st injures the second and the second injures the
first one. The end, ordinarily, is the sacrifice of one to the other,
and, most frequently, the failure of both.

II. Abusive Government Intervention.

Application of this law to the public power.--General effect
of its intervention.

Let us follow out the effects of this law when it is the public power
which, beyond its principal and peculiar task, undertakes a different
task and puts itself in the place of corporate bodies to do their
work; when the State, not content with protecting the community and
individuals against external or internal oppression, takes upon itself
additionally the government of churches, education, or charity, the
direction of art, science, and of commercial, agricultural, municipal,
or domestic affairs.--Undoubtedly, it can intervene in all corporate
bodies other than itself; it has both the right and the duty to
interfere; it is bound to do this through its very office as defender
of persons and property, to repress in these bodies spoliation and
oppression, to compel in them the observance of the primordial statute,
charter, or contract, to maintain in the them rights of each member
fixed by this statute, to decide according to this statute all conflicts
which may arise between administrators and the administrated, between
directors and stockholders, between pastors and parishioners, between
deceased founders and their living successors. In doing this, it affords
them its tribunals, its constables, and its gendarmes, and it affords
these to them only with full consent after having looking into and
accepted the statute. This, too, is one of the obligations of its
office: its mandate hinders it from placing the public power at the
service of despoiling and oppressive enterprises; it is interdicted from
authorizing a contract for prostitution or slavery, and above all, for
the best of reasons, a society for brigandage and insurrections, an
armed league, or ready to arm itself, against the community, or a part
of the community, or against itself.--But, between this legitimate
intervention which enables it to maintain rights, and the abusive
interference by which it usurps rights, the limit is visible and it
oversteps this limit when, to its function of justiciary, it adds a
second, that of governing or supporting another corporation. In this
case two series of abuses unfold themselves; on the one side, the State
acts contrary to