Thus Smith throughout remains very hostile to certain collective enterprises of a private nature, such as joint-stock companies,[224] because of the absence of personal interest. The only exceptions which he would tolerate are banks, insurance companies, and companies formed for the construction or maintenance of canals or for supplying great towns with water, for the management of such undertakings can easily be reduced to a kind of routine, “or to such a uniformity of method as admits of little or no variation.”[225] His opposition to every kind of monopoly granted either to an individual or to a company is even more pronounced. A whole chapter is devoted to an attack upon the great trading companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were created with a view to the development of colonial trade, and of which the East India Company was the most famous. One other observation remains to be made. Non-intervention for Smith was a general principle, and not an absolute rule. He was no doctrinaire, and he never forgot that to every rule there are some exceptions. An interesting list could be made, giving all the cases in which, according to Smith, the legitimacy of State intervention was indisputable—legal limitation of interest,[226] State administration of the post-office, compulsory elementary education, State examinations as a condition of entry into the liberal professions or to any post of confidence whatever, bank-notes of a minimum value of £5, etc.[227] In a characteristic phrase he gave expression to his feeling on the question of restricting the liberty of banks. “Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole of society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as of the most despotical.”[228] Despite these reservations it is still very evident that the whole of Smith’s work is a plea for the economic freedom of the individual. It is an eloquent appeal against the Mercantilist policy and a violent attack upon every economic system inspired by it.