endowed with the rights and duties of posing and solving social
problems, they are as follows: Those who are bound to solve the
problems are the rich, comfortable, prosperous, virtuous, respectable,
educated, and healthy; those whose right it is to set the problems are
those who have been less fortunate or less successful in the struggle
for existence. The problem itself seems to be, How shall the latter be
made as comfortable as the former? To solve this problem, and make us
all equally well off, is assumed to be the duty of the former class;
the penalty, if they fail of this, is to be bloodshed and destruction.
If they cannot make everybody else as well off as themselves, they are
to be brought down to the same misery as others.

During the last ten years I have read a great many books and articles,
especially by German writers, in which an attempt has been made to set
up "the State" as an entity having conscience, power, and will
sublimated above human limitations, and as constituting a tutelary
genius over us all. I have never been able to find in history or
experience anything to fit this concept. I once lived in Germany for
two years, but I certainly saw nothing of it there then. Whether the
State which Bismarck is moulding will fit the notion is at best a
matter of faith and hope. My notion of the State has dwindled with
growing experience of life. As an abstraction, the State is to me only
All-of-us. In practice--that is, when it exercises will or adopts a
line of action--it is only a little group of men chosen in a very
haphazard way by the majority of us to perform certain services for all
of us. The majority do not go about their selection very rationally,
and they are almost always disappointed by the results of their own
operation. Hence "the State," instead of offering resources of wisdom,
right reason, and pure moral sense beyond what the average of us
possess, generally offers much less of all those things. Furthermore,