24]--This is due
to his not being an utopian or a theorist, like his predecessors of the
Convention, but a perspicacious statesman, who is in the habit of
using his own eyes. He sees things directly, in themselves; he does not
imagine them through book formulae or party phrases, by a process of
verbal reasoning, employing the gratuitous suppositions of humanitarian
optimism or the dogmatic prejudices of Jacobin nonsense. He sees Man
just as he is, not Man in himself, an abstract citizen, the philosophic
puppet of the Contrat Social, but the real individual, the entire living
man, with his profound instincts, his tenacious necessities, which,
whether tolerated or not by legislation, still subsist and operate
infallibly, and which the legislator must take into consideration if he
wants to turn them to account.--This individual, a civilized European
and a modern Frenchman, constituted as he is by several centuries
of tolerable police discipline, of respected rights and hereditary
property, must have a private domain, an enclosed area, large or small,
which belongs and is reserved to him personally, to which the public
power interdicts access and before which it mounts guard to prevent
other individuals from intruding on it. Otherwise his condition seems
intolerable to him; he is no longer disposed to exert himself, to set
his wits to work, or to enter upon any enterprise. Let us be careful not
to snap or loosen this powerful and precious spring of action; let him
continue to work, to produce, to economize, if only that he may be in
a condition to pay taxes; let him continue to marry, to bring forth and
raise up sons, if only to serve the conscription. Let us ease his mind
with regard to his enclosure;[2325] let him exercise full proprietorship
over it and enjoy it exclusively; let him feel himself at home in his
own house in perpetuity, safe from any intrusion, protected by the
code and by the courts, not alone against his enemies, but against the
administration itself. Let him in this well-defined, circumscribed abode
be free to turn round and range as he pleases, free to browse at will,
and, if he chooses, to consume all his hay himself. It is not essential
that his meadows should be very extensive: most men live with their nose
to the ground; very few look beyond a very narrow circle; men are not
much troubled by being penned up; the egoism and urgent needs of daily
life are already for them ready-made limits: within thes