William G. Sumner (1840–1910) was the last noted champion of a governmental _laissez faire_ doctrine. He held that the State owes nothing to anybody except peace, order, and the guarantee of rights. It is not true that the poor ought to care for each other, and that the churches ought to collect capital and spend it for the poor; it is not true that if you get wealth you should support others; and that if you do not get wealth others ought to support you. In a society based on contract there is no place for sentiment in public or common affairs.[XI-28] Every individual will develop the self-reliance of a free person, if he is not taught that others will care for him in case he fails to care for himself. Sumner spoke vigorously as well as harshly in support of liberty, contract, and private property. Although he took an extreme and untenable position his ideas will bear careful, unbiased study, for they contain a large amount of common sense. His ethnological work will be indicated at some length in another chapter. A noteworthy statement which has come from a current American school of legal thinkers concerning individualistic social thought, is found in the writings of Professor Roscoe Pound of Harvard Law School. In “A Theory of Social Interests” he has summed up the new point of view.[XI-29] In the last century all interests were thought of in terms of individual interests, all were reduced to their purely individual elements and considered as rights. In this century, Dean Pound indicates that law, for example, aims primarily to conserve some general social interest. It conserves the social interest in the general security, that is, in public health and in peace. It conserves the social interest in institutions,--domestic, religious, political. It conserves the social interest in natural resources, preventing the waste of oil and gas and protecting water rights. It conserves the social interest in general progress, in economic, political, cultural progress, although its main contribution in other fields, such as promoting the esthetic interests, are yet to be made. It conserves the social interests in individual life and in seeing that people live humanly and that the will of the individual is not trodden upon. Legal processes have thus become types of social engineering.