There is an error gradually infecting all nations of late which is that the state, as such, is above morality; that what the civil authority permits or orders is by that fact alone made licit or obligatory. Hence the interference with individual liberty, with the rights of man, shown by laws for the mutilation of the physically degenerate, laws conferring privileges on one part of the community to the detriment of another, meddling in parental rights, and so on. Political error has come to such a pass that the men on the street think any majority is justified, solely because it is a majority, in recalling a judge or a law, in overriding authority for the satisfaction of appetite. The sovereign people tries to be subject and sovereign at the same time, and it deems its rulers mere hired men who may be discharged at will like cooks. A law is a rule and standard of action; a just, permanent, and rational ordination for the good of the community, promulgated by one who has charge of that community. Dominion is the power of claiming a thing as one's own, the right of ownership; and if this possessor has created the object, his dominion may be absolute. A governor, lawgiver, judge, has power or jurisdiction for the good of the governed. The business of government, of the state, is to protect each citizen in the pursuit of temporal happiness, to develop his natural faculties, establish and preserve social order, wherein each citizen is secured in his natural and legal rights, and is held up to the fulfilment of his own duties so far as they bear on the good of the community as such; and also to put within the reach of all citizens, as far as possible, a fair allowance of means to acquire temporal happiness, or external peace and prosperity. This is the whole business of the state. The state is for the people, and it may not transgress an inch beyond its proper limits, which are as hard and fast as those that bind the individual citizen. The citizen is not to be treated solely as an industrial or military unit; nor are material progress and military power, or even sheer intellectual civilization, to be the sole aim of the state. The state should develop a man's entire nature, physical, mental, and moral.