As early as 1842 Spencer contributed to the Nonconformist a series of letters called The Proper Sphere of Government, his first major publication. It contains his political philosophy of extreme individualism and Laissez Faire, which was not much modified in his writi

Spencer charges legislators with confusing "family ethics" with "state ethics." In the family, benefits received have little or no relation to merit. In the state, the ruling principle ought to be justice; therefore the relation between benefits and merits should be proportional. Spencer explains that the intrusion of family ethics into state ethics is a dangerous interference with the laws of nature and society, and slowly followed by fatal results.

The last essay is "the Great Political Superstition." In which Spencer says that the great political superstition of the past, was the divine right of kings. Whereas, in the present it is the divine right of parliaments. He attacks the doctrine of sovereignty as propounded by Hobbes and rejects the claim of "popular majorities for unlimited authority as being inconsistent with the inalienable rights of the individual." Spencer concludes his book with the final reminder that government is not a divine institution but a committee of management, and that it has no intrinsic authority beyond the ethical sanction bestowed on it by the free consent of the citizens: " The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the powers of the king. The functions of true Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the powers of parliaments."

In his third essay, "The Sins of Legislators," Spencer rejects the spread of government activity in social and economic areas. Progress is the result of the desire to increase personal welfare, and not the product of governmental regulation: "It is not the state that owe the multitudinous useful inventions from the spade to the telephone; it was not the state which made the discoveries in physics, chemistry, and the rest, which guide modern manufactures; it was not the state which devised the machinery for producing fabrics of every kind, for transferring men and things from place to place, and for ministering in a thousand ways to our comforts."

Spencer's political ideas hardly changed between 1842, when he published his Proper Sphere of Government, and 1903, the year of his death. The constancy of his political thought in the face of rapidly changing social and economic scene explains why the same ideas that were the last word in radical individualism in the eighteen-forties had become the orthodox c

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