Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/245

nize, without an evident contradiction, the mysterious virtue that they refuse to blood, of conferring sovereign attributes. The people, according to the socialists, have not thrown off the yoke of the Pharaohs, in order to submit to that of the tyrants of Babylon or of Assyria; nor are they so utterly destitute of power and right, that they will deliver themselves up to the rapacity of the rich, after having freed themselves from the tyranny of the insolent nobles. They consider that the liberal school is guilty of a manifest absurdity when it denies the solidarity of the family, (which the socialists likewise reject,) and afterward admits the solidarity of the nation. The socialists accept the first of these principles in common with the liberals, but they absolutely deny the second as contradictory of the first, and they assert both the perfect equality of all nations and of all men.

From these principles result the following consequences: All men being entirely and perfectly equal, it is absurd to distribute them in groups, since this mode of distribution can have no other foundation than the solidarity of these same groups; and the liberal schools reject this solidarity, as the perpetual source of inequality among men. If this is accepted, the logical deduction is the dissolution of the family; and this consequence is so unavoidably deduced from all the theories and principles of liberalism, that without it these principles cannot be realized in political associations. They will in vain proclaim the idea of equality. This idea will not take root so long as the family remains. The family is a tree of so superior a growth that its wonderful fecundity perpetually produces the idea of a nobility.

But the destruction of the family necessarily involves