Edinburgh, and laid down his Presidency; he brought out his “Manual of Vertebrate Anatomy,” and wrote a review of “Mr. Darwin’s Critics” (see below), while on October 9 he delivered an address at the Midland Institute, Birmingham, on “Administrative Nihilism” ("Collected Essays” 1).  This address, written between September 21 and 28, and remodelled later, was a pendant to his educational campaign on the School Board; a restatement and justification of what he had said and done there.  His text was the various objections raised to State interference with education; he dealt first with the upholders of a kind of caste system, men who were willing enough to raise themselves and their sons to a higher social plane, but objected on semi-theological grounds to any one from below doing likewise—­neatly satirising them and their notions of gentility, and quoting Plato in support of his contention that what is wanted even more than means to help capacity to rise is “machinery by which to facilitate the descent of incapacity from the higher strata to the lower.”  He repeats in new phrase his warning] “that every man of high natural ability, who is both ignorant and miserable, is as great a danger to society as a rocket without a stick is to people who fire it.  Misery is a match that never goes out; genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow:  and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run amuck among friends and foes.”

[Another class of objectors will have it that government should be restricted to police functions, both domestic and foreign, that any further interference must do harm.]

Suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that we accept the proposition that the functions of the State may be properly summed up in the one great negative commandment—­“Thou shalt not allow any man to interfere with the liberty of any other man,”—­I am unable to see that the logical consequence is any such restriction of the power of Government, as its supporters imply.  If my next-door neighbour chooses to have his drains in such a state as to create a poisonous atmosphere, which I breathe at the risk of typhoid and diphtheria, he restricts my just freedom to just as much as if he went about with a pistol threatening my life; if he is to be allowed to let his children go unvaccinated, he might as well be allowed to leave strychnine lozenges about in the way of mine; and if he brings them up untaught and untrained to earn their living, he is doing his best to restrict my freedom, by increasing the burden of taxation for the support of gaols and workhouses, which I have to pay.

The higher the state of civilisation, the more completely do the actions of one member of the social body influence all the rest, and the less possible is it for any one man to do a wrong thing without interfering, more or less, with the freedom of all his fellow-citizens.  So that, even upon the narrowest view of the functions of the State, it must be admitted to have wider powers than the advocates of the police theory are disposed to admit.