carefully and
conscientiously all that the most fastidious sensibility could claim or
desire.

Section V.

Government.

*The establishment and preservation of order is the prime and essential
function of government*; the prevention and punishment of crime, its
secondary, incidental, perhaps even temporary use. In a perfect state of
society, government would still be necessary; for it would be only by the
observance of common and mutual designations of time, place, and measure,
that each individual member of society could enjoy the largest liberty and
the fullest revenue from objects of desire, compatible with the just
claims and rights of others. These benefits can, under no conceivable
condition in which finite beings can be placed, be secured except by
system, under a central administration, and with the submission of
individual wills and judgments to constituted and established authority. A
bad government, then, is better than none; for a bad government can exist
only by doing a part of its appropriate work, while in a state of anarchy
the whole of that work is left undone and unattempted.

*Obedience to government is*, then, fitting, and therefore a duty,
independently of all considerations as to the wisdom, or even the justice
of its decrees or statutes. If they are unwise, they yet are rules to
which the community can conform itself, and by which its members can make
their plans and govern their expectations, while lawlessness is the
negation alike of guidance for the present and of confidence in the
future. If they are unjust, they yet do less wrong and to fewer persons,
than would be done by individual and sporadic attempts to evade or
neutralize them. Nay, unwise and inequitable laws, to which the habits and
the industrial relations of a people have adjusted themselves, are to be
preferred to vacillating legislation, though in a generally right
direction. Laws that affect important interests should be improved only
with reference to the virtual pledges made by previous legislation, and so
as to guard the interests involved against the injurious effects of new
and revolutionary measures. The tariff regulations of our own country will
illustrate the bearing of this principle. It forms no part of our present
plan to discuss the mooted questions of free trade and protection. But in
the confession of even extreme partisans on either side, the capital and
industry of our