agree on how to view issues. Thus, with reason it has been said that this division and balance of opinions is the life of a republic, supports the vigilance of some authorities over others and of the people over all authorities; it examines the truth closely, and enlightenment is advanced, through which the legislator and government discover appropriate means to carry out the high aims of their institution, and the craftiness and tortuousness of arbitrariness, natural enemy of free thought, cannot be hidden.

But is this liberty indefinite, or are there bounds within which it must be confined? If there are, by what signs will we know when these bounds have been crossed or when the disputes degenerate into dangerous factions? What will the consequences be? Such are the points we propose to elucidate at a time in which abuse of words, anarchical doctrines, and political absurdities are growing into an intense force to lead the incautious astray and justify enormous crimes.

In an already constituted society, the conflict of opinions can never be about the truly essential foundations of society, that is to say, about the agreements and laws that secure individual guarantees. For all men feel deeply embedded in their being the need to preserve, by all possible

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means, their security, their liberty, their property, because they left the forests and formed societies only with this preeminent goal. The unanimity of this feeling is thus immutable, and dissent will be only the most offensive degradation or the most foolish ignorance. Thus, all opinion that openly or deceitfully attacks it is criminal by its nature.

Nor can there be differences over clearly constitutional laws, which are, according to Lanjuinais, “those which, created or agreed to by the representatives of the nation or by the nation itself, determine the nature, the extent, the limits of public powers, so that this code is truly the supreme law and has a special character of permanence that distinguishes it from ordinary laws.” The permanence that must be an essential characteristic of the constitution is contrary to discussion that tends to change it, for otherwise society would never have that firm and permanent repose indispensable for achieving its goals, and the continual fluctuation would end in destroying society and making it the prisoner of tyranny.

Let us note that not all the articles of a constitution are constitutional, but rather only those that sanction national independence, the form of government, the division, limitation, and sphere of public powers. Such sanctions are a sanctuary where no one should go except to worship the protector deity of societies. Even when a better worked out constitution can be imagined, the one that exists, established by the vote and respect of the nation, will always be preferable, and the difficulties of the change can never be counterbalanced by whatever advantages are imagined, for a new constitution has been written only on the ruins and ashes of the nation that dictates it; and as long as the guarantees are respected, as long as the laws are observed and the constitution gives security to some and energy to others, the people are happy, they will live in tranquility, and they will not remember the terrible right of resistance, whose use should be so rare, it is even more unusual for altering the constitution, and so that resistance more often has restoration as its object than change. The classes that actually make up the nation will never risk their fate and well-being to the setbacks of an unfortunate commutation. Such desires are from those who, without industry or love of work, pursued relentlessly by poverty and provoked by fierce ambition, base their hopes on the upheaval and ruin of the patria.

The very broad field of combat is in the methods of administration; in the management, investment, and good use of public revenues; in the

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application of political economy to the needs of the nation; in the rules and procedures of justice; in the plans for education and national instruction; in the great and various matters that the legislative body examines; . . . the political subjects that, in a free system, can be clarified by public writings cannot be enumerated; in them each one can and must deploy the talents and knowledge that nature and his work have afforded him, keeping what is most useful and refuting the errors of his opponents. The beneficial truths are deepened and refined in these disputes; and if one wishes to give them the name of parties, these are necessary and advantageous for the people, for even those that are incorrect are useful at least occasionally so that the truth can be recognized and triumph. A good government does not remain indifferent amidst violence, and it makes good use of the enlightenment that is spread, impartially chooses the better, and stimulates the discussion necessary for success.

But going beyond this well-defined territory, and when heightened and base passions are substituted for the calm and sincerity of discussion, inasmuch as they cannot openly and impudently attack those primary and essential aims, they seek detours and tunnels to undermine them; they are not content with reasons; they take hold of seduction, convert error, the absurd, to practice; they set out as their sole aim that the inventions and cunning means of injustice take root. Then the old resentments are unearthed, the bitterness of the struggle is inflamed, hatred explodes like a volcano, vomits slanders and calumnies, intellectual darkness grows, and they do not consider the nature of the methods they use to destroy and annihilate the opponent. Unfortunate nation that carries in its breast these frenzied sons who, cutting each other to pieces, break and crush the nation. These are the true parties or factions of whom the dignified Hume justly says,

As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honoured and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated; because the influence of faction is directly contrary to that of laws. Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection to each other. And what should render the founders of parties more odious is, the difficulty of extirpating these weeds, when once they have taken root in any state. They naturally propagate themselves

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for many centuries, and seldom end but by the total dissolution of that government in which they are sown. They are, besides, plants which grow most plentifully in the richest soil; and though absolute governments be not wholly free from them, it must be confessed that they rise more easily and propagate themselves faster in free governments, where they always infect the legislature itself, which alone could be able, by the steady application of rewards and punishments, to eradicate them.

In truth, if, in a free government, the factions come to grow and progress to that extreme, one can infer that its agents are either imbeciles or depraved, because every constituted society has in its authorities, in its laws and tribunals, means that are quite sufficient to stifle at their outset and root out the factions that disrupt the order. No excuse can vindicate a government that sees and acquiesces to a faction that increases greatly because the government acquiesced to it, for if it had not, the faction would have perished when it was first arising.

But to what must this willingness to oblige be attributed? What interest can the government have in pretending not to notice destructive factions? This is clear to anyone who knows that in free governments there must be a persistent conflict between them and their subjects. The power exercised by men, no matter how broad it might be, always brings with it an irresistible drive to extend itself more and more, becomes annoyed with the obstacles that the law puts up against it, and, like a torrent, constantly pushes and hollows out the dikes in which the general will keeps it contained, always watchful and ready to invade if there is no resistance. As it cannot openly and clearly trample on the laws, it avoids them, glosses them in accord with its intentions, varnishes its transgressions with lovely names, hypocritically takes as a motto what society most esteems, that is, its independence and tranquility, pretends dangers, feigns or exaggerates conspiracies, and uses the vague and insignificant name of circumstances (when it is not possible to have them because of injustice) as a veil to hide its lies and as a weapon to destroy all social benefits.

But the personal interest of each member of society, spurred on by the danger that threatens it, claims offenses on the part of the authority, demands observance of the laws, cries out against abuses, criticizes the conduct of those who govern, and, with the weapons of reason and

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justice, encircles its guarantees against the assaults of the power, calls the nation to its aid, and because of this valiant resistance they end up thwarted.

It also happens that in their weakness, those who govern never believe it possible to advance by the well-worn path of the laws; they suppose that their powers are not sufficient for emergencies, all beneficial measures are paralyzed in their trembling hands; they do not dare uphold legal methods with vigor and integrity, fearful of everything and everyone, and in vacillation and uncertainty regarding all and everything, those who govern lose the favorable opportunity, squander the best elements; the edifice is worn away, and everything dies under their slow and collapsed administration, those being the first who are submerged in nothingness, where they should always hide themselves.

In both cases, which are common among recently constituted peoples, in which the public spirit has neither progressed nor formed customs, the government, not finding in itself means to triumph or resources not to die, casts its covetous eyes on the various classes that make up the nation; but the virtuous citizens are not capable of helping injustice triumph, and they are also very open in telling those imbeciles who govern that the only thing they have to do is entrust the post to whomever knows how to execute it. It is, then, a certain consequence that an evil or weak government will depend on factions composed of corrupt characters, those who, in exchange for commanding the government itself, lend themselves to the most iniquitous goals, and as a reward they immediately request and obtain jobs, pensions, wealth (all spoils of a sacrificed nation); as collaborators, they set themselves up as essential, they identify themselves with the government, one is their interest, the other their goal; disorder, injustice, oppression. In this case the agitators believe and consider themselves to be the government itself, and when the public voice cries out against their lies, they respond with insolence that doing so is to discredit the government, that to attack them is to attack it, as if the name of government could justify iniquities, or as if a government that has made itself factious would still merit respect and esteem, which in a republic is the reward for virtues. Meanwhile dull or perverse rulers degrade themselves, making themselves blind and passive instruments of their own and the general ruin. And here is the first and most terrible characteristic of a devastating faction.

The majority of a nation is always just and reasonable, for men, although

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they might individually be bad, gathered together or collectively are virtuous, according to Montesquieu’s observation. Men gathered together inevitably identify themselves with what is useful to all, a clear instinct makes them sense that any injustice whatsoever redounds against them, and if they do the evil deed thinking they can escape its consequences, they never put into practice the evil deed that hangs over their heads.

Never, then, can disastrous projects be the work of any but a small group that, tenaciously pursuing its own prosperity, will impudently tread on the laws, do away with all barriers that oppose virtue, the most wicked methods costing it nothing so long as they lead to the venting of its revenge or the insatiable yearning of its ambition or avarice, it will defy public opinion and will abjure all decency. The agitators themselves will be amazed at having arrived where they did not foresee, for, drunken with their first triumphs, they will have embarked upon and achieved excesses that cannot have happened to anyone, except when that one is involved in enormous crimes that it is necessary to cover over with other, even more atrocious crimes. For them, morality (the only true politics) is an impediment that they have removed from their course, growing deaf to its clamors, and by force of combating it, they have managed to harden themselves against remorse and honor. What must be the fate of the unhappy nation whose destiny is in such hands? What fortunes will be enough to gratify the ravenous swarm of catilinarians? What laws, what equity, what rights will be respected by those who forsake order?

The difference between the methods of a faction and those of a sound part or majority of a people is palpable. This latter knows no other methods than guarantees, laws, justice, because these methods can never ever be contrary by their nature to the end to which they aspire; there are between them intimate relations that can hardly exist between injustice and benevolence, which is universal justice. How can those who violate the principles of justice, then, argue that they love the nation, that they promote the general good, the only foundation for justice? Are people so stupid that they come to believe that they can be saved only by trampling on the venerable principles of virtue? Will those who offend this essential principle and soul of the republic be republicans? Will the nation ever think that its situation is such that the political dogmas to which it has consecrated reason and experience of all the centuries have

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nothing to do with it? Has the nature of things changed? And so, if it suits a faction, must we abjure the most evident and holy truths and violate reason, this support and asylum of man? You who make a show of saving us by crushing the rights of humanity, know that if it were possible that our existence and honor were incompatible with justice, we would rather choose to die in disgrace. But it does not depend on you to change what is disinterested and eternal, and it is much easier to believe and even feel that your tricks and processes are what is incompatible with the good and honor of men; their future will depend on and be secured forever by justice. If you were fair you would say that ambition, vengeance, avarice . . . are the true motives for your conduct; give up fraud and histrionics that no one believes and everyone detests.

But despite everything, haughty with the experiment they have made of their power, they try to make good use of the moments, knowing that their fatal influence will last only until the nation, terrified by upheaval, deploys its irresistible resources against this handful of vipers that eat away at its core; so they try to lull the nation with deceitful snares and to intimidate and persecute those men who, with wisdom and character, can unmask them and make their crimes evident to the people, lead a reaction in support of the constitution and the laws, and oust them. From here emanates the spirit of intolerance and persecution, another innate characteristic of factions.

“Of all the proscriptions,” says the famous Bignon,¹ “the most terrible are those stirred up by a minority. The majority, which knows its strengths, can be momentarily cruel; but neither is it for a long time, nor is it always. The minority, on the contrary, believes that it increases its number by multiplying its harsh acts. . . . Proscription has a frightening character when it attempts to repress the dominant spirit of nations, for inasmuch as it then originates from a fragment that wishes to subjugate the majority, it is inevitable that it be more violent and expansive. The nation as a whole needs fixed and constant laws, the minority has need of laws of exception.”

In a free and civilized nation, it is not the same to seize power as to capture opinion; on the contrary, the seizing of power is always guarded against and opposed by those who fear (and that is everyone) the diminishment of their rights. A just government respects this guarding

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and opposition for the advantages that redound to it; but a faction or a factious government that cannot bear the inspection of the public becomes irritated and enraged by its own conscience, for it knows that its errors and crimes are obvious to everyone, and in the inability to stifle the truth it furiously pronounces the maxim of tyrants: Let them hate me, so long as they fear me. Much better would be the love and respect of the people if they changed course. But what about the responsibility of the ministers? How is it possible that they resign themselves to giving up their posts and become objects of contempt and cursing? How to acknowledge themselves defeated in a struggle in which they have prostituted their consciences, sold their honor, assaulted what is most sacred? Will they not then reveal their dreadful secrets, and will there not come to light so many machinations, treacheries, depravities, atrocities . . .?

Thus, they see themselves committed to continuing their maneuvers at any price, to trampling whatever crosses their path, to aiming their guns at whomever might have the courage and ability to oppose them. The first shots hit persons they carefully make loathsome beforehand, suggesting to people that they are their enemies, as the sans-culottes did in France with those they called aristocrats. Distorted equality was the popular idol, and as many as calumny had designated were sacrificed to it. With that name emphatically pronounced, several thousand were dragged to the scaffold, crushing the forms and all rights. It would be easy to cite other examples, but unfortunately we have among ourselves practiced worse trampling underfoot, for there is no proscription more barbarously 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

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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.

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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

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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

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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 traitors of the patria, you have reduced us to the unhappy extreme of seeing despotism as a relief from the horrible ills with which your ambition and immorality have crushed and exhausted us. Will we consume the miserable scraps of our fortune that you have eradicated, and will we spill the blood that has escaped your cruelty to defend your power that you have used only to sacrifice us? What benefit could we expect from our efforts? That you surely continue your revenges and pillages, and that you will indefinitely prolong your exterminating rule! But you have not left us a glimmer of hope, and you have cruelly extirpated us and made the patria disappear. We no longer have it! And this is, barbarians, all the benefit we owe you. You are tranquil, and your decision is made: you will fly to meet the tyrant and, prostrated despicably, you will worship his footsteps; you will buy with the most ignominious prostitution a smile from the idol, and, infamous informers, you will top off all your crimes by slandering your brothers to ingratiate yourselves with your masters.”

May the peoples of Anáhuac reflect on, confront, and apply these truths, may they look attentively at the terrifying aspect that the Republic presents in all its affairs; confidence has fled, and peace is about to flee a country that seeks it and roots out all of its supports. Already Europe, which had admired us, announces our downfall; and the complexity and clashes of our affairs and the scorn in which the laws are seen must hasten it. Our independence is threatened, our liberty abused, our property badly secured, and we sleep in a fatal confidence! But there is still time to save the patria that appeals forcefully to us. Let us not feign ignorance because time flies, and if we do not make the most vehement efforts and all the sacrifices it demands of us, a piercing regret will torment us much more than the loss of the precious goods of which we are going to be stripped.