No one has ever succeeded in formulating a precept for distinguishing and defining the field of action of the state, when approaching it from the negative side. It appears to be impossible to formulate such a precept, for the cases must be decided as they arise. It is altogether a matter of expediency. As such it may be subject to general maxims, whose application to particular cases must be controlled by good sense and sound judgment. The statesman must be a man of sagacity, cultivated judgment, practical experience, broad observation, and acute perception in regard to the relation of means to ends; he cannot fill his position by doing nothing.
But if it is difficult to define the function of the state from the negative side, and to say that the state should do only this or that, what shall be said of the attempt to define it positively? If we seek to give a charter to the state, that it may interfere, and to found interference on "principles" of morality and expediency, we find ourselves floundering in puerilities and pedantic generalizations. Such generalizations have been put forth, and the complacency with which they are propounded, in connection with their obvious ineptitude, is among the prominent features of work in social science at the present time. It has, for instance, been said that the natural monopolies constitute a definition of the field of legitimate control by the state, and it has been repeated so often, in one form or another, that it has become a sort of current dogma, as if a solution had been found which is at least good as far as it goes. The test of any such dogma is to see whether it contains all the necessary inclusions and exclusions so as properly to mark off the ground which it pretends to define.
Life insurance is not a natural monopoly, but I suppose that no one would deny that life insurance, on
