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| 2 | ESTEBAN ECHEVERRÍA Symbolic Words (1837) (Excerpts) * |
I
1. ASSOCIATION
Society is a fact embossed on the pages of history, and the necessary condition instilled in man by Providence for the free exercise and full development of his faculties in making the universe his own. Society is the vast theater where his power grows, where his intelligence is nourished, and where the fruits of his tireless activity appear in quick succession.
Without association there can be no progress; or rather, association is the necessary condition of all civilization and progress.
To work for the spirit of association to spread and be shared among all classes is to set about the great task of progress and civilization for our country.
There can be no true association except among equals. Inequality engenders hatred and passions that suffocate fraternity and weaken social bonds.
To extend the orbit of association and at the same time strengthen and increase it, it is necessary to even out social individualities, or make an effort to attain equality.
In order for association to broadly match its purposes, it is necessary to organize and form it in such a way that social interests and individual interests do not clash or damage each other, or combine the two elements: the social element and the individual, the country and the independence of the citizen. In the alliance and harmony of these two principles lies the whole question of social science.
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The rights of man and the right to association are equally legitimate.
Politics must concentrate its labors toward ensuring for each citizen his liberty and individuality through association.
Society must protect the individual independence of all of its members, as all individualities are obliged to join forces for the good of the country.
Society must not absorb the citizen or demand the absolute sacrifice of his individuality. Nor does social interest allow the exclusive predominance of individual interests, because society would then dissolve, as its members would not be joined to each other by a common bond.
The will of a people or of a majority cannot establish laws that undermine individual rights, because there is no absolute authority whatsoever on Earth, because none is an infallible organ of supreme justice, and because above human laws there is the law of conscience and reason.
No legitimate authority rules but in the name of law, justice, and truth: it is up to the national will, the true public conscience, to interpret and decide finally what is just, true, and obligatory: herein lies the domain of positive law. But beyond that law, and in a higher sphere, there exist the rights of man, which as the basis and essential condition of social order overrule and prevail over the positive law.
No majority, party, or assembly has the right to establish a law that attacks natural laws and the principles that preserve society, or that puts the security, freedom, and lives of all men at the mercy of the whim of one man.
Any people that commits this act is foolish, or at least stupid, because it uses a right that it does not possess, because it sells what is not its own to sell, the freedom of others; as it cannot do this, it sells itself, enslaving itself when it is free under the laws of God and nature.
The will of a people could never sanction as just what is essentially unjust.
To plead the national interest as an excuse for the violation of these rights is to introduce Machiavellianism and effectively subject men to the disastrous rule of force and arbitrariness. The welfare of the people does not stem from anything but the religious and inviolable respect for the rights of each and every one of its members.
In order to be able to exercise certain rights over its members, society owes them all justice, equal protection, and laws that guarantee their
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person, their property, and their freedom. It is obliged to shield them from every injustice or violence: to keep their reciprocal passions at bay, so that they will not harm themselves; to provide them with the means to work without any hindrance whatsoever, for their own well-being, without damaging that of others; to place each man under the safeguard of all so that he may peacefully enjoy what he possesses or has acquired through his labor, his industry, or his talents.
The social power that does not do this; that divides instead of fraternizing; that sows distrust and ill will; that stokes the partisan spirit, the spirit of vengeance; that fosters perfidy, espionage, and betrayal, and seeks to convert society into a swarm of informers, executioners, and victims, is an iniquitous, immoral, and abominable power.
The institution of government is useful, moral, and necessary only if it seeks to ensure for each citizen his essential rights and above all his freedom.
The perfection of the association is proportionate to the freedom of each and every person. To achieve this it is necessary to preach fraternity, generosity, mutual sacrifice among the members of the same family. It is necessary to work so that individual forces, instead of isolating themselves and concentrating on their own selfishness, come together simultaneously and collectively for a single goal: the progress and growth of the nation.
The predominance of the individual has led us to perdition. Selfish passions have sown anarchy in the soil of freedom and sterilized its fruits: this has led to the loosening of social ties; here selfishness is contained in all hearts and shows its deformed and menacing face everywhere; these hearts do not beat to the sound of the same words or at the sight of the same symbols; minds are not linked by a common belief in the homeland, in equality, in fraternity and liberty.
How to revive this disintegrating society?
How to make the sociable element of the human heart predominate and save the country and civilization? The remedy exists only in the spirit of association.
Association, progress, liberty, equality, fraternity, correlative terms of the great social and humanitarian synthesis; divine symbols of the successful future of all peoples and of humanity.
Freedom can be realized only by means of equality, and equality
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without the assistance of association or coming together of all individual forces toward a single, undefined object; continuous progress, a fundamental formula of nineteenth-century philosophy.
That social organization offering greater guarantees for the development of equality and liberty and giving more scope to the free and harmonious exercise of human faculties would be the more perfect; that government more analogous with our customs and our social condition would be the better one.
The road to freedom is equality; equality and freedom are the principles that engender democracy.
Democracy is therefore the regime that suits us and the only one that is feasible for us.
It is our mission to prepare the elements to organize and form the seed of democracy that exists in our society.
The Association of the Young Argentine Generation represents the future of the Argentine nation in its provisional organization: its mission is essentially organic. It seeks to spread its spirit and doctrine; to extend the circle of its progressive tendencies; to foster enthusiasm for the great national association by unifying opinion and concentrating it in the homeland and in the principles of equality, liberty, and fraternity of all men.
It will work to reconcile and harmonize the citizen and the homeland, the individual and the association; and in preparing the elements of the organization of the Argentine nationality based on the democratic principle.
In its final form it will seek to bring together the two fundamental ideas of the period: homeland and humanity, and make the progressive movement of the nation march alongside the progressive movement of the great humanitarian association.
II
2. PROGRESS
“Humanity is like a man who lives forever in constant progress.”1 With one foot in the present and another reaching out into the future,
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humanity marches indefatigably, as if impelled by God’s spirit, in search of the Eden promised to her hopes.
The heavens, the Earth, the animals, mankind, the whole universe has a life that is developed and manifests itself in time through a series of continuous generations: this law of development is called the law of progress.
Just like man, organic beings, and nature, peoples are also in possession of a life of their own, whose continuous development constitutes their progress, because life is nothing more in all creation than the incessant exercise of activity.
All human associations exist because of progress and for progress, and civilization itself is nothing more than the indelible testimony of humanitarian progress.
All of man’s and society’s endeavors are directed toward procuring the well-being they crave.
The well-being of a people is related to and is born from their progress.
“To live by the law of one’s being is well-being. Only through the free and harmonious exercise of all their faculties can men and peoples attain the most extensive application of this law.”2
A people that does not work to improve its condition is a people that does not obey the law of its being.
The revolution for us is progress. America, believing that it could improve its condition, emancipated itself from Spain; since then it has entered the path of progress.
To progress is to become civilized, or to guide the action of all one’s strength to achieving well-being, or in other words, the realization of the law of one’s being.
Europe is the center of the civilization of centuries and of humanitarian progress.
America must therefore study the progressive movement of European intelligence; but without being blindly tied to its influences. Free
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inquiry and choice are the right and criteria of an enlightened reason. It must appropriate all that can contribute to the fulfillment of its needs; it must walk with the torch of the human spirit if it is to know itself and light up its path.
Every people has its own life and intelligence. “From the development and exercise of this its special mission is born, which participates fully in the general mission of humanity. This mission builds nationality. Nationality is sacred.”3
A people that enslaves its intelligence to the intelligence of another people is stupid and sacrilegious.
A people that stands still and does not progress has no mission whatsoever, and will never manage to form its nationality.
When American intelligence has reached the level of European intelligence, the sun of its complete emancipation shall shine.
III
3. FRATERNITY—4. EQUALITY—5. LIBERTY
“Human fraternity is mutual love, or that generous disposition that makes man inclined to do unto others what he would have done unto him.”4
Christ made it divine with his blood, and the prophets sanctified it with their martyrdom.
But man then was weak because he lived for himself and only with himself. Humanity or the concord of the human family, coming together for the same end, did not exist.
The tyrants and the selfish easily snuffed out the divine light of the word of the Redeemer with their deadly breath, and set father against son, brother against brother, family against family, in order to rule.
Blinded and confined in his ego, man thought it just to sacrifice the well-being of others to his passions, and peoples and men warred and tore each other apart like wild animals.
“By the law of God and mankind all men are brothers. Any act of selfishness is an attack on human fraternity.”5
Selfishness is the death of the soul. The selfish man does not feel love,
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or charity, or friendliness toward his brothers. All his acts are for the satisfaction of ego; all his thoughts and actions revolve around his ego; and duty, honor, and justice are empty, meaningless words for his depraved spirit.
Selfishness becomes deified and makes its heart the center of the universe. All tyrants are selfishness embodied.
It is the duty of all men who know their mission to fight it hand-to-hand until it is annihilated.
Fraternity is the golden chain that must link all pure and truly patriotic hearts; without this there is no strength, no union, no homeland.
Any act, any word that seeks to loosen this tie is an attack on the homeland and on humanity.
Let us forget the errors of our forefathers; man is fallible. Let us fairly take stock of their deeds and let us see what we would have done under the same circumstances. What we are and what we shall be in the future, we owe to them. Let us open up the sanctuary of our hearts to those who truly served the homeland and sacrificed themselves for it.
The selfish and the evil shall get their due; the judgment of posterity awaits them. The motto of the new generation shall be fraternity.
“Under the law of God and of mankind, all men are equal.”6
For equality to become a reality it is necessary for men to be imbued with their rights and obligations unto each other.
Equality amounts to those rights and duties being equally admitted and declared by all, and no one being able to avoid the action of the law that establishes them, each man being equally entitled to their enjoyment in proportion to his intelligence and labor. All privilege is an attack on equality.
There is no equality where the wealthy class takes precedence and has more privileges than others.
Where a certain class monopolizes the public future.
Where influence and power paralyze the action of the law for some and strengthen it for others.
Where only the parties, not the nation, are sovereign.
Where taxation is not shared equally and in proportion to the assets and industry of each man.
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Where the poorer class suffers alone the harshest social burdens, such as military service, etc.
Where the last henchman of power can violate the security of the liberty of the citizen with impunity.
Where rewards and jobs are not given on fact-based merit.
Where each public employee is a mandarin to whom the citizen must bow.
Where public employees are servile agents of power, not paid by and dependent on the nation.
Where the parties grant titles and rewards at their whim.
Where talent and integrity have no merit, but abject stupidity and adulation do.
Any privilege granted to a civil, military, or religious corporation, academy, or university, any exceptional or special law, is also an attack on equality.
Society, or the power that represents it, owes all its members equal protection, security, and liberty; if it is granted to some and not to others, there is inequality and tyranny.
Social power is not moral, nor does it fulfill its ends if it does not protect the weak, the poor, and the needy; that is, if it does not put to use the means that society has put in its hands to bring about equality.
Equality is related to the enlightenment and the well-being of citizens.
Enlightening the masses on their true rights and obligations, educating them in order to make them capable of exercising their citizenship and instilling in them the dignity of free men, protecting them and stimulating them to work and be industrious, giving them the means to acquire well-being and independence: this is how we raise them to a position of equality.
The only hierarchy that must exist in a democratic society is that which originates in nature and is as invariable and necessary as nature itself.
Money can never be a qualification if it is not in the hands of the pure, the charitable, and the virtuous. A stupid and villainous soul, a depraved and selfish heart, might be favored by fortune; but neither the gold nor the incense of the lowest commoner will ever instill in them what nature has denied them: republican capacity and virtues.
God, supreme intelligence, wanted man to stand out for his reason
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and intelligence so that he would rule over all creation and overcome all other creatures.
Intelligence, virtue, capacity, proven merit; these are the only hierarchies of man’s natural and divine origin.
Society acknowledges only merit attested for in deeds. Society asks of the general, covered in titles and medals: what useful victory have you brought for your country? Of the leader and the affluent it asks: what relief have you brought to the poverty and needs of the people? Of the individual: for what deeds have you merited the respect and consideration of your fellow citizens and humanity? And of all of us, in short: under what circumstances have you proven yourselves to be capable, virtuous, and patriotic?
He who has no answer to these questions, and yet manifests pretensions and seeks supremacy, is a fool who deserves only our pity and contempt.
The problem with social equality lies in this principle: “To each man according to his capacity; to each man according to his deeds.”7
“Under the law of God and of humanity all men are free.”
“Freedom is the right that every man has to use his faculties without any hindrance whatsoever in the pursuit of his well-being, and to choose the means that might help him achieve his goal.”8
The free exercise of individual faculties must not cause injury or violence to the rights of others. Do not unto others what you would not have done unto yourself; human liberty has no other limits.
There is no liberty where man cannot change his abode as he pleases.
Where he is not permitted to enjoy the fruits of his industry and his labor.
Where he must sacrifice his time and his assets to power.
Where he can be harassed and insulted by the thugs of an arbitrary power.
Where without having broken the law, without prior judgment or
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due process whatsoever, he can be incarcerated or deprived of the use of his physical or intellectual faculties.
Where his right to speak or publish his opinions is limited.
Where a religion or form of worship is imposed on him that differs from that which his conscience judges to be true.
Where he can be arbitrarily disturbed in his home, torn from the bosom of his family, and banished beyond his homeland.
Where his security, his life, and his assets are at the mercy of a leader’s whim.
Where he is obliged to bear arms without absolute need and without this being required by the common good.
Where obstacles and conditions are placed on the exercise of any industry whatsoever, such as printing, etc.
IV
6. GOD, THE CENTER AND PERIPHERY OF OUR RELIGIOUS BELIEF; CHRISTIANITY; ITS LAW
The natural religion is that imperious instinct that leads man to pay homage to his Creator.9
Man’s relationships with God are, like those of son to father, of a moral nature. As God is the pure source of our life and our faculties, of our hopes and joys, in exchange for those assets we give him the only offering that can please him, the homage of our hearts.
But natural religion has not been enough for man because, lacking as it is in certainty, life, and sanction, it has not satisfied the needs of his conscience; and it has been necessary for positive religions that base their authority on historic facts to come and proclaim the laws that must rule those intimate relations between man and his Creator.
The best of all positive religions is Christianity, because it is nothing more than the revelation of the moral instincts of humanity.
The Gospel is the law of God because it is the moral law of conscience
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and of reason. Christianity brought to the world fraternity, equality, and liberty, and redeemed the human race by restoring its rights. Christianity is in its essence a civilizing and progressive force.
The world was immersed in darkness and the word of Christ illuminated it, and out of chaos grew a world. Mankind was a corpse, and it received life and resurrection with his spirit.
The Gospel is the law of love, and as the Apostle James says, the perfect law, which is the law of liberty. Christianity must be the religion of democracies.
Examine everything and choose what is good, says the Gospel; and thus it has proclaimed the independence of reason and of the freedom of conscience, because freedom lies mainly in the right to examine and to choose.
All religions imply worship. Worship is the visible part or the outer manifestation of religion, just as the word is the necessary element of thought.
Religion is a tacit pact between God and the human conscience; it forms a spiritual bond that joins the creature with its Maker. Man should therefore direct his thoughts to God as he sees fit. God is the only judge of the actions of his conscience, and no earthly authority may appropriate that divine prerogative, and will never be able to do so, because conscience is free.
If freedom of conscience is suppressed, the voice and the hands shall exercise, automatically, one might say, the practices of worship; but the heart will deny it and will guard freedom in its inviolable sanctuary.
If freedom of conscience is the individual’s right, then freedom of worship is a right of religious communities.
If freedom of conscience is recognized, it would be contradictory not to then recognize freedom of worship, which is nothing more than the immediate application of the former.
The profession of beliefs and of worship will be free only when no obstacle whatsoever is placed in preaching the doctrine of the former, or on the practice of the latter, and when the individuals of any religious communion have the same civil and political rights as other citizens.
Religious society is independent of civil society; the former directs its hope to another world, the latter concentrates it here on Earth; the mission of the former is spiritual, that of the latter temporal. The tyrants
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have forged chains from religion for man, whence the impure alliance of power and the altar has come forth.
It is not the government’s responsibility to regulate beliefs, placing itself between God and the human conscience: but to protect the principles that preserve society and safeguard social morals.
If any religion or worship were to publicly or directly, in deed or writing, offend social morals and disturb order, it will be the duty of the government to take action to suppress its excesses.
The government’s jurisdiction in terms of religion should limit itself to ensuring that they do not offend each other or sow social discord.
The state, as a political body, cannot have a religion, because as it is not an individual person it lacks its own conscience.
The dogma of the dominant religion is also unjust and an attack on equality because it pronounces social excommunication on those who do not profess its creed, and deprives them of their natural rights without exempting them from social burdens.
The principle of freedom of conscience could never be reconciled with the dogma of the state religion.
If freedom of conscience is recognized, no religion may be declared dominant, or sponsored by the state; all religions must be respected and protected equally, as long as their morals are pure and their worship does not infringe on social order.
The word tolerance, in terms of religion and worship, indicates only the absence of liberty and contains an insult to the rights of mankind. What is inhibited or evil is tolerated; a right is recognized and proclaimed. The human spirit is a free essence; freedom is an indestructible element of its nature and a gift from God.
The priest is the minister of worship; the priesthood is a public burden. The mission of the priest is to moralize, to preach brotherhood—charity, that is, the law of peace and love, the law of God.
The priest who stirs up passions and provokes vengeance from the pulpit of the Holy Spirit is impious and sacrilegious.
Love your neighbor as yourself; love your enemies, says Christ; this is the word of the priest.
The priest must preach tolerance, not persecution of indifference and impiety. Force makes hypocrites, not believers, and ignites fanaticism and war.
“How will they have faith in the word of the priest if he himself does
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not obey the law? He who says, ‘I know him,’ but disobeys his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.”10
“We do not demand blind obedience, says Saint Paul; we teach, we prove, we persuade: Fides suadenda non imperanda, reiterates Saint Bernard.”11
The mission of the priest is exclusively spiritual, because in mixing mundane passions and interests he compromises and blemishes the sanctity of his ministry and brings upon himself scorn and hatred in place of love and veneration.
The vicars and ministers of Christ must not take any temporal employment or authority whatsoever; Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo, our divine master said, and he showed thus the limits of the Church’s authority.
The clergy, as members of the state, are under its jurisdiction and cannot form a privileged body distinct from society. Like all other citizens, they must be bound by the same burdens and obligations, the same civil and penal laws, and the same authorities. All men are equal; only merit and virtue can engender supremacy.12 …
X
12. ORGANIZATION OF THE FATHERLAND ON DEMOCRATIC FOUNDATIONS
Equality and liberty are the two central axes, or rather, the two poles of the world of democracy.
Democracy arises from a necessary fact, namely, the equality of the classes, and marches steadily toward the conquest of the broadest kingdom of liberty, of individual, civil, and political freedom.
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Democracy is not a form of government, but the very essence of all republican governments, or instituted by all for the good of the community or the society.
Democracy is the rule of liberty based on the equality of the classes.
All modern political associations seek to establish the equality of the classes, and it can be assured, in observing the progressive movement of the European and American nations, “that the gradual development of equality of conditions is a providential fact; it has the principal characteristics of one: it is universal, it is lasting, it escapes every day from human power; all events, like all men, serve its development.”13
Democracy is the government of the majorities or the uniform consent of the reason of all men, working for the creation of the law and to decide supremely over all that interests society.
That general and uniform consent constitutes the sovereignty of the people.
The sovereignty of the people is unlimited in all that belongs to society, in politics, in philosophy, in religion; but the people are not sovereign as regards the individual, his conscience, his property, his life, and his liberty.
Association has been established for the good of all men; it is the common foundation of all individual interests or the animated symbol of the strength and intelligence of each one.
The goal of society is to organize democracy and ensure to each and every one of its members the broadest and most free enjoyment of their natural rights; the broadest and freest exercise of their faculties.
Therefore the sovereign people or the majority cannot violate those individual rights, limit the exercise of those faculties, which are at once the origin, the bond, the condition, and the goal of society.
From the moment it violates them, the pact is broken, society dissolves,
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and each man shall be the absolute owner of his will and his actions and derive his right from his strength.
It follows from here that the limit of collective reason is the right; and the limit of individual reason, the sovereignty of the reason of the people.
The rights of man come before the rights of society. The individual under God’s law and the law of mankind is the sole owner of his life, his property, his conscience, and his liberty: his life is a gift from God; his property, the sweat of his brow; his conscience, the eye of his soul and the intimate judge of his actions; his freedom, the necessary condition for the development of the faculties that God has given him so that he might live happily, the very essence of his life, as life without freedom is death.
The right of the association is therefore circumscribed by the orbit of individual rights.
The sovereign, the people, the majority dictate the social and positive law with the goal of strengthening and enacting the primeval law, the natural law of the individual. So it is that, far from denying man part of his freedom and rights when he enters society, he has, on the contrary, come together with the others and formed the association in order to ensure and extend them.
If the positive law of the sovereign follows natural law, that right is legitimate and all must obey it, on pain of punishment as offenders; if it violates it, it is illegitimate and tyrannical and no one is obliged to obey it.
The individual’s right to resist the tyrannical decisions of the sovereign people or of the majority is therefore legitimate, as is the right to repel force with force, and to kill the thief or murderer who attacks our property or our lives, as this is born from the very conditions of the social pact.
The sovereignty of the people is unlimited as long as it respects the right of man: first principle.
The sovereignty of the people is absolute as long as reason is its norm: second principle.
Only collective reason is sovereign, not the collective will. The will is blind, whimsical, irrational; the will wants, reason examines, weighs, and decides.
It therefore follows that the sovereignty of the people may reside only
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in the reason of the people, and that only the sensible and rational part of the social community is summoned to exercise it.
The ignorant part remains under the protection and safeguard of the law dictated by the uniform consent of the rational people.
Democracy, then, is not the absolute despotism of the masses, nor of the majorities; it is the rule of reason.
Sovereignty is the greatest and most solemn act of reason of a free people. How can those who do not know of its importance take part in this act? Those who through their lack of enlightenment are incapable of discerning right from wrong in terms of public affairs? Those who, ignorant as they are of what best suits them, have no opinion of their own and are therefore exposed to yield to the suggestions of the malicious? Those who through their imprudent vote might compromise the liberty of the country and the existence of society? I say, how could the blind see, the crippled walk, the mute speak; that is, how could he who has neither capacity nor independence take part in sovereign acts?
Another condition for the exercise of sovereignty is industry. The idler, the vagabond, he who has no trade, cannot be part of the sovereign, because he is not tied by any interest whatsoever to society and will easily give his vote for gold or threats.
He whose well-being depends on the will of another and enjoys no personal independence cannot be entitled to sovereignty, as he would hardly sacrifice his interests for the independence of his reason.
The tutelage of the ignorant, of the vagabond, of he who does not have personal independence, is therefore necessary. The law does not prevent them from exercising sovereign rights per se, only as long as they remain minors; it does not divest them of these but imposes a condition for possessing them; the condition of emancipating themselves.
But the people, the masses, do not always have the means in their hands to gain their emancipation. Society or the government that represents it must put it within their reach.
It should foster industry, destroy the fiscal laws that hinder its development, not overburden it with taxation but leave it to exercise its activity freely and austerely.
It should spread enlightenment throughout society and hold out a beneficent hand to the poor and the destitute. It should seek to raise the proletarian class to the level of the other classes, emancipating first its body in order to then emancipate its reason.
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To emancipate the ignorant masses and open for them the road to sovereignty it is necessary to educate them. The masses have only their instincts; they are more sensitive than rational; they want the good, but they do not know where to find it; they wish to be free, but they do not know the path to freedom.
Education for the masses must be systematized.
By giving them morals, religion will make fertile in their hearts the seeds of good habits. Elementary education will put them in a position to attain greater enlightenment and one day grasp the rights and duties imposed on them by citizenship.14
The ignorant masses, however, while temporarily deprived of the exercise of the rights of sovereignty or political liberty, fully enjoy their individual liberty; like all members of society, their natural rights are inviolable; in addition, civil liberty protects them, as it does everyone; the same civil, penal, and constitutional law, dictated by the sovereign, protects their lives, their property, their conscience, and their liberty; it brings them to court when they commit a crime, condemning them or absolving them.
They cannot participate in the creation of the law that forms the rights and duties of the associate members as long as they remain under tutelage or in minority of age, but that same law gives them the means to emancipate themselves and keeps them in the meantime under its protection and defense.
Democracy works to even out conditions and make the classes equal.
Class equality includes individual liberty, civil liberty, and political liberty. When all members of the association are in full and absolute possession of these liberties and jointly exercise sovereignty, democracy shall have been definitively constituted on the indestructible basis of class equality; this is the third principle.
We have unraveled the spirit of democracy and set out the limits of the sovereignty of the people. Let us now examine how the sovereign acts, or in other words, what apparent or visible form it imposes on its decisions, and how it organizes the government of democracy.
For the creation of a law, the sovereign delegates its powers, reserving
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the power to enact the law. The delegate represents the sovereign’s interests and reason.
The legislator exercises a limited and temporary sovereignty; his norm is reason.
The legislator issues the organic law and formulates therein the rights and duties of the citizen and the conditions of the pact of association.
It divides social authority into three great powers, of whom it draws the limits and attributes that constitute the symbolic unity of democratic sovereignty.
The legislative power represents the reason of the people, the judiciary its justice, and the executive its action and will; the first creates the law, the second applies it, and the third executes it; the first votes on expenditure and taxation and the immediate organ of the desires and needs of the people; the second is the organ of social justice, manifested in the laws; the third is the tireless administrator and agent of social interests.
These three powers are truly independent; but far from isolating themselves and condemning themselves to immobility, offering mutual resistance to maintain a certain illusory balance, they will proceed harmoniously, via different routes, to the single goal of social progress. Their strength shall be the sum of the three joint forces, their wills shall unite in a single will; just as reason, sentiment, and will constitute the moral unit of the individual, the three powers shall form the unity that shall lead to democracy, or the legitimate organ of sovereignty, intended to pass judgment without appeal on all matters that interest society.
The conditions of the pact are written; the cornerstone of the social edifice has been laid; the government is organized and driven by the spirit of the fundamental law. The legislator presents it to the people; the people approve it, if it is the living symbol of their reason.
The work of the constituent legislator is done.
If the organic law is not the expression of public reason proclaimed by its legitimate representatives, if they have not spoken in this law of the interests and opinions of their constituents, if they have not succeeded in interpreting their thoughts; or in other words, if the legislators, ignoring their mission and the vital demands of the people they represent, have become miserable plagiarists and copied, from here and there, articles from other countries’ constitutions, instead of writing one with living roots in the popular conscience, their work shall be an
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aborted monster, a lifeless body, an ephemeral law without action that could never be sanctioned by public judgment.
The legislator will have betrayed the trust of his constituents; he will be an imbecile.
If on the contrary the work of the legislator fully satisfies public reason, his work is great, his creation sublime, and resembles the work of God.
Then neither the people, nor the legislator, nor any social authority whatsoever will be able to raise its sacrilegious hand in that sanctuary where the supreme and inviolable law is written in divine letters; the law of laws, which each and every man has acknowledged, proclaimed, and sworn before God and man to respect.
Sovereignty, it can be said, has been embodied in that law, the reason and consent of the people is there; order, justice, and liberty are there; therein lies the safeguard of democracy.
This law could be revised, improved in time, and adapted to the progress of public reason by an assembly elected ad hoc by the sovereign; but until such time comes which the law itself indicates, its power is omnipotent; its will dominates all wills; its reason rules over all reason.
No majority, no party, no assembly may break this law, on pain of being usurpatory and tyrannical.
That law is the touchstone for all other laws; its light illuminates them, and all thoughts and actions of the social body and of the constituted powers are born from it and converge at its center. It is their driving force and around it gravitate, like heavenly bodies around the sun, all the partial forces that make up the world of democracy.
With democracy thus constituted, the sovereignty of the people arises from that point and starts to exercise its unceasing and unlimited action, but always circling in the orbit that the organic law traces; its right does not go beyond this.
Through its representatives, it makes and reverses laws, innovating every day, taking its activity everywhere and imposing an incessant movement, a progressive transformation to the social machine.
Each act of its will is a new creation; each decision of its reason is progress.
Politics, religion, philosophy, art, industry; it examines everything, develops it, puts it to the supreme vote, and enacts it; the voice of the people is the voice of God.
From this we can deduce that if the people have no enlightenment or
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morality; that if the seeds of a constitution are not, so to speak, disseminated in their customs, in their sentiments, in their memories, in their traditions, the work of organizing it is unrealizable; that the legislator is not called upon to create an organic law, or to adapt that of other countries to his, but to know the instincts, needs, interests, all that forms the intellectual, moral, and physical life of the people he represents, and proclaim them and formulate them in a law; and that legislators must only be those who combine the highest capacity and noblest virtue with the most complete knowledge of the spirit and demands of the nation.
From here it also arises that if the legislator is conscious of his duty, before examining which form of government would be preferable, he must find out whether the people are in a fit condition to be ruled by a constitution, and if this is the case offer them not the best and most perfect constitution in theory, but that which is best adapted to their condition.
“I have given the Athenians not the best laws,” said Solon,15 “but those which they are in a fit state to receive.”
From this it can be inferred that when public reason is not ripe, the constituent legislator has no mission whatsoever, and as he cannot be conscious of his dignity, or of the importance of the role he represents, he is part of a farce that he himself does not understand, and passes or copies laws with the same ease as he would the briefs of his legal practice or the accounts of his business.
From this, in short, we can deduce the need to prepare the legislator before entrusting to him the work of a constitution.
The legislator will not be prepared if the people are not. How can the legislator do the right thing if the people are ignorant of what is good? If they do not appreciate the advantages of liberty? If they prefer inertia over activity? Their habits over innovations? What they know and can touch over what they do not know and view from afar?
For this reason, to prepare the people and the legislator it is vital to draw up first the subject of the law, that is, to spread the ideas that should be embodied in the legislators and realized in the laws, making them circulate, giving them popularity, incorporating them into the public spirit.
It is necessary, in a word, to enlighten the reason of the people and
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that of the legislator on political questions before proceeding to constitute the nation.
Only on this condition will we achieve what we all earnestly desire, that a future legislator or a national representation may appear capable of understanding and remediating the ills that beset society, of satisfying its desires and laying the foundation of an unshakeable and permanent social order.
As long as the public spirit is not sufficiently mature, the constitutions will do no more than fuel anarchy and foster in all spirits the scorn of all law, of all justice, and of the most sacred principles.
As democracy is the government of the people by itself, it requires the constant action of all of man’s faculties and cannot be made firm without the assistance of enlightenment and morality.
Democracy, arising from the principle of class equality, seeks to take root in the ideas, customs, and sentiments of the people and elaborates its laws and institutions so that they might extend and strengthen its predominance.
All the efforts of our governments and legislators must be directed toward fulfilling the aims of democracy.
The Association of the Young Argentine Generation believes that the seed of democracy exists in our society; its mission is to preach, to spread its spirit, and to devote the action of its faculties so that one day democracy will be established in the Republic.
It knows that many obstacles will be placed in its path by certain aristocratic remnants, certain retrograde traditions and laws, the lack of enlightenment and of morality.
The Association knows that the work of organizing democracy is not done in a day; that constitutions are not improvised; that liberty can be based only on the foundations of enlightenment and customs; that a society is not enlightened and moralized at a single stroke; that the reason of a people aspiring to be free can ripen only with time; but, having faith in the future and believing that the high aims of the revolution were not only to bring down the former social order, but also to rebuild a new order, will work with the full extent of its faculties so that the generations to come, reaping the fruit of its labor, may have in their hands better elements than us to organize and constitute Argentine society on the unshakeable foundation of equality and democratic liberty.
