This fusion of the political and social orders—­which in reality means the suppression of the latter to the profit of the former—­is the fatal error of the day and producive [Transcriber’s note:  productive?] of great evils.  An Educational Department is the open door through which any Government may force its particular views on the growing generation.  The monopoly of State education is nothing else but the conscription of the minds, an “intellectual militarism,” which eventually leads to the absorption of the individual and the family and to greater disasters than war.  Under the cover of citizenship it will legalize a country into servitude.  The school ambitions of Prussia prepared the catastrophe the world has just witnessed.  Always and everywhere the same cause will produce the same effects.

III.—­A Political Reason

Authority and liberty are the two poles on which revolves Society.  The perfect equilibrium of these two contending forces, one centripetal, the other centrifugal, make for its safety and welfare.  The encroachment of one upon the other displaces the social axis and throws a nation out of its natural orbit.  Political Society then oscillates between autocracy and anarchy.  The infringement of this supreme law of moral gravitation has strewn the paths of history with the ruins of kingdoms and empires.  The violation of a natural law bears always with itself its own punishment.  For, society is not the conventional creation of man; it is governed by laws that man does not make, but, which his reason and experience discover and to which he must submit.

This perfect equilibrium of authority and liberty is perfectly expressed in Lincoln’s famous definition:  “A sane democracy is one of the people, by the people and for the people.”  The reason of this law of the political order is that liberty is previous to authority, for authority only exists to protect liberty against tyranny and to safeguard it against its own excesses.  He is best governed who is least governed.  LePlay, the celebrated French economist, made this just and pertinent remark:  “The truly free nations are those who, without compromising this prosperity, extend the benefices of private life at the expense of public life.” (Reforme Sociale II, page 92.)

Therefore the ideal State exists when all civil or social rights—­which stand for the public enjoyment of all natural rights—­are fully protected by political rights.  These political liberties moreover claim not only the negative protection or non-interference of authority, but also its positive financial help.  For political liberty exists for the protection of civil liberty, and not vice versa.  The collective forces of a society are for the benefit of the individual and not the individual for them.  A State is an institution for the protection of rights inherent to a free people.