[1] Though for the sake of all parties, and to avoid temptation, a strong policing of threatened districts may be desirable in such circumstances.
Thus, we have seen the true nature and aims of punishment as following from the aim of the State in maintaining the system of rights instrumental to the fullest life. The three main aspects of punishment which we have considered are really inseparable, and each, if properly explained, expands so as to include the others.
We may, in conclusion, sum up the whole theory of State action in the formula which we inherit from Rousseau--that Sovereignty is the exercise of the General Will.
First. All State action is General in its bearing and justification, even if particular, or rather { 232} concrete, in its details. It is embodied in a _system_ of rights, and there is no element of it which is not determined by a bearing upon a public interest. The verification of this truth, throughout, for example, our English system of public and private Acts of Parliament, would run parallel to the logical theory of the Universal Judgment as it passes into Judgments whose subjects are proper names. But the immediate point is that no rights are absolute, or detached from the whole, but all have their warrant in the aim of the whole, which at the same time implies their adjustment and regulation according to general principles. This generality of law is practically an immense protection to individuals against arbitrary interference. It makes every regulation strike a class and not a single person.
And, secondly. All State action is at bottom the exercise of a Will; the real Will, or the Will as logically implied in intelligences as such, and more or less recognised as imperative upon them. And, therefore, though in the form of force it acts through automatism, that is, not directly as conscious Will, but through a system which gives rise to acts by influences apparently alien, yet the root and source of the whole structure is of the nature of Will, and its end, like that of organic automatism, is to clear the road for true volition; it is “forcing men to be free.” And in so far as by misdirection of the automatic [1] process it { 234} encroaches on the region of living Will the region where the good realises itself directly by its own force as a motive it is “sawing off the branch on which it sits,” and superseding the aim by the instrument.