Chapter V: The Realisation of Opinion (2)

Next, even belief in one's own infallibility does not necessarily lead to intolerance. For it may be said that though no man in his senses would claim to be incapable of error, yet in every given case he is quite sure that he is not in error, and therefore this assurance in particular is tantamount by process of cumulation to a sense of infallibility in general. Now even if this were so, it would not of necessity either produce or justify intolerance. The certainty of the truth of your own opinions is independent of any special idea as to the means by which others may best be brought to share them. The question between persuasion and force remains apart--unless, indeed, we may say that in societies where habits of free discussion have once begun to take root, those who are least really sure about their opinions, are often most unwilling to trust to persuasion to bring them converts, and most disposed to grasp the rude implements of coercion, whether legal or merely social. The cry, 'Be my brother, or I slay thee,' was the sign of a very weak, though very fiery, faith in the worth of fraternity. He whose faith is most assured, has the best reason for relying on persuasion, and the strongest motive to thrust from him all temptations to use angry force. The substitution of force for persuasion, among its other disadvantages, has this further drawback, from our present point of view, that it lessens the conscience of a society and breeds hypocrisy. You have not converted a man, because you have silenced him. Opinion and force belong to different elements. To think that you are able by social disapproval or other coercive means to crush a man's opinion, is as one who should fire a blunderbuss to put out a star. The acquiescence in current notions which is secured by law or by petulant social disapproval, is as worthless and as essentially hypocritical, as the conversion of an Irish pauper to protestantism by means of soup-tickets, or that of a savage to Christianity by the gift of a string of beads. Here is the radical fallacy of those who urge that people must use promises and threats in order to encourage opinions, thoughts, and feelings which they think good, and to prevent others which they think bad. Promises and threats can influence acts. Opinions and thoughts on morals, politics, and the rest, after they have once grown in a man's mind, can no more be influenced by promises and threats than can my knowledge that snow is white or that ice is cold. You may impose penalties on me by statute for saying that snow is white, or acting as if I thought ice cold, and the penalties may affect my conduct. They will not, because they cannot, modify my beliefs in the matter by a single iota. One result therefore of intolerance is to make hypocrites. On this, as on the rest of the grounds which vindicate the doctrine of liberty, a man who thought himself infallible either in particular or in general, from the Pope of Rome down to the editor of the daily newspaper, might still be inclined to abstain from any form of compulsion. The only reason to the contrary is that a man who is so silly as to think himself incapable of going wrong, is very likely to be too silly to perceive that coercion may be one way of going wrong.

The currency of the notion that earnest sincerity about one's opinions and ideals of conduct is inseparably connected with intolerance, is indirectly due to the predominance of legal or juristic analogies in social discussion. For one thing, the lawyer has to deal mainly with acts, and to deal with them by way of repression. His attention is primarily fixed on the deed, and only secondarily on the mind of the doer. And so a habit of thought is created, which treats opinion as something equally in the sphere of coercion with actions. At the same time it favours coercive ways of affecting opinion. Then, what is still more important, the jurist's conception of society has its root in the relation between sovereign and subject, between lawmaker and those whom law restrains. Exertion of power on one hand, and compliance on the other--this is his type of the conditions of the social union. The fertility and advance of discussion on social issues depends on the substitution of the evolutional for the legal conception. The lawyer's type of proposition is absolute. It is also, for various reasons which need not be given here, inspired by involuntary reference to the lower, rather than to the more highly developed, social states. In the lower states law, penalties, coercion, compulsion, the strong hand, a sternly repressive public opinion, were the conditions on which the community was united and held together. But the line of thought which these analogies suggest, becomes less and less generally appropriate in social discussion, in proportion as the community becomes more complex, more various in resource, more special in its organisation, in a word, more elaborately civilised. The evolutionist's idea of society concedes to law its historic place and its actual part. But then this idea leads directly to a way of looking at society, which makes the replacement of law by liberty a condition of reaching the higher stages of social development.

The doctrine of liberty belongs to the subject of this chapter, because it is only another way of expressing the want of connection between earnestness in realising our opinions, and anything like coercion in their favour. If it were true that aversion from compromise, in carrying out our ideas, implied the rightfulness of using all the means in our power to hinder others from carrying out ideas hostile to them, then we should have been preaching in a spirit unfavourable to the principle of liberty. Our main text has been that men should refuse to sacrifice their opinions and ways of living (in the self-regarding sphere) out of regard to the _status quo_, or the prejudices of others. And this, as a matter of course, excludes the right of forcing or wishing any one else to make such a sacrifice to us. Well, the first foundation-stone for the doctrine of liberty is to be sought in the conception of society as a growing and developing organism. This is its true base, apart from the numerous minor expediencies which may be adduced to complete the structure of the argument. It is fundamentally advantageous that in societies which have reached our degree of complex and intricate organisation, unfettered liberty should be conceded to ideas and, within the self-regarding sphere, to conduct also. The reasons for this are of some such kind as the following. New ideas and new 'experiments in living' would not arise, if there were not a certain inadequateness in existing ideas and ways of living. They may not point to the right mode of meeting inadequateness, but they do point to the existence and consciousness of it. They originate in the social capability of growth. Society can only develop itself on condition that all such novelties (within the limit laid down, for good and valid reasons, at self regarding conduct) are allowed to present themselves. First, because neither the legislature nor any one else can ever know for certain what novelties will prove of enduring value. Second, because even if we did know for certain that given novelties were pathological growths and not normal developments, and that they never would be of any value, still the repression necessary to extirpate them would involve too serious a risk both of keeping back social growth at some other point, and of giving the direction of that growth an irreparable warp. And let us repeat once more, in proportion as a community grows more complex in its classes, divisions, and subdivisions, more intricate in its productive, commercial, or material arrangements, so does this risk very obviously wax more grave.

In the sense in which we are speaking of it, liberty is not a positive force, any more than the smoothness of a railroad is a positive force.[33] It is a condition. As a force, there is a sense in which it is true to call liberty a negation. As a condition, though it may still be a negation, yet it may be indispensable for the production of certain positive results. The vacuity of an exhausted receiver is not a force, but it is the indispensable condition of certain positive operations. Liberty as a force may be as impotent as its opponents allege. This does not affect its value as a preliminary or accompanying condition. The absence of a strait-waistcoat is a negation; but it is a useful condition for the activity of sane men. No doubt there must be a definite limit to this absence of external interference with conduct, and that limit will be fixed at various points by different thinkers. We are now only urging that it cannot be wisely fixed for the more complex societies by any one who has not grasped this fundamental preconception, that liberty, or the absence of coercion, or the leaving people to think, speak, and act as they please, is in itself a good thing. It is the object of a favourable presumption. The burden of proving it inexpedient always lies, and wholly lies, on those who wish to abridge it by coercion, whether direct or indirect.

One reason why this truth is so reluctantly admitted, is men's irrational want of faith in the self-protective quality of a highly developed and healthy community. The timid compromiser on the one hand, and the advocate of coercive restriction on the other, are equally the victims of a superfluous apprehension. The one fears to use his liberty for the same reason that makes the other fearful of permitting liberty. This common reason is the want of a sensible confidence that, in a free western community, which has reached our stage of development, religious, moral, and social novelties--provided they are tainted by no element of compulsion or interference with the just rights of others, may be trusted to find their own level. Moral and intellectual conditions are not the only motive forces in a community, nor are they even the most decisive. Political and material conditions fix the limits at which speculation can do either good or harm. Let us take an illustration of the impotence of moral ideas to override material circumstances; and we shall venture to place this illustration somewhat fully before the reader.

There is no more important distinction between modern civilised communities and the ancient communities than the fact that the latter rested on Slavery, while the former have abolished it. Hence there can hardly be a more interesting question than this--by what agencies so prodigious a transformation of one of the fundamental conditions of society was brought about. The popular answer is of a very ready kind, and it passes quite satisfactorily. This answer is that the first great step towards free labour, the transformation of personal slavery into serfdom, was the result of the spiritual change which was wrought in men's minds by the teaching of the Church. It is unquestionable that the influence of the Church tended to mitigate the evils of slavery, to humanise the relations between master and slave, between the lord and the serf. But this is a very different thing from the radical transformation of those relations. If we think of society as an organism we instantly understand that so immense a change as this could not possibly have been effected without the co-operation of the other great parts of the social system, any more than a critical evolution could take place in the nutritive apparatus of an animal, without a change in the whole series of its organs. Thus in order that serfage should be evolved from slavery, and free labour again from serfage, it could not be enough that an alteration should have been wrought in men's ideas as to their common brotherhood, and the connected ideas as to the lawfulness or unlawfulness of certain human relations. There must have been an alteration also of the economic and material conditions. History confirms the expectations which we should thus have been led to entertain. The impotence of spiritual and moral agencies alone in bringing about this great metamorphosis, is shown by such facts as these. For centuries after the new faith had consolidated itself, slavery was regarded without a particle of that deep abhorrence which the possession of man by man excites in us now. In the ninth and tenth centuries the slave trade was the most profitable branch of the commerce that was carried on in the Mediterranean. The historian tells us that, even so late as this, slaves were the principal article of European export to Africa, Syria, and Egypt, in payment for the produce of the East which was brought from those countries. It was the crumbling of the old social system which, by reducing the population, lessening the wealth, and lowering the standard of living among the free masters, tended to extinguish slavery, by diminishing the differences between the masters and their bondsmen. Again, it was certain laws enacted by the Roman government for the benefit of the imperial fisc, which first conferred rights on the slave. The same laws brought the free farmer, whose position was less satisfactory for the purposes of the revenue, down nearer and nearer to a servile condition. Again, in the ninth and tenth centuries, pestilence and famine accelerated the extinction of predial slavery by weakening the numbers of the free population. 'History,' we are told by that thoroughly competent authority, Mr. Finlay, 'affords its testimony that neither the doctrines of Christianity, nor the sentiments of humanity, have ever yet succeeded in extinguishing slavery, where the soil could be cultivated with profit by slave labour. No Christian community of slave-holders has yet voluntarily abolished slavery. In no country where it prevailed has rural slavery ceased, until the price of productions raised by slave labour has fallen so low as to leave no profit to the slave-owner.'

The moral of all this is the tolerably obvious truth, that the prosperity of an abstract idea depends as much on the medium into which it is launched, as upon any quality of its own. Stable societies are amply furnished with force enough to resist all effort in a destructive direction. There is seldom much fear, and in our own country there is hardly any fear at all, of hasty reformers making too much way against the spontaneous conservatism which belongs to a healthy and well-organised community. If dissolvent ideas do make their way, it is because the society was already ripe for dissolution. New ideas, however ardently preached, will dissolve no society which was not already in a condition of profound disorganisation. We may be allowed just to point to two memorable instances, by way of illustration, though a long and elaborate discussion would be needed to bring out their full force. It has often been thought since, as it was thought by timorous reactionaries at the time, that Christianity in various ways sapped the strength of the Roman Empire, and opened the way for the barbarians. In truth, the most careful and competent students know now that the Empire slowly fell to pieces, partly because the political arrangements were vicious and inadequate, but mainly because the fiscal and economic system impoverished and depopulated one district of the vast empire after another. It was the break-up of the Empire that gave the Church its chance; not the Church that broke up the Empire. It is a mistake of the same kind to suppose that the destructive criticism of the French philosophers a hundred years ago was the great operative cause of the catastrophe which befel the old social régime. If Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, had never lived, or if their works had all been suppressed as soon as they were printed, their absence would have given no new life to agriculture, would not have stimulated trade, nor replenished the bankrupt fisc, nor incorporated the privileged classes with the bulk of the nation, nor done anything else to repair an organisation of which every single part had become incompetent for its proper function. It was the material misery and the political despair engendered by the reigning system, which brought willing listeners to the feet of the teachers who framed beneficent governments on the simple principles of reason and the natural law. And these teachers only busied themselves with abstract politics, because the real situation was desperate. They had no alternative but to evolve social improvements out of their own consciousness. There was not a single sound organ in the body politic, which they could have made the starting-point of a reconstitution of a society on the base of its actual or historic structure. The mischiefs which resulted from their method are patent and undeniable. But the method was made inevitable by the curse of the old régime.[34]

Nor is there any instance in history of mere opinion making a breach in the essential constitution of a community, so long as the political conditions were stable and the economic or nutritive conditions sound. If some absolute monarch were to be seized by a philanthropic resolution to transform the ordering of a society which seemed to be at his disposal, he might possibly, by the perseverance of a lifetime, succeed in throwing the community into permanent confusion. Joseph II. perhaps did as much as a modern sovereign can do in this direction. Yet little came of his efforts, either for good or harm. But a man without the whole political machinery in his power need hardly labour under any apprehension that he may, by the mere force of speculative opinion, involuntarily work a corresponding mischief. If it is true that the most fervent apostles of progress usually do very little of the good on which they congratulate themselves, they ought surely on the same ground to be acquitted of much of the harm for which they are sometimes reviled. In a country of unchecked and abundant discussion, a new idea is not at all likely to make much way against the objection of its novelty, unless it is really commended by some quality of temporary or permanent value. So far therefore as the mere publication of new principles is concerned, and so far also as merely self-regarding action goes, one who has the keenest sense of social responsibility, and is most scrupulously afraid of doing anything to slacken or perturb the process of social growth, may still consistently give to the world whatever ideas he has gravely embraced. He may safely trust, if the society be in a normal condition, to its justice of assimilation and rejection. There are a few individuals for whom newness is a recommendation. But what are these few among the many to whom newness is a stumbling-block? Old ideas may survive merely because they are old. A new one will certainly not, among a considerable body of men in a healthy social state, gain any acceptance worth speaking of, merely because it is new.

The recognition of the self-protecting quality of society is something more than a point of speculative importance. It has a direct practical influence. For it would add to the courage and intrepidity of the men who are most attached to the reigning order of things. If such men could only divest themselves of a futile and nervous apprehension, that things as they are have no root in their essential fitness and harmony, and that order consequently is ever hanging on a trembling and doubtful balance, they would not only gain by the self-respect which would be added to them and the rest of the community, but all discussion would become more robust and real. If they had a larger faith in the stability for which they profess so great an anxiety, they would be more free alike in understanding and temper to deal generously, honestly, and effectively with those whom they count imprudent innovators. There is nothing more amusing or more instructive than to turn to the debates in parliament or the press upon some innovating proposal, after an interval since the proposal was accepted by the legislature. The flaming hopes of its friends, the wild and desperate prophecies of its antagonists, are found to be each as ill-founded as the other. The measure which was to do such vast good according to the one, such portentous evil according to the other, has done only a part of the promised good, and has done none of the threatened evil. The true lesson from this is one of perseverance and thoroughness for the improver, and one of faith in the self-protectiveness of a healthy society for the conservative. The master error of the latter is to suppose that men are moved mainly by their passions rather than their interests, that all their passions are presumably selfish and destructive, and that their own interests can seldom be adequately understood by the persons most directly concerned. How many fallacies are involved in this group of propositions, the reader may well be left to judge for himself.

We have in this chapter considered some of the limitations which are set by the conditions of society on the duty of trying to realise our principles in action. The general conclusion is in perfect harmony with that of the previous chapters. A principle, if it be sound, represents one of the larger expediencies. To abandon that for the sake of some seeming expediency of the hour, is to sacrifice the greater good for the less, on no more creditable ground than that the less is nearer. It is better to wait, and to defer the realisation of our ideas until we can realise them fully, than to defraud the future by truncating them, if truncate them we must, in order to secure a partial triumph for them in the immediate present. It is better to bear the burden of impracticableness, than to stifle conviction and to pare away principle until it becomes more hollowness and triviality. What is the sense, and what is the morality, of postponing the wider utility to the narrower? Nothing is so sure to impoverish an epoch, to deprive conduct of nobleness, and character of elevation.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 27: _The Study of Sociology_, p. 396.]

[Footnote 28: No one, for instance, has given more forcible or decisive expression than Mr. Spencer has done to the duty of not passively accepting the current theology. See his _First Principles_, pt. i. ch. vi, § 34; paragraph beginning,--'Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view,' etc.]

[Footnote 29: _Speech on Conciliation with America_.]

[Footnote 30: 'Toute énormité dans les esprits d'un certain ordre n'est souvent qu'une grande vue prise hors du temps et du lieu, et ne gardant aucun rapport réel avec les objets environnants. Le propre de certaines prunelles ardentes est de franchir du regard les intervalles et de les supprimer. Tantôt c'est une idée qui retarde de plusieurs siècles, et que ces vigoureux esprits se figurent encore présente et vivante; tantôt c'est une idée qui avance, et qu'ils croient incontinent réalisable. M. de Couaën était ainsi; il voyait 1814 dès 1804, et de là une supériorité; mais il jugeait 1814 possible dès 1804 ou 1805, et de là tout un chimérique entassement.--Voilà un point blanc à l'horizon, chacun jurerait que c'est un nuage. "C'est une montagne," dit le voyageur à l'oeil d'aigle; mais s'il ajoute: "Nous y arriverons ce soir, dans deux heures;" si, à chaque heure de marche, il crie avec emportement: "Nous y sommes," et le veut démontrer, il choque les voisins avec sa poutre, et donne l'avantage aux yeux moins perçants et plus habitués à la plaine.'--Ste. Beuve's _Volupté_, p. 262]

[Footnote 31: It is sometimes convenient to set familiar arguments down once more; so I venture to reprint in a note at the end of the chapter a short exposition of the doctrine of liberty, which I had occasion to make in considering Sir J.F. Stephen's vigorous attack on that doctrine.]

[Footnote 32: Mr. Samuel Bailey's _Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions_, etc., p. 138, (1826.)]

[Footnote 33: There is a sense, and a most important sense, in which liberty is a positive force. It is its robust and bracing influence on character, which makes wise men prize freedom and strive for the enlargement of its province. As Mr. Mill expressed this:--'It is of importance not only what men do, but what manner of men they are that do it,' Milton pointed to the positive effect of liberty on character in the following passage:--'They are not skilful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin. Though ye take from a covetous man his treasure, he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste that came not thither so. Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look how much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue. And were I the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil-doing. For God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person, more than the restraint of ten vicious.']

[Footnote 34: There is, I think, nothing in this paragraph really inconsistent with De Tocqueville's well-known and striking chapter, 'Comment les hommes de lettres devinrent les principaux hommes politiques du pays, et des effets qui en résultèrent.' (_Ancien Régime_, iii. i.) Thus Sénac de Meilhan writes in 1795;--'C'est quand la Révolution a été entamée qu'on a cherché dans Mably, dans Rousseau, des armes pour sustenter le système vers lequel entrainait l'effervescence de quelques esprits hardis. Mais ce ne sont point les auteurs que j'ai cités qui ont enflamme les têtes; M. Necker seul a produit cet effet, et déterminé l'explosion,' ... 'Les écrits de Voltaire ont certainement nui à la religion, et ébranlé la croyance dans un assez grand nombre; mais ils n'ont aucun rapport avec les affaires du gouvernement, et sont plus favorables que contraires à la monarchie....' Of Rousseau's _Social Contract_:--'Ce livre profond et abstrait était peu lu, et etendu de bien peu de gens.' Mably--'avait peu de vogue.' _De Gouvernment, etc., en France_, p. 129, etc.]

NOTE TO PAGE 242.

THE DOCTRINE OF LIBERTY.

Mr. Mill's memorable plea for social liberty was little more than an enlargement, though a very important enlargement, of the principles of the still more famous Speech for Liberty of Unlicensed Printing with which Milton ennobled English literature two centuries before. Milton contended for free publication of opinion mainly on these grounds: First, that the opposite system implied the 'grace of infallibility and incorruptibleness' in the licensers. Second, that the prohibition of bold books led to mental indolence and stagnant formalism both in teachers and congregations, producing the 'laziness of a licensing church.' Third, that it 'hinders and retards the importation of our richest merchandise, truth;' for the commission of the licenser enjoins him to let nothing pass which is not vulgarly received already, and 'if it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself, whose first appearance to our eyes, bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom, is more unsightly and unplausible than many errors, even as the person is of many a great man slight and contemptible to see to.' Fourth, that freedom is in itself an ingredient of true virtue, and 'they are not skilful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin; that virtue therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her virtue is but an excremental virtue, which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the form of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon and the tower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know and yet abstain.'

The four grounds on which Mr. Mill contends for the necessity of freedom in the expression of opinion to the mental wellbeing of mankind, are virtually contained in these. His four grounds are, (1) that the silenced opinion may be true; (2) it may contain a portion of truth, essential to supplement the prevailing opinion; (3) vigorous contesting of opinions that are even wholly true, is the only way of preventing them from sinking to the level of uncomprehended prejudices; (4) without such contesting, the doctrine will lose its vital effect on character and conduct.

But Milton drew the line of liberty at what he calls 'neighbouring differences, or rather indifferences.' The Arminian controversy had loosened the bonds with which the newly liberated churches of the Reformation, had made haste to bind themselves again, and weakened that authority of confessions, which had replaced the older but not more intolerant authority of the universal church. Other controversies which raged during the first half of the seventeenth century,--those between catholics and protestants, between prelatists and presbyterians, between socinians and trinitarians, between latitudinarians, puritans, and sacramentalists,--all tended to weaken theological exclusiveness. This slackening, however, was no more than partial. Roger Williams, indeed, the Welsh founder of Rhode Island, preached, as early as 1631, the principles of an unlimited toleration, extending to catholics, Jews, and even infidels. Milton stopped a long way short of this. He did not mean 'tolerated popery and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religious and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit that intends not to unlaw itself.'

Locke, writing five-and-forty years later, somewhat widened these limitations. His question was not merely whether there should be free expression of opinion, but whether there should furthermore be freedom of worship and of religious union. He answered both questions affirmatively,--not on the semi-sceptical ground of Jeremy Taylor, which is also one of the grounds taken by Mr. Mill, that we cannot be sure that our own opinion is the true one,--but on the strength of his definition of the province of the civil magistrate. Locke held that the magistrate's whole jurisdiction reached only to civil concernments, and that 'all civil power, right, and dominion is bounded to that only care of promoting these things; and that it neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the saving of souls. This chiefly because the power of the civil magistrate consists only in outward force, while true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God, and such is the nature of the understanding that it cannot he compelled to the belief of anything by outward force.... It is only light and evidence that can work a change in men's opinions; and that light can in no manner proceed from corporal sufferings, or any other outward penalties.' 'I may grow rich by an art that I take not delight in; I may be cured of some disease by remedies that I have not faith in; but I cannot be saved by a religion that at I distrust and a ritual that I abhor.' (_First Letter concerning Toleration_.) And much more in the same excellent vein. But Locke fixed limits to toleration. 1. No opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate. Thus, to take examples from our own day, a conservative minister would think himself right on this principle in suppressing the Land and Labour League; a catholic minister in dissolving the Education League; and any minister in making mere membership of the Mormon sect a penal offence. 2. No tolerance ought to be extended to 'those who attribute unto the faithful, religious, and orthodox, that is in plain terms unto themselves, any peculiar privilege or power above other mortals, in civil concernments; or who, upon pretence of religion, do challenge any manner of authority over such as are not associated with them in their ecclesiastical communion.' As I have seldom heard of any sect, except the Friends, who did not challenge as much authority as it could possibly get over persons not associated with it, this would amount to a universal proscription of religion; but Locke's principle might at any rate be invoked against Ultra-montanism in some circumstances. 3. Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. The taking away of God, _though but even in thought_, dissolves all society; and promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, have no hold on such. Thus the police ought to close Mr. Bradlaugh's Hall of Science, and perhaps on some occasions the Positivist School.

Locke's principles depended on a distinction between civil concernments, which he tries to define, and all other concernments. Warburton's arguments on the alliance between church and state turned on the same point, as did the once-famous Bangorian controversy. This distinction would fit into Mr. Mill's cardinal position, which consists in a distinction between the things that only affect the doer or thinker of them, and the things that affect other persons as well. Locke's attempt to divide civil affairs from affairs of salvation, was satisfactory enough for the comparatively narrow object with which he opened his discussion. Mr. Mill's account of civil affairs is both wider and more definite; naturally so, as he had to maintain the cause of tolerance in a much more complex set of social conditions, and amid a far greater diversity of speculative energy, than any one dreamed of in Locke's time. Mr. Mill limits the province of the civil magistrate to the repression of acts that directly and immediately injure others than the doer of them. So long as acts, including the expression of opinions, are purely self-regarding, it seems to him expedient in the long run that they should not be interfered with by the magistrate. He goes much further than this. Self-regarding acts should not be interfered with by the magistrate. Not only self-regarding acts, but all opinions whatever, should, moreover, be as little interfered with as possible by public opinion, except in the way of vigorous argumentation and earnest persuasion in a contrary direction; the silent but most impressive solicitation of virtuous example; the wise and careful upbringing of the young, so that when they enter life they may be most nobly fitted to choose the right opinions and obey the right motives.

The consideration by which he supports this rigorous confinement of external interference on the part of government, or the unorganised members of the community whose opinion is called public opinion, to cases of self-protection, are these, some of which have been already stated:--

1. By interfering to suppress opinions or experiments in living, you may resist truths and improvements in a greater or less degree.

2. Constant discussion is the only certain means of preserving the freshness of truth in men's minds, and the vitality of its influence upon their conduct and motives.

3. Individuality is one of the most valuable elements of wellbeing, and you can only be sure of making the most of individuality, if you have an atmosphere of freedom, encouraging free development and expansion.

4. Habitual resort to repressive means of influencing conduct tends more than anything else to discredit and frustrate the better means, such as education, good example, and the like. (_Liberty_, 148.)

The principle which he deduces from these considerations is--'that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection; the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot be rightfully compelled to do or forbear because it will make him happier, because in the opinion of others to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to others.' (_Liberty_, 22.)

Two disputable points in the above doctrine are likely at once to reveal themselves to the least critical eye. First, that doctrine would seem to check the free expression of disapproval; one of the most wholesome and indispensable duties which anybody with interest in serious questions has to perform, and the non-performance of which would remove the most proper and natural penalty from frivolous or perverse opinions and obnoxious conduct. Mr. Mill deals with this difficulty as follows:--'We have a right in various ways to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance) for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and as it were the spontaneous, consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment.' (_Liberty_, 139.) This appears to be a satisfactory way of meeting the objection. For though the penalties of disapproval may be just the same, whether deliberately inflicted, or naturally and spontaneously falling on the object of such disapproval, yet there is a very intelligible difference between the two processes in their effect on the two parties concerned. A person imbued with Mr. Mill's principle would feel the responsibility of censorship much more seriously; would reflect more carefully and candidly about the conduct or opinion of which he thought ill; would be more on his guard against pharisaic censoriousness, and that desire to be ever judging one another, which Milton well called the stronghold of our hypocrisy. The disapproval of such a person would have an austere colour, a gravity, a self-respecting reserve, which could never belong to an equal degree of disapproval in a person who had started from the officious principle, that if we are sure we are right, it is straightway our business to make the person whom we think wrong smart for his error. And in the same way such disapproval would be much more impressive to the person whom it affected. If it was justified, he would be like a froward child who is always less effectively reformed--if reformable at all--by angry chidings and passionate punishments than by the sight of a cool and austere displeasure which lets him persist in his frowardness if he chooses.

The second weak point in the doctrine lies in the extreme vagueness of the terms, protective and self-regarding. The practical difficulty begins with the definition of these terms. Can any opinion, or any serious part of conduct, be looked upon as truly and exclusively self-regarding? This central ingredient in the discussion seems insufficiently laboured in the essay on Liberty. Yet it is here more than anywhere else that controversy is needed to clear up what is in just as much need of elucidation, whatever view we may take of the inherent virtue of freedom--whether we look on freedom as a mere negation, or as one of the most powerful positive conditions of attaining the highest kind of human excellence.

To some persons the analysis of conduct, on which the whole doctrine of liberty rests, seems metaphysical and arbitrary. They are reluctant to admit there are any self-regarding acts at all. This reluctance implies a perfectly tenable proposition, a proposition which has been maintained by nearly all religious bodies in the world's history in their non-latitudinarian stages. To distinguish the self-regarding from the other parts of conduct, strikes them not only as unscientific, but as morally and socially mischievous. They insist that there is a social as well as a personal element in every human act, though in very different proportions. There is no gain, they contend, and there may be much harm, in trying to mark off actions, in which the personal element decisively preponderates, from actions of another sort. Mr. Mill did so distinguish actions, nor was his distinction either metaphysical or arbitrary in its source. As a matter of observation, and for the practical purposes of morality, there are kinds of action whose consequences do not go beyond the doer of them. No doubt, you may say that by engaging in these kinds in any given moment, the doer is neglecting the actions in which the social element preponderates, and therefore even acts that seem purely self-regarding have indirect and negative consequences to the rest of the world. But to allow considerations of this sort to prevent us from using a common-sense classification of acts by the proportion of the personal element in them, is as unreasonable as if we allowed the doctrine of the conservation of physical force, or the evolution of one mode of force into another, to prevent us from classifying the affections of matter independently, as light, heat, motion, and the rest. There is one objection obviously to be made to most of the illustrations which are designed to show the public element in all private conduct. The connection between the act and its influence on others is so remote (using the word in a legal sense), though quite certain, distinct, and traceable, that you can only take the act out of the self-regarding category, by a process which virtually denies the existence of any such category. You must set a limit to this 'indirect and at-a-distance argument,' as Locke called a similar plea, and the setting of this limit is the natural supplement to Mr. Mill's 'simple principle.'

The division between self-regarding acts and others then, rests on observation of their actual consequences. And why was Mr. Mill so anxious to erect self-regarding acts into a distinct and important class, so important as to be carefully and diligently secured by a special principle of liberty? Because observation of the recorded experience of mankind teaches us, that the recognition of this independent provision is essential to the richest expansion of human faculty. To narrow or to repudiate such a province, and to insist exclusively on the social bearing of each part of conduct, is to limit the play of motives, and to thwart the doctrine that 'mankind obtain a greater sum of happiness when each pursues his own, under the rules and conditions required by the rest, than when each makes the good of the rest his only object.' To narrow or to repudiate such a province is to tighten the power of the majority over the minority, and to augment the authority of whatever sacerdotal or legislative body may represent the majority. Whether the lawmakers be laymen in parliament, or priests of humanity exercising the spiritual power, it matters not.

We may best estimate the worth and the significance of the doctrine of Liberty by considering the line of thought and observation which led to it. To begin with, it is in Mr. Mill's hands something quite different from the same doctrine as preached by the French revolutionary school; indeed one might even call it reactionary, in respect of the French theory of a hundred years back. It reposes on no principle of abstract right, but, like the rest of its author's opinions, on principles of utility and experience. Dr. Arnold used to divide reformers into two classes, popular and liberal. The first he defined as seekers of liberty, the second as seekers of improvement; the first were the goats, and the second were the sheep. Mr. Mill's doctrine denied the mutual exclusiveness of the two parts of this classification, for it made improvement the end and the test, while it proclaimed liberty to be the means. Every thinker now perceives that the strongest and most durable influences in every western society lead in the direction of democracy, and tend with more or less rapidity to throw the control of social organisation into the hands of numerical majorities. There are many people who believe that if you only make the ruling body big enough, it is sure to be either very wise itself, or very eager to choose wise leaders. Mr. Mill, as any one who is familiar with his writings is well aware, did not hold this opinion. He had no more partiality for mob rule than De Maistre or Goethe or Mr. Carlyle. He saw its evils more clearly than any of these eminent men, because he had a more scientific eye, and because he had had the invaluable training of a political administrator on a large scale, and in a very responsible post. But he did not content himself with seeing these evils, and he wasted no energy in passionate denunciation of them, which he knew must prove futile. Guizot said of De Tocqueville, that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat. Mr. Mill was too penetrated by popular sympathies to be an aristocrat in De Tocqueville's sense, but he likewise was full of ideas and hopes which the unchecked or undirected course of democracy would defeat without chance of reparation. This fact he accepted, and from this he started. Mr. Carlyle, and one or two rhetorical imitators, poured malediction on the many-headed populace, and with a rather pitiful impatience insisted that the only hope for men lay in their finding and obeying a strong man, a king, a hero, a dictator. How he was to be found, neither the master nor his still angrier and more impatient mimics could ever tell us.

Now Mr. Mill's doctrine laid down the main condition of finding your hero; namely, that all ways should be left open to him, because no man, nor majority of men, could possibly tell by which of these ways their deliverers were from time to time destined to present themselves. Wits have caricatured all this, by asking us whether by encouraging the tares to grow, you give the wheat a better chance. This is as misleading as such metaphors usually are. The doctrine of liberty rests on a faith drawn from the observation of human progress, that though we know wheat to be serviceable and tares to be worthless, yet there are in the great seed-plot of human nature a thousand rudimentary germs, not wheat and not tares, of whose properties we have not had a fair opportunity of assuring ourselves. If you are too eager to pluck up the tares, you are very likely to pluck up with them these untried possibilities of human excellence, and you are, moreover, very likely to injure the growing wheat as well. The demonstration of this lies in the recorded experience of mankind.

Nor is this all. Mr. Mill's doctrine does not lend the least countenance to the cardinal opinion of some writers in the last century, that the only need of human character and of social institutions is to be let alone. He never said that we were to leave the ground uncultivated, to bring up whatever might chance to grow. On the contrary, the ground was to be cultivated with the utmost care and knowledge, with a view to prevent the growth of tares--but cultivated in a certain manner. You may take the method of the Inquisition, of the more cruel of the Puritans, of De Maistre, of Mr. Carlyle; or you may take Mr. Mill's method of cultivation. According to the doctrine of Liberty, we are to devote ourselves to prevention, as the surest and most wholesome mode of extirpation. Persuade; argue; cherish virtuous example; bring up the young in habits of right opinion and right motive; shape your social arrangements so as to stimulate the best parts of character. By these means you will gain all the advantages that could possibly have come of heroes and legislative dragooning, as well as a great many more which neither heroes nor legislative dragooning could ever have secured.

It is well with men, Mr. Mill said, moreover, in proportion as they respect truth. Now they at once prove and strengthen their respect for truth, by having an open mind to all its possibilities, while at the same time they hold firmly to their own proved convictions, until they hear better evidence to the contrary. There is no anarchy, nor uncertainty, nor paralysing air of provisionalness in such a frame of mind. So far is it from being fatal to loyalty or reverence, that it is an indispensable part of the groundwork of the only loyalty that a wise ruler or teacher would care to inspire--the loyalty springing from a rational conviction that, in a field open to all comers, he is the best man they can find. Only on condition of liberty without limit is the ablest and most helpful of 'heroes' sure to be found; and only on condition of liberty without limit are his followers sure to be worthy of him. You must have authority, and yet must have obedience. The noblest and deepest and most beneficent kind of authority is that which rests on an obedience that is rational and spontaneous.

The same futile impatience which animates the political utterances of Mr. Carlyle and his more weak-voiced imitators, takes another form in men of a different training or temperament. They insist that if the majority has the means of preventing vice by law, it is folly and weakness not to resort to those means. The superficial attractiveness of such a doctrine is obvious. The doctrine of liberty implies a broader and a more patient view. It says:--Even if you could be sure that what you take for vice is so--and the history of persecution shows how careful you should be in this preliminary point--even then it is an undoubted and, indeed, a necessary tendency of this facile repressive legislation, to make those who resort to it neglect the more effective, humane, and durable kinds of preventive legislation. You pass a law (if you can) putting down drunkenness; there is a neatness in such a method very attractive to fervid and impatient natures. Would you not have done better to leave that law unpassed, and apply yourselves sedulously instead to the improvement of the dwellings of the more drunken class, to the provision of amusements that might compete with the ale-house, to the extension and elevation of instruction, and so on? You may say that this should be done, and yet the other should not be left undone; but, as matter of fact and history, the doing of the one has always gone with the neglect of the other, and ascetic law-making in the interests of virtue has never been accompanied either by law-making or any other kinds of activity for making virtue easier or more attractive. It is the recognition how little punishment can do, that leaves men free to see how much social prevention can do. I believe, then, that what seems to the criminal lawyers and passionate philanthropists self-evident, is in truth an illusion, springing from a very shallow kind of impatience, heated in some of them by the addition of a cynical contempt for human nature and the worth of human existence.

If people believe that the book of social or moral knowledge is now completed, that we have turned over the last page and heard the last word, much of the foundation of Mr. Mill's doctrine would disappear. But those who hold this can hardly have much to congratulate themselves upon. If it were so, and if governments were to accept the principle that the only limits to the enforcement of the moral standard of the majority are the narrow expediencies of each special case, without reference to any deep and comprehensive principle covering all the largest considerations, why, then, the society to which we ought to look with most admiration and envy, is the Eastern Empire during the ninth and tenth centuries, when the Byzantine system of a thorough subordination of the spiritual power had fully consolidated itself!