State is not the natural
teacher of the child.

This fusion of the political and social orders--which in reality means
the suppression of the latter to the profit of the former--is the fatal
error of the day and producive [Transcriber's note: productive?] of
great evils. An Educational Department is the open door through which
any Government may force its particular views on the growing
generation. The monopoly of State education is nothing else but the
conscription of the minds, an "intellectual militarism," which
eventually leads to the absorption of the individual and the family and
to greater disasters than war. Under the cover of citizenship it will
legalize a country into servitude. The school ambitions of Prussia
prepared the catastrophe the world has just witnessed. Always and
everywhere the same cause will produce the same effects.

_III.--A Political Reason_

Authority and liberty are the two poles on which revolves Society. The
perfect equilibrium of these two contending forces, one centripetal,
the other centrifugal, make for its safety and welfare. The
encroachment of one upon the other displaces the social axis and throws
a nation out of its natural orbit. Political Society then oscillates
between autocracy and anarchy. The infringement of this supreme law of
moral gravitation has strewn the paths of history with the ruins of
kingdoms and empires. The violation of a natural law bears always with
itself its own punishment. For, society is not the conventional
creation of man; it is governed by laws that man does not make, but,
which his reason and experience discover and to which he must submit.

This perfect equilibrium of authority and liberty is perfectly
expressed in Lincoln's famous definition: "A sane democracy is one of
the people, by the people and for the people." The reason of this law
of the political order is that liberty is previous to authority, for
authority only exists to protect liberty against tyranny and to
safeguard it against its own excesses. He is best governed who is
least governed. LePlay, the celebrated French economist, made this
just and pertinent remark: "The truly free nations are those who,
without compromising this prosperity, extend the benefices of private
life at the expense of public life." (Reforme Sociale II, page 92.)

Therefore the ideal State exists when all civil or social rights--which
stand for the _public enjoyment_ of all natural rights--ar