joined to produce: such proportion being settled by bargaining. Moreover, it is by fulfilment of contract that there is effected a balancing of all the various products to the various needs — the large manufacture of knives and the small manufacture of lancets; the great growth of wheat and the little growth of mustard-seed. The check on undue production of each commodity, results from finding that after a certain quantity, no one will agree to take any further quantity on terras that yield an adequate money equivalent. And so there is prevented a useless expenditure of labour in pro- ducing that which society does not want.
Lastly, we have to note the still more significant fact that the condition under which only, any specialized group of Avorkers can grow when the community needs more of its particular kind of work, is that contracts shall be free and fulfilment of them enforced. If when, from lack of material, Lancashire failed to supply the usual quantity of cotton-goods, there had been such interference with contracts as prevented.Yorkshire from asking a greater price for its woollens, which it was enabled to do by the greater demand for them, there would have been no temptation to put more capital into the woollen manufacture, no increase in the THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 101 amonnt of machinery and number of artizans employed, and no increase of woollens: the consequence being that the whole com- munity would have suffered from not having deficient cottons replaced by extra woollens. What serious injury may result to a nation if its members are hindered from contracting with one another, was well shown in the contrast between England and France in respect of railways. Here, though obstacles were at first raised by classes predominant in the legislature, the obstacles were not such as prevented capitalists from investing, engineers from furnishing directive skill, or contractors from undertaking works; and the high interest originally obtained on investments, the great profits made by contractors, and the large payments received by engineers, led to that drafting of money, energy, and ability, into railway-making, which rapidly developed our railway- system, to the enormous increase of our national prosperity. But when M. Thiers, then Minister of Public Works, came over to inspect, and having been taken about by Mr. Vignoles, said to him when leaAang: — " I do not think railways are suited to France,"* there resulted, from the consequent policy of hindering free contract, a delay of " eight or ten years " in that material progress which F'rance experienced when railways were made.
What do all these facts means? They mean »that for tlie healthful activity and due proportioning of those industries, occupations, professions, which maintain and aid the life of a society, there must, in the first place, be few restrictions on men's liberties to make agreements with one another, and there must, in the second place, be an enforcement of the agreements which they do make. As we have seen, the checks naturally arising to each man's actions when men become associated, are those only which result from mutual limitation; and there consequently can be no resulting check to the contracts they voluntarily make: inter- ference with these is interference with those rights to free action which remain to each when the rights of others are fully recognized. And then, as we have seen, enforcement of their rights implies enforcement of contracts made; since breach of contract is indirect aggression. If, when a customer on one side of the counter asks a shopkeeper on the other for a shilling's worth of his goods, and, while the shopkeeper's back is turned, walks off with the goods * Acldres?? of C. B. Vignoles, Esq., F.E.S., on his Election as President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Session 1869-70, p. 53.
102 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE.
•without leavinor the shilling lie tacitly contracted to give, his act differs in no essential way from robbery. In each sacli case the individual injured is deprived of something he possessed, without receiving the equivalent something bargained for; and is in the state of having expended his labour without getting benefit — has had an essential condition to the maintenance of life infringred.
Thus, then, it results that to recognize and enforce the rights of individuals, is at the same time to recognize and enforce the conditions to a normal 80cia,l life. There is one vital requirement for both.
Before turning to those corollaries which have practical applica- tions, let us observe how the special conclusions drawn converge to the one general conclusion originally foreshadowed — glancing at them in reversed order.
We have just found that the pre-requisite to individual life is in a double sense the pre-requisite to social life. The life of a society, in whichever of two senses conceived, depends on mainten- ance of individual rights. If it is nothing more than the sum of the lives of citizens, this implication is obvious. If it consists of those many unlike activities which citizens carry on in mutual dependence, still this aggregate impersonal life rises or falls according as the rights of individuals are enforced or denied.
Study of men's politico-ethical ideas and sentiments, leads to allied conclusions. Primitive peoples of various types show us that before governments exist, immemorial customs recognize private claims and justify maintenance of them. Codes of law independently evolved by different nations, agree in forbidding certain trespasses on the persons, properties, and liberties of citizens; and their correspondences imply, not an artificial source for individual rights, but a natural source. Along with social development, the formulating in law of the rights pre-established by custom, becomes more definite and elaborate. At the same time, Government undertakes to an increasing extent the business of enforcing them. While it has been becoming a better protector, Government has been becoming less aggressive —has more and more diminished its intrusions on men's spheres of private action. And, lastly, as in past times laws were avowedly modified to fit better with current ideas of equity; so now, law-reformers are THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 103 guided by ideas of equity which, are not derived from law but to which law has to conform.
Here, then, we have a politico-ethical theory justified alike by •analysis and by history. What have we against it? A fashionable counter-theory which proves to be unjustifiable. On the one hand, while we find that individual life and social life both imply main- tenance of the natural relation between efforts and benefits; we rJso find that this natural relation, recognized before Government existed, has been all along asserting and re-asserting itself, and obtaining better recognition in codes of law and systems of ethics. On the other hand, those who, denying natural rights, commit themselves to the assertion that rights are artificially created by law, are not only flatly contradicted by facts, but their assertion is .self-destructive: the endeavour to substantiate it, when challenged, involves them in manifold absurdities.
Nor is this all. The re-institution of a vague popular concep- tion in a definite form on a scientific basis, leads us to a rational view of the relation betw^een the wills of majorities and minorities. It turns out that those co-operations in which all can voluntarily lunite, and in the carrying on of which the will of the majority is rightly supreme, are co-operations for maintaining the conditions requisite to individual and social life. Defence of the society as a whole against external invaders, has for its remote end to preserve each citizen in possession of such means as he has for satisfying bis desires, and in possession of such liberty as he has for getting further means. And defence of each citizen against internal invaders, from murderers down to those who inflict nuisances on their neighbours, has obviously the like end — an end desired by every one save the criminal and disorderly. Hence it follows that for maintenance of this vital principle, alike of individual life and social life, subordination of minority to majority is legitimate; as implying only such a trenching on the freedom and property of each, as is requisite for the better protecting of his freedom and property. At the same time it follows that such subordination is not legitimate beyond this; since, implying as it does a greater iiggression upon the individual than is requisite for protecting him, it involves a breach of the vital principle which is to be main tained.
Thus we come round a^jain to the* proposition that the assumed 104 THE MAX VERSUS THE STATE.
divine right of parliaments, and the implied divine right of majorities, are superstitions. While men have abandoned the old theory respecting the source of State-authority, they have retained a belief in that unlimited extent of State-authority which rightly accompanied the old theory, but does not rightly accompany the new one. Unrestricted power over subjects, rationally ascribed to the ruling man when he was held to bo a deputy-god, is now ascribed to the ruling body, the deputy-godhood of which nobody asserts.
Opponents will, possibly, contend that discussions about the- origin and limits of governmental authority are mere' pedantries, " Government," they may perhajDs say, " is bound to use all the means it has, or can get, for furthering the general happiness. Its aim must be utility; and it is warranted in employing whatever measures are needful for achieving useful ends. The welfare of the people is the supreme law; and legislators are not to be deterred from obeying that law by questions concerning the source and range of their power." Is there really an escape here? or may this opening be effectually closed?
The essential question raised is the truth of the utilitarian theory as commonly held; and the answer here to be given is that, as commonly held, it is not true. Alike by the statements of utilitarian moralists, and by the acts of politicians knowingly or unknowingly following their lead, it is implied tha.t utility is to be directly determined by simple inspection of the immediate facts and estimation of probable results. Whereas, utilitarianism as- rightly understood, implies guidance by the general conclusions which anal^'sis of experience yields. " Good and bad results can- not be accidental, but must be necessary consequences of the constitution of things; " and it is " the business of Moral Science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness."* Current utilitarian specula- tion, like current practical politics, shows inadequate consciousness of natural causation. The habitual thought is that, in the absence of some obvious impediment, things can be done this way or that way; and no question is put whether there is either agreement or conflict with the normal working' of thing-s.
The foregoing discussions have, I think, shown that the dictates- * Data of Eihies, § 21. See also §§ 5G-G2.
THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 105 of utility, and, consequently, the proper actions of goverments, are not to be settled by inspection of facts on the surface, and accept- ance of theiv prima facie meanings; but are to be settled by reference to, and deduction from, fundamental facts. The funda- mental facts to which all rational judgments of utility must go back, are the facts that life consists in, and is maintained by, certain activities; and that among men in a society, these activities, necessarily becoming mutually limited, are to be carried ou by each within the limits thence arising, and not carried on beyond those limits: the maintenance of the limits becoming, by consequence^ the function of the agency which regulates society. If each, having freedom to use his powers up to the bounds fixed by the like freedom of others, obtains from his fellow-men as much for his services as they find them worth in comparison with the services of others — if contracts uniformly fulfilled bring to each the share thus deter- m.ined, and he is left secure in person and possessions to satisfy his wants with the proceeds; then there is maintained the vital prin- ciple alike of individual life and of social life. Further, there is maintained the vital principle of social progress; inasmuch as, under such conditions, the individuals of most worth will prosper and multiply more than those of less worth. So that utility, not as- empirically estimated but as rationally determinedly enjoins this maintenance of individual rights; and, by implication, negatives any -course which traverses them.
Here, then, we reach the ultimate interdict against meddling legislation. Reduced to its lowest terms, every proposal to inter- fere with citizens' activities further than by enforcing their mutual limitations, is a proposal to improve life by breaking through the fundamental conditions to life. When some are prevented from buying beer that others may be prevented from getting drunk, those who make the law assume that more good than evil will result from interference with the normal relation between conduct and consequences, alike in the few ill-regulated and the many well- regulated. A government which takes fractions of the incomes of multitudinous people, for the purpose of sending to the colonies some who have not prospered here, or for building better industrial dwellings, or for making public libraries and public museums, &c., takes for granted that, not only proximately but ultimately, increased general happiness will result from transgressing the essential requirement to general happiness — the requirement that 10 G THE ]\IAN VERSUS THE STATE.
€ach sliall enjoj all those means to happiness which his actions, carried on wii^hout aggression, have brought him. In other cases we do not thus let the immediate blind us to the remote. When asserting the sacred ness of property against private transgressors, we do not ask whether the benefit to a hungry man who takes bread from a baker's shop, is or is not greater than the injury inflicted on the baker: we consider, not the special effects, but the? general effects which arise if property is insecure. But when the State exacts further amounts from citizens, or further restrains their liberties, we consider only the direct and proximate effects, and ignore the indirect and distant effects which are caused when these invasions of individual rights are continually multiplied. We do not see that by accumulated small infractions of them, the vital conditions to life, individual and social, come to be so imperfectly fulfilled that the life decays.
Yet the decay thus caused becomes manifest where the policy is pushed to an extreme. Any one who studies, in the writings of MM. Taine and de Tocqueville, the state of things which preceded the French Revolution, will see that that tremendous catastrophe came about from so excessive a regulation of men's actions in all their details, and such an enormous drafting away of the products of their actions to maintain the regulating organization, that life was fast becoming impracticable. The empirical utilitarianism of that day, like the empirical utilitarianism of our day, differed from, rational utilitarianism in this, that in each successive case it contemplated only the effects of particular interferences on the actions of particular classes of men, and ignored the effects produced by a multiplicity of such interferences on the lives of men at large. And if we ask what then made, and what now makes, this error possible, we find it to be the political superstition that governmental power is subject to no restraints.
When that " divinity " which *' doth hedge a king," and which has left a glamour around the body inheriting i;is power, has quite died away — when it begins to be seen clearly that, in a popularly-governed nation, the government is simply a committee of management; it will also be seen that this committee of manage- ment has no intrinsic authority. The inevitable conclusion will bo that its authority is given by those appointing it; and has just such bounds as they choose to impose. Along mth this will go the further conclusion that the laws it j^asses are not in themselres THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 107 6acred; but tliat whatever sacredness they have, it is entirely due to the ethical sanction — an ethical sanction which, as we find, is derivable from the laws of human life as carried on under social •conditions. And there will come the corollary that when they have not this ethical sanction they have no sacredness, and may Tightly be challenged.
The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the powers of kijigs. The function of true Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the powers of Parlia- jmcnts.
POSTSCRIPT.
" Do I expect tills cloctrine to meet with any consIfTovablo accept* ance?" I wish I could say, yes; but unhappily various reason* oblige me to conclude that only here and there a solitary citizen may have his political creed modified. Of these reasons there is one from which all the others originate.
This essential reason is that the restriction of governmental power within the limits assigned, is appropriate to the industrial type of society only; and, while wholly incongruous with the militant type of society, is partially incongruous with that semi- militant semi-industrial type, which now characterizes advanced nations. At every stage of social evolution there must exist substantial agreement between practices and beliefs — real beliefs I mean, not nominal ones. Life can be carried on only by the harmonizing of thoughts and acts. Either the conduct required by circumstances must modify the beliefs to fit it; or else the changed beliefs must eventually modify the conduct.
Hence if the maintenance of social life under one set of condi- tions, necessitates extreme subordination to a ruler and entire faith in him, there will be established a theory that the subordination and the faith are proper — nay imperative. Conversely if, under other conditions, great subjection of citizens to government is no longer needful for preservation of the national life — if, contrari- wise, the national life becomes larger in amount and higher in quality as fast as citizens gain increased freedom of action; there comes a progressive modification of their political theory, having the result of diminishing their faith in governmental action, increasing their tendency to question governmental authority, and leading them in more numerous cases to resist governmental power: involving, eventually, an established doctrine of limitation.
POSTSCRIPT. 109 Thus it is not to be expected that current opinion respecting governmental authority, can at present be modified to any great extent. But let us look at the necessities of the case more closely.
Manifestly the success of an army depends very much on the faith of the soldiers in their general: disbelief in his ability will :go far towards paralyzing them in battle; while a,bsolute confi- dence in him will make them fulfil their respective parts with courage and energy. If, as in the normally-developed militant type of society, the ruler in peace and the leader in war are one xind the same, this confidence in him extends from military action to civil action; and the society, in large measure identical with the army, willingly accepts his judgments as law-giver. Even where the civil head, ceasing to be the military head, does his generalship by deputy, there still clings to him the traditional faith.
Similarly with the willingness to obey. Other things equal an ^army of insubordinate soldiers fails before an army of subordinate soldiers. Those whose obedience to their leader is perfect and prompt, are obviously more likely to succeed in battle than are those who disregard the commands issued to them. And as with the army so with the society as a whole; success "in war must largely depend on that conformity to the ruler's will which brings men and money when wanted, and adjusts all conduct to his needs.
Thus by survival of the fittest, the militant type of society becomes characterized by profound faith in the governing power, joined with a loyalty causing submission to it in all matters what- ever. And there must tend to be established among those who speculate about political aflfairs in a militant society, a theory giving form to the needful ideas and feelings; accompanied by assertions that the law -giver if not divine in nature is divinely directed, and that unlimited obedience to him is divinely ordered.
Change in the ideas and feelings which thus become charac- terestic of the militant form of organisation, can take place only where circumstances favour development of the industrial form of organization. Being carried on by voluntary co-operation instead of by compulsory co-operation, industrial life as we now know it, habituates men to independent activities, leads them to enforce 110 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE.
their own claims while respecting the claims of others, strengthens the consciousness of personal rights, and prompts them to resist excesses of governmental control. But since the circumstances which render war less frequent arise but slowly, and since the modifications of nature caused by the transition from a life pre- dominantly militant to a life predominantly industrial can there fore go on only little by little, it happens that the old sentiments and ideas give place to new ones, by small degrees only. And there are several reasons why the transition not only is, but ought to be, gradual. Here are some of them.
In the primitive man and in man but little civilized, there does not exist the nature required for extensive voluntary co-operations. Efforts willingly united with those of others for a common advan- tage, imply, if the undertaking is large, a perseverance he does not possess. Moreover, where the benefits to be achieved are distant and unfamih'ar, as are many for which men now-a-days combine, there needs a strength of constructive imagination not to be found in the minds of the uncivilized. And yet again, great combina- tions of a private kind for wholesale production, for large enterprises, and for other purposes, require a graduated subordination of the united workers — a graduated subordination such as that which militancy produces. In other words, the way to the developed industrial type as we now know it, is through the militant type; which, by discipline generates in long ages the power of con- tinuous application, the willingness to act under direction (now no longer coercive but agreed to under contract) and the habit of achieving large results by organizations.
Consequently, during long stages of social evolution there needsj for the management of all matters but the simplest, a govern- mental power great in degree and wide in range, with a correlative faith in it and obedience to it. Hence the fact that, as the records of early civilizations show ns, and as we are shown in the East at present, large undertakings can be achieved only by State-action. And hence the fact that only little by little can voluntary co-opera- tion replace compulsory co-operation, and rightly bring about a correlative decrease of faith in governmental ability and authority.
Chiefly, however, the maintenance of this faith is necessitated by the maintenance of fitness for war. This involves continuance of such confidence in the ruling agency, and such subordination to it.
POSTSCKIPT. 11 3 as may enable it to wield all the forces of the society on occasions of attack or defence; and there must survive a political theory justifying the faith and the obedience. While their sentiments and ideas are of kinds which perpetually endanger peace, it is requisite that men should have such belief in the authority of government as shall give it adequate coercive power over them for war pur- poses— a belief in its authority which inevitably, at the same time, gives it coercive power over them for other purposes.
Thus, as said at first, the fundamental reason for not expecting much acceptance of tlie doctrine set forth, is that we have at present but partially emerged from the militant regime and have but partially entered on that industrial regime to which this doctrine is proper.
So long as the religion of enmity predominates over the religion of amity, the current political superstition must hold its ground. While throughout Europe, the early culture of the ruling classes is one which every day of the week holds up for admiration those who in ancient times achieved the greatest feats in battle, and only on Sunday repeats the injunction to put up the eword — while these rnling classes are subject to a moral discipline consisting of six-sevenths pagan example and one-seventh Christian precept; there is no likelihood that there will arise such international relations as may make a decline in governmental power practicable, and a corresponding modification of political theory acceptable. While among ourselves the administration of colonial affairs is such that native tribes who retaliate on English- men by whom they have been injured, are punished, not on their own savage principle of life for life, but on the improved civilized principle of wholesale massacre in return for single murder, there is little chance that a political doctrine consistent only witli unaggressive conduct will gain currency. While the creed men profess is so interpreted that one of them who at home addresses missionary meetings, seeks, when abroad, to foment a quarrel with an adjacent people whom he wishes to subjugate, and then receives public honours after his death, it is not likely that the relations of our society to other societies will become such that there can spread to any extent that doctrine of limited govern- mental functions accompanying the diminished governmental authority proper to a peaceful state. A nation which, intereated