It is not under its tutelage, obliged to submit its accounts to the prefect; it delegates no powers and confers no right of justice, or police; in short, it is neither its pupil nor its agent.

Such is the lien which permanent proximity establishes between men; we see that it is of a singular species: neither in fact, nor in law, can the associates free themselves from it; solely because they are neighbors, they form a community for certain indivisible or jointly owned things, an involuntary and obligatory community.

To make amends, and even owing to this, I mean through institution and in the natural order of things, their community is limited, and limited in two ways, restricted to its object and restricted to its members, reduced to matters of which proprietorship or enjoyment is forcibly in common, and reserved to inhabitants who, on account of situation and fixed residence, possess this enjoyment or this property.i III.

Essential Public Local Works.
Analysis of other local societies, commune, department, or province .-- Common interests which necessitate local action.
-- Two objects in view: care of public roads and means of protection against spreading calamities .-- Why collaboration is an obligation .-- Neighbors involuntarily subject to a common bond on account of proximity .-- Willingly or not each shares in its benefits .-- What portion of the expense belongs to each .-- Equal advantages for each .-- The unequal and proportionate advantages for each in his private expenses, industrial or commercial gains, and in the locative value of his real estate .-- Each person's quota of expense according to his equal and proportionate share in advantages.
All local societies are of this kind, each limited to a certain territory and included with others like it inside a larger area, each possessing two budgets depending on whether it is a distinct body or member of a larger corporation, each, from the commune to the department or province, instituted on a basis of interests which make them jointly but involuntarily liable .-- There are two of these important interests which, as in the Annecy building, elude human arbitrariness, which demand common action and distribution of the expense, because, as in the Annecy building, they are the inevitable results of physical proximity: First, comes care for the public highways, by land or by water, river navigation, canals, towing-paths, bridges, streets, public squares, by-roads, along with the more or less optional and gradual improvements which public roads demand or prescribe, such as their laying-out, sidewalks, paving, sweeping, lighting, drainage, sewers, rolling, ditches, leveling, embankments, and other engineering works, which establish or increase safety and convenience in circulation, with facilities for and dispatch in transportation.
Next, comes protection against the spread of calamities, such as fires, inundations, contagious diseases, epidemics, along with the more or less optional and remote precautions which this protection exacts or recommends, night watchers in Russia, dikes in Holland, levees in the valleys of the Po and the Loire, cemeteries and regulations for interment, cleanliness of the streets, ventilation of holes and corners, drainage of marshes, hydrants, and supplies of drinkable water, disinfecting of contaminated areas, and other preventive or necessary hygienic measures which remove or prevent insalubrities growing out of neighborhood or contact.
All this has to be provided for, and the enterprise, if not wholly and in its developments, at least in itself and in what is necessary, imposes itself, collectively, on all the inhabitants of the conscription, from the highest to the lowest.

For, in the absence of a public road, none of them can do his daily work, travel about, or even leave his premises; while transportation ceases and trade is suspended; hence, commerce and other pursuits languish, industry is arrested, agriculture becomes impracticable or fruitless; the fields are no longer cultivated; while provisions, food, including bread,[4104] everything is wanting; the dwellings becoming uninhabitable, more so than the Annecy houses when the roofs fall in and let in the rain .-- On the other hand, for lack of protection against calamities, these get a free rein: the day arrives when an equinoctial tide submerges the flat coastal area, when the river overflows and devastates the countryside, when the conflagration spreads, when small-pox and the cholera reach a contagious point, and life is in danger, far more seriously imperiled than when, in the Annecy domicile, the main walls threaten to tumble down.[4105] Undoubtedly, I can personally accept this miserable condition of things, resign myself to it, and consent, as far as I am concerned, to shut myself up within my own walls, to fast there, and run the risk, more or less imminent, of being drowned, burnt, or poisoned; but I have no right to condemn another to do this, nor to refuse my contribution to a protection by which I am to profit.