"The sheep which we have raised follows us, but it follows in company with the flock in the midst of which it was born.It regards man AS THE CHIEF OF ITS FLOCK....Man is regarded by domestic animals as a member of theIr society.All that he has to do is to get himself accepted by them as an associate: he soon becomes their chief, in consequence of his superior intelligence.He does not, then, change the NATURAL CONDITIONof these animals, as Buffon has said.On the contrary, he uses this natural condition to his own advantage; in other words, he finds SOCIABLE animals, and renders them DOMESTIC by becoming their associate and chief.Thus, the DOMESTICITY of animals is only a special condition, a simple modification, a definitive consequence of their SOCIABILITY.All domestic animals are by nature sociable animals."...--Flourens: Summary of the Observations of F.Cuvier.
Sociable animals follow their chief by INSTINCT; but take notice of the fact (which F.Cuvier omitted to state), that the function of the chief is altogether one of INTELLIGENCE.The chief does not teach the others to associate, to unite under his lead, to reproduce their kind, to take to flight, or to defend themselves.Concerning each of these particulars, his subordinates are as well informed as he.
But it is the chief who, by his accumulated experience, provides against accidents; he it is whose private intelligence supplements, in difficult situations, the general instinct; he it is who deliberates, decides, and leads; he it is, in short, whose enlightened prudence regulates the public routine for the greatest good of all.
Man (naturally a sociable being) naturally follows a chief.
Originally, the chief is the father, the patriarch, the elder; in other words, the good and wise man, whose functions, consequently, are exclusively of a reflective and intellectual nature.The human race--like all other races of sociable animals--has its instincts, its innate faculties, its general ideas, and its categories of sentiment and reason.Its chiefs, legislators, or kings have devised nothing, supposed nothing, imagined nothing.They have only guided society by their accumulated experience, always however in conformity with opinions and beliefs.
Those philosophers who (carrying into morals and into history their gloomy and factious whims) affirm that the human race had originally neither chiefs nor kings, know nothing of the nature of man.Royalty, and absolute royalty, is--as truly and more truly than democracy--a primitive form of government.Perceiving that, in the remotest ages, crowns and kingships were worn by heroes, brigands, and knight-errants, they confound the two things,--royalty and despotism.But royalty dates from the creation of man; it existed in the age of negative communism.
Ancient heroism (and the despotism which it engendered)commenced only with the first manifestation of the idea of justice; that is, with the reign of force.As soon as the strongest, in the comparison of merits, was decided to be the best, the oldest had to abandon his position, and royalty became despotic.
The spontaneous, instinctive, and--so to speak--physiological origin of royalty gives it, in the beginning, a superhuman character.The nations connected it with the gods, from whom they said the first kings descended.This notion was the origin of the divine genealogies of royal families, the incarnations of gods, and the messianic fables.From it sprang the doctrine of divine right, which is still championed by a few singular characters.
Royalty was at first elective, because--at a time when man produced but little and possessed nothing--property was too weak to establish the principle of heredity, and secure to the son the throne of his father; but as soon as fields were cleared, and cities built, each function was, like every thing else, appropriated, and hereditary kingships and priesthoods were the result.The principle of heredity was carried into even the most ordinary professions,--a circumstance which led to class distinctions, pride of station, and abjection of the common people, and which confirms my assertion, concerning the principle of patrimonial succession, that it is a method suggested by Nature of filling vacancies in business, and completing unfinished tasks.
From time to time, ambition caused usurpers, or SUPPLANTERS of kings, to start up; and, in consequence, some were called kings by right, or legitimate kings, and others TYRANTS.But we must not let these names deceive us.There have been execrable kings, and very tolerable tyrants.Royalty may always be good, when it is the only possible form of government; legitimate it is never.Neither heredity, nor election, nor universal suffrage, nor the excellence of the sovereign, nor the consecration of religion and of time, can make royalty legitimate.Whatever form it takes,--monarchic, oligarchic, or democratic,--royalty, or the government of man by man, is illegitimate and absurd.
