venting such wrongs. A third person, moreover, can only decide according to external characteristics. It is therefore impossible for the State to wait to see whether the citizens will fail in taking due precautions against dangerous actions, neither can it rely on the probability of their foreseeing the injury: where circumstances seem to represent the apprehension as urgent, it must rather restrict actions in themselves harmless.
In view of these considerations, therefore, we may be justified in laying down the following principle: in order to provide for the security of its citizens, the State must prohibit or restrict such actions, referring immediately to the agents alone, as imply the infringement on others' rights in their consequences, or encroach in these on their freedom or property without or against their will; and further, it must forbid or restrict these actions when the probability of such consequences is fairly to be apprehended,—a probability in which it must necessarily consider the extent of the injury feared, and on the other hand the consequences of the restriction on freedom implied in the law contemplated. Beyond this, every limitation of personal freedom is to be condemned, as wholly foreign to the sphere of the State's activity.
Since, according to the ideas I have unfolded, the protection of the rights of others affords the only just ground for these restrictions, the necessity for them must naturally disappear when this ground no longer exists; and hence when—for instance, in most police-regulations—the danger extends only to the circuit of the community, the village, the town, as soon as such a community expressly and unanimously demands that these restrictions should be abolished. The State must then relax its efforts, and content itself with punishing such injuries only as have occurred with an intentional or culpable violation of right.
