Social statics, or, The conditions essential to human happiness specified, and the first of them developed by Herbert Spencer

Author:Herbert Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: D. Appleton

Further confirmation may be drawn from the universal practice of mankind in this matter. Widely as people have differed respecting the proper bounds of legislative superintendence, all have held them to include the defence of the subject against aggression. Whilst, in various countries and times, a hundred different functions have been assigned to the state—whilst there have probably been no two governments that have entirely agreed in the number and nature of their functions—whilst the things specially attended to by some have been wholly neglected by others, and thereby proved non-essential, there is one office—thatof protector—which has been common to them all. Did this fact stand alone it might by a stretch of incredulity be construed into an accident. But coinciding as it does with the foregoing inferences drawn from the nature of man's constitution and the necessary origin of society, we may safely take it as a further evidence that the duty of the state is—to protect—to enforce the law of equal freedom; to maintain men's rights, or, as we commonly express it—to administer justice.

§ 3. The question—What is the thing to be done by a government? being answered, there arises the other

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