… is from page 309 of Albert Venn Dicey’s 1905 volume, Lectures on the Relation Between Law & Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century; I read it as a warning against the romantic notion that ‘good’ and (seemingly) ‘apolitical’ government poses little or no danger to individual liberty:
English administrative mechanism was reformed and strengthened [during the last half of the 19th century]. The machinery was thus provided for the practical extension of the activity of the State; but, in accordance with the profound Spanish proverb, “the more there is of the more the less there is of the less,” the greater the intervention of the Government the less becomes the freedom of each individual citizen.
