there are different degrees of obedience, and it is not every degree
that is commendable. Only an unmitigated despotism demands that the
individual citizen shall obey unconditionally every mandate of persons
in authority. We must at least limit the definition to such mandates
as are general, and issued in the deliberate form of laws. Order, thus
understood, expresses, doubtless, an indispensable attribute of
government. Those who are unable to make their ordinances obeyed, can
not be said to govern. But, though a necessary condition, this is not
the object of government. That it should make itself obeyed is
requisite, in order that it may accomplish some other purpose. We are
still to seek what is this other purpose, which government ought to
fulfill abstractedly from the idea of improvement, and which has to be
fulfilled in every society, whether stationary or progressive.

In a sense somewhat more enlarged, Order means the preservation of
peace by the cessation of private violence. Order is said to exist
where the people of the country have, as a general rule, ceased to
prosecute their quarrels by private force, and acquired the habit of
referring the decision of their disputes and the redress of their
injuries to the public authorities. But in this larger use of the
term, as well as in the former narrow one, Order expresses rather one
of the conditions of government, than either its purpose or the
criterion of its excellence; for the habit may be well established of
submitting to the government, and referring all disputed matters to
its authority, and yet the manner in which the government deals with
those disputed matters, and with the other things about which it
concerns itself, may differ by the whole interval which divides the
best from the worst possible.

If we intend to comprise in the idea of Order all that society