147. This may be truly urged, but it does not therefore follow that the duty of befriending the slave is necessarily paramount to the duty of obeying the law which forbids his being befriended: and if it is possible for the latter duty to be paramount, it will follow, on the principle that there is no right to violate a duty, that under certain conditions the right of helping the slave may be cancelled by the duty of obeying the prohibitory law. It would be so if the violation of law in the interest of the slave were liable to result in general anarchy, not merely in the sense of the dissolution of this or that form of civil combination, but of the disappearance of the conditions under which any civil combination is possible; for such a destruction of the state would mean a general loss of freedom, a general substitution of force for mutual good-will in men's dealings with each other, that would outweigh the evil of any slavery under such limitations and regulations as an organised state imposes on it. I. _PRIVATE RIGHTS._ _THE RIGHT TO LIFE AND LIBERTY._ 148. Returning from this digression, we resume our consideration of the nature and functions of the state. In order to understand this nature, we must understand the nature of those rights which do not come into being with the state, but arise out of social relations that may exist where a state is not; it being the first though not the only office of the state to maintain those rights. They depend for their existence, indeed, on society, a society of men who recognise each other as ἴσοι καὶ ὅμοιοι, as capable of a common well-being, but not on society's having assumed the form of a state. They may therefore be treated as claims of the individual without reference to the form of the society which concedes or recognises them, and on whose recognition, as we have seen, their nature as rights depends. Only it must be borne in mind that the form in which these claims are admitted and acted on by men in their dealings with each other varies with the form of society; that the actual form, e.g., in which the individual's right of property is admitted under a patriarchal _régime_ is very different from that in which it is admitted in a state; and that though the principle of each right is throughout the same, it is a principle which only comes to be fully recognised and acted on when the state has not only been formed, but fully developed according to its idea.