s under freely-chosen chiefs, frankly accepted and faithfully
followed. Mutual confidence, respect for the law, loyalty, voluntary
subordination, foresight, moderation, patience, perseverance, practical
good sense, every disposition of head and heart, with which no
association of any kind is efficacious or even viable, have died out
for lack of exercise. Henceforth spontaneous, pacific, and fruitful
co-operation, as practiced by a free people, is unattainable; men
have arrived at social incapacity and, consequently, at political
incapacity.--In fact they no longer choose their own constitution or
their own rulers; they put with these, willingly or not, according as
accident or usurpation furnishes them: now the public power belongs
to the man, the faction, or the party sufficiently unscrupulous,
sufficiently daring, sufficiently violent, to seize and hold on to it
by force, to make the most of it as an egotist or charlatan, aided by
parades and prestige, along with bravura songs and the usual din of
ready-made phrases on the rights of Man and the public salvation.--This
central power itself has in its hands no body who might give it an
impetus and inspiration, it rules only over an impoverished, inert,
or languid social body, solely capable of intermittent spasms or of
artificial rigidity according to order, an organism deprived of its
secondary organs, simplified to excess, of an inferior or degraded
kind, a people no longer anything but an arithmetical sum of separate,
unconnected units, in brief, human dust or mud.--This is what the
interference of the State leads to.

There are laws in the social and moral world as in the physiological
and physical world; we may misunderstand them, but we cannot elude them;
they operate now against us, now for us, as we please, but always
alike and without heeding us; it is for us to heed them; for the two
conditions they couple together are inseparable; the moment the first
appears the second inevitably follows.

*****

[Footnote 2201: Macaulay, "Essays: Gladstone on Church and State."--This
principle, of capital importance and of remarkable fecundity, may be
called the principle of specialties. Adam Smith fist applied it to
machines and to workmen. Macaulay extended it to human associations.
Milne-Edwards applied it to the entire series of animal organs. Herbert
Spencer largely develops it in connection with physiological organs
and human societies in his "Principles of Bio