Every society, great or small, resembles such a complex molecule, in which the atoms are represented by men, possessed of all those multifarious attractions and repulsions which are manifested in their desires and volitions, the unlimited power of satisfying which, we call freedom.  The social molecule exists in virtue of the renunciation of more or less of this freedom by every individual.  It is decomposed, when the attraction of desire leads to the resumption of that freedom, the suppression of which is essential to the existence of the social molecule.  And the great problem of that social chemistry we call politics, is to discover what desires of mankind may be gratified, and what must be suppressed, if the highly complex compound, society, is to avoid decomposition.  That the gratification of some of men’s desires shall be renounced is essential to order; that the satisfaction of others shall be permitted is no less essential to progress; and the business of the sovereign authority—­which is, or ought-to be, simply a delegation of the people appointed to act for its good—­appears to me to be, not only to enforce the renunciation of the anti-social desires, but, wherever it may be necessary, to promote the satisfaction of those which are conducive to progress.

The great metaphysician, Immanuel Kant, who is at his greatest when he discusses questions which are not metaphysical, wrote, nearly a century ago, a wonderfully instructive essay entitled “A Conception of Universal History in relation to Universal Citizenship,"[1] from which I will borrow a few pregnant sentences:—­

[Footnote 1:  “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbuergerlichen Absicht,” 1784.  This paper has been translated by De Quincey, and attention has been recently drawn to its “signal merits” by the Editor of the Fortnightly Review in his Essay on Condorcet. (Fortnightly Review, No. xxxviii.  N.S. pp. 136, 137.)]

“The means of which Nature has availed herself, in order to bring about the development of all the capacities of man, is the antagonism of those capacities to social organization, so far as the latter does in the long run necessitate their definite correlation.  By antagonism, I here mean the unsocial sociability of mankind—­that is, the combination in them of an impulse to enter into society, with a thorough spirit of opposition which constantly threatens to break up this society.  The ground of this lies in human nature.  Man has an inclination to enter into society, because in that state he feels that he becomes more a man, or, in other words, that his natural faculties develop.  But he has also a great tendency to isolate himself, because he is, at the same time, aware of the unsocial peculiarity of desiring to have everything his own way; and thus, being conscious of an inclination to oppose others, he is naturally led to expect opposition from them.

“Now it is this opposition which