its primary office, and, on the other, it discharges
the duties of its superadded office badly.[2202]

III. The State attacks persons and property.

It acts against its function. Its encroachments are attacks
on persons and property.

For, in the first place, to govern another corporate body, for example
the Church, the State at one time appoints its ecclesiastical heads, as
under the old monarchy after the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction by
the Concordat of 1516; at another, as with the Constituent Assembly in
1791, without appointing its heads, it invents a new mode of appointment
by imposing on the Church a discipline contrary to its spirit and even
to its dogmas. Sometimes it goes further still and reduces a special
body into a mere administrative branch, transforming its heads into
revocable functionaries whose acts it orders and directs; such under
the Empire as well as under the Restoration, were the mayor and
common-councilors in a commune, and the professors and head-masters of
the University. One step more and the invasion is complete: naturally,
either through ambition or precaution, or through theory or prejudice,
on undertaking a new service it is tempted to reserve to itself or
delegate its monopoly. Before 1789 there existed one of these monopolies
to the advantage of the Catholic Church, through the interdiction of
other cults, also another to the advantage of each corporation of "Arts
et Metiers," through the interdiction of free labor; after 1800, there
existed one for the benefit of the University through all sorts of
shackles and constraints imposed on the establishment and maintenance
of private schools.--Now, through each of these constraints the State
encroaches on the domain of the individual; the more extended its
encroachments the more does it prey upon and reduce the circle of
spontaneous initiation and of independent action, which constitute the
true life of the individual; if, in conformity with the Jacobin program,
it pushes its interference to the end, it absorbs in itself all other
lives;[2203] henceforth, the community consists only of automata
maneuvered from above, infinitely small residues of men, passive,
mutilated, and, so to say, dead souls; the State, instituted to preserve
persons, has reduced them to nonentities.

The effect is the same with property when the State supports other
organizations than its own. For, to maintain these, it has no other
funds t