STATE INTERVENTION IN SOCIAL ECONOMY. 467 



everything is permitted it, and vaunts itself on subjecting every- 

 thing. It wants to be all, and its will is changing, violent, and 

 weak by turns, like the passionate majorities and the ignorant 

 crowds whence it emanates ; and so slight is our confidence in the 

 state that its mobility reassures us more than it scares us. 



Yes, we distrust the state, whatever its name or shape ; we dis- 

 trust its prudence, its lights, its doctrines, and its aims ; its pro- 

 cesses, its methods, its propensity to regulate, its obstructiveness, 

 and its self-conceit ; its morality, its conscience, and its probity. 

 It worries us to see in it the organ of right and the instrument of 

 justice. We can not arm the state with new rights or fortify its 

 power on one side without re-enforcing it on all sides. The do- 

 main of public authority can not be extended over all interests 

 and private contracts without enslaving the individual and sub- 

 jecting the family to it. No artifice of political science can find 

 means to make the state the master of economical life, the om- 

 nipotent arbiter of the mill and the shop, without our societies 

 that live by work being taken wholly into its hand. There is 

 only one way to establish forever the despotism of the state in 

 the world, but there is one, and it is this. 



Even if the modern state should become more equitable and 

 more enlightened ; if it should become really something else than 

 an irresponsible collectivity exercising power by changing and pas- 

 sionate proxies ; if it should put away its sectarian spirit and its 

 tyrannical processes we should still doubt its competence and its 

 capacity to regulate the mill and the shop. The state is a weighty 

 engine, with slow-running machinery uselessly complicated, which 

 exacts a considerable expenditure of fuel and manual labor for 

 the least work. No other instrument makes a feebler return and 

 wastes so much force. Consequently, the more we extend the 

 action of the state the more we risk impoverishing the country. 

 Instead of hastening the development of national wealth, the state 

 is calculated to hinder it by restraining the free factors of capital 

 and labor. It is always a reproach which its intervention can 

 not escape, and a very grave one in social and economical matters, 

 that the meddling of public authority unnerves private initiative. 

 This of itself would be a cause of uneasiness, for private initiative 

 has always been the main-spring of progress ; to break it or para- 

 lyze it by enveloping it with laws and regulations which would 

 arrest or restrict its play would be to fetter the progress of indus- 

 try and of wealth, and to delay the improvement of the condition 

 of the masses. Further than this, in social questions themselves 

 questions belonging to the workmen the intervention of the 

 state, with its vexatious processes and its annoying habits, would 

 generally simply end in depressing instead of stimulating private 

 forces and living energies, humanitarian philanthropy and Chris- 



