ght to save men from
suffering, and if the case admits to put them under conditions in which
the normal balance of impulse is most likely to be restored. It may be
added that, in the case of the drunkard--and I think the argument
applies to all cases where overwhelming impulse is apt to master the
will--it is a still more obvious and elementary duty to remove the
sources of temptation, and to treat as anti-social in the highest degree
every attempt to make profit out of human weakness, misery, and
wrong-doing. The case is not unlike that of a very unequal contract. The
tempter is coolly seeking his profit, and the sufferer is beset with a
fiend within. There is a form of coercion here which the genuine spirit
of liberty will not fail to recognize as its enemy, and a form of injury
to another which is not the less real because its weapon is an impulse
which forces that other to the consent which he yields.

I conclude that there is nothing in the doctrine of liberty to hinder
the movement of general will in the sphere in which it is really
efficient, and nothing in a just conception of the objects and methods
of the general will to curtail liberty in the performance of the
functions, social and personal, in which its value lies. Liberty and
compulsion have complementary functions, and the self-governing State
is at once the product and the condition of the self-governing
individual.

Thus there is no difficulty in understanding why the extension of State
control on one side goes along with determined resistance to
encroachments on another. It is a question not of increasing or
diminishing, but of reorganizing, restraints. The period which has
witnessed a rapid extension of industrial legislation has seen as
determined a resistance to anything like the establishment of doctrinal
religious teaching by a State authority,[10] and the distinction is
perfectly just. At bottom it is the same conception of liberty and the
same conception of the common will that prompts the regulation of
industry and the severance of religious worship and doctrinal teaching
from the mechanism of State control.

So far we have been considering what the State compels the individual to
do. If we pass to the question what the State is to do for the
individual, a different but parallel question arises, and we have to
note a corresponding movement of opinion. If the State does for the
individual what he ought to do for himself what will be the effec