"The chief duty of governments, in so far as they are coercive, is to restrain those who would interfere with the inalienable rights of the individual, among which are the right to life, the right to liberty, the right to the pursuit of happiness, and the right to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience"

Dwight Morrow articulates a minimalist, rights-centered vision of the state: government is acknowledged as coercive, yet its legitimate use of force is narrowly bounded by a single purpose, shielding individuals from violations of their inherent rights. By naming life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and freedom of worship according to conscience, he echoes a natural-rights tradition that treats certain liberties as pre-political and nonnegotiable. The state does not grant these rights; it recognizes and protects them. Its role is primarily protective and negative, preventing interference, rather than managerial, paternalistic, or perfectionist.

Such a view implies concrete institutional duties: preventing violence and theft, abolishing enslavement and persecution, and maintaining impartial courts and predictable laws so individuals can live, speak, work, and believe without coercion from others. It also implies limits on government itself. Because the state is the most powerful coercive actor, it must be constrained constitutionally and culturally to avoid becoming the primary violator of the very rights it exists to defend. The invocation of conscience underscores a robust pluralism: people may seek fulfillment in divergent ways, and government ought to remain neutral among them so long as each person’s exercise of freedom does not infringe another’s rights.

Tensions are acknowledged implicitly. Protecting liberty sometimes requires limiting certain actions that harm others; preserving public order must not collapse into suppressing dissent; honoring conscience must be reconciled with equal protection under law. The guiding test is whether coercion is used only to restrain rights violations, not to impose uniformity or to engineer favored outcomes. Measured by this standard, legitimacy rests less on grand projects than on steady, even-handed protection of persons and their freedoms. A just government keeps the peace by drawing a firm line around the individual’s moral domain and by policing, above all, its own impulse to cross it.