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  Words of Wisdom from Frédéric Bastiat

  “The State is the great fiction through which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else.”

  He was unequivocal in his opposition to limitless government. “It is not true,” he wrote, “that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person.”

  David Hart is the editor of Liberty Fund’s English translation of The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. He writes:

  Bastiat thought the modern bureaucratic and regulatory State of his day was based on a mixture of outright violence and coercion on the one hand, and trickery and fallacies (sophisms) on the other. The violence and coercion came from the taxes, tariffs, and regulations, which were imposed on taxpayers, traders, and producers; the ideological dimension that maintained the current class of plunderers came from a new set of “political” and “economic sophisms” that confused, misled, and tricked a new generation of “dupes” into supporting the system. The science of political economy, according to Bastiat, was to be the means by which the economic sophisms of the present would be exposed, rebutted, and finally overturned, thus depriving the current plundering class of its livelihood and power.

  Blocked Suns and Broken Windows

  Economics these days can be dull and lifeless. Bastiat proved that economics doesn’t have to be that way. He could make core economic truths lively and unforgettable, and could tell a story that pierced you with its brilliance.

  One of his most memorable analogies comes from “The Candlemakers’ Petition,” in which candlemakers protest to the government “the unfair competition of a foreign rival.” The candlemakers declare: “This foreign manufacturer of light has such an advantage over us that he floods our domestic markets with his product. And he offers it at a fantastically low price.”

  That competitor turns out to be the sun.

  Bastiat wittily demolished the proposed “remedy” of the protectionist candlemakers—forbidding windows or requiring that they be painted black—and explained that it is to society’s advantage to accept all the free sunlight it can get and use the resources that might otherwise go to candles to meet other needs.

  Bastiat relentlessly assaulted protectionist arguments such as those of the candlemakers. Why should two countries that dig a tunnel through their mountainous border to facilitate travel and trade then undo the advantages by imposing burdensome taxes at both ends? If an exporter sells his goods abroad for more than they were worth at home, then buys valuable goods with the proceeds to bring back to his homeland, why would anyone condemn the transactions as yielding a balance-of-trade “deficit”? If you’re a protectionist before reading Bastiat, after reading his work you’ll either repent or remain forever in darkness with no excuse that you weren’t instructed otherwise.

  Bastiat’s 1850 essay “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen” introduced his famous parable of the broken window. It’s a brilliant exposition of what would later become known as “opportunity cost,” a core concept in economics. If a hoodlum breaks a baker’s window, the economy in general is not “stimulated” because the baker must now do business with a glazier. Less visible but just as real is the fact that to replace the broken glass, the baker must cancel his plans to buy other things, such as a suit of clothes. The act of destruction means a gain for the glazier, but that gain is more than offset by the losses of the baker and the tailor.

  Bastiat served the last two years of his life in France’s Constituent and Legislative Assemblies, where he worked tirelessly to convince fellow members of the merits of freedom and free markets. These colleagues proved to be his toughest audience. Most were more interested in selfish and ephemeral satisfactions (such as power, money, reelection, and the dispensing of favors to friends) than in eternal truths.

  He could be devilishly brilliant in denouncing those colleagues who presumed to plan the lives of others, as in this admonition: “Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don’t you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.” Or in this one, my personal favorite: “If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”

  Bastiat’s most famous work is The Law, which appeared the year he died. In only about fifty pages, Bastiat reveals the dangers of statism and presents a brilliant defense of the free society. Were this timeless essay required reading in schools today, it would transform the world, as it has opened minds and changed lives for many decades.

  Permanent Principles

  Our world is beset with economic fallacies that are, for the most part, modern versions of those that Bastiat demolished in the mid-nineteenth century. The answers to the vexing problems those fallacies produce are rarely to be found in proposals that empower bureaucracy while imposing tortuous regulations on private behavior. The answers are far more likely to lie in the profound and permanent principles that Frédéric Bastiat did so much to illuminate.

  Jim Powell offers this tribute to a great champion of liberty:

  And so that frail Frenchman whose public career spanned just six years, belittled as a mere popularizer, dismissed as a dreamer and an ideologue, turns out to have been right. Even before Karl Marx began scribbling The Communist Manifesto in December 1847, Frédéric Bastiat knew that socialism is doomed. Marx called for a vast expansion of government power to seize privately owned land, banks, railroads, and schools, but Bastiat warned that government power is a mortal enemy, and he was right. He declared that prosperity is everywhere the work of free people, and he was right again. He maintained that the only meaningful way to secure peace is to secure human liberty by limiting government power, and he was right yet again. Bastiat took the lead, he stood alone when he had to, he displayed a generous spirit, he shared epic insights, he gave wings to ideas, and he committed his life for liberty. He earned his place among the immortals.

  Lessons from Frédéric Bastiat

  Tell stories: In a field full of dull presentations, Frédéric Bastiat told lively stories that made his arguments accessible. His stories—the parable of the broken window, “The Candlemakers’ Petition,” etc.—allowed him to make a powerful case for freedom and free markets.

  Explode statist myths: Proponents of more government power are still very much with us. Bastiat shows us how to destroy their arguments using wit and logic.

  10

  Prudence Crandall

  In Defiance of Racism

  On April Fools’ Day in 1833, the little hamlet of Canterbury, Connecticut, was in an uproar. A new private school had opened that day, and it was no joke. A few blocks away, with local politicians leading the charge, angry townspeople gathered at the Congregational Church to demand that the state legislature put the school out of business. The air was thick with denunciations of the owner and operator, a twenty-nine-year-old teacher and entrepreneur named Prudence Crandall.

  What was so reprehensible about this school? Just two years earlier, Crandall had opened her first one, in the same building, to universal acclaim. She and her sister Almira had bought and paid for the spacious, Georgian-style 1805 mansion with a $500 down payment and a $1,500 mortgage. They called it the Canterbury Female Boarding School. The reviews from the families of its more than two dozen white female students were stellar.

  But the new school that Prudence opened on April 1, 1833, carried a name that sent shock waves throughout Connecticut: Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of
Color.

  Prudence Crandall had done the unthinkable. She was determined to run a school exclusively for—hold on to your hat—young black girls. Crandall would be vilified and threatened in the most vicious and disgusting terms. She would be arrested. She would endure three court cases against her. She would see her school vandalized.

  “I Will Be Heard”

  You might ask: Racism in Connecticut? Weren’t such ugly sentiments confined to the Deep South? Not at all. In America’s early days, racism was common in all parts of the country, as it was in most of the world. Slavery itself was not foreign to New England. Although slavery by then had largely died out in Connecticut, its effects were still visible. Crandall biographer Donald E. Williams Jr. notes that “many of the free blacks Prudence Crandall saw in northeastern Connecticut were former slaves,” since farmers in Canterbury had owned slaves through the end of the eighteenth century. The slave trade had still been legal in America when Crandall was born in 1803.

  Growing up in a Quaker home, Crandall was steeped in the values of peace, tolerance, and goodwill. They were reinforced when she attended a Quaker boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island, founded by noted abolitionist Moses Brown. Friends and family claimed she was a born teacher, devoted to cultivating young minds through excellence in the classroom. Her dream was to teach in a school of her own.

  Words of Wisdom from Prudence Crandall

  “What shall I do? Shall I be inactive and permit prejudice, the mother of abominations, to remain undisturbed? Or shall I venture to enlist in the ranks of those who with the Sword of Truth dare hold combat with prevailing iniquity?”

  The year that Crandall opened her first school, 1831, saw two momentous events in the history of slavery. First, the century’s biggest slave uprising, the Nat Turner rebellion, claimed the lives of dozens of whites and blacks and sparked a new level of race-based fear and bigotry. Second, the fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his famous newspaper, The Liberator. Garrison stirred passions on both sides of the slavery question with this declaration in his first issue:

  I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.

  America’s First Integrated School

  Only white girls enrolled at Crandall’s Canterbury Female Boarding School in its first year. But in the second, a very bright black girl named Sarah Harris approached Crandall and expressed interest in attending. Harris, the daughter of free black parents in Canterbury, was a young lady of solid reputation in the community. She wanted to be a teacher herself someday and was, in Crandall’s words, “correct in her deportment … pleasing in her personal appearance and manners.”

  Concerned that a white backlash might ensue and endanger the school’s financial survival, Crandall hesitated at first before deciding that rejecting Sarah (whose parents offered to pay full tuition) would be an unconscionable insult to her own values. “I told her if I was injured on her account I would bear it,” Crandall later said. Sarah Harris became the first black student in the first integrated school of any kind—public or private—in the United States. Crandall explained the decision this way:

  I said in my heart, here are my convictions. What shall I do? Shall I be inactive and permit prejudice, the mother of abominations, to remain undisturbed? Or shall I venture to enlist in the ranks of those who with the Sword of Truth dare hold combat with prevailing iniquity? I contemplated for a while the manner in which I might best serve the people of color. As wealth was not mine, I saw no other means of benefiting them than by imparting to those of my own sex that were anxious to learn all the instruction I might be able to give, however small the amount.

  Local reaction to the news of Sarah’s enrollment in the fall of 1832 was swift and fierce. Overnight, Prudence Crandall was transformed from hero to villain. Ugly rumors spread that her real goal was to stoke conflict and even foster—heaven forbid—interracial marriage. Local business and political leaders visited Crandall to insist that Sarah be expelled. Parents of the white students began withdrawing their daughters or threatening to do so if Sarah didn’t disappear.

  Less determined or more timid people in Crandall’s shoes might have folded. After all, she had put all her hopes as well as her savings into the school. Why risk failure and opprobrium over a single student when, with a simple dismissal, all would be well again?

  The fools of Canterbury underestimated Prudence Crandall. Not only did she refuse to cave in; she came up with a revolutionary idea. “Under the circumstances,” she declared, “I made up my mind that, if it were possible, I would teach colored girls exclusively.”

  Over at The Liberator in Boston, Garrison offered his full support and promised to help recruit free black students from every New England state if that’s what it would take to make the Crandall school a success. For the sum of twenty-five dollars per quarter, half paid in advance, black female students would have a school of their own where they could get a first-class education.

  Prudence Crandall would soon be a household name from Maine to Georgia.

  Backlash

  Six weeks after that fateful April 1, the Connecticut General Assembly passed the infamous “Black Law,” which made it illegal for out-of-state black students to attend any Connecticut school without the permission of local town authorities. At least twenty were already enrolled at the Crandall school, most of them from other New England states.

  All but a handful of her friends deserted Crandall. Local vendors wouldn’t do business with her. The threats mounted, but her resolve to press on only strengthened. No mere law would shut her school, she defiantly declared.

  The students themselves were subjected to abuse by hostile townspeople. Stagecoach drivers refused to provide them with transportation. None of the doctors in town would provide necessary medical attention. After somebody poisoned the school’s well, others prevented Crandall from obtaining water elsewhere. She hauled it in herself from her father’s farm. When the girls went outside, they were often met with angry epithets from egg- and stone-throwing hooligans of all ages. One seventeen-year-old student, Anna Eliza Hammond, was even arrested, but with the help of donations from abolitionists, she was released upon posting $10,000 bond.

  On August 23, 1833, Crandall was arrested for violating the Black Law. After a night in jail, she appeared in court, where she benefited greatly from good lawyers financed by the Boston businessman, philanthropist, and abolitionist Arthur Tappan.

  Crandall’s legal defense rested on the argument that free blacks from other states were U.S. citizens and, as such, were entitled to the same rights as all citizens. If they chose to attend a private school, with their own money, there was nothing the state of Connecticut could constitutionally do to deny them that right.

  The first of three trials ended with a hung jury. The second found Crandall guilty when the judge upheld the Black Law, arguing that blacks were not citizens and, by virtue of their skin color, were not guaranteed any constitutional rights. On appeal, Connecticut’s highest court overturned the decision on a minor procedural issue.

  Although the decision in the third case would have allowed the school to operate, the behavior of many Canterbury residents was too much for Crandall and her students to take. A mob broke into the school and damaged windows and furniture. Constant threats to assault the students and to burn the school to the groun
d (it was set on fire at least once) forced a painful decision. The one thing that Crandall could not countenance was the thought of harm to her students. On September 10, 1834, she closed the school and left the state with her new husband, Baptist preacher Calvin Philleo.

  Belated Recognition

  In the years that followed, Prudence Crandall lived in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Illinois before finally settling in Kansas, where she died in 1890 at the age of eighty-six.

  In 1885, interviewed in her tiny eight-by-twelve-foot cabin, Crandall told a Topeka newspaper reporter:

  The aspirations of my soul to benefit the colored race were never greater than at the present time. I hope to live long enough to see a college built on this farm, into which can be admitted all the classes of the human family, without regard to sex or color.… I want professorships of the highest order.… You see that my wants are so many, and so great, that I have no time to waste, no time to spend in grief.

  Though Connecticut repealed the Black Law in 1838, Crandall never resided there again. But four years before her death, at the urging of Mark Twain and others, the Connecticut legislature voted to send her a pension of $400 per year, or about $11,000 in 2016 dollars. The mansion she bought and turned into a school almost two hundred years ago is still there in Canterbury, now the home of the Prudence Crandall Museum. In 1995 Connecticut legislators officially designated her the state heroine. It was belated recognition of her courageous stand against prejudice.

  Government Meddling

  The Prudence Crandall case was neither the first nor the last time that government attempted to thwart education, and race is only one of many excuses authorities have used to hamper or shut down schools they didn’t like.

  How would children learn without government? That’s a perennial question asked by many who assume, mistakenly, that government is indispensable to the business of education. Prudence Crandall would undoubtedly respond with another query: “How will children get an education with government?”