interests of the various classes in a community; and a good Parliament is one in which the parties answering to these respective interests are so balanced, that their united legislation concedes to each class as much as consists with the claims of the rest.”

All this appears to be very just.  But if the resemblances between the body physiological and the body politic are any indication, not only of what the latter is, and how it has become what it is, but of what it ought to be, and what it is tending to become, I cannot but think that the real force of the analogy is totally opposed to the negative view of State function.

Suppose that, in accordance with this view, each muscle were to maintain that the nervous system had no right to interfere with its contraction, except to prevent it from hindering the contraction of another muscle; or each gland, that it had a right to secrete, so long as its secretion interfered with no other; suppose every separate cell left free to follow its own “interests,” and laissez-faire lord of all, what would become of the body physiological?

The fact is that the sovereign power of the body thinks for the physiological organism, acts for it, and rules the individual components with a rod of iron.  Even the blood-corpuscles can’t hold a public meeting without being accused of “congestion”—­and the brain, like other despots whom we have known, calls out at once for the use of sharp steel against them.  As in Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” the representative of the sovereign authority in the living organism, though he derives all his powers from the mass which he rules, is above the law.  The questioning of his authority involves death, or that partial death which we call paralysis.  Hence, if the analogy of the body politic with the body physiological counts for anything, it seems to me to be in favour of a much larger amount of governmental interference than exists at present, or than I, for one, at all desire to see.  But, tempting as the opportunity is, I am not disposed to build up any argument in favour of my own case upon this analogy, curious, interesting, and in many respects close, as it is, for it takes no cognizance of certain profound and essential differences between the physiological and the political bodies.

Much as the notion of a “social contract” has been ridiculed, it nevertheless seems to be clear enough, that all social organization whatever depends upon what is substantially a contract, whether expressed or implied, between the members of the society.  No society ever was, or ever can be, really held together by force.  It may seem a paradox to say that a slaveholder does not make his slaves work by force, but by agreement.  And yet it is true.  There is a contract between the two which, if it were written out, would run in these terms:—­“I undertake to feed, clothe, house, and not to kill, flog, or otherwise maltreat you, Quashie, if you perform