This insidious attack on public freedoms is the more terrible to the extent that one takes them as a pretext and hides behind the mask of their preservation. Almost never has it been done without the destruction of the government or the republic. If the people allow themselves to be overtaken by fear of conspiracies and permit the system’s principles to be destroyed in order to extinguish or prevent them, they have already fallen into the trap, and they themselves, with their tolerance or positive concessions, have advanced the evil for which they seek a remedy. The
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first thing sought by the one who tries to establish the arbitrary regime is to have the persons of citizens entirely at his disposal. Once attaining this, he moves without hindrance until he arrives at his goal. To achieve it, he suggests the need to increase the strength of the government by suspension of judicial forms, by laws of exception, and by establishment of tribunals that are all loyal to the power and are under his direction and influence. For this, the system of exaggerating risks and dangers serves admirably.
When Bonaparte disbanded the Consulate of France and destroyed the Directory, the talk in Paris was of an immense and intricate conspiracy in favor of royalism, which never existed except in the minds of the people of his faction. Iturbide, in the attacks he made on the national representation on the third of April and the nineteenth of May, when he fell upon some of its members and dissolved it, made no mention of anything other than the conspiracies he supposed had even penetrated the sanctuary of the laws. Nonetheless, time and subsequent events showed with the greatest clarity that the motive of both strategems was not the good of the patria, or devotion to or concern for public safety, but rather the beginnings of ambition, of augmentation of power and personal aggrandizement.
It matters not at all whether this augmentation is obtained by force or by spontaneous concessions; the effect is always the same. Liberty is destroyed by events contrary to principles, whoever might be the agent to whom they owe their origin. Liberty is not a name empty and devoid of meaning that can be applied to any system of government. Liberty is itself the result of a conjunction of cautionary rules that the observation and experience of many centuries have taught men are necessary to avoid the abuses of the powerful and to secure the persons and goods of the members, not only from the oppressions of individuals, but also from those of the power. And although intended to protect them, many or most times the power degenerates into a malefactor, turning weapons against those who put them in its hands so that it might defend them.
Be convinced, then, citizens who have the happiness of belonging to a republic that has adopted free institutions for its rule—be convinced of the importance of putting a brake on a government that goes beyond or tries to go beyond the boundaries that limit its power; destroy by legal means all those who show aversion to the principles of the system and who have the audacity and brazenness to attack them; distrust all
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the demands relative to the augmentation or concession of powers that are extraconstitutional or contrary to the foundations of the system, no matter what their title or name might be, especially if to attain them the existence or fears of conspiracies is alleged; listen with the greatest distrust to those who speak to you about them for the purpose of provoking you into disposing of the common rules and established order; for if this should be carried out at some time, political crimes will be reproduced unceasingly and freedom will never be seated on its throne in a nation that is a theater of reactions and of persecution, composed of oppressors and oppressed, and that carries in itself the germ of its ruin and de struction.
Peoples and states that make up the Mexican Federation, take warning from France, from the new nations of America, and from the recent events of your history. Fear the power of the ambitious ones and of the factions they call to their assistance. Unite your efforts to destroy them, so will you be invincible; isolated, they will beat you bit by bit. May the law and the national will preside over your destinies and make dominion of factions, etc., cease.
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| 5 | Discourse on the Civil Liberties of the Citizen * |
Political liberty consists of security,
Or at least in the opinion one has of one’s own security . . .
When the innocence of the citizens is not secure, neither is liberty.
— Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, book XII, chapter 4
In a society that is well constituted and intends to destroy all the abuses that have perpetuated the existence of an arbitrary regime, it is necessary to accustom its members not to be enamored of insignificant voices and rather to concern themselves with the reality of things. The abuse of unspecified words, especially in political matters, has been, since the extinction of feudalism, the source of all the woes of peoples who emerge from the control of lords only to become slaves of governments. The word “liberty,” which has been used so often for the destruction of its own meaning, has been the usual pretext for all the world’s political revolutions. People have been moved just by hearing it pronounced and have reached out their hands to embrace the tutelary spirit of societies, which its leaders have made disappear like a phantom at the very moment it ceased being necessary for the attainment and successful outcome of their ambitious aims. Philosophical lovers of humanity have raised their voice in vain against such conduct. The people have been and will be frequently deceived if they are satisfied with forms of government and neglect to ensure the most important point of all free government, the civil liberty of the citizen, or, what is the same, the power to do without fear of being reprimanded or punished everything that the law does not expressly prohibit.
The precious right to do what does not harm another cannot, unfortunately,
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be put into effect in the state of nature in which man, reduced to his individual strengths, would inevitably be despot or slave, depending on whether these strengths are adequate to suppress the rest or insufficient to resist their aggressions. Men, then, have regarded themselves as compelled to create societies and to organize a public force that, being superior to that of each individual, might check and contain the perpetrators of high-handed crime against helpless innocents. But before long, governments and the force put at their disposal, forgetting their origin and feigning ignorance of the purpose and ends for which they have been instituted, themselves commit those crimes that they were supposed to avoid or curb in individuals. It was necessary, therefore, to place limits on their power, to request and seek assurances that these limits would never be violated, that the authority could be exercised only in certain and specified cases and under fixed rules or conditions, which, when they have been well and religiously observed, have created in men such confidence that they can act as they please within legal boundaries without fear of being injured or disturbed and which we know by the name of individual security. Unfortunately, this open and honest conduct among the agents of power has been very rare, and its lack has led to a thousand disturbances because of the prolonged struggle between governments and the people, a struggle that depends on the diverse interests that drive different groups and are the reason for their different and contrary ways of acting.
It is in the nature of those who dominate, whatever might be their number and the name given to them, to seek to make the exercise of power as advantageous as possible for themselves, and it is equally in the nature of those who become subordinated to make domination a heavy burden for those who exercise it and the lightest it can be for those who endure it. Whatever may be the name of those who govern, the question for them is always the same. Whether they be called presidents, directors, emperors, or kings; be they five or be they three, whether there are two or only one; whether they be elected or hereditary, usurpers or legitimate, their interest is always the same: to have persons at their disposal in the most absolute way, to have