nates the countless heterogeneous considerations which affect the immediate and remote welfare of the whole community. We may describe the oflice of the brain as that of averaging the interests of life, physical, intellectual, moral, social; and a good brain is one in which the desires, answering to their respective interests, are so balanced that the conduct they jointly dictate sacrifices none of them. Similarly we may describe the office of Parliament as that of averaging the interests of the various classes in a community; and a good Parliament is one in which the parties answering to these respective interests are so balanced that their united legislation concedes to each class as much as consists with the claims of the rest."
All this appears to be very just. But if the resemblance between the body physiological and the body politic is any indication, not only of what the latter is, and how it has become what it is, but of what it ought to be, and what it is tending to become, I cannot but think that the real force of the analogy is totally opposed to the negative view of state function.
Suppose that in accordance with this view, each muscle were to maintain that the nervous system had no right to interfere with its contraction, except to prevent it from hindering the contraction of another muscle; or each gland that it had a right to secrete, so long as its secretion interfered with no other; suppose every separate cell left free to follow its own "interests," and laissez faire, Lord of all, what would become of the body physiological?
The fact is, that the sovereign power of the body thinks for the physiological organism, acts for it, and rules the individual components with a rod of iron. Even the blood-corpuscles cannot hold a public meeting without being accused of "congestion"—and the brain, like other despots whom we have known, calls out at once for the use of sharp steel against them. As in Hobbes's "Leviathan," the representative of the sovereign authority in the living organism, though he derives all his powers from the mass which he rules, is above the law. The questioning of his authority involves death, or that partial death which we call paralysis. Hence, if the analogy of the body politic with the body physiological counts for anything, it seems to me to be in favor of a much larger amount of governmental interference than exists at present, or than I, for one, at all desire to see.[1]
This criticism of Professor Huxley has never been answered
- ↑ Loc. cit., pp. 534–535. Also: Critiques and Addresses, London, 1873, pp. 17–18.
