The Real Functions of the State.

Maoriland Worker, Volume I, Issue 6, 20 February 1911, Page 5

The Real Functions of the State.

TO THE EDITOR

Dear Sir, —Under the above heading a contributor to the January issue of your valuable journal, in the course of his remarks, made a futile attempt tc discredit the contention of those wh< assert that there are no such rights a; natural human rights. In his effon to disprove he has proved, beyond th< shadow of a doubt, that all humai rights are social, and have been eyolved owing to man living in families, tribes, states, or nations. There may have been a time in the history (unwritten) of our remote ancestors in which the relations of man were governed by natural rights, but if such a time did ever exist it was before even the most crude social relations between men, and would then be based on the laws of nature peculiar to the whole of the animal and vegetable kingdom.—"the survival of the fittest." But man has stepped out from the rest of the animal kingdom—perhaps through some extraordinary environment into which some convulsion of nature had thrown him—and began to handle materials of nature not a part of his own organism as aids to procuring food and protecting him against the natural right of the more physically strong or fleet of the rest of the animals to make a meal of him, and also against the changing moods of Nature itself, and has developed a brain superior to the rest of the animals, and with that brain a social consciousness which has been ever tending, in its gradual evolution through the numberless economic changes in the social organisation, to the subordination of those natural rights to "eat or be eaten," and to replace them by that highest product of social consciousness, "each for all and all for each." So that all the rights the modern man can claim have been lifted to the higher plane of social rights without the existence of the social organisation. Man has no rights other than those of the rest of the animals, who live according to natural laws (except when interfered with by domestication). Hence, apart from the human or social laws— the product of social consciousness—r there can be no rightfulness or wrongfulness by which laws can be measured. But society, being an organism (or number of organisms with geographical boundaries), like all other organisms, when the laws or relations which govern its organs, or members, or groups of members, cause irritation or disease, there is a consciousness in the healthy social organism itself which causes the other parts of it to rush to the aid of the part injured or attacked. The social organisation or State which has , not this vital social consciousness must suffer froi>~ disease and eventually die.

The great Charles Darwin has ol served that organisms tend to chang as their environment and food an

methods of getting it change. And so it is with the social organism, the State. Aa its economic conditions change, so the laws which govern it must be modified, and it is just in so far as the governing force of the social organism carries out this function that we are free from the diseases which afflict the social body. So that all wo have to consider, in order to arrive at a right conception of the proper function of the democracy, the governing force of our particular social organism, is to find what constitutes a hoalthy organism. And I think it will be generally conceded that to be healthy an organism must be true from parasites, and all its organs, or members, must be doing something beneficial to its existence, and receiving from it sufficient to maintain their function unimpaired. So the proper function of our State would appear to be to rid itself from its parasites and give every individual the fullest access to the social benefits accumulated by the social human labour (mental and physical) of the centuries, on one condition only, viz., that he or she is willing, if not incapacitated, to perform useful service to perpetuate that right, which is the product of the collective achievements of society. And any law which aims at procuring this for the individual and the whole of the individuals of society, or the State eventually, may truthfully be said to be the proper function of the State or Nation which hopes to become robust and self-reliant.—Yours, etc., A. M. HALL. Pareora, February 2, 1911.