For, under such an administration, every one would feel that he
possessed all the fulness, as well as all the responsibility of his
existence. So long as personal safety was ensured, so long as labour
was free, and the fruits of labour secured against all unjust attacks,
no one would have any difficulties to contend with in the State. When
prosperous, we should not, it is true, have to thank the State for our
success; but when unfortunate, we should no more think of taxing it with
our disasters, than our peasants think of attributing to it the arrival
of hail or of frost. We should know it only by the inestimable blessing
of Safety.

It may further be affirmed, that, thanks to the non-intervention of the
State in private affairs, our wants and their satisfactions would
develop themselves in their natural order. We should not see poor
families seeking for literary instruction before they were supplied with
bread. We should not see towns peopled at the expense of rural
districts, nor rural districts at the expense of towns. We should not
see those great displacements of capital, of labour, and of population,
which legislative measures occasion; displacements, which render so
uncertain and precarious the very sources of existence, and thus
aggravate to such an extent the responsibility of Governments.

Unhappily, law is by no means confined to its own department. Nor is it
merely in some indifferent and debateable views that it has left its
proper sphere. It has done more than this. It has acted in direct
opposition to its proper end; it has destroyed its own object; it has
been employed in annihilating that justice which it ought to have
established, in effacing amongst Rights, that limit which was its true
mission to respect; it has placed the collective force in the service of
those who wish to traffic, without risk, and without scruple, in the
persons, the liberty, and the property of others; it has converted
plunder into a right, that it may protect it, and lawful defence into a
crime, that it may punish it.

How has this perversion of law been accomplished? And what has resulted
from it?

The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different
causes--bare egotism and false philanthropy.

Let us speak of the former.

Self-preservation and development is the common aspiration of all men,
in such a way that if every one enjoyed the free exercise of his
faculties and the free disposition of their