It clears the channels of national
industry of all obstacles. By its legislative, judicial, and executive
functions, it establishes, on the one hand, common methods of action
among multitudes having common interests and aims, and thus obviates
clashing and confusion; and, on the other, it punishes those who would
interfere with and obstruct or destroy this order.

The government is the concentrated will and intelligence of the people,
directed to the wise guidance of the national life--directed to the
harmonizing of the diversified activity and industry of the nation, to
the opening of all possible channels for that activity, and to the
removal of everything that would obstruct and counteract the nation's
utmost development and progress.

In this way, a free government exhibits, as far as human imperfection
admits, the union of the two great principles, _liberty_ and _order_.
The people are free to think, talk, write, and act as they see fit; but
since there can be no liberty, but only license, or lawlessness, without
order--without beneficent methods, symmetrical forms and arrangements,
_in which_ that liberty can be enjoyed by individuals and communities,
without conflicting with other individuals and communities, parts of the
same free whole--therefore government is created by the people to
prescribe and maintain this order, essential to this common liberty; an
order which is the _form_, or _forms_, under which both individuals and
communities shall act, singly or in concert, in the countless relations
in which the members of the same community or nation come into contact
with each other.

Now, in the United States, the chart of this orderly and symmetrical
network of political arrangements for the free movement among each other
of the individuals in the township, of the townships in the county, of
the counties in the State, and of the States in the Union--and within
the protecting lines of which political arrangements, the people are
enabled to pursue their industrial avocations without mutual
interference and collision, and to attend in peace and security to all
the employments that tend to elevate, refine, and freely develop the
individual man (for government is only and solely a _means_ to this
great end)--the chart, we say, of all these orderly arrangements, is our
immortal national Constitution, together with the State constitutions
that cluster around it, as their centre, axis, and support.

Through each S