At the utmost, the millions of buckets of water, forcibly taken from private reservoirs, half fill with a good deal of trouble the great central artificial basin in which the water, low and stagnant, is never sufficient in quantity or force to move the huge public wheel that replaces the small private wheels, doing the nation's work.
Thus, even when we only consider men as manufactures, even if we treat them simply as producers of what is valuable and serviceable, with no other object in view than to furnish society with supplies and to benefit the consumers, even though the private domain includes all enterprises undertaken by private individuals, either singly or associated together, through personal interests or personal taste, then this is enough to ensure that all is managed better than the State could have done; it is by virtue of this that they have devolved into their hands.

Consequently, in the vast field of labor, they themselves decide on what they will undertake; they themselves, of their own authority, set their own limits.

They may therefore enlarge their own domain to any extent they please, and reduce indefinitely the domain of the State.

On the contrary, the State cannot pretend to more than what they leave; as they advance on their common territory separated by vague frontiers, it is bound to recede and leave the ground to them; whatever the task is, it should not perform it except in case of their default, or their prolonged absence, or on proof of their having abandoned it.
All the rest, therefore falls to the State; first, the offices which they would never claim, and which they will deliberately leave in its hands, because they do not have that indispensable instrument, called armed force.

This force forces assures the protection of the community against foreign communities, the protection of individuals against one another, the levying of soldiers, the imposition of taxes, the execution of the laws, the administration of justice and of the police .-- Next to this, come matters of which the accomplishment concerns everybody without directly interesting any one in particular--the government of unoccupied territory, the administration of rivers, coasts, forests and public highways, the task of governing subject countries, the framing of laws, the coinage of money, the conferring of a civil status, the negotiating in the name of the community with local and special corporations, departments, communes, banks, institutions, churches, and universities .-- Add to these, according to circumstances, sundry optional co-operative services,[2217] such as subsidies granted to institutions of great public utility, for which private contributions could not suffice, now in the shape of concessions to corporations for which equivalent obligations are exacted, and, again, in those hygienic precautions which individuals fail to take through indifference; so occasionally, such provisional aid as supports a man, or so stimulates him as to enable him some day or other to support himself; and, in general, those discreet and scarcely perceptible interpositions for the time being which prove so advantageous in the future, like a far-reaching code and other consistent regulations which, mindful of the liberty of the existing individual, provide for the welfare of coming generations.