Frederic Bastiat: A Man Alone by George Charles Roche III

Author:George Charles Roche III [George Charles Roche III]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-61016-296-8
Publisher: Arlington House
Published: 1971-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

Here I am in the Eternal City, but not much disposed to visit its marvels. I am infinitely better than I was at Pisa, surrounded as I am with excellent friends. . . . I should desire only one thing, to be relieved of the acute pain which the disease of the windpipe occasions. This continuity of suffering torments me. Every meal is a punishment. To eat, drink, speak, cough, are all painful operations. Walking fatigues me—carriage airings irritate the throat—I can no longer work, or even read, seriously. You see to what I am reduced. I shall soon be little better than a dead body, retaining only the faculty of suffering.

And yet his mind continued to work on plans for the second volume of Economic Harmonies.

By Christmas eve of 1850, Bastiat could go on no longer. At the last, he beckoned to those with him to approach the bedside. One of those present reported that “. . . his eye sparkled with that peculiar expression which I had frequently noticed in our conversations, and which announced the solution of a problem.” Bastiat raised his head a bit as though to convey something of importance, and twice murmured the words, “The Truth.” Then he was gone. Apparently Bastiat had solved one final problem to his satisfaction.

Some months before, Bastiat had written, “What gives me courage is . . . the thought that, perhaps, my life may not have been useless to mankind.” For a man who had only been engaged in active public life for some six years, the balance sheet is indeed impressive. He had produced seven volumes of work, together with his service as a major political, social, and economic commentator on his times. While he died too soon to realize that his ideas would have a lasting impact, the seeds he had sown would one day bear fruit. Bastiat’s rediscovery in twentieth-century America, a time, and a place plagued by the same false ideas which so plagued his France, is a clear indication that he has had a great impact, perhaps a greater impact than we can yet appreciate.

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