By nature Man is an individual, that is to say a small distinct world in himself, a center apart in an enclosed circle, a detached organism complete in itself and which suffers when his spontaneous inclinations are frustrated by the intervention of an outside force.
The passage of time has made him a complicated organism, upon which three or four religions, five or six civilizations, thirty centuries of rich culture have left their imprint; in which its acquisitions are combined together, wherein inherited qualities are crossbred, wherein special traits have accumulated in such a way as to produce the most original and the most sensitive of beings. As civilization increases, so does his complexity: with the result that man's originality strengthens and his sensitivity become keener; from which it follows that the more civilized he becomes, the greater his repugnance to constraint and uniformity.
At the present day, (1880), each of us is the terminal and peculiar product of a vast elaboration of which the diverse stages occur in this order but once, a plant unique of its species, a solitary individual of superior and finer essence which, with its own inward structure and its own inalienable type, can bear no other than its own characteristic fruit. Nothing could be more adverse to the interest of the oak than to be tortured into bearing the apples of the apple tree; nothing could be more adverse to the interests of the apple tree than to be tortured into bearing acorns; nothing could be more opposed to the interests of both oak and apple tree, also of other trees, than to be pruned, shaped and twisted so as all to grow after a forced model, delineated on paper according to the rigid and limited imagination of a surveyor. The least possible constraint is, therefore, everybody's chief interest; if one particular restrictive agency is established, it is that every one may be preserved by if from other more powerful constraints, especially those which the foreigner and evil-doer would impose. Up to that point, and not further, its intervention is beneficial; beyond that point, it becomes one of the evils it is intended to forestall. Such then, if the common weal is to be looked after, the sole office of the State is,
1. to prevent constraint and, therefore, never to use it except to prevent worse constraints;
2. to secure respect for each individual in his own physical and moral domain; never to encroach on this except for that purpose and then to withdraw immediately;
3. to abstain from all indiscreet meddling, and yet more, as far as is practicable, without any sacrifice of public security;
4. to reduce old assessments, to exact only a minimum of subsidies and services;
5. to gradually limit even useful action;
6. to set itself as few tasks as possible;
7. to let each one have all the room possible and the maximum of initiative;