Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/239

illustrations of this truth, the very question we are discussing will suffice to place it beyond all doubt.

The law of solidarity is so universal, that it is manifested in all human associations, and men cannot unite to form a society without falling under the jurisdiction of this inexorable law. Through his ancestors, man is in a union of solidarity with past ages; through the successive duration of his own acts, and through his descendants, he enters into communion with future ages, and as an individual and a member of domestic society the solidarity of the family weighs upon him. As a priest or a magistrate he enters upon a communion of rights and duties, of merits and demerits in common with the magistracy or the priesthood. As a member of a political association he becomes amenable to the law of a national solidarity, and finally, in his character as man, the law of human solidarity reaches him. And notwithstanding that he is responsible in so many different ways, he preserves his personal responsibility whole and intact, which none other diminishes, restrains, or absorbs. He may be virtuous, although a member of an offending family; uncorrupted and incorruptible, although belonging to a depraved society; a prevaricator, although a member of an irreproachable magistracy; and a reprobate, although a member of a holy priesthood. Yet this high power which has been granted to man, of withdrawing from this solidarity by an exercise of his sovereign will, does not in anything alter the principle in virtue of which, in matters in general, and without diminution of his liberty, man is what the family is in which he is born, and what the society is where he lives and breathes.

Such has been, throughout the duration of historic