where there is neither privilege nor servitude, but where the rights and duties are in equilibrium, and that status is civil liberty in the only sense in which it is thinkable or realizable in laws, institutions, and history.
We have seen cases above in which the same men were under privilege and servitude at the same time, having accepted one as the price of the other. We have also seen cases in which the privilege of some involved the servitude of others. The former class of cases have been those which have had the most unhappy issue, for the privileges have often faded with time and the servitudes have been intensified. It is a bargain which a rational being can rarely afford to make, to incur servitude in the hope of privilege. Herein lies the curse of socialistic schemes when viewed from the side of the supposed beneficiary—they are a bait to defraud him of his liberty. I do not see how the German accident and workman's insurance can fail to act as a law of settlement, thereby, under a pretense of offering the workman security, robbing him of his best chance of improving his position. Still, the cases where a man incurs his own servitude for the sake of his own privilege are not as bad in some respects as those in which some have privileges for which others bear servitudes.
The modern jural state, at least of the Anglo-American type, by its hostility to privileges and servitudes, if not by direct analytical definition of its purpose, aims to realize the above definition of liberty. It is the one which fills our institutions at their best, and the one which forms the stem of our best civil and social ideals. If all privileges and all servitudes are abolished, the individual finds that there are no prescriptions left either to lift him up or to hold him down. He simply has all his chances left open that he may make out of
