i.] ADMINISTRATIVE NIHILISM. 17 



value of that principle when applied to the pursuit of 

 wealth, there must be added that nobler and better 

 reason for a profound distrust of legislative interference, 

 which animates Von Humboldt and shines forth in the 

 pages of Mr. Mill's famous Essay on Liberty I mean 

 the just fear lest the end should be sacrificed to the 

 means ; lest freedom and variety should be drilled and 

 disciplined out of human life in order that the great 

 mill of the State should grind smoothly. 



One of the profoundest of living English philosophers, 

 who is at the same time the most thoroughgoing and 

 consistent of the champions of astynomocracy, has de- 

 voted a very able and ingenious essay 1 to the drawing 

 out of a comparison between the process by which men 

 have advanced from the savage state to the highest 

 civilization, and that by which an animal passes from 

 the condition of an almost shapeless and structureless 

 germ, to that in which it exhibits a highly complicated 

 structure and a corresponding diversity of powers. Mr. 

 Spencer says with great justice 



" That they gradually increase in mass ; that they become, little 

 by little, more complex ; that, at the same time, their parts grow 

 more mutually dependent ; and that they continue to live and grow 

 as wholes, while successive generations of their units appear and dis- 

 appear, are broad peculiarities which bodies politic display, in common 

 with all living bodies, and in which they and living bodies differ from 

 everything else." 



In a very striking passage of this essay Mr. Spencer 

 shows with what singular closeness a parallel between 

 the development of a nervous system, which is the 

 governing power of the body in the series of animal 

 organisms, and that of government, in the series of social 

 organisms, can be drawn : 



" Strange as the assertion will be thought," says Mr. Spencer, "our 

 Houses of Parliament discharge in the social economy functions that 



1 " The Social Organism : " Essays. Second Series. 



