Now just in the same way the unreasonable neglect of government
by the Manchester School has produced, not a reasonable regard
for government, but an unreasonable neglect of everything else.
So that to hear people talk to-day one would fancy that every
important human function must be organized and avenged by law;
that all education must be state education, and all employment
state employment; that everybody and everything must be
brought to the foot of the august and prehistoric gibbet.
But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind
will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet,
that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory;
and in short that in most important matters a man has always been
free to ruin himself if he chose. The huge fundamental function
upon which all anthropology turns, that of sex and childbirth,
has never been inside the political state, but always outside of it.
The state concerned itself with the trivial question of killing people,
but wisely left alone the whole business of getting them born.
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