But, except at rare intervals, Britain's insular position has given her people so soothing a sense of security that they have allowed the conception of the commonwealth to droop, and have tended to regard the State as, under normal conditions, a nuisance which should as far as possible be abated, as an intruder into the sphere of private enterprise which should be extruded, as an enemy to liberty which should be suppressed. It may readily be admitted that in days before the State had been democratized this hostile attitude was not without justification. In the early seventeenth century, for instance, the State meant the Stuart monarch--_L'État c'est Moi_--and the interests of the Stuart monarch were by no means those of any of the nations that he governed. In the early eighteenth century the State meant the Whig oligarchy, and its members only too easily came to regard the welfare of the Empire as identical with their own prosperity. In the early nineteenth century the State meant the landed and moneyed magnates of the Tory aristocracy, and they had an extremely inadequate apprehension of the needs and aspirations of the rapidly increasing millions over whom they exercised authority. Hence one can understand that opposition to the policy of Stuart king, or Whig nobility, or Tory plutocracy, readily took the form of antagonism to the State as such. Thus the political theory of Milton and the Puritans not only justified resistance to Charles I, it also proclaimed a doctrine of the natural rights of the individual fatal to all types of government. Similarly the political theory of Adam Smith and the _laissez-faire_ economists, together with that of their contemporaries, Bentham and the utilitarian philosophers, not only attacked the restrictive regulations of the Whig oligarchy, but showed on general principles the strongest dislike of what it called "State interference" in all circumstances. So, too, Herbert Spencer and the nineteenth century school of scientific individualists not only demonstrated (as they did with extraordinary pungency and success) the extreme folly and incompetence of the main government departments of their own day; they also sought to establish the eternal and inevitable antagonism of Man versus the State, and to limit universally the functions of government to the irreducible minimum.