Whether justly or not, Mill’s modern reputation as a political theorist rests on a single essay. The Essay on Government, Mill later wrote, was meant to serve as a “comprehensive outline” or “skeleton map” with whose aid one could find one’s way across the vast, varied, and ofttimes confusing and dangerous terrain of politics (Mill 1820). Government, Mill maintains, is merely a means to an end, viz. the happiness of the whole community and the individuals composing it. We should begin by assuming that every human being is motivated by a desire to experience pleasure and to avoid pain. Pleasures and pains come from two sources, our fellow human beings and nature. Government is concerned directly with the first and indirectly with the second: “Its business is to increase to the utmost the pleasures, and diminish to the utmost the pains, which men derive from one another.” Yet, “the primary cause of government” is to be found in nature itself, since humans must wrest from nature “the scanty materials of happiness” (Mill 1992, 4–5). Nature and human nature combine to make government necessary. It is man’s nature not only to desire happiness but to satisfy that desire by investing as little effort as possible. Labor being the means of obtaining happiness, and our own labor being painful to us, we will, if permitted, live off the labor of others. To the degree that others enjoy the fruits of my labor, my primary incentive for working—namely my own happiness—is diminished if not destroyed.