Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a ''taxing-machine;'' to the contented, a ''machine for securing property.'' Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable. Thomas Carlyle