LIBERTY AND ITS FOES.* LORD Holm CECIL has done a

real service by making Liberty and Authority the subject of his address to the Associated Societies of the University of Edinburgh. The individual and the State are often antagonistic to-day, as they have been in past ages, but, whereas the State formerly stood for the dominion of powerful minorities over a weak majority, it seems more and more coming to stand for the dominion of a powerful majority over its own members. The interference with liberty involved in this change has none of the safeguards which attended the older forms of the conflict. A weak majority learns in time that what it needs most of all is organisation. If it can but obtain this its numbers must in the end tell. When once this is recognised the road to emancipation is open, however hard it may be to travel, or however long the journey may take. But when the journey is accomplished, when the absolutism of Sovereigns or oligarchies has yielded to the qualified absolutism of aristocracies, and this has in turn given way to the absolutism of the organised democracy, nothing is left us but the difficult task of convincing the democracy that its welfare depends on its readiness to set bounds to its own powers. The State is no longer an exceptionally strong element in the community, it is the community itself ; and if it deliberately sets itself to make its power felt in every department of life, those who resent its interference have no visible help left them. We may be a long way as yet from the realisation of this state of things, but it is daily coming nearer, and any writer who asks us to consider the dangers which await us if we go blindly forward deserves a warm welcome. The well- being of society hangs on the proper equilibrium of liberty and authority, and the disappearance of the latter over large areas of human thought only makes its supremacy in the region of government more complete.

Lord Hugh Cecil takes two great writers as representatives of these two ideas,—John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold. Mill's definition of liberty does not satisfy him. It is not enough, he thinks, to say that the individual should have liberty so long as his actions only affect himself, but should be liable to interference as soon as those actions affect the rights or interests of others. The difficulty of the problem lies in ascertaining where this legitimate interference begins and ends. According to Mill, a man should be free to do or leave undone all self-regardful acts ; he should only be controlled when the consequences of his acts or omissions extend to others. Lord Hugh Cecil thinks this definition " unsound and inadequate." That it is inadequate Mill would have himself admitted. Indeed, he has no sooner stated it than he sets to work to limit its application. But we do not see that because it is inadequate it is therefore unsound. The- doctrine that the State may interfere with the liberty of individuals whenever the act interfered with is not self-regard- ful needs to be continually qualified by the equally true doctrine that the consequences of State interference are so serious that there is always a strong primd-facie reason against resorting to it. But a remedy does not cease to be a remedy—and perhaps the only remedy— because in certain cases it may be worse than the disease. That is a reason, not for its rejection, but for the exercise of great caution in applying it, and this is the substance of the restrictions with which Mill fences round his definition. Lord Hugh Cecil himself does not escape a similar necessity when he rightly makes liberty " the condition of human progress." Without liberty there can be no virtue, for virtue " does not consist in doing right, but in choosing to do right." Yet in the interest of human progress e Liberty end Authority. By Lord Hugh Cecil. London : E. Arnold. [Si. ad.]

liberty must be restricted in certain cases. Though "every control is a hindrance some control is necessary." Lord Hugh draws an illustration of his principle from tem- perance legislation. The Prohibitionist, he argues, destroys true temperance, since " there is no temperance except where it is open to a man to get drunk, and he deliberately refuses to do so." But unless Lord Hugh Cecil would impose no penalty upon drunkenness, he must draw precisely the same distinction that he thinks inconsistent in M.ilL To argue " that it is not an invasion of liberty to stop a man getting drunk if it leads him to beat his wife, but that it is an invasion of liberty if the drunkard only breaks his wife's heart," seems to him absurd. " Moral pain is just as real as physical pain" ; why, then, should the wife of a drunkard be protected against one, and left exposed to the other ? Simply, we should answer, because the State has unmistakable facts to go upon in the one case, and has not in the other. A broken heart is a worse evil than a broken head, but it does not admit of the same kind of proof; and if benevolently minded Governments undertook the redress of all the moral suffering that wives undergo, in fact or in imagination, at the hands of their husbands, matrimony might in the end be abolished in sheer despair of regulating successfully the relations between the parties to the contract. Mill's distinction seems to us to supply a reasonably workable rule,—interference where the need is plain, and where there is no danger of going far wrong in meeting it ; abstention where the case is complicated, and the action of the remedy obscure. The difference between Mill and his critic has not, therefore, much importance. Both writers agree in recognising that human liberty " consists in the power of doing, not what others approve of, but what they disapprove of," just as property " consists in something which you may misuse, and not in something which you may only use as others think right."

With the principle which underlies the second part of Lord Hugh Cecil's address we are in entire agreement.

Matthew Arnold is a fascinating writer, but he is very far from being a safe or a final guide. We may fairly suspect, indeed, that were be now alive he would add many cautions and qualifications to his former teaching. Lord Hugh Cecil's criticism goes straight to the point. He quotes the famous passage : " Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness, or (shall I say ?) the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the straight- forward vigour of our Anglo-Saxon breed! " Arnold used the appeal to compassion " as a check on extravagant optimism."

His disciples carry things further. Do not prate to us, they say, of freedom and individual rights ; men and women are in distress, there is unemployment and sweating, poverty and destitution, hunger and cold. We cannot stop to listen to abstractions. Wragg is in custody.' So it is said, and with widespread assent and applause." Lord Hugh Cecil does not deny that " a case may sometimes he made out so extreme that normal principles of human progress must be laid aside." No doubt there are such cases, and if their exceptional character were properly recognised it would be easy to deal with them. Unfortunately this is the feature in them which gets least attention. From the very first the exceptions tend to become rules. This process has been very visible in the question of unemploy- ment. One ineffectual effort after another has been made to deal with it as an exception to the natural economic order until the Labour Party now proclaims that the cure can only be found in a Right to Work Bill. Lord Hugh Cecil's treat- ment of this part of his subject is excellent. "If we are right in supposing that humanity only makes true progress by choosing between right and wrong, we must pay a great price even for the most evidently necessary social reform which involves a diminution of liberty." For all social reforms have one feature in common. They add to the responsibility of the State and lessen that of the individual. Half-a-century ago Mill warned us what would be the consequences of yielding to the ideas then just beginning to gain a hearing :-

" If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint stock companies, the universities, and the public charities were all of them branches of the Government ; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and lnesi boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration ; if the employes of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the Government, and looked to the Government for every rise in life ; not all the freedom of the

press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name."

Life would cease to be a school of character, and would become a mere machine for impressing the official stamp on the citizens. On a small scale we may see this process at work in any large elementary school. Ten years before the Education Act of 1870 Mill wrote :— "That the whole or any large part of the education of the people should be in State hands I go as far as any one in

deprecating An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence."

In its first conception the Act of 1870 was modelled to some extent on this principle. State schools were to be set up

where Voluntary schools did not exist in sufficient numbers, and parents who could not afford to pay the school fees were helped by the State to keep their children at any school they liked. But this arrangement had no charms for the educa- tional reformer. He was not satisfied with requiring that every child should be educated up to a certain point, and leaving it to the parents to obtain that education where and how they pleased. He must needs provide the education himself, with the result that we all know, and that some of us have learned to distrust. All our elementary schools are organised on one model. No attention is paid either to the varying capacities of the children, or to the varying needs of the classes from which they are taken. Every child whose parents are not rich enough to educate him as they choose is passed into the same education mill to take his chance what he will come out.

It is a conspicuous merit in Lord Hugh Cecil that he is not afraid of being misunderstood. There are writers who allow their anxiety on this head to deprive their statements of all useful meaning. They would be afraid, for example, to regret with Lord Hugh that the working classes are less disposed than the easy and leisured classes to contend strongly and passionately for their own individual freedom :—

" I hope," he goes on, "this is only a transitional stage. I hope the people of this country will inherit to the full that great tradition of fighting for the individual's rights, the great tradition which teaches each man to look for help and progress to himself, to his own capacity and his own strength trained by self-discipline and self-control, and not to the State's enervating hand."

That is the best wish we can frame for the new democracy. The temptation to which they are now exposed is a very grave one. They suddenly see the power of giving effect to their own ideals by legislation almost within their grasp. They need no longer seek to convince their countrymen that these ideals are good, and that the world will be the happier for their adoption. They look forward to a near future in which the forces of the State will be in their own hands, and for the slow processes of the formation and strengthening of character there will be substituted the irresistible action of the State machine. Even some of us who ought to know better are tempted in moments of eagerness to look, and to teach others to look, to the omnipotent community instead of to their feeble selves. They forget Mill's dictum that "the

worth of a State in the long run is the worth of the indi- viduals composing it." If in order to get quickly at specific results the democracy ignores this vital fact, it will find that in its blind search for freedom it has only made its chains tighter, and lessened its ability to shake them off.