it has no external check upon it in fact; for all
civil legislative power is in its own nature under an internal check of
right: it is a power of restraining or altering the rights of the
subjects for the purpose of advancing or securing the general good, and
not of restraining or altering them for any purpose whatever, and much
less for no purpose at all." There are, therefore, no arbitrary laws
which fulfil the end of law. Doubtless the true objects of society and
government may be mistaken by him who sets up to be law-maker, or if
those objects are properly appreciated, the means for advancing them may
be mistaken. It is not wonderful that in a matter which demands the
highest wisdom, many should try and fail.

It becomes important to inquire what are the true ends of society and
government? Man is a gregarious animal--a social being. He may exist in
solitude, but he cannot enjoy life: he cannot perfect his nature. Those
who have watched and studied closely the habits of those irrational
animals, who live in communities, as the ant, the bee, and the beaver,
have observed not only a settled system and subordination, but the
existence of some wonderful faculty, like articulate speech, by which
communication takes place from one to another; a power essential to
order. Man, the highest social animal in the scale of earthly being,
has also the noblest faculty of communication.

The final cause--the reason why man was made a social being--is that
society was necessary to the perfection of his physical, intellectual,
and moral powers, in order to give the fullest return to the labor of
his hands and to secure the greatest advances in knowledge and wisdom.
It is for no vain national power or glory, for no experimental
abstraction, that governments are instituted among men. It is for man as
an individual. It is to promote his development; and in that consists
his true happiness. The proposition would be still more accurate were it
said, society is constituted that men may be free--free to develop
themselves--free to seek their own happiness, following their own
instincts or conclusions. Without society--and government, which of
course results from it--men would not be free. An individual in a state
of isolation might defend himself from savage beasts, and more savage
men, as long as his strength lasted, but when sickness or age came on,
the product of the labor of his hands, accumulated by a wise foresight
to meet such a con