Page:Sphere and Duties of Government.djvu/185

not immediately operate to restrictfree activity; and although it is evident that all those consequences must be acknowledged to follow such a policy which I have before represented as the effects of the State solicitude for the physical welfare of the citizen, still they only follow here in a much smaller degree, since such a solicitude is extended only to a few persons. Nevertheless they do always really follow in the train of such a policy; the very struggle between internal morality and the external circumstances is done away with, and along with it its beneficial influence on the agent's strength of character, and on the mutual benevolence among the citizens in general; and the very circumstance that such a solicitude can only reach single persons, necessitates political interference in the individual circumstances of the citizens—all of which are injuries which we could only overlook in the conviction that the security of the State would suffer without some such arrangement. But there seems to me considerable room for doubt as to the existence of such a necessity. For in a State which does not give rise to such critical circumstances by the very nature of its own constitution, but which, on the contrary, secures such a degree of freedom to its citizens as that which it is the design of these pages to recommend, it is hardly possible in general that such situations as those we describe should arise, without finding a sufficient remedy in the voluntary assistance of the citizens themselves, and thereby rendering any State interference unnecessary; the cause in such a case must be looked for in the conduct of the man himself. But in this case it is wrong for the State to interpose itself, and disturb that order of events which the natural course of things induces in the man's actions. These situations, moreover, will only occur so rarely as to require no especial State interference, so that the advantages of such solicitude would be surpassed by those disadvantages which need no more detailed exposition here, after all we have already observed.