powerful machine which he controls and of which he
is the main wheel; he increases its yield ; he economizes, maintains,
repairs and improves it with a capability and success that nobody
questions; in short, he fabricates in a superior way.--But this
living source, to which the superiority of the works is due, cannot
be separated from the owner and chief, for it issues from his own
affections and deepest sentiments. It is useless without him; out of
his hands, in the hands of strangers, the fountain ceases to flow and
production stops.--If, consequently, a good and large yield is required,
he alone must have charge of the mill; he is the resident owner of
it, the one who sets it in motion, the born engineer, installed and
specially designed for that position. In vain may attempts be made to
turn the stream elsewhere; there simply ensues a stoppage of the natural
issue, a dam barring useful canals, a haphazard change of current
not only without gain, but loss, the stream subsiding in swamps or
undermining the steep banks of a ravine. At the utmost, the millions of
buckets of water, forcibly taken from private reservoirs, half fill with
a good deal of trouble the great central artificial basin in which the
water, low and stagnant, is never sufficient in quantity or force to
move the huge public wheel that replaces the small private wheels, doing
the nation's work.

Thus, even when we only consider men as manufactures, even if we treat
them simply as producers of what is valuable and serviceable, with
no other object in view than to furnish society with supplies and to
benefit the consumers, even though the private domain includes all
enterprises undertaken by private individuals, either singly or
associated together, through personal interests or personal taste, then
this is enough to ensure that all is managed better than the State could
have done; it is by virtue of this that they have devolved into their
hands. Consequently, in the vast field of labor, they themselves decide
on what they will undertake; they themselves, of their own authority,
set their own limits. They may therefore enlarge their own domain to any
extent they please, and reduce indefinitely the domain of the State. On
the contrary, the State cannot pretend to more than what they leave; as
they advance on their common territory separated by vague frontiers, it
is bound to recede and leave the ground to them; whatever the task
is, it should not perform