laxes its grasp.

Now, in every human society a government is necessary, or, in other
words, an organisation of the power of the community. No other machine
is so useful. But a machine is useful only as it is adapted to its
purpose; otherwise it does not work well, or it works adversely to that
purpose. Hence, in its construction, the prime necessity of calculating
what work it has to do, also the quantity of the materials one has at
one's disposal.

During the French Revolution, legislators had never taken this into
consideration; they had constituted things as theorists, and likewise as
optimists, without closely studying them, or else regarding them as they
wished to have them. In the national assemblies, as well as with the
public, the task was deemed easy and ordinary, whereas it was
extraordinary and immense, for the matter in hand consisted in effecting
a social revolution and in carrying on a European war.

What is the service which the public power renders to the public? The
principal one is the protection of the community against the foreigner,
and of private individuals against each other. Evidently, to do this, it
must _in all cases_ be provided with indispensable means, namely,
diplomats, an army, a fleet, arsenals, civil and criminal courts,
prisons, a police, taxation and tax-collectors, a hierarchy of agents
and local supervisors, who, each in his place and attending to his
special duty, will co-operate in securing the desired effect. Evidently,
again, to apply all these instruments, the public power must have,
_according to the case_, this or that form of constitution, this or that
degree of impulse and energy; according to the nature and gravity of
external or internal danger, it is proper that it should be concentrated
or divided, emancipated from control or under control, authoritative or
liberal. No indignation need be cherished beforehand against its
mechanism, whatever this may be. Properly speaking, it is a vast engine
in the human community, like any given industrial machine in a factory,
or any set of organs belonging to the living body.

Unfortunately, in France, at the end of the eighteenth century, a bent
was taken in the organisation of this machine, and a wrong bent. For
three centuries and more the public power had unceasingly violated and
discredited spontaneous bodies. At one time it had mutilated them and
decapitated them. For example, it had suppressed provincial governments
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