A man need not, it is true, do this or that act, the term act implies a choice, —­but he must act somehow.  Furthermore, the public generally profits by individual activity.  As action cannot be avoided, and tends to the public good, there is obviously no policy in throwing the hazard of what is at once desirable and inevitable upon the actor. [96] The state might conceivably make itself a mutual insurance company against accidents, and distribute the burden of its citizens’ mishaps among all its members.  There might be a pension for paralytics, and state aid for those who suffered in person or estate from tempest or wild beasts.  As between individuals it might adopt the mutual insurance principle pro tanto, and divide damages when both were in fault, as in the rusticum judicium of the admiralty, or it might throw all loss upon the actor irrespective of fault.  The state does none of these things, however, and the prevailing view is that its cumbrous and expensive machinery ought not to be set in motion unless some clear benefit is to be derived from disturbing the status quo.  State interference is an evil, where it cannot be shown to be a good.  Universal insurance, if desired, can be better and more cheaply accomplished by private enterprise.  The undertaking to redistribute losses simply on the ground that they resulted from the defendant’s act would not only be open to these objections, but, as it is hoped the preceding discussion has shown, to the still graver one of offending the sense of justice.  Unless my act is of a nature to threaten others, unless under the circumstances a prudent man would have foreseen the possibility of harm, it is no more justifiable to make me indemnify my neighbor against the consequences, than to make me do the same thing if I had fallen upon him in a fit, or to compel me to insure him against lightning.

I must now recur to the conclusions drawn from innocent trespasses upon land, and conversions, and the supposed analogy of those cases to trespasses against the person, lest the law concerning the latter should be supposed to lie between two antinomies, each necessitating with equal cogency an opposite conclusion to the other.

[97] Take first the case of trespass upon land attended by actual damage.  When a man goes upon his neighbor’s land, thinking it is his own, he intends the very act or consequence complained of.  He means to intermeddle with a certain thing in a certain way, and it is just that intended intermeddling for which he is sued. 1 Whereas, if he accidentally hits a stranger as he lifts his staff in self defence, the fact, which is the gist of the action,—­namely, the contact between the staff and his neighbor’s head,—­was not intended, and could not have been foreseen.  It might be answered, to be sure, that it is not for intermeddling with property, but for intermeddling with the plaintiff’s property, that a man is sued; and that in the supposed cases, just as much as in that of the accidental blow, the