Title: The State
Book: The Functions Of Government
Author: Wilson, Woodrow
The Functions Of Government
1473. What are the Functions of Government? - The question has its own
difficulties and complexities: it cannot be answered out of hand and by the
list, as the physiologist might answer the question, What are the functions of
the heart? In its nature government is one, but in its life it is many: there
are governments and governments. When asked, therefore, What are the
functions of government? we must ask in return, Of what government? Different
states have different conceptions of their duty, and so undertake different
things. They have had their own peculiar origins, their own characteristic
histories; circumstance has moulded them; necessity, interest, or caprice has
variously guided them. Some have lingered near those primitive institutions
which all once knew and upheld together; others have quite forgotten that man
ever had a political childhood and are now old in complex practices of
national self-government.
1474. The Nature of the Question. - It is important to notice at the
outset that this is in one aspect obviously a simple question of fact; and yet
there is another phase of it, in which it becomes as evidently a question of
opinion. The distinction is important because over and over again the
question of fact has been confounded with that very widely different question,
What ought the functions of government to be? The two questions should be
kept entirely separate in treatment. Under no circumstances may we
instructively or safely begin with the question of opinion: the answer to the
question of fact is the indispensable foundation of all sound reasoning
concerning government, which is at all points based upon experience rather
than upon theory. The facts of government mirror the principles of government
in operation. What government does must arise from what government is: and
what government is must determine what government ought to do.
1475. Classification. - It will contribute to clearness of thought to
observe the functions of government in two groups, I. The Constituent
Functions, II. The Ministrant. Under the Constituent I would place that
usual category of governmental function, the protection of life, liberty, and
property, together with all other functions that are necessary to the civic
organization of society, - functions which are not optional with governments,
even in the eyes of strictest laissez faire, - which are indeed the very bonds
of society. Under the Ministrant I would range those other functions (such as
education, posts and telegraphs, and the care, say, of forests) which are
undertaken, not by way of governing, but by way of advancing the general
interests of society, - functions which are optional, being necessary only
according to standards of convenience or expediency, and not according to
standards of existence; functions which assist without constituting social
organization.
1476. Of course this classification is based primarily upon objective and
practical distinctions and cannot claim philosophic completeness. There may be
room for question, too, as to whether some of the functions which I class as
Ministrant might not quite as properly have been considered Constituent; but I
must here simply act upon my own conclusions without rearguing them,
acknowledging by the way that the line of demarcation is not always perfectly
clear.
1477. "The admitted functions of government," said Mr. Mill, "embrace a
much wider field than can easily be included within the ring-fence of any
restrictive definition, and it is hardly possible to find any ground of
justification common to them all, except the comprehensive one of general
expediency."
1478. I. The Constituent Functions:
(1) The keeping of order and providing for the protection of persons and
property from violence and robbery.
(2) The fixing of the legal relations between man and wife and between
parents and children.
(3) The regulation of the holding, transmission, and interchange of
property, and the determination of its liabilities for debt or for crime.
(4) The determination of contract rights between individuals.
(5) The definition and punishment of crime.
(6) The administration of justice in civil causes.
(7) The determination of the political duties, privileges, and relations
of citizens.
(8) Dealings of the state with foreign powers: the preservation of the
state from external danger or encroachment and the advancement of its
international interests.
These will all be recognized as functions which are obnoxious not even to
the principles of Mr. Spencer, ^1 and which persist under every form of
government.
[Footnote 1: As set forth in his pamphlet, Man versus the State.]
1479. II. The Ministrant Functions. - It is hardly possible to give a
complete list of those functions which I have called Ministrant, so various
are they under different systems of government. The following partial list
will suffice, however, for the purpose of the present discussion:
(1) The regulation of trade and industry. Under this head I would
include the coinage of money and the establishment of standard weights and
measures, laws against forestalling and engrossing, the licensing of trades,
etc., as well as the great matters of tariffs, navigation laws, and the like.
(2) The regulation of labor.
(3) The maintenance of thoroughfares, - including state management of
railways and that great group of undertakings which we embrace within the
comprehensive term 'Internal Improvements.'
(4) The maintenance of postal and telegraph systems, which is very
similar in principle to (3).
(5) The manufacture and distribution of gas, the maintenance of water-
works, etc.
(6) Sanitation, including the regulation of trades for sanitary purposes.
(7) Education.
(8) Care of the poor and incapable.
(9) Care and cultivation of forests and like matters, such as the
stocking of rivers with fish.
(10) Sumptuary laws, such as 'prohibition' laws, for example.
1480. These are all functions which, in one shape or another, all
governments alike have undertaken. Changed conceptions of the nature and duty
of the state have arisen, issuing from changed historical conditions, deeply
altered historical circumstances; and part of the change which has thus
affected the idea of the state has been a change in the method and extent of
the exercise of governmental functions; but changed conceptions have left the
functions of government in kind the same. Diversities of conception are very
much more marked than diversities of practice.
1481. The following may be mentioned among ministrant functions not
included under any of the foregoing heads, and yet undertaken by more than one
modern government: the maintenance of savings-banks, especially for small sums
(e.g., the English postal savings-bank), the issuance of loans to farmers, and
the maintenance of agricultural institutes (as in France), and the
establishment of insurance for workingmen (as in Germany).
1482. History of Governmental Function: Province of the Ancient State. -
Notable contrasts both of theory and of practice separate governments of the
ancient omnipotent type from governments of the modern constitutional type.
The ancient State, standing very near, as it did, in its thought, to that
time, still more remote, when the State was the Kin, knew nothing of
individual rights as contrasted with the rights of the state. "The nations of
Italy," says Mommsen, "did not merge into that of Rome more completely than
the single Roman burgess merged in the Roman community." And Greece was not a
whit behind Rome in the absoluteness with which she held the subordination of
the individual to the state.
1483. This thought is strikingly visible in the writings of Plato and
Aristotle, not only in what they say, but also, and even more, in what they do
not say. The ideal Republic of which Plato dreams is to prescribe the whole
life of its citizens; but there is no suggestion that it is to be set up under
cover of any new conception as to what the state may legitimately do, - it is
only to make novel experiments in legislation under the old conception. And
Aristotle's objection to the utopian projects of his master is not that they
would be socialistic (as we should say), but merely that they would be unwise.
He does not fear that in such a republic the public power would prove to have
been exalted too high; but, speaking to the policy of the thing, he foresees
that the citizens would be poor and unhappy. The state may do what it will,
but let it be wise in what it does. There is no one among the Greeks to deny
that it is the duty of the state to make its citizens happy and prosperous;
nay, to legislate them happy, if legislation may create fair skies and a kind
fortune; the only serious quarrel concerns the question, What laws are to be
tried to this end?
1484. Roman Conception of Private Rights. - Roman principles, though
equally extreme, were in some respects differently cast. That superior
capacity for the development of law, which made the Romans singular among the
nations of antiquity, showed itself in respect of the functions of government
in a more distinct division between public and private rights than obtained in
the polity of the Greek cities. An examination of the conception of the state
held in Rome reveals the singular framework of her society. The Roman family
did not suffer that complete absorption into the City which so early overtook
the Greek family. Private rights were not individual rights, but family
rights: and family rights did not so much curtail as supplement the powers of
the community. The family was an indestructible organ of the state. The
father of a family, or the head of a gens, was in a sense a member of the
official hierarchy of the City, - as the king, or his counterpart the consul,
was a greater father. There was no distinction of principle between the power
of king or consul and the power of a father; it was a mere difference of
sphere, a division of functions.
1485. A son was, for instance, in some things exempt from the authority
of the City only because he was in those things still subject, because his
father still lived, to the dominion of that original state, the family. There
was not in Rome that separation of the son from the family at majority which
characterizes the Greek polity, as it now characterizes our own. The father
continued to be a ruler, an hereditary state officer, within the original
sphere of the family life, the large sphere of individual privilege and
property.
1486. This essential unity of state and family furnishes us with the
theoretic measure of state functions in Rome. The Roman burgess was
subordinated, not to the public authority exactly, but rather to the public
order, to the conservative integrity of the community. He was subject to a
law which embodied the steady, unbroken habit of the State-family. He was not
dominated, but merged.
1487. Powers of the Roman Senate. - The range of state power in ancient
times, as a range broken only by limits of habit and convenience, is well
illustrated in the elastic functions of the Roman Senate during the period of
the Republic. With an unbroken life which kept it conscious of every
tradition and familiar with every precedent; with established standards of
tested experience and cautious expediency, it was able to direct the movements
of the compact society at whose summit it sat, as the brain and consciousness
direct the movements of the human body; and it is evident from the freedom of
its discussions and the frequency of its action upon interests of every kind,
whether of public or of private import, that the Roman state, as typified in
its Senate, was in its several branches of family, tribe, and City, a single
undivided whole, and that its prerogatives were limited by nothing save
religious observance and fixed habit. Of that individual liberty which we
cherish it knew nothing. (Compare secs. 173, 174.)
1488. Government the Embodiment of Society. - As little was there in
Greek politics any seed of the thought which would limit the sphere of
governmental action by principles of inalienable individual rights. Both in
Greek and in Roman conception government was as old as society, - was indeed
nothing less than the express image and embodiment of society. In government
society lived and moved and had its being. Society and government were one,
in some such sense as the spirit and body of man are one: it was through
government, as through mouth and eyes and limbs, that society realized and
gave effect to its life. Society's prejudices, habits, superstitions, did
indeed command the actions of government; but only because society and
government were one and the same, not because they were distinct and the one
subordinate to the other. In plain terms, the functions of government had no
limits of principle, but only certain limits of wont and convenience, and the
object of administration was nothing less than to help society on to all its
ends: to speed and facilitate all social undertakings. So far as full
citizens of the state were concerned, Greek and Roman alike was what we should
call a socialist; though he was too much in the world of affairs and had too
keen an appreciation of experience, too keen a sense of the sane and possible,
to attempt the Utopias of which the modern socialist dreams, and with which
the ancient citizen's own writers sometimes amused him. He bounded his
politics by common sense, and so dispensed with 'the rights of man.'
1489. Feudalism: Functions of Government Functions of Proprietorship. -
Individual rights, after having been first heralded in the religious world by
the great voice of Christianity, broke into the ancient political world in the
person of the Teuton. But the new politics which the invader brought with him
was not destined to establish at once democratic equality: that was a work
reserved for the transformations of the modern world. During the Middle Ages,
government, as we conceive it, may be said to have suffered eclipse. In the
Feudal System the constituent elements of government fell away from each
other. Society was drawn back to something like its original family groups.
Conceptions of government narrowed themselves to small territorial
connections. Men became sovereigns in their own right by virtue of owning
land in their own right. There was no longer any conception of nations or
societies as wholes. Union there was none, but only interdependence.
Allegiance bowed, not to law or to fatherhood, but to ownership. The
functions of government under such a system were simply the functions of
proprietorship, of command and obedience: "I say unto one, Go, and he goeth;
and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth
it." The public function of the baron was to keep peace among his liegemen, to
see that their properties were enjoyed according to the custom of the manor
(if the manor had been suffered to acquire custom on any point), and to exact
fines of them for all privileges, whether of marrying, of coming of age, or of
making a will. The baronial conscience, bred in cruel, hardening times, was
the only standard of justice; the baronial power the only conclusive test of
prerogative.
1490. This was between baron and vassal. Between baron and baron the
only bond was a nominal common allegiance to a distant king, who was himself
only a greater baron. For the rest there was no government, but only
diplomacy and warfare. Government lived where it could and as it could, and
was for the most part divided out piecemeal to a thousand petty holders.
Armed feuds were the usual processes of justice.
1491. The Feudal Monarchy. - The monarchy which grew out of the ruins of
this disintegrate system concentrated authority without much changing its
character. The old idea, born of family origins, that government was but the
active authority of society, the magistrate but society's organ, bound by
society's immemorial laws, had passed utterly away, and government had become
the personal possession of one man. The ruler did not any longer belong to
the state; the state belonged to him: he was himself the state, as the rich
man may be said to be his possessions. The Greek or Roman official was
wielded by the community. Not so the king who had swept together into his own
lap the powers once broadcast in the feudal system: he wielded the community.
Government breathed with his breath, and it was its function to serve him.
The state had become, by the processes of the feudal development, his private
estate.
1492. Modern De-socialization of the State. - The reaction from such
conceptions, slow and for the most part orderly in England, sudden and
violent, because long forcibly delayed, on the Continent, was natural, and
indeed inevitable. When it came it was radical; but it did not swing the
political world back to its old-time ideas; it turned it aside rather to new.
The ancient man had had no thought but to live loyally the life of society;
but it became the object of the revolutionist and the democrat of the new
order of things to live his own life. The antique citizen's virtues were not
individual in their point of view, but social; whereas our virtues are almost
entirely individual in their motive, social only in some of their results.
1493. In brief, the modern State has been largely de-socialized. The
modern idea is this: the state no longer absorbs the individual; it only
serves him. The state, as it appears in its organ, the government, is the
representative of the individual, and not his representative even except
within the definite commission of constitutions; while for the rest each man
makes his own social relations. 'The individual for the State' has been
reversed and made to read, 'The State for the individual.'
1494. More Changes of Conception than of Practice. - Such are the
divergencies of conception separating modern from ancient politics,
divergencies at once deep and far-reaching. How far have such changes of
thought been accompanied by changes of function? By no means so far as might
be expected. Apparently the new ideas which have been given prevalence in
politics from time to time have not been able to translate themselves into
altered functions, but only into somewhat curtailed functions, breeding rather
a difference of degree than a difference of kind. Even under the most liberal
of our modern constitutions we still meet government in almost every field of
social endeavor. Our modern life is so infinitely wide and complex, it is
true, that we may go great distances in any field of enterprise without
receiving either direct aid or direct check from government; but that is only
because every field of enterprise is vastly big nowadays, not because
government is not somewhere in it: and we know that the tendency is for
governments to make themselves everywhere more and more conspicuously present.
We are conscious that we are by no means in the same case with the Greek or
Roman: the state is ours, not we the state's. But we know at the same time
that the tasks of the state have not been much diminished. Perhaps we may say
that the matter stands thus: what is changed is not the activities of
government but only the morals, the conscience of government. Government may
still be doing substantially the same things as of old; but an altered
conception of its responsibility deeply modifies the way in which it does
them. Social convenience and advancement are still its ultimate standard of
conduct, just as if it were still itself the omnipotent impersonation of
society, the master of the individual; but it has adopted new ideas as to what
constitutes social convenience and advancement. Its aim is to aid the
individual to the fullest and best possible realization of his individuality,
instead of merely to the full realization of his sociality. Its plan is to
create the best and fairest opportunities for the individual; and it has
discovered that the way to do this is by no means itself to undertake the
administration of the individual by old-time futile methods of guardianship.
1495. Functions of Government much the Same now as always. - This is
indeed a great and profound change; but it is none the less important to
emphasize the fact that the functions of government are still, when
catalogued, found to be much the same both in number and magnitude that they
always were. Government does not stop with the protection of life, liberty,
and property, as some have supposed; it goes on to serve every convenience of
society. Its sphere is limited only by its own wisdom, alike where republican
and where absolutist principles prevail.
1496. The State's Relation to Property. - A very brief examination of the
facts suffices to confirm this view. Take, for example, the state's relation
to property, its performance of one of the chief of those functions which I
have called Constituent. It is in connection with this function that one of
the most decided contrasts exists between ancient and modern political
practice; and yet we shall not find ourselves embarrassed to recognize as
natural the practice of ancient states touching the right of private property.
Their theory was extreme, but, outside of Sparta, their practice was moderate.
1497. In Sparta. - Consistent, logical Sparta may serve as the point of
departure for our observation. She is the standing classical type of
exaggerated state functions and furnishes the most extreme example of the
antique conception of the relations of the state to property. In the early
periods of her history at least, besides being censor, pedagogue, drill
sergeant, and housekeeper to her citizens, she was also universal landlord.
There was a distinct reminiscence in her practice of the time when the state
was the family, and as such the sole owner of property. She was regarded as
the original proprietor of all the land in Laconia, and individual tenure was
looked upon as rather of the nature of a usufruct held of the state and at the
state's pleasure than as resting upon any complete or indefeasible private
title. (Compare sec. 105.)
1498. Peculiar Situation of the Spartans. - There were in Sparta special
reasons for the persistence of such a system. The Spartans had come into
Laconia as conquerors, and the land had first of all been tribal booty. It
had been booty of which the Spartan host as a whole, as a state, had had the
dividing, and it had been the purpose of the early arrangement to make the
division of the land among the Spartan families as equal as possible. Nor did
the state resign the right of disposition in making this first distribution.
It remained its primary care to keep its citizens, the favored Spartiatoe,
upon an equal footing of fortune, to the end that they might remain rich in
leisure, and so be the better able to live entirely for the service of the
state, which was honorable, to the avoidance of that pursuit of wealth which
was dishonorable. The state, accordingly, undertook to administer the wealth
of the country for the benefit of its citizens. When grave inequalities
manifested themselves in the distribution of estates it did not hesitate to
resume its proprietary rights and effect a reapportionment; no one dreaming,
the while, of calling its action confiscation. It took various means for
accomplishing its ends. It compelled rich heiresses to marry men without
patrimony; and it grafted the poor citizen upon a good estate by means of
prescribed adoption. No landed estate could be alienated either by sale or
testament from the family to which the state had assigned it unless express
legislative leave were given. In brief, in respect of his property the
citizen was both ward and tenant of the state.
1499. Decay of the System. - As the Spartan state decayed this whole
system was sapped. Estates became grossly unequal, as did also political
privileges even among the favored Spartiatoe. But these changes were due to
the decadence of Spartan power and to the degeneration of her political fibre
in days of waning fortune, not to any conscious or deliberate surrender by the
state of its prerogatives as owner, guardian, and trustee. She had grown old
and lax simply; she had not changed her mind.
1500. In Athens. - When we turn to Athens we experience a marked change
in the political atmosphere, though the Athenians hold much the same abstract
conception of the state. Here men breathe more freely and enjoy the fruits of
their labor, where labor is without reproach, with less restraint. Even in
Athens there remain distinct traces, nevertheless, of the family duties of the
state. She too, like Sparta, felt bound to dispose properly of eligible
heiresses. She did not hesitate to punish with heavy forfeiture of right
(atimia) those who squandered their property in dissolute living. There was
as little limit in Athens as in Sparta to the theoretical prerogatives of the
public authority. The freedom of the citizen was a freedom of indulgence
rather than of right: he was free because the state refrained, - as a
privileged child, not as a sovereign under Rousseau's Law of Nature.
1501. In Rome. - When we shift our view to republican Rome we do not find
a simple city omnipotence like that of Greece, in which all private rights are
sunk. The primal constituents of the city yet abide in shapes something like
their original. Roman society consists of a series of interdependent links:
the family the gens, the city. The aggregate, not the fusion, of these makes
up what we should call the state. But the state, so made up, was omnipotent,
through one or other of its organs, over the individual. Property was not
private in the sense of being individual; it vested in the family, which was,
in this as in other respects, an organ of the state. Property was not
conceived of as state property, because it had remained the undivided property
of the family. The father, as a ruler in the immemorial hierarchy of the
government, was all-powerful trustee of the family estates; individual
ownership there was none.
1502. Under Modern Governments. - We with some justice felicitate
ourselves that to this omnipotence of the ancient state in its relations to
property the practice of our own governments offers the most pronounced
contrasts. But the point of greatest interest for us in the present
connection is this, that these contrasts are contrasts of policy, not of
power. To what lengths it will go in regulating property rights is for each
government a question of principle, which it must put to its own conscience,
and which, if it be wise, it will debate in the light of political history:
but every government must regulate property in one way or another and may
regulate it as much as it pleases. If the ancient state was regarded as the
ultimate owner, the modern state is regarded as the ultimate heir of all
estates. Failing other claimants, property escheats to the state. If the
modern state does not assume, like the ancient, to administer their property
upon occasion for competent adults, it does administer their property upon
occasion for lunatics and minors. The ancient state controlled slaves and
slavery. The modern state has been quite as absolute: it has abolished slaves
and slavery. The modern state, no less than the ancient, sets rules and
limitations to inheritance and bequest. Most of the more extreme and hurtful
interferences with rights of private ownership government has abandoned, one
may suspect, rather because of difficulties of administration than because of
difficulties of conscience. It is of the nature of the state to regulate
property rights; it is of the policy of the state to regulate them more or
less. Administrators must regard this as one of the Constituent functions of
political society.
1503. The State and Political Rights. - Similar conclusions may be drawn
from a consideration of the contrasts which exist in the field of that other
Constituent function which concerns the determination of political rights, -
the contrasts between the status of the citizen in the ancient state and the
status of the citizen in the modern state. Here also the contrast, as between
state and state, is not one of power, but one of principle and habit rather.
Modern states have often limited as narrowly as did the ancient the enjoyment
of those political privileges which we group under the word Franchise. They,
too, as well as the ancient states, have admitted slavery into their systems;
they too have commanded their subjects without moderation and fleeced them
without compunction. But for all they have been so omnipotent, and when they
chose so tyrannical, they have seldom insisted upon so complete and unreserved
a service of the state by the citizen as was habitual to the political
practice of both the Greek and the Roman worlds. The Greek and the Roman
belonged each to his state in a quite absolute sense. He was his own in
nothing as against the claims of his city upon him: he freely acknowledged all
his privileges to be but concessions from his mother, the commonwealth. Those
privileges accrued to him through law, as do ours; but law was to him simply
the will of the organic community; never, as we know it in our constitutions,
a restraint upon the will of the organic community. He knew no principles of
liberty save only those which custom had built up: which inhered, not in the
nature of things, not in abstract individuality, but in the history of
affairs, in concrete practice. His principles were all precedents.
Nevertheless, however radically different its doctrines, the ancient state was
not a whit more completely master touching laws of citizenship than the state
of to- day is.
1504. As Regards the State's Ministrant Functions. - Of the Ministrant,
no less than of the Constituent functions, the same statement may be made,
that practically the state has been relieved of very little duty by
alterations of political theory. It is natural enough that in the field of
the Constituent functions the state should serve society now as always; in
this field of the Ministrant functions one would expect the state to be less
active now than formerly. But there is in fact no such difference: government
does now whatever experience permits or the times demand; and though it does
not do exactly the same things it still does substantially the same kind of
things that the ancient state did. It will conduce to clearness if I set
forth my illustrations of this in the order of the list of Ministrant
functions which I have given (sec. 1479).
1505. (1) The State in Relation to Trade. - All nations have habitually
regulated trade and commerce. In the most remote periods of which history has
retained any recollection the regulation of trade and commerce was necessary
to the existence of government. The only way in which communities which were
then seeking to build up a dominant power could preserve an independent
existence and work out an individual development was to draw apart to an
absolutely separate life. Commerce meant contact; contact meant
contamination: the only way in which to develop character and achieve cohesion
was to avoid intercourse. In the classical states this stage is passed and
trade and commerce are regulated for much the same reasons that induce modern
states to regulate them, in order, that is, to secure commercial advantage as
against competitors or in order to serve the fiscal needs of the state.
Athens and Sparta and Rome, too, regulated the corn trade for the purpose of
securing for their citizens full store of food. In the Middle Ages the feuds
and highway brigandage of petty lords loaded commerce with fetters of the most
harassing sort, except where the free cities could by militant combination
keep open to it an unhindered passage to and fro between the great marts of
North and South. As the mediaeval states emerge into modern times we find
trade and commerce handled by statesmen as freely as ever, but according to
the reasoned policy of the mercantilist thinkers; and in our own days
according to still other conceptions of national advantage.
1506. (2) The State in Relation to Labor. - Labor, too, has always been
regulated by the state. By Greek and Roman the labor of the handicrafts and
of agriculture, all manual toil indeed, was for the most part given to slaves
to do; and of course law regulated the slave. In the Middle Ages the labor
which was not agricultural and held in bondage to feudal masters was in the
cities, where it was rigidly ordered by the complex rules of the guild system,
as were trade also and almost all other like forms of making a livelihood.
Where, as in England, labor in part escaped from the hard service of the
feudal tenure the state stepped in with its persistent "statutes of laborers"
and sought to tie the workman to one habitation and to one rate of wages.
'The rustic must stay where he is and must receive only so much pay,' was its
command. Apparently, however, all past regulation of labor was but timid and
elementary as compared with the labor legislation about to be tried by the
governments of our own day. The birth and development of the modern industrial
system has changed every aspect of the matter; and this fact reveals the true
character of the part which the state plays in the case. The rule would seem
to be that in proportion as the world's industries grow must the state advance
in its efforts to assist the industrious to advantageous relations with each
other. The tendency to regulate labor rigorously and minutely is as strong in
England, where the state is considered the agent of the citizen, as it was in
Athens, where the citizen was deemed the child and tool of the state, and
where the workman was a slave.
1507. (3) Regulation of Corporations. - The regulation of corporations is
but one side of the modern regulation of the industrial system, and is a
function added to the antique list of governmental tasks.
1508. (4) The State and Public Works. - The maintenance of thoroughfares
may be said to have begun with permanent empire, that is to say, for Europe,
with the Romans. For the Romans, indeed, it was first a matter of moving
armies, only secondarily a means of serving commerce; whereas with us the
highway is above all things else an artery of trade, and armies use it only
when commerce stands still at the sound of drum and trumpet. The building of
roads may therefore be said to have begun by being a Constituent function and
to have ended by becoming a Ministrant function of government. But the same
is not true of other public works, of the Roman aqueducts and theatres and
baths, and of modern internal improvements. They, as much as the Roman tax on
old bachelors, are parts, not of a scheme of governing, but of plans for the
advancement of other social aims, - for the administration of society.
Because in her conception the community as a whole was the only individual,
Rome thrust out as of course her magnificent roads to every quarter of her
vast territory, considered no distances too great to be traversed by her
towering aqueducts, deemed it her duty to clear river courses and facilitate
by every means both her commerce and her arms. And the modern state, though
holding a deeply modified conception of the relations of government to
society, still follows a like practice. If in most instances our great iron
highways are left to private management, it is oftener for reasons of
convenience than for reasons of conscience.
1509. (5) Administration of the Conveniences of Society. - Similar
considerations apply in the case of that modern instrumentality, the public
letter-post, in the case of the still more modern manufacture of gas, and in
the case of the most modern telegraph. The modern no less than the ancient
government unhesitatingly takes a hand in administering the conveniences of
society.
1510. (6) Sanitation. - Modern governments, like the government of Rome,
maintain sanitation by means of police inspection of baths, taverns, and
houses of ill fame, as well as by drainage; and to these they add hospital
relief, water supply, quarantine, and a score of other means.
1511. (7) Public Education. - Our modern systems of public education are
more thorough than the ancient, notwithstanding the fact that we regard the
individual as something other than a mere servant of the state, and educate
him first of all for himself.
1512. (8) Sumptuary Laws. - In sumptuary laws ancient states of course
far outran modern practice. Modern states have foregone most attempts to make
citizens virtuous or frugal by law. But even we have our prohibition
enactments; and we have had our fines for swearing.
1513. Summary. - Apparently it is safe to say with regard to the
functions of government taken as a whole that, even as between ancient and
modern states, uniformities of practice far out-number diversities of
practice. One may justly conclude, not indeed that the restraints which
modern states put upon themselves are of little consequence, or that altered
political conceptions are not of the greatest moment in determining important
questions of government and even the whole advance of the race; but that it is
rather by gaining practical wisdom, rather by long processes of historical
experience, that states modify their practices. New theories are subsequent
to new experiences.
