Now it is important to remark, that to organise justice by law, that is to say by force, excludes the idea of organising by law, or by force any manifestation whatever of human activity--labour, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, instruction, the fine arts, or religion; for any one of these organisations would inevitably destroy the essential organisation. How, in fact, can we imagine force encroaching upon the liberty of citizens without infringing upon justice, and so acting against its proper aim? Here I am encountering the most popular prejudice of our time. It is not considered enough that law should be just, it must be philanthropic. It is not sufficient that it should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive exercise of his faculties, applied to his physical, intellectual, and moral development; it is required to extend well-being, instruction, and morality, directly over the nation. This is the fascinating side of socialism. But, I repeat it, these two missions of the law contradict each other. We have to choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free. M. de Lamartine wrote to me one day thus:--"Your doctrine is only the half of my programme; you have stopped at liberty, I go on to fraternity." I answered him:--"The second part of your programme will destroy the first." And in fact it is impossible for me to separate the word _fraternity_ from the word _voluntary_. I cannot possibly conceive fraternity _legally_ enforced, without liberty being _legally_ destroyed, and justice _legally_ trampled under foot. Legal plunder has two roots: one of them, as we have already seen, is in human egotism; the other is in false philanthropy. Before I proceed, I think I ought to explain myself upon the word plunder.[8] I do not take it, as it often is taken, in a vague, undefined, relative, or metaphorical sense. I use it in its scientific acceptation, and as expressing the opposite idea to property. When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent, and without compensation, to him who has not created it, whether by force or by artifice, I say that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated. I say that this is exactly what the law ought to repress always and everywhere. If the law itself performs the action it ought to repress, I say that plunder is still perpetrated, and even, in a social point of view, under aggravated circumstances. In this case, however, he who profits from the plunder is not responsible for it; it is the law, the lawgiver, society itself, and this is where the political danger lies.