The principle of the hindrance of hindrances is most valuable and luminous when rightly grasped, just in these middle cases. A pretty and healthy house, which its inhabitant is fond of, is an element in the best life. Who could doubt it who knows what home-life is? But in order that putting a family out of a bad house into a good one should give rise to such an element of the best life, it is strictly and precisely necessary that the case or policy should come under our principle. That is to say, unless there was a better life struggling to utter itself, and the deadlift of interference just removed an obstacle which bound it down, the good house will not be an element in a better life, and the encroachment on the ground of volition will have been made with out compensation--a fact which may show itself in many fatal ways. If, on the other hand, the struggling tendency to a better life has power [1] to effect the change without the deadlift from outside, then the result is certain and wholly to the good. [1] Many forms of _social_ co-operation, it must be remembered, need no deadlift from the _State_ as such. We are not setting self-help against co-operation, but will against automatism. Thus we may say that every law and institution, every external fact maintained by the public power, must be judged by the degree in which it sets at liberty a growth of mind and spirit. It is a {200} problem partly of removing obstacles to growth, and partly of the division of labour between consciousness and automatism. It ought to occur to the reader that the ground here assigned for the limitation of State action--that is, of social action through the public power--is not _prima facie_ in harmony with the account of political obligation, according to which laws and institutions represented a real self or general will, recognised by individuals as implied in the common good which was imperative upon them. We spoke, for example, of being forced to be free, and of the system of law and order as representing the higher self. And yet we are now saying that, in as far as force is operative through compulsion and authoritative suggestion, it is a means which can only reach its end through a negation.