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 Price One Shilling, 
 
 THE MAN versm 
 
 CONTAININO 
 
 /^/^ J 
 
 "THE NEW TORYISM," 
 "THE COMING SLAVERY," 
 "THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS " 
 
 AND 
 
 ^^THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION.'^ 
 
 BY 
 
 HERBERT SPENCER. 
 
 Reprinted fro^i 
 
 THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, 
 
 With a Postscript. 
 
 WILLIAMS & NORGATE, 
 
 14, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London; 
 
 AND 7, Broad Street, Oxford. 
 
 1902.
 
 THE MAN versus THE STATE:
 
 THE MAN versus THE STATE 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 "THE NEW TORYISM," 
 "THE COMING SLAYERY," 
 "THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS" 
 
 AND 
 
 "THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION.' 
 
 BY 
 
 HERBERT SPENCER. 
 
 Reprinted from 
 
 THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, 
 
 With a Postscript. 
 
 seventeenth thousand. 
 
 WILLIAMS & NOEaATE, 
 
 14, Henrietta Street, Coyent Garden, London; 
 
 AND 7, Broad Street, Oxford. 
 
 1902.
 
 LONDON : 
 PRINTED BY HARRISON AND SONS, ST. MARTIN'S LANE, 
 
 Printers in Ordinarj/ to His Majesty.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The Westminster Review for April 1860, contained an article 
 entitled " Parliamentary Reform : the Dangers and the Safe- 
 guards." In that article I ventured to predict some results of 
 political changes then proposed. 
 
 Eeduced to its simplest expression, the thesis maintained 
 was that, unless due precautions were taken, increase of freedom 
 in form would be followed by decrease of freedom in fact. 
 Nothing has occurred to alter the belief I then expressed. The 
 drift of legislation since that time has been of the kind antici- 
 pated. Dictatorial measures, rapidly multiplied, have tended 
 continually to narrow the liberties of individuals; and have 
 done this in a double way. Regulations have been made in 
 yearly-growing numbers, restraining the citizen in directions 
 where his actions were previously unchecked, and compelling 
 actions which previously he might perform or not as he liked ; 
 and at the same time heavier public burdens, chiefly local, have 
 further restricted his freedom, by lessening that portion of 
 his earnings which he can spend as he pleases, and augmenting 
 the portion taken from him to be spent as public agents please. 
 The causes of these foretold effects, then in operation, con- 
 tinue in operation— are, indeed, likely to be strengthened ; and 
 finding that the conclusions drawn respecting these causes and 
 effects have proved true, T have been prompted to set forth and
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 emphasize kindred conclusions respecting the future, and do 
 what little may be done towards awakening attention to 
 threatened evils. 
 
 For this purpose were written the four following articles, 
 originally published in the Contemporary Revieiu for February, 
 April, May, June and July of this year. To meet certain 
 criticisms and to remove some of the objections likely to be 
 raised, I have now added a postscript. 
 
 Bayswater, July, 1884:. 

 
 CONTENTS, 
 
 I. The New Toryism 1 
 
 II. The Coming Slavery 18 
 
 III. The Sins of Legislators 44 
 
 IV. The Great Political Superstition 78 
 
 V. Postscript 108
 
 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 THE NEW TORYISM. 
 
 i\rosT cf those "wlio now pass as Liberals, are Tories of a new type.- 
 This is a paradox which I propose to justify. That I may justify 
 it, I must first point out what the two political parties originally 
 w^ere ; and I must then ask the reader to bear with me while X 
 remind him of facts he is familiar with, that I may impress on him 
 the intrinsic natures of Toryism and Liberalism properly so called.. 
 Dating back to an earlier period than their names, the two 
 political parties at first stood respectively for two opposed types 
 of social organization, broadly distinguishable as the militant and 
 the industrial — types which are characterized, the one by the 
 regime of status, almost universal in ancient days, and the other 
 by the regime of contract, which has become general in modern 
 days, chiefly among the Western nations, and especially among 
 ourselves and the Americans. If, instead of uring the word 
 " co-operation" in a limited sense, we use it in its widest sense, as 
 signifying the combined activities of citizens under whatever 
 system of regulation ; then these two are definable as the system 
 of compulsory co-operation and the system of voluntary co-opera- 
 tion. The typical structure of the one we see in an army formed 
 of conscripts, in which the units in their several grades have to 
 fulfil commands under pain of death, and receive food and clothing 
 and pay, arbitrarily apportioned ; while the typical structure of 
 the other we see in a body of producers or distributors, who seve- 
 
 B
 
 2 THE :\IAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 I ally agree to specified payments in return for specified services, 
 and may at will, after due notice, leave the organization if they 
 do not like it. 
 
 During social evolution in England, the distinction between 
 these two fundamentnlly-opposed forms of co-operation, made its 
 appearance gradually ; but long before the names Tory and Whig 
 came into use, the parties were becoming traceable, and their con- 
 nexions with militancy and industrialism respectively, were vaguely 
 shown. The truth is familiar that, here as elsewhere, it was 
 habitually by town-populations, formed of workers and traders 
 accustomed to co-operate under contract, that resistances were 
 TQade to that coercive rule which characterizes co-operation under 
 status. While, conversely, co-operation under status, arising from, 
 and adjusted to, chronic \varfare, was supported in rural districts, 
 originally peopled by military chiefs and their dependents, where 
 the primitive ideas and traditions survived. Moreover, this 
 contrast in political leanings, shown before Whig and Tory prin- 
 ciples became clearly distinguished, continued to be shown after- 
 wards. At the period of the Revolution, " while the villages and 
 smaller towns were monopolized by Tories, the larger cities, the 
 manufacturing districts, and the ports of commerce, formed the 
 strongholds of the Whigs." And that, spite of exceptions, the like 
 general relation still exists, needs no proving. 
 
 Such were the natures of the two parties as indicated by their 
 orio'ins. Observe, now, how their natures were indicated by their 
 early doctrines and deeds. Whiggism began with resistance to 
 Charles II. and his cabal, in their efforts to re-establish unchecked 
 monarchical power. The Whigs " regarded the monarchy as a civil 
 institution, established by the nation for the benefit of all its 
 members ;" while with the Tories " the monarch was the delegate 
 of heaven." And these doctrines involved the beliefs, the one 
 that subjection of citizen to ruler was conditional, and the other 
 that it was unconditional. Describing Whig and Tory as conceived 
 at the end of the seventeenth century, some fifty years before be 
 wrote his Dissertation on Fariies, Bolingbroke says : — 
 
 "The power and majesty of the people, an original contract, the 
 authority and independency of Parliaments, liberty, resistance, exclusion, 
 iibdication, deposition ; these v/ere ideas associated, at that time, to the 
 idea of a Whig, and sujjposed by every Whig to be incomnumicable, and 
 inconsistent with the idea of a Tory.
 
 THE NEW TORYISM. 3 
 
 "Divine, hereditaiy, indefeasible right, lineal succession, passive- 
 obedience, prerogative, non-resistance, slavery, nay, and sometimes popery 
 too, were associated in many minds to the idea of a Tory, and deemed 
 incommunicable and inconsistent, in the same manner, with the idea of a 
 Whig." — Dissertation on Parties^ p. 5. 
 
 And if we compare these descriptions, we see that in the one parly 
 there was a desire to resist and decrease the coercive power of the 
 ruler over the subject, and in the other party to maintain or increase 
 his coercive power. This distinction in their aims — a distinction 
 which transcends in meaning and importance all other political 
 distinctions — w^as displayed in their early doings. Whig principles 
 were exemplified in the Habeas Corpus Act, and in the measure by 
 which judges were made independant of the Crown ; in defeat of 
 the Non-Resisting Test Bill, which proposed for legislators and 
 officials a compulsory oath that they would in no case resist the 
 king by i^rms ; and, later, they were exemplified in the Bill cf 
 Rights, framed to secure subjects against monarchical aggressions. 
 These Acts had the same intrinsic nature. The principle of com- 
 pulsory co-operation throughout social life was weakened by them, 
 and the principle of voluntary co-operation strengthened. That at 
 at a subsequent period the policy of the pai-ty iiad the same general 
 tendency, is well shown by a remark of Mr. Green concerning the 
 period, of Whig power after the death of Anne : — 
 
 " Before the fifty years of their rule had passed. Englishmen had for- 
 gotten that it was possible to persecute for diff'erences of religion, or to put 
 down the liberty of the press, or to tamper with the administration of 
 justice, or to rule without a Parliament." — Short History^ p. 705. 
 
 And now, passing over the war-period which closed the last 
 century and began this, during which that extension of individual 
 freedom previously gained was lost, and the retrograde movement 
 towards the social type proper to militancy was shown by all kinds 
 of coercive measures, from those which took by force the persons 
 and property of citizens for war-purposes to those which suppressed 
 public meetings and sought to gag the press, let us recall the general 
 characters of those changes effected by Whigs or Liberals after the 
 re-establishment of peace permitted revival of the industrial regime 
 and return to its appropriate type of structure. Under growing 
 Whig influence there came repeal of the laws forbidding combina- 
 tions among artisans, as well as of those which interfered with their 
 freedom of travelling. There was the measure by which, under 
 
 L 2
 
 4 TIIK !\rAN VEHSUS THE STATE. 
 
 \v'iii;^ pressure, Dissenters were «illowed to believe as they plonsetJ 
 Aviiiiout safFering certain civil penalties; and there was tbo Whig- 
 mrasure, carried by Tories under compulsion, which enabled Ca- 
 tholics to profess their religion without losing part of their free- 
 dom. The area of liberty was extended by Acts which forbad tha 
 br.ying of negroes and the holding of them in bondage. The East 
 India Company's monopoly was abolished, and trade with the East 
 made open to all. The political serfdom of the unrepresented 
 wns narrowed in area, both by the Reform Bill and the Municipal 
 lljiorm Bill ; so that alike generally and locally, the many were 
 less under the coercion of the few. Dissenters, no longer obliged 
 to submit to the ecclesiastical form of marriage, were made free to 
 wed by a purely civil rite. Later came diminution and removal of 
 restraints on the buying of foreign commodities and the employ- 
 ment of foreign vessels and foreign sailors ; and later still tho 
 removal of those burdens on the press, which were originally 
 imposed to hinder the diffusion of opinion. And of all theso- 
 changes it is unquestionable that, whether made or not by Liberals 
 themselves, they w^ere made in conformity with principles professed 
 and urged by Liberals. 
 
 But why do I enumerate facts so well known to all ? Simply 
 because, as intimated at the outset, it seems needful to remind 
 everybody what Liberalism was in the past, that they may perccivo 
 its unlikeness to the so-called Liberalism of the present. It would 
 be inexcusable to name these various measures for the purpose of 
 pointing out the character common to them, were it not that in 
 Oiir daymen have forgotten their common character. They do not 
 remember that, in one or other way, all these truly Liberal changes 
 diminished compulsory co-operation throughout social life and in- 
 creased voluntary co-operation. They have forgotten that, in one 
 direction or other, they diminished the range of governmental 
 authority, and increased the area within which each citizen may 
 act unchecked. They have lost sight of the truth that in past 
 tun?s Liberalism habitually stood for individual freedom versus 
 {State-coercion. 
 
 And now comes the inquiry" — How is it that Liberals have lost 
 Bight of this ? How is it that Liberalism, getting more and more 
 into power, has grown more and more coercive in its legislation ? 
 H.ow is it that, either directly through its own majorities or iu- 
 direclly thvough aid given in such cases to the majorities of its
 
 THE NE\Y TORYISM. 5 
 
 op23onents, Liberalism Las to tin increriRiTig; extent adopted tlio 
 policy of dictatino; the actions of citizens, and, by consequence, 
 'diminishing the range throughout which their actions remain free? 
 How are we to explain this spreading confusion of thought which 
 has led it, in pursuit of what appears to be public good, to invert 
 the method by which in earlier. days it achieved public good ? 
 
 Unaccountable as at first sight this unconscious change of policy 
 «eems, wo shall find that it has arisen quite naturally. Given tho 
 Tinanalytical thought ordinarily brought to bear on political matters, 
 and, under existing conditions, nothing else was to be expected. 
 To make this clear some parenthetic explanations are needful. 
 
 From the lowest to the highest creatures, intelligence progresses 
 "by acts of discrimination; and it continues so to progress amoDg 
 men, from the most ignorant to the most cultured. To class 
 rightly — to pat in the same group things which are of essentially 
 the same natures, and in other groups things of natures ei^sentially 
 different — is the fundamental condition to right guidance of actions. 
 Beginning with rudimentary vision, wdiich gives warning that some 
 large opaque body is passing near (just as closed*ieyes turned to the 
 window, perceiving the shade caused by a hand put before them, 
 tell us of something moving in front), the advance is to developed 
 ■vision, which, by exactly-appreciated combinations of forms, 
 colours, and motions, identifies objects at great distances as prey or 
 enemies, and so makes it possible to improve the adjustments of 
 conduct for securing food or evading death. That progressing 
 jDcrception of differences and consequent greater correctness of 
 classing, constitutes, under one of its chief aspects, the grov/th of 
 intelligence, is equally seen when we pass from the relatively simple 
 physical vision to the relatively complex intellectual vision— tho 
 vision through the agency of which, things previously grouped by 
 certain external resemblances or by certain extrinsic circumstances, 
 come to be more truly grouped in conformity with their intrinsic 
 structures or natures. Undeveloped intellectual vision is just as 
 indisciiminating and erroneous in its classings as undeveloped 
 physical vision. Instance the early arrangement of plants into 
 the groups, trees, shrubs, and herbs : size, the most conspicuous 
 trait, being the ground of distinction ; and the assemblages formed 
 being such as united many plants extremely unlike in their natures, 
 and separated others that arc near akin. Or still better, take the
 
 R THE MAN VERSUS THE STATK. 
 
 popular claFsification which puts together under the same general 
 name, fish aud shell-fish, and under the sub-name, shell-fish, puts 
 together crustaceans and molluscs ; nay, -which goes further, and 
 regards as fish the cetacean mammals. Partly because of the like- 
 ness in their modes of life as inhabiting the water, and partly because 
 of some general resemblance in their flavours, creatures that are in 
 their essential natures far moro widely separated than a fish is 
 from a bird, are associated in the same class and in the same sub- 
 class. 
 
 Now the general truth thus exemplified, holds throughout 
 those higher ranges of intellectual vision concerned with things 
 not presentable to the senses, and, among others, such things as 
 political institutions and political measures. For when thinking 
 of these, too, the results of inadequate intellectual faculty, or 
 inadequate culture of it, or both, are erroneous classings and con- 
 sequent erroneous conclusions. Indeed, the liability to error is 
 here much greater ; since the things with which the intellect is 
 concerned do not admit of examination in the same easy way. 
 You cannot touch or see a political institution : it can be known 
 only by an effort of constructive imagination. Neither can you 
 apprehend by physical perception a political measure : this no less 
 requires a process of mental representation by which its elements 
 are put together in thought, and the essential nature of the com- 
 bination conceived. Here, therefore, still more than in the cases 
 abo^'e named, defective intellectual vision is shown in grouping by 
 external characters, or extrinsic circumstances. How institutions 
 are wrongly classed from this cause, we see in the common notion 
 that the Roman Republic was a popular form of government. 
 Look into the early ideas of the French revolutionists who aimed 
 at an ideal state of freedom, and you find that the political forms 
 and deeds of the Romans were their models ; and even now a 
 historian might be named who instances the corruptions of the 
 Roman Republic as showing us what popular government leads to 
 Yet the resemblance bet-ween the institutions of the Romans and 
 free institutions properly so-called, was less than that between a 
 shark and a porpoise — a resemblance of general external form 
 accompanying widely different internal structures. For the 
 Roman Government was that of a small oligarchy within a larger 
 oligarchy : the members of each being unchecked autocrats. A 
 Kociety in which the relatively few men who had political power.
 
 THE NEW TORYISM. 7 
 
 and were in a. qunlificd sense free, were so many petty despots, 
 holding not only slaves and dependents but even cliildren in a 
 bondage no less absolute than that in whicli tbey held their cattle, 
 was, by its intrinsic nature, more nearly allied to an ordinary 
 despotism than to a society of citizens politically equal. 
 
 Passing now to our special question, w^e may understand the 
 kind of confusion in which Liberalism has lost itself; and the 
 origin of those mistaken classings of political measures which have 
 misled it — classings, as we shall see, by conspicuous external traits 
 instead of by internal natures. For what, in the popular appre- 
 hension and in the apprehension of those w^ho effected them, were 
 the changes made by Liberals in the past ? They were abolitions 
 of grievances suffered by the people, or by portions of them : this 
 was the common trait they had which most impressed itself on 
 men's minds. They were mitigations of evils which had directly 
 or indirectly been felt by large classes of citizens, as causes of 
 misery or as hindrances to happiness. And since, in the minds of 
 most, a rectified evil is equivalent to an achieved good, these 
 measures came to be thought of as so many positive benefits ; and 
 the welfare of the many came to be conceived "alike by Liberal 
 statesmen and Liberal voters as the aim of Liberalism. Hence 
 the confusion. The gaining of a popular good, being the external 
 conspicuous trait common to Liberal measures in earlier days 
 (then in each case gained by a relaxation of restraints), it has 
 happened that popular good has come to be sought by Liberals, 
 not as an end to be indirectly gained by relaxations of restraints,, 
 but as the end to be directly gained. And seeking to gain it 
 directly, they have used methods intrinsically opposed to those 
 originally used. 
 
 And now, having seen how this reversal of policy has arisen (or 
 partial reversal, I should say, for the recent Burials Act and the 
 efforts to remove all remaining religious inequalities, show con- 
 tinuance of the original policy in certain directions), let us proceed 
 to contemplate the extent to which it has been carried during 
 recent times, and the still greater extent to which the future 
 will see it carried if current ideas and feelings continue to pre- 
 dominate. 
 
 Before proceeding, it may be well to say that no reflectiors 
 are intended on the motives which prompted one after anothc^
 
 8 THE MAN VERSUS I HE STATE. 
 
 of these varions restraints and dictations. These motives were 
 doubtless in nearly all cases good. It must be admitted that the 
 restrictions jDlaced by an Act of 1870, on the employment of women 
 and children in Turkey-red dyeing works, were, in intention, no 
 less philanthropic than those of Edward VI., which prescribed the 
 mhiimum time for which a journeyman should be retained. 
 Without question, the Seed Supply (Ireland) Act of 1880, which 
 empowered guardians to buy seed for poor tenants, and then to 
 see it properly planted, was moved by a desire for public welfare 
 no less great than that which in 1533 prescribed the number of 
 sheep a tenant might keep, or that of 1597, which commanded that 
 decayed houses of husbandry should be rebuilt. Nobody will dis- 
 pute that the various measures of late years taken for restricting 
 the sale of intoxicating liquors, have been taken as much with a 
 view to public morals as were the measures taken of old for 
 checking the evils of luxury ; as, for instance, in the fourteenth 
 century, when diet as well as dress was restricted. Everyone 
 must see that the edicts issued by Henry VIII. to prevent the 
 lower classes from playing dice, cards, bowls, &c., v/ere not more 
 prompted by desire for popular welfare than were the Acts passed 
 of late to check gambling. 
 
 Further, I do not intcnrl here to question the wisdom of these 
 modern interferences, which Conservatives and Liberals vie v/ith 
 one another in multiplying, any more than to question the wisdom 
 of those ancient ones which they in many cases resemble. We will 
 not now consider Avhether the plans of late adopted for preserving 
 the lives of sailors, are or are not more judicious than that sweeping 
 Scotch measure which, in the middle of the fifteenth century, pro- 
 hibited captains from leaving harbour during the winter. For 
 the present, it shall remain undebated whether there is a better 
 warrant for giving sanitary officers powers to search certain pre- 
 mises for unfit food, than there was for the law of Edward III., 
 under which innkeepers at seaports were sworn to search their 
 guests to prevent the exportation of money or plate. We will 
 •assume that there is no less sense in that clause of the Canal-boat 
 Act, which forbids an owner to board gratuitously the children of 
 the boatmen, than there was in the Spitalficlds Acts, which, up to 
 1824<, for the benefit of the artisans, forbade the manufacturers to 
 tix their factories more than ten miles from the Royal Exchange. 
 
 We exclude, then, these questions of philanthropic motive and
 
 THE NEW TOr.YISM. 9 
 
 %Tise judgment, taking both of them for granted ; and have hore 
 to concern ourselves solely with the compulsory nature of tho 
 measures which, for good or evil as the case may be, have been put 
 in force during periods of Liberal ascendancy. 
 
 To bring the illustrations within compass, let ns commence 
 with 1860, under the second administration of Lord Palmerston. 
 In that 3'ear, the restrictions of the Factories Act were extended 
 to bleaching and dyeing works ; authority was given to provide 
 analysts of food and drink, to be paid out of local rates ; there v/as 
 an Act providing for inspection of gas-works, as well as for fixing 
 quality of gas and limiting price; there was the act which, in addi- 
 tion to further mine-inspection, made it penal to employ boys under 
 twelve not attending school and unable to read and write. In ISGl 
 occurred an extension of the compulsory provisions of the Factories 
 Act to lace- works ; power was given to poor-law guardians, &c., to 
 enforce vaccination ; local boards were authorized to fix rates of 
 hire for horses, j)onies, mules, asses, and boats; and certain locally- 
 formed bodies had given to them powers of taxing the locality 
 for rural drainage and irrigation works, and for supplying water to 
 cattle. In 1862, an Act was passed for restricting the employment 
 of women and children in open-air bleaching ; and an Act for 
 making illegal a coal-mine with a single shaft, or with shafts sepa- 
 rated by less than a specified space ; as well as an Act giving tho 
 Council of Medical Education the exclusive right to publish a 
 Pharmacopoeia, the price of which is to be fixed by the Treasury. 
 In 1863 came the extension of compulsory vaccination to Scotland, 
 and also to Ireland; there came the empowering of certain boards 
 to borrow money repayable from the local rates, to employ and pay 
 those out 01 work ; there came the authorizing of town-authorities 
 to take possession of neglected ornamental spaces, and rate the 
 inhabitants for their support; there came the Bakehouses Regula- 
 tion Act, which, besides specifying minimum age of employes 
 occupied between certain hours, prescribed periodical lime- washing, 
 three coats of paint when painted, and cleaning with hot water 
 and soap at least once in six months ; and there came also an Act 
 giving a magistrate authority to decide on the wholesomeness or 
 anwholesomeness of food brought before him by an inspector. Of 
 comjDulsory legislation dating from 1864, may be named an exten- 
 liion of the Factories Act to various additional trades, including 
 regulations for cleansing and ventilation, and specifying of ccvtaiu
 
 10 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 employes in matoli-works, that tliey might not take meals on the 
 premises except in the wood-cutting places. Also there were 
 passed a Chimney-S weepers Act, an Act for further regulating 
 the sale of beer in Ireland, an Act for compulsory testing of cables 
 and anchors, an Act extending the Public Works Act of 1863, 
 and the Contagious Diseases Act : which last gave the police, in 
 specified places, powers which, in respect of certain classes of women, 
 abolished sundry of those safeguards to individual freedom estab- 
 lished in past times. The year I860 witnessed further provision 
 for the reception and temporary relief of wanderers at the cost of 
 ratepayers; another public-house closing Act; and an Act making 
 compulsory regulations for extinguishing fires in London. Then, 
 Tinder the Ministry of Lord John Russell, in 1866, have to be named 
 an act to regulate cattle-sheds, &c., in Scotland, giving local 
 authorities powers to inspect sanitary conditions and fix the numbers 
 of cattle ; an Act forcing hop-growers to label their bags wath the 
 year and place of growth and the true weight, and giving police 
 powers of search; an Act to facilitate the building of lodging- 
 houses in Ireland, and providing for regulation of the inmates ; a 
 Public Health Act, under which there is registration of lodging- 
 houses and limitation of occupants, with inspection and directions 
 for lime-washing, &c. ; and a Public Libraries Act, giving local 
 powers by which a majority can tax a minority for their books. 
 
 Passing now to the legislation under the first Ministry of Mr. 
 Gladstone, we have, in 1869, the establishment of State- telegraphy, 
 with the accompanying interdict on telegraphing through any other 
 apency ; we have the empowering a Secretary of State to regulate 
 hired conveyances in London; we have further and more stringent 
 regulations to prevent cattle-diseases from spreading, another Beer- 
 house Regulation Act, and a Sea-birds Preservation Act (ensuring 
 greater mortality of fish). In 1870 we have a law authorizing the 
 Board of Public Works to make advances for landlords' improve- 
 ments and for purchase by tenants ; we have the Act which enables 
 the Education De[)artment to form school-boards which shall pur- 
 chase sites for schools, and may provide free schools supported by 
 local rates, and enabling scliool-boards to pay a child's fees, to 
 compel parents to send their children, &c. &c. ; we have a further 
 Factories and Workshops Act, making, among other restrictions, 
 Bomc on the employment of women and children in fruit-preserving 
 ail 1 tish-cariiior works. In 1871 we meet with an amended Mcr-
 
 THE NEW TORYISM. 11 
 
 chant Shipping Act, directing officers of the Board of Trade to 
 record the draiight of sea-going vessels leaving port ; there is 
 another Factory and Workshops Act, making further restrictions ; 
 there is a Pedlar's Act, inflicting penalties for hawking without 
 a certificate, and limiting the district within which the certifi- 
 cate holds, as well as giving the police power to search pedlars' 
 packs; and there are further measures for enforcing vaccination . 
 The year 1872 had, among other Acts, one which makes it illegal 
 to take for hire more than one child to nurse, unless in a house 
 registered by the authorities, who prescribe the number of infants 
 to be received ; it had a Licensing Act, interdicting sale of spirits to 
 those apparently under sixteen ; and it had another Merchant Ship, 
 ping Act, establishing an annual survey of passenger steamers. Then 
 in 1873 was passed the Agricultural Children's Act, which makes it 
 penal for a farmer to employ a child who has neither certificate of 
 elementary education nor of certain prescribed school-attendances; 
 and there was passed a Merchant Shipping Act, requiring on each 
 vessel a scale showing draught and giving the Board of Trade power 
 to fix the numbers of boats and life-saving appliances to be carried. 
 Turn now to Liberal law-making under the present Ministry. 
 We have, in 1880, a law which forbids conditional advance-notes 
 in payment of sailors' wages ; also a law which dictates certain 
 arrangements for the safe carriage of grain-cargoes ; also a law 
 increasing local coercion over parents to send their children to 
 school. In 1881 comes legislation to prevent trawling over clam- 
 beds and bait-beds, and an interdict making it impossible to buy 
 a glass of beer on Sunday in Wales. In 1882 the Board of Trade 
 was authorised to grant licences to generate and sell electricity, 
 and municipal bodies were enabled to levy rates for electric-lighting ; 
 further exactions from ratepayers were authorized for facilitating 
 more accessible baths and washhouses ; and local authorities were 
 empowered to make bye-laws for securing the decent lodging 
 of persons engaged in picking fruit and vegetables. Of such 
 legislation during 1883 may be named the Cheap Trains Act, 
 which, partly by taxing the nation to the extent of £400,000 
 a year (in the shape of relinquished passenger duty), and 
 partly at the iOt,i of railway-proprietors, still further cheapens 
 travelling for workmen : the Board of Trade, through the Railway 
 Commissioners, being empowered to ensure sufficiently good and 
 frequent accommodation. Again, there is the Act which, under
 
 12 THE MAN VKUSUS THE STATE. 
 
 penalty of £10 for disobcJicnce, forbids the payment of wa^^cs to 
 -workmen at or witliin pubb'c-housos ; there is another Factory :ind 
 Workshops Act, commanding inspection of white lead works {to 
 see that there are provided overalls, respirators, baths, acidulated 
 drinks, ttc.) and of bake-houses, regulating times of employnicnb 
 in both, and prescribing in detail some constructions for the last, 
 which are to be kept in a condition satisfactory to the inspectors. 
 
 Bat we are far from forming an adequate conception if we look 
 only at the compulsory legislation which has actually been estab- 
 blished of late years. We must look also at that which is advo- 
 <;ated, and which threatens to be far more sweeping in range and 
 stringent in character. We have lately had a Cabinet Minister, ono 
 of the most advanced Liberals, so-called, who pooh-poohs the plana 
 of the late Government for improving industrial dwellings as so 
 much "tinkering;" and contends for effectual coercion to be exer- 
 cissd over owners of small houses, over land-owners, and over rate- 
 payers. Here is another Cabinet Minister who, addressing his 
 constituents, speaks slightingly of the doings of philanthropic 
 societies and religious bodies to help the poor, and says that "the 
 whole of the people of this country ought to look upon this work 
 as being their own work :" that is to say, some extensive Govern- 
 ment measure is called for. Again, we have a Radical member of 
 Parliament who leads a large and powerful bod}^, aiming with 
 annually-increasing promise of success, to enforce sobriety by 
 giving to local majorities powers to prevent freedom of cxchango 
 in respect of certain commodities. Regulation of the hours of 
 labour for certain classes, which has been made more and more 
 general by successive extensions of the Factories Acts, is likely 
 now to be made still more general : a measure is to be proposed 
 bringing the employes in all shops under such regulation. There 
 is a rising demand, too, that education shall be made gratis for 
 all. The payment of school-fees is beginning to be denounced as a 
 wrong : the State must take the whole burden. Moreover, it is 
 proposed by many that the State, regarded as an undoubtedly com- 
 petent judge of -what constitutes good education for the poor, shall 
 undertake also to prescribe good education for the middle classes — 
 shall stamp the children of these, too, after a State pattern, con- 
 cerning the goodness of which they have no more doubt than the 
 Chinese had when they fixed theirs. Then there is the " endow- 
 ment of research," of late energetically urged. Already tho
 
 THE NEW TOIIYISM. 13 
 
 Governmsnt gives every year the sum or £-i,000 for this purpose, 
 to be distributed througli the Royal Society ; and in the absence 
 of those who have strong motives for resisting the pressure of the 
 interested backed by those they easily persuade, it may by-and-by 
 establish that paid " priesthood of science " long ago advocated b^ 
 Sir David Brewster. Once more, plausible proposals are made 
 that there should be organized a system of compulsory insurance, 
 by which men during their early lives shall bo forced to provide 
 for the time when they will be incapacitated. 
 
 iNor does enumeration of these further measures of coercive 
 rule, looming on ns near at hand or in the distance, complete the 
 account. Nothing more than cursory allusion has yet been made 
 to that accompanying compulsion which takes the form of increased 
 taxation, general and local. Partly for defraying the costs of 
 carrying out these ever-multiplying coercive measures, each of 
 which requires an additional staff of officers, and partly to meet 
 the outlny for new public institutions, such as board-schools, free 
 llbi'aries, public museums, baths and washhouses, recreation 
 grounds, &c., &c,, local rates are year after year increased ; as the 
 general taxation is increased by grants for education and to the 
 departments of science and art, &c. Every one of these involves 
 further coercion — restricts still more the freedom j)f the citizen, 
 ^or the implied address accompanying every additional exaction is 
 — "Hitherto you have been free to spen-i this portion of your 
 earnings in any Avay which pleased you ; hereafter you shall not be 
 free so to spend it, bat we will spend it for the general benefit.'* 
 Thus, either directly or indirectl}^, and in most cases both at once, 
 the citizen is at each further stage in the growth of this compulsory 
 legislation, deprived of some liberty which he previously had. 
 
 Such, then, are the doings of the party which claims the name 
 of Liberal ; and which calls itself Liberal as being the advocate of 
 extended freedom. 
 
 I doubt not that many a member of the pnrty has read tbo 
 preceding section with impatience ; wanting, as he does, to point 
 ijut an immense oversight which he thinks destroys the validity of 
 the argument. "You forget," he wishes to say, " the fundamental 
 dilierence between the power which, in the past, established those 
 restraints that Liberalism abolished, and the power which, in the 
 present, csfcciblishcs the restraints yoq. call anti-Liberal. Yo^l
 
 14 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 forget tliat tlie one was an irresponsible power, while the other is 
 a responsible power. You forget that if by the recent legislation 
 of Liberals, people are variously regulated, the body which regu- 
 lates them is of their own creating, and has their warrant for its 
 acts." 
 
 My answer is, that I have not forgotten this difference, but am 
 prepared to contend that the difference is in large measure irrele- 
 vant to the issue. 
 
 In the first place, the real issue is whether the lives of citizens 
 are more interfered with than they were ; not the nature of the 
 agency which interferes with them. Take a simpler case. A 
 member of a trades' union has joined others in establishing 
 an organization of a purely representative character. By it 
 he is compelled to strike if a majority so decide ; he is for- 
 bidden to accept work save under the conditions they dictate ; he 
 is prevented from profiting by his superior ability or energy to the 
 extent he might do were it not for their interdict. He cannot dis- 
 obey without abandoning those pecuniary benefits of the organi- 
 zation for which he has subscribed, and bringing on himself the 
 persecution, and perhaps violence, of his fellows. Is he any the 
 less coerced because the body coercing him is one which he had an 
 equal voice -with the rest in forming ? 
 
 In the second place, if it be objected that the analogy is faulty, 
 since the governing body of a nation, to which, as protector of the 
 national life and interests, all must submit under penalty of social 
 disorganization, has a far higher authority over citizens than the 
 government of any private organization can have over its members ; 
 then the reply is that, granting the difference, the answer made 
 continues valid. If men use their liberty in such a way as to sur- 
 render their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves ? If 
 people by 2, })Jehiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain 
 free because the despotism was of their own making ? Are the 
 coercive edicts issued by him to be regarded as legitimate because 
 they are the ultimate outcome of their own votes ? As well might 
 it be argued that the East Afncan, Avho breaks a spear in another's 
 presence that he may so become bondsman to him, still retains his 
 liberty because he freely chose his master. 
 
 Finally if any, not without marks of irritation as I can imagine, 
 repudiae this reasoning, and say that there is no true parallelism 
 between the relation of people to government where an irresponsible
 
 THE NEW TORYISM. 15 
 
 single ruler Las been permanently eleoted, and the relation where a 
 responsible representative body is maintained, and from time to 
 time re-elected; then there comes the ultimate reply — an altogether 
 heterodox reply — by which most will be greatly astonished. This 
 reply is, that thes*^ multitudinous restraining acts are not defensible 
 on the ground that they proceed from a popularly-chosen body; for 
 that the authority of a popularly-chosen body is no more to be 
 regarded as an unlimited authority than the authority of a monarch ; 
 and that as true Liberalism in the past disputed the assumption of 
 a monarch's unlimited authority, so true Liberalism in the present 
 will dispute the assumption of unlimited parliamentary authority. 
 Of this, however, more anon. Here I merely indicate it as an 
 ultimate answer. 
 
 Meanwhile it suffices to point out that until recently, just as of 
 old, true Liberalism was shown by its acts to be moving towards 
 the theory of a limited parliamentary authority. All these aboli- 
 tions of restraints over religious beliefs and observances, over 
 exchange and transit, over trade-combinations and the travelling of 
 artisans, over the publication of opinions, theological or political, 
 &c., &c., were tacit assertions of the desirableness of limitation. 
 Tn the same way that the abandonment of sumptuary laws, of 
 laws forbidding this or that kind of amusement, of Jaws dictating 
 modes of farming, and many others of like meddling nature, which 
 took place in early days, w^as an implied admission that the State 
 ought not to interfere in such matters; so those removals of 
 hindrances to individual activities of one or other kind, which the 
 Liberalism of the last generation effected, were practical confes- 
 gions that in these directions, too, the sphere of governmental 
 action should be narrowed. And this recognition of the propriety 
 of restricting governmental action was a preparation for restricting 
 it in theory. One of the most familiar political truths is that, in 
 the course of social evolution, usage precedes law ; and that when 
 usage has been well established it becomes law by receiving autho- 
 litative endorsement and defined form. Manifestly then, Liberalism 
 in the past, by its practice of limitation, was preparing the way for 
 the principle of limitation. 
 
 But returning from these more general considerations to the 
 special question, I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a 
 citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the govern- 
 mental machincx-y he lives under, whether representative or other.
 
 18 THE l^IAN VEIiSCS THE STATE. 
 
 bufc by tbo relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on liim ; 
 and that, whether this machinery is or is not one that he has 
 shared in making, its actions are not of the kind proper to 
 Liberalism if they increase such restraints beyond those wbich are 
 needful for preventing him from directly or indirectly aggressing 
 on his fellows — needful, that is, for maintaining the liberties of his 
 fbllows against his invasions of them : restraints which are, there- 
 fore, to be distinguished as negatively coercive, not positively 
 coercive. 
 
 Probably, however, the Liberal, and still more the snb-spccief=; 
 Kadical, who more than any other in these latter days seems under 
 the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is 
 warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able, vrill 
 continue to i^rotost. Knowing that his aim is popular benefit of 
 some kind, to be achieved in some way, and believing that the Tory 
 is, contrariwise, prompted by chiss-interest and the desire to main- 
 tain class-power, he Avill regard it as palpably absurd to gronp him 
 as one of the same genno, and will scorn the reasoning used to 
 prove that he belongs to it. 
 
 Perhaps an analogy will help him to see its validity. If, away 
 in the far East, where personal government is the only foi-m of 
 government known, he heard from the inhabitants an account of c^ 
 struggle by which they had deposed a cruel and vicious despot, and 
 put in his place one whose acts proved his desire for their welfare — 
 ii, after listening to their self-gratulatious, he told them that they 
 had not essentially changed the nature of their government, he 
 would greatly astonish them ; and probably he would have diffi- 
 culty in making them understand that the substitution of a bene- 
 volent despot for a malevolent despot, still left the government a 
 despotism. Similarly with Toryism as rightly conceived. Standing 
 as it does for coercion by the State versus the freedom of the indi< 
 vidual. Toryism remains Toryism, whether it extends this coercion 
 for selfish or unselfish reasons. As certainly as the despot is still 
 a despot, whether his motives for arbitrary rale are good or bad j 
 so certainly is the Tory still a Tory, whether he has egoistic or al- 
 truistic motives for using State-power to restrict the liberty of tho 
 cidzen, beyond the degree required for maintaining the liberties of 
 other citizens. The altruistic Tory as well as the egoistic Tory 
 boiongs to the gcnas Tory; though he forms a new species of the
 
 THE NEW TOUYTSM. 17 
 
 |)^e-mis. And both staucl in distinct contrast with the Liberal as 
 defined in the days wlicn Liberals were rightly so called, and when 
 the definition wns — " one who adv^ocates greater freedom from 
 restraint, especially in political institutions." 
 
 Thus, then, is justified the paradox I set out with. As we have 
 seen, Toryism and Liberalism originally emerged, the one frora 
 militancy and the other from industrialism. The one stood for the 
 regime of status and the other for the regime of contract — the one 
 for that system of compulsory co-operation which accompanies the 
 legal inequality of classes, and the other for that voluntary co- 
 operation which accompanies their legal equality ; and beyond all 
 question the early acts of the two parties were respectively for the 
 maintenance of agencies which effect this compulsory co-operation, 
 and for the weakening or curbing of them. Manifestly the 
 implication is that, in so far as it has been extending the system 
 -of compulsion, what is now called Liberalism is a new form of 
 Toryism. 
 
 How truly this is so, we shall see still more clearly on looking 
 at the facts the other side upward :i, which we will presently do. 
 
 Note. — By sundry newspapers which noticed this article when 
 it was originally published, the meaning of the above paragraphs 
 was supposed to be that Liberals and Tories have changed i)laces. 
 This, however, is by no means the implication. A new species of 
 Tory may arise without disappearance of the original species. 
 When saying, as on page 8, that in our days " Conservatives and 
 Liberals vie with one another in multiplying " interferences, I 
 clearly implied the belief that while Liberals have taken to coercive 
 legislation. Conservatives have not abandoned it. Nevertheless, it 
 is true that the laws made by Liberals are so greatly increasing 
 the compulsions and restraints exercised over citizens, that among 
 Conservatives who suffer from this aggressiveness there is growing 
 lip a tendency to resist it. Proof is furnished by the fact that 
 the " Liberty and Property Defence Leagae," largely consisting 
 of Conservatives, has taken for its motto " Individualism versus 
 Socialism." So that if the present drift of things continues, it 
 may by and by really happen that the Tories will be defenders 
 of liberties which the Liberals, in pursuit of what they think 
 popular welfare, trample under foot, 
 

 
 THE COMING SLAVERY. 
 
 'I'iiE kinship of pity to love is shown among other ways in this, 
 that it idealizes its object. Sympathy with one in suffering 
 suppresses, for the time beino-, remembrance of his transgressions. 
 The feeling which vents itself in " poor follow ! " on seeing one in 
 agony, excludes the thought of " bad fellow," which might at 
 another time arise. Naturally, then, if the wretched are unknown 
 or but vaguely known, all the demerits they may have are 
 ignored ; and thus it happens that when, as just now, the miseries 
 of the poor are depicted, they are thought of as the miseries of the 
 deserving poor, instead of being thought of, as in large measure 
 they should be, as the miseries of the undeserving poor. Those 
 whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclaimed in 
 sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are assumed 
 to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged ; and none of them are 
 thought of as bearing the penalties of their own misdeeds. 
 
 On hailing a cab in a London street, it is surprising how 
 frequently the door is officiously opened by one who expects to get 
 something for his trouble. The surprise lessens after counting 
 the many loungers about tavern-doors, or after observing the 
 quickness with which a street-performance, or procession, draws 
 from neighbouring slums and stable-yards a group of idlers. 
 Seeing how numerous they are in every small area, it becomes 
 manifest that tens of thousands of such swarm through Ijoudon. 
 " They have no work," you say. Say rather that they either 
 refuse work or quickly turn themselves out of it. They are 
 simply good-for-nothings, who in one way or other live on the 
 good-for-somethiags — vagrants aad sots, criminals and those on 
 the way to crime, youths who are burdens on hard-wox'kcd parents,
 
 THE COMING SLAVERY. 19 
 
 men -who appropriate the wages of their wives, fellows who share 
 the gains of prostitutes ; and then, less visible and less numerous, 
 there is a corresponding class of women. 
 
 Is it natural that happiness shoald be the lot of such ? or is it 
 natural that they should bring unhappiness on themselves and 
 those connected with them ? Is it not manifest that there must 
 exist in our midst an immense amount of misery which is a normal 
 result of misconduct, and ought not to be dissociated from it ? 
 There is a notion, always more or less prevalent and just now 
 vociferously expressed, that all social suffering is removable, and 
 that it is the duty of somebody or other to remove it. Both these 
 beliefs are false. To separate pain from ill-doing is to fight against 
 the constitution of things, and will be followed by far more pain. 
 Saving men from the natural penalties of dissolute living, even- 
 tually necessitates the infliction of artificial penalties in solitary 
 cells, on tread-whieols, and by the lash. I suppose a dictum, on 
 which the current creed and the creed of science are at one, may 
 be considered to have as high an authority as can be found. Well, 
 the command " if any would not work neither should he eat," is • 
 simply a Christian enunciation of that universal law of Nature 
 under which life has reached its present height — the law that a 
 creature not energetic enough to maintain itself must tiie : the sole 
 difference being that the law which in the one case is to be arti- 
 ficially enforced, is, in the other case, a natural necessity. And yet 
 this particular tenet of their religion which science so manifestly 
 justifies, is the one which Christians seem least inclined to accept. 
 The current assumption is that there should be no suffering, and 
 that society is to blame for that which exists. 
 
 " But surely we are not without responsibilities, even when the 
 suffering is that of the unworthy ? " 
 
 If the meaning of the word " we " be so expanded as to 
 include with ourselves our ancestors, and especially our ancestral 
 legislators, I agree. I admit that those who made, and modified, 
 and administered, the old Poor Law, were responsible for pro- 
 ducing an appalling amount of demoralization, which it will take 
 more than one generation to remove. I admit, too, the partial 
 responsibility of recent and present law-makers for regulations 
 which have brought into being a permanent body of tramps, 
 who ramble from union to union ; and also their responsibility for 
 maintaining a constant supply of felons by sending back convicts 
 
 c 2
 
 20 THE MAN VEnSUS THE STATE. 
 
 into society under such, conditions tliat they are almost compelled 
 ng-ain to commit crimes. Moreover, I admit that the philanthropic 
 are not without their share of responsibility ; since, that they may 
 aid the offspring of the unworthy, they disadvantage the offsprins: 
 of the worthy through burdening their parents by increased local 
 rates, Nay, I even admit that these swarms of good-for-nothings, 
 fostered and multiplied by public and private agencies, have, by 
 sundry mischievous meddlings, been made to suffer more than 
 they would otherwise have suffered. Are these the responsibilities 
 jtneant ? I suspect not. 
 
 But now, leaving the question of responsibilities, however con- 
 ceived, and considering only the evil itself, what shall we say of its 
 .treatment ? Let me begin with a fact. 
 
 A late uncle of mine, the Rev. Thomas Spencer, for some 
 "^twenty years incumbent of Hinton Charterhouse, near Bath, no 
 fiooner entered on his parish duties than he proved himself anxious 
 for the welfare of the poor, by establishing a school, a library, a 
 clothing club, and land-allotments, besides building some model 
 cottages. Moreover, up to 1833 he w^as a pauper's friend — always 
 for the pauper against the overseer. There presently came, however, 
 the debates on the Poor Law, which impressed him with the evils 
 •of the system then in force. Though an ardent philanthropist he 
 was not a timid sentimentalist. The result was that, immediately 
 the new Poor Law was passed, he proceeded to carry out its 
 provisions in his parish. Almost universal opposition was 
 encountered by him : not the poor only being his opponents, but 
 even the farmers on whom came the burden of heavy poor-rates. 
 For, strange to say, their interests had become apparently identified 
 Avith the maintenance of this system which taxed them so largely. 
 The explanation is that there had grown up the practice of paying 
 out of the rates a part of the wages of each farm-servant — " make- 
 wages," as the sum was called. And though the farmers contri- 
 buted most of the fund from which *' make-wages " were paid, 
 yet, since all other ratepayers contributed, the farmers seemed 
 to gain by the arrangement. My uncle, however, not easily 
 deterred, faced all this opposition and enforced the law. Tho 
 result was that in two years the rates were reduced from £700 a 
 year to £200 a year; while the condition of the parish was greatly 
 tmprovod. " Those who had hitherto loitered at the corners of
 
 THE COMI^'G SLAVERY. 21 
 
 tlie streets, or at the doors of the beer-shops, had something else 
 to do, and one after another they obtained employment ; " so that 
 out of a population of 800, only 15 had to bo sent as incapable 
 paupers to the Bath Union (when that was formed), in place of 
 the 100 who received out-door relief a short time before. If it be 
 said that the £20 telescope which, a few years after, his parishioners 
 presented to my uncle, marked only the gratitude of the rate- 
 payers ; then my reply is the fact that when, some years later still, 
 having killed himself by overwork in pursuit of popular welfare, 
 he was taken to Hinton to be buried, the procession which followed 
 him to the grave included not the well-to-do only but the poor. 
 
 Several motives have prompted this brief narrative. One is the 
 wish to prove that sympathy with the people and self-sacrificing 
 cliorts on their behalf, do not necessarily imply approval of 
 gratuitous aids. Another is the desire to show that benelit may 
 result, not from multiplication of artificial appliances to mitigate 
 distress, but, contrariwise, from diminution of them. And a 
 further purpose I have in view is that of preparing the way for an 
 analogy. 
 
 Under another form and in a different sphere, wo are now 
 yearly extending a system which is identical in nature with the 
 system of " make-wages " under the old Poor Law. Little as 
 politicians recognize the fact, it is nevertheless demonstrable that 
 ihese various public appliances for working-class comfort, which 
 they are supplying at the cost of ratepayers, are intrinsically of the 
 Eiime nature as those which, in past times, treated the fariuer's man 
 as half-labourer and half-pauper. In either case the worker 
 receives in return for what he does, money wherewith to buy 
 certain of the things he wants ; while, to procure the rest of tliem 
 fcip him, money is furnished out of a common fund raised b}' taxes, 
 ^^hat matters it whether the things supplied by ratepayers for 
 nL'thing, instead of by the employer in payment, are of this kind 
 or that kind ? the principle is the same. For sums received let us 
 substitute the commodities and benefits purchased; and then see 
 huw the matter stands. In old Poor- Law times, the farmer gav^ 
 for work done the equivalent, say of house-rent, bread, clothes, and 
 fire; while the ratepayers practically supplied the man and his 
 family with their shoes, tea, sugar, candles, a little bacon, &c. The 
 division is, of course, arbitrary ; but unquestionably the farmer anrl 
 the ratepayers t'uruishcd these things between tliem At tho
 
 »9 
 
 THE MAN vr:RSUS THE STATE. 
 
 present time the artisan receives from his employer in wages, the 
 equivalent of the consumable commodities he wants ; while from 
 the public comes satisfaction for others of his needs and desires. 
 At the cost of ratepayers he has in some cases, and will presently 
 \.i\ve in more, a house at less than its commercial value; for of 
 CDurse when, as in Liverpool, a municipality spends nearly 
 £:iOO,000 in pulling down and reconstructing low-class dwellings, 
 nnd is about to spend as much again, the implication is that in 
 Bome way the ratepayers supply the poor with more accommo- 
 dation than the rents they pay would otherwise have brought. 
 The artisan further receives from them, in schooling for hi.s 
 children, much more than he pays for; and there is every pro- 
 br«bility that he will presently receive it from them gratis. The 
 ratepayers also satisfy what desire he may have for books and 
 newspapers, and comfortable places to read them in. In some 
 cases too, as in Manchester, gymnasia for his children of both 
 sexes, as well as recreation grounds, are provided. . That is to say, 
 he obtains from a fund raised by local taxes, certain benefits beyond 
 those which the sum received for his labour enables him to 
 purchase. The sole difference, then, between this system and the 
 old system of '' make- wages," is between the kinds of satisfactions 
 obtained; and this difference does not in the least affect the 
 nature of the arrangement. 
 
 Moreover, the two are pervaded by substantially the same 
 illusion. In the one case, as in the other, what looks like a gratis 
 benefit is not a gratis benefit. The amount which, under the old Poor 
 Law, the half- pauperized labourer received from the parish to eke 
 out his weekly income, was not really, as it appeared, a bonus ; for 
 it was accompanied by a substantially-equivalent decrease of his 
 wages, as was quickly proved when the system was abolished and 
 the wages rose. Just so is it with these seeming boons received 
 by working people in towns. I do not refer only to the fact that 
 they unawares pay in part through the raised rents of their dwell- 
 ings (when they are not actual ratepayers) ; but I refer to the fact 
 that the wages received by them are, like the wages of the farm- 
 labourer, diminished by these public burdens falling on employers. 
 Read the accounts coming of late from Lancashire concerning the 
 cotton-strike, containing proofs, given by artisans themselves, that 
 the margin of profit is so narrow that the less skilful manufacturers, 
 as well as those with deficient capital, fail, and that the companies
 
 THE COMING SLAVERY. 23 
 
 of co-operators who compete with them can rarely hold their own ; 
 and then consider what is the implication respecting wages. Among 
 the costs of production have to be reckoned taxes, general and 
 local. If, as in our large towns, the local rates now amount to 
 one-third of the rental or more — if the employer has to pay this, 
 not on his private dwelling only, but on his business-premises, 
 factories, Avarehouses, or the like ; it results that the interest on 
 his capital must be diminished by that amount, or the amount must 
 be taken from the wages-fund, or partly one and partly the other. 
 And if competition among capitalists in the same business and in 
 other businesses, has the effect of so keeping down interest that 
 while some gain others lose, and not a few are ruined — if capital, 
 not getting adequate interest, flows elsewhere and leaves labour 
 unemployed; then it is manifest that the choice for the artisan 
 under such conditions, lies between diminished amount of work or 
 diminished rate of payment for it. Moreover, for kindred reasons 
 these local burdens raise the costs of the things he consumes. Tha 
 charges made by distributors are, on the average, determined 
 by the current rates of interest on capital used in distributing 
 businesses ; and the extra costs of carrying on such businesses have 
 to be paid for by extra prices. So that as in the past the rarat 
 worker lost in one way what he gained in another, so.in the present 
 does the urban worker: there being, too, in both cases, the loss 
 entailed on him by the cost of administration and the waste ac- 
 companying it. 
 
 *' But what has all this to do with ' the coming slavery ' ? " will 
 perhaps be asked. Nothing directly, but a good deal indirectly, as 
 we shall see after yet another preliminary section. 
 
 It is said that when railways weretirst opened in Spain, peasants 
 standing on the tracks were not unfrequently run over; and that 
 the blame fell on tlie engine-drivers for not stopping: roral ex- 
 periences having yielded no conception of the momentum of a large 
 mass moving at a high velocity. 
 
 The incident is recalled to me on contemplating the ideas of the 
 so-called " practical " politician, into whose mind there enters nc 
 thought of such a thing as political momentum, still less of a political 
 momentum which, instead of diminishing or remaining constant, 
 increases. The theory on which he daily proceeds is that the 
 change caased by his measure will stop where he intends it to
 
 24 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 stop. IIo contemplates intently the things his act will achieve, bui 
 thinks little of the remoter issues of the movement his act sets np^ 
 and still less its collateral issues. When, in war-time, " food for 
 powder " was to bo provided by encouraging population — when Mr. 
 Pitt said, " Let us make relief in cases where there are a number of 
 children a matter of right and honour, instead of a ground for 
 opprobrium and contempt ; "* it was not expected that the poor-rates 
 would be quadrupled in fifty years, that women with many bastard* 
 would be preferred as wives to modest women, because of their 
 incomes from the parish, and that hosts of ratepayers would b(? 
 pulled down into the ranks of pauperism. Legislators who in 183;3- 
 voted £20,000 a year to aid in building school-houses, never sup- 
 posed that the step they then took would lead to forced contribu- 
 tions, local and general, now amounting to £6,000,000 ; they did 
 not intend to establish the principle that A should be made re- 
 sponsible for educating B's offspring; they did not dream of a 
 compulsion which would deprive poor widows of the help of their 
 elder children ; and still less did they dream that their successors^ 
 by requiring impoverished parents to apply to Boards of Gaardians 
 to pay the fees which School Boards would not remit, would initiate 
 a habit of applying to Boards of Guardians and so cause paupcriza- 
 tion.f Neither did those who in 1834 passed an Act regulating the- 
 labour of Avomen and children in certain factories, imagine that the 
 By stem they were beginning would end in the restriction and in- 
 .»pection of labour in all kinds of producing establishments where- 
 more than fifty people are employed ; nor did they conceive that 
 the inspection provided would grow to the extent of requiring that 
 before a "young person" is employed in a factory, authority must 
 bo given by a certifying sni'geon, who, by personal examination (to- 
 v.hich no limit is placed) has satisfied himself that there is no in- 
 c.ipacitating disease or bodily infirmity : his verdict determining 
 whether the " young person " shall earn wages or not. J Even less, 
 as I say, does the jDolitician who jDlumes himself on the practical- 
 ness of his aims, conceive the indirect results which Avill follow 
 the direct results of his measures. Thus, to take a case connected 
 with one named above, it was not intended tlirough the system of 
 " payment by results," to do anything more than give teachers an 
 
 * llimsai'd's Pavllamentarif ILlaiorii, 32, p. 710. 
 
 t Fortnifjhilif lieview, Januar}', 188 1, p. 17. 
 
 t Fc.cLohes and Workshops Act, 41 and 42 Vio. e-up. 13.
 
 THE COMING SLAVERY. 25 
 
 cfB.cient siimulas: it- was not supposed that m numerous cases 
 t'leir health would give way under the stimulus ; it was nob 
 expected that they would bo led to adopt a cramming system and 
 to put undue pressure on dull and weak children, often to their 
 great injury; it was not foreseen that in many cases a bodily en- 
 feeblement would be caused which no amount of grammar and 
 geography can compensate for. The licensing of i^ublic-houses 
 was simply for maintaining public order: those who devised it 
 never imagined that there would result an organized interest 
 powerfully influencing elections in an unwholesome way. Nor 
 did it occur to the "practical" politicians who provided a com- 
 pulsory load-line for merchant vessels, that the pressure of ship- 
 owners' interests would habitually cause the putting of tlio 
 load-line at the very highest limit, and thai from precedent to 
 precedent, tending ever in the same direction, the load-lino V70uld 
 graduallv rise in the better class of shipn ; as from good authority 
 I learn that it has already done. Legislators who, some forty 
 years ago, by Act of Parliament compelled railw^ay-companies to 
 supply cheap locomotion, would have ridiculed the belief, had it 
 been expressed, that eventually their Act Avould punish the com- 
 panies which improved the supply ; and yet this wns the result to 
 companies which began to carry third-class passofigers by fast 
 trains; since a penalty to the amount of the passenger-duty v/as 
 inflicted on them for every third-class passenger so carried. To 
 Avhich instance concerning railways, add a far more striding one 
 disclosed by comparing the railway policies of England and J'rance. 
 The law-makers Avho provided for the ultimate lapsing of French 
 railways to the State, never conceived the possibility that inferior 
 travelling facilities would result — did not foresee that reluctance 
 to depreciate the value of property eventually coming to the State, 
 would negative the authorization of competing lines, and that in 
 th3 absence of competing lines locomotion would be relatively 
 costly, slovv^, and infrequent ; for, as Sir Thomas Farrer has lately 
 shown, the traveller in England has great advantages over the 
 French traveller in the economy, swiftness, and frequency with 
 which his journeys can be made. 
 
 But the "practical " politician who, in spite of such experiences 
 repeated generation after generation, goes on thinking only of 
 proximate results, naturally never thinks of results still moro 
 remote, still more general, and still mere important than those just
 
 26 THE MAN VEHSUS THE STATE. 
 
 exemplified. To repeat the metaplior used above — he never asks 
 Avhether the political momentum set up by his measure, in some 
 cases decreasing but in other cases greatly increasing, will or will 
 not have the same general direction with other like momenta; and 
 whether it may not join them in presently producing an aggregate 
 energy working changes never thought of. Dwelling only on the 
 effects of his particular stream of legislation, and not observing 
 how other such streams already existing, and still other streams 
 which will follow his initiative, pursue the same average course, 
 it never occurs to him that they may presently unite into a volu- 
 minous flood utterly changing the face of things. Or to leave 
 figures for a more literal statement, he is unconscious of the trutli 
 that he is helping to form a certain type of social organization, 
 and that kindred measures, effecting kindred changes of organiza- 
 tion, tend with ever-increasing force to make that type general ; 
 until, passing a certain point, the proclivity towards it becomes 
 irresistible. Just as each society aims when possible to produce in 
 other societies a structure akin to its own — just as among the 
 G reeks, the Spartans and the Athenians struggled to spread their 
 respective political institutions, or as, at the time of the French 
 Revolution, the European absolute monarchies aimed to re-establish 
 absolute monarchy in France while the Republic encouraged the 
 formation of other republics ; so within every society, each species 
 oJ: structure tends to propagate itself. Just as the system of 
 voluntary co-operation by companies, associations, unions, to 
 achieve business ends and other ends, spreads throughout a com- 
 munity ; so does the antagonistic system of compulsory co-opera- 
 tion under State-agencies spread; and the larger becomes its 
 extension the more power of spreading it gets. The question of 
 questions for the politician should ever be — " What type of social 
 structure am I tending to produce ? " Bat this is a question he 
 never entertains. 
 
 Here we will entertain it for him. Let us now observe the 
 general course of recent changes, with the accompanying current 
 of ideas, and see whither they are carrying us. 
 
 The blank form of a question daily asked is — " We have already 
 done this ; why should we not do that ? " And the regard for pre- 
 cedent suggested by it, is ever pushing on regulative legislation. 
 Having had brought within thuir sphere of operation more and
 
 THE COMING SLAVEUY. 27 
 
 more nnmerons businesses, the Acts restricting hours of employ- 
 ment and dictating the treatment of workers are now to be made 
 applicable to shops. From inspecting lodging-houses to limit the 
 numbers of occupants and enforce sanitary conditions, we have 
 passed to inspecting all houses below a certain rent in which there 
 are members of more than one family, and are now passing to a 
 kindred inspection of all small houses.* The buying and working 
 of telegraphs by the State is made a reason for urging that the 
 State should buy and work the railwaj'S. Supplying children with 
 food for their minds by public agency is being followed in some 
 cases by supplying food for their bodies; and after the practice 
 has been made gradually more general, we may anticipate that the 
 supply, now proposed to be made gratis in the one case, will 
 eventually be proposed to be made gratis in the other : the argu- 
 ment that good bodies as well as good minds are needful to make 
 good citizens, being logically urged as a reason for the extension.f 
 And then, avowedly proceeding on the precedents furnished by the 
 church, the school, and the reading-room, all publicly provided, it 
 is contended that "pleasure, in the sense it is now generally 
 admitted, needs legislating for and organizing at least as much 
 as work." J 
 
 Not precedent only prompts this spread, but also the necessity 
 •which arises for supplementing ineffective measures, and for 
 dealing with the artificial evils continually caused. Failure does 
 not destroy faith in the agencies employed, but merely suggests 
 more stringent use of such agencies or wider ramifications of them. 
 Laws to check intemperance, beginning in early times and coming 
 down to our own times, when further restraints on the sale of 
 intoxicating liquors occupy nights every session, not having done 
 what was expected, there come demands for more thorough-going 
 laws, locally preventing the sale altogether; and here, as in 
 America, these will doubtless be followed by demands that pre- 
 vention shall be made universal. All the many appliances for 
 
 * See letter of Local G-overnment Board, Times, January 2, 1884. 
 
 t Verification comes more promptly than I expected. This article has been 
 etandii'g in type since January 30, and in the interval, namely on March 13 
 [the article was pviblished on April 1], the London School Board resolved to 
 apply for authority to use local charitable funds for supplying gritis meals 
 and clothing to indigent children. Presently the definition of " indigent " will 
 be widened ; more children will be included, and more funds asked for. 
 
 X FortnigMlij Hecieiv, January, 1881, p. 21.
 
 28 THE ^lAX VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 *'stamplnnf out" cpidomic diseases not having succeeded in 
 preventing outbreaks of small-pox, fevers, and the like, a further 
 remedy is applied for in the shape of police-power to search house?? 
 tor diseased person^j, and authority for medical officers to examine 
 any one thoy think fit, to sec -whether he or she is suffering from 
 an infectious or contagious malady. Habits of improvidence 
 having for generations been cultivated by the Poor-Law, and the 
 improvident enabled to multiply, the evils produced by compulsory 
 charity are now proposed to be met by compulsory insurance. 
 
 The extension of this policy, causing extension of corresponding 
 ideas, fosters everywhere the tacit assumption that Government 
 should step in whenever anything is not going right. " Surely you. 
 would not have this misery continue ! " exclaims some one, if you 
 hint a demurrer to much that is now being said and done. 
 Observe what is implied by this exclamation. It takes for granted, 
 first, that all suffering ought to be prevented, which is not true : 
 much suffering is curative, and prevention of it is prevention of a 
 remedy. In the second place, it takes for granted that every evil 
 can be removed : the truth bein;^ that with the existing defects of 
 human nature, many evils can only be thrust out of one place or 
 form into another plnce or form — often being increased by tho 
 change. The exclamation also implies the unhesitating belief, 
 here especially concerning us, that evils of all kinds should be dealt 
 with by the State, There does not occur the inquiry whether 
 there are at work other agencies capable of dealing with evils, and 
 whether tho evils in question may not be among those which are 
 best dealt with by these other agencies. And obviously, the more 
 numerous governmental interventions become, the more confirmed 
 does this habit of thought grow, and the more loud and perpetual 
 the demands for intervention. 
 
 Every extension of the regulative policy involves an addition io 
 the regulative agents — a further growth of officialism and an 
 increasing power of the organization formed of ollicials, Take a 
 pair of scales with many shot in the one and a few in the other. 
 Life shot after shot out of the loaded scale and put it into the 
 unloaded scale. Presently you will produce a balance ; and if you 
 go on, the position of the scales will be reversed. Suppose the 
 beam to be unequally divided, and let the lightly loaded scale be at 
 the end of a ve;y long arm; then the transferor each shot, pro- 
 ducing a much greater c!icct, will far sooner bring aboat a change
 
 THE COMIXG SLAVERY. 29 
 
 of position. I use tlio figure to illustrate what results from trat^s- 
 ferring one individual after another from the regulated mass of the 
 community to the regulating structures. The transfer weakens 
 the one and strengthens the other in a far greater degree than is 
 implied by the relative change of numbers. A comparatively 
 small body of officials, coherent, having common interests, and 
 acting under central authority, has an immense advantage over an 
 incoherent public which has no settled policy, and can be brought 
 to act unitedly only under strong provocation. Hence an organiza- 
 tion of officials, once passing a certain stage of growth, becomes 
 Jess and less resistible ; as we see in the bureaucracies of the 
 Continent. 
 
 Not only does the power of resistance of the regulated part 
 /ecrease in a geometrical ratio as the regulating part increases, but 
 the private interests of many in the regulated part itself, make the 
 change of ratio still more rapid. In every circle conversations show 
 that now, when the passing of competitive examinations renders 
 them eligible for the public service, youths are being educated in 
 such ways that they may pass them and get employment under 
 Government. One consequence is that men who might otherwise 
 reprobate some further growth of officialism, are led to look on it 
 with tolerance, if not favourably, as offering possible careers for 
 those dependent on them and those related to them. Any one 
 who remembers the numbers of upper-class and middle-class 
 families anxious to place their children, will see that no small 
 encouragement to the spread of Icgishitive control is now coming 
 from those who, but for the personal interests thus arising, would 
 be hostile to it. 
 
 This pressing desire for careers is enforced by the preference for 
 careers which are thought respectable. " Even if his salary is 
 small, his occupation will be that of a gentleman," thinks the 
 father, who wants to get a Government-clerkship for his son. And 
 this relative dignity of State-servants as compared with those 
 occujDied in business, increases as the administrative organization 
 becomes a larger and more powerful element in society, and tends 
 more and more to fix the standard of honour. The prevalent 
 Jimbition with a young Frenchman is to get some small official post 
 in his locality, to rise thence to a place in the local centre of 
 government, and finally to reach some head office in Paris. And 
 in Russia, ^\here that universality of Statc-iegulatiun which charao-
 
 30 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 « 
 t3i':ze.«> the militant type of society has been carried furthest, we 
 
 see this ambition pushed to its extreme. Says Mr. Wallace, 
 quoting a passage from a play : — " All men, even shopkeepers and 
 cobblers, aim at becoming officers, and the man who has passcnl his 
 whole life without official rank seems to be not a human being."* 
 
 These various influences working from above downwards meet 
 with an increasing response of expectations and solicitations pro- 
 ceeding from below upwards. The hard- worked and over-burdened 
 who form the great majority, and still more the incapables per- 
 petually helped who are ever led to look for more help, are ready 
 supporters of schemes which promise them this or the other benefit 
 by Stats agency, and ready believers of those who tell them that 
 such benefits can be given, and ought to be given. They listen 
 with eager faith to all builders of political air-castles, from Oxford 
 graduates down to Irish irreconcilables ; and every additional 
 tax-snpported appliance for their welfare raises hopes of further 
 ones. Indeed the more numerous public instrumentalities be- 
 come, the more is there generated in citizens the notion that 
 everything is to be done for them, and nothing by them. Each 
 generation is made less familiar with the attainment of desired 
 ends by individual actions or private combinations, and more 
 familiar with the attainment of them by governmental agencies ; 
 until, eventually, governmental agencies come to be thought of 
 as the only available agencies. This result was well shown in the 
 recent Trades-Unions Congress at Paris. The English delegates, 
 reporting to their constituents, said that between themselves and 
 their foreign colleagues "the point of difference was the extent to 
 which the State should be asked to protect laboar : " reference 
 being thus made to the fact, conspicuous in the reports of the 
 proceedings, that the French delegates always invoked govern- 
 mental power as the only means of satisfying their wishes. 
 
 The diffusion of education has worked, and will work still more, 
 in the same direction. *" We must educate our masters," is the 
 well-known saying of a Liberal who opposed the last extension of 
 the franchise. Yes, if the education were worthy to be so called, 
 and were relevant to the political enlightenment needed, much 
 might be hoped from it. But knowing rules of syntax, being able 
 to add up correctly, having geographical information, and a, 
 memory stocked with the dates of kings' accessions and generals* 
 * Eitnala, i. 422.
 
 THE COMING SLAVERY. 31 
 
 victories, no more implies fitness to form political conclusions than 
 acquirement of skill in drawing implies expertness in telegraphing, 
 or than ability to play cricket implies proficiency on the violin. 
 *' Surely," rejoins some one, " facility in reading opens the way to 
 political knowledge." Doubtless ; but will the way be followed ? 
 Table-talk proves that nine out of ten people read what amuses 
 them or interests them rather than what instructs them ; and 
 that the last thing they read is something which tells them disa- 
 greeable truths or dispels groundless hopes. That popular edu- 
 cation results in an extensive reading of publications which foster 
 pleasant illusions rather than of those which insist on hard reali- 
 ties, is beyond question. Says " A Mechanic," writing in the Pall 
 Mall Gazette of December 3, 1883 :— 
 
 " Improved education instils the desire for culture — culture instils the 
 desire for many things as yet quite beyond working men's reach .... in 
 the furious competition to which the present age is given up they are 
 utterly impossible to the poorer classes ; hence they are discontented with 
 things as they are, and the more educated the more discontented. Hence, 
 too, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Morris are regarded as true prophets by many 
 of us." 
 
 And that the connexion of canse and effect here alleged is a real 
 one, we may see clearly enough in the present state of Germany. 
 
 Being possessed of electoral power, as are now the mass of those 
 who are thus led to nurture sanguine anticipations of benefits to be 
 obtained by social reorganization, it results that whoever seeks 
 their votes must at least refrain from exposing their mistaken 
 beliefs ; even if he does not yield to the temptation to express 
 agreement with them. Every candidate for Parliament is prompted 
 to propose or support some new piece of ad capiandum legislation 
 Nay, even the chiefs of parties — these anxious to retain oflBce and 
 those to wrest it from them — severally aim to get adherents by 
 outbidding one another. Each seeks popularity by promising 
 more than his opponent has promised, as we have lately seen. And 
 then, as divisions in Parliament show us, the traditional loyalty 
 to leaders overrides questions concerning the intrinsic propriety of 
 IDroposed measures. Representatives are unconscientious enough 
 to vote for Bills which they believe to be wrong in principle, be 
 cause party-needs and regard for the next election demand it. And 
 thus a vicious policy is strengthened even by those who see it& 
 viciousness.
 
 S2 THE MAN VEnSUS THE STATE. 
 
 !Meanwliilc there goes on out-of-doors an active pro;)agacda to 
 Avliich all these influences arc ancillary. Communistic theories, 
 partially indorsed by one Act of Parliament after another, and 
 tacitly if not avowedlj' favoured by numerous public men seckinc^ 
 teupporters, are being advocated more and more vociferously under 
 one or other form by popular leaders, and urged on by organized 
 societies. There is the movement for land-nationalization \yhich, 
 aiming at a system of land-tenure equitable in the abstract, is, as all 
 the world knows, pressed by Mr. George and his friends with avowed 
 disregard for the just claims of existing owners, and as the basis of a 
 scheme going more than half-way to State-socialism. And then 
 there is tlie thorough-going Democratic Federation of Mr. Hyudman 
 and his adherents. We are told by them that " the handful of 
 marauders who now hold possession [of the land] have and can 
 have no right save brute force against the tens of millions whom 
 they wron^," They exclaim against "the shareholders who have 
 been afow^d to lay hands upon (!) our great railway communica- 
 tions." They condemn " above all, the active capitalist class, the 
 loan-mongers, the farmers, the mine exploiters, the contractors, the 
 olddle-men, the factory-lords — these, the modern slave drivers** 
 'svho exact " more and yet more surplus value out of the v/age- 
 slaves whom they employ." And they think it "high time" that 
 trade should bo " removed from the control of individual greed."* 
 It remains to point out that the tendencies thus variously 
 displayed, are being strengthened by press-advocacy, daily more 
 pronounced. Journalists, always chary of saying that which is 
 distasteful to their readers, are some of them going with the stream 
 and adding to its force. Legislative meddlings which they would 
 once have condemned they now pass in silence, if they do nob 
 advocate tbem; and they speak of laissez-faire as an exploded 
 doctrine. " People are no longer frightened at the thought of 
 socialism," is the statement which meets us one dc.j. On another 
 day, a town which does not adopt the Free Libraries Act is sneered 
 at as being alarmed by a measure so moderately communistic. And 
 then, along with editorial assertions that this economic evolution is 
 coming and must be accepted, there is prominence given to the 
 <;ontrIbutions of its advocates. Meanwhile those who regard the 
 recent course of legislation as disastrous, and see that its futuro 
 
 * Socialism made Plain. Reeves, 1S5, Fleet Slrcct.
 
 THE COMING SLAVERY. 33 
 
 course is likely to be still more disastrous, are being reduced to 
 silence by the belief that it is useless to reason with people in a 
 state of political intoxication. 
 
 See, then, the many concurrent causes which threaten continually 
 to accelerate the transformation now going on. There is that 
 spread of regulation caused by following precedents, which become 
 the more authoritative the further the policy is carried. There is 
 that increasing need for administrative compulsions and restraints, 
 which results from the unforeseen evils and shortcomings of pre- 
 ceding compulsions and restraints. Moreover, every additional 
 State-interference strengthens the tacit assumption that it is the 
 duty of the State to deal with all evils and secure all benefits. 
 Increasing power of a growing administrative organization is 
 accompanied by decreasing power of the rest of the society to resist 
 its further growth and control. The multiplication of careers 
 opened by a developing bureaucracy, tempts members of the classes 
 regulated by it to favour its extension, as adding to the chances of 
 safe and respectable places for their relatives. The people at large, 
 led to look on benefits received through public agencies as gratis 
 benefits, have their hopes continually excited by the prospects of 
 more. A spreading education, furthering the diffusion of pleasing 
 errors rather than of stern truths, renders such hopes both stronger 
 and more general. Worse still, such, hopes are ministered to by 
 candidates for public choice, to augment their chances of success ; 
 and leading statesmen, in pursuit of party ends, bid for popular 
 favour by countenancing them. Getting repeated justifications- 
 from new laws harmonizing with their doctrines, political 
 enthusiasts and unwise philanthropists push their agitations with 
 growing confidence and success. Journalism, ever responsive to 
 popular opinion, daily strengthens it by giving it voice; while 
 counter-opinion, more and more discouraged, finds little utterance. 
 
 Thus influences of various kinds conspire to increase corporate 
 action and decrease individual action. And the change is being on 
 all sides aided by schemers, each of whom thinks only of his pet 
 project and not at all of the general re-organization which his, joinet? 
 with others such, are working out. It is said that the French 
 Revolution devoured its own children. Here an analogous catas- 
 trophe seems not unlikely. The numerous socialistic changes 
 made by Act of Parliament, joined with the numerous others 
 presently to be made, will by -and -by be all merged in tt.ate- 
 
 D
 
 34 THE MAN f Ens us THE STATE. 
 
 Socialism — swallowed in the vast wave which they have little by 
 little raised. 
 
 ' *'But why is this change described as ' the coming slavery' ? " 
 is a question which many will still ask. The reply is simple. All 
 socialism involves slavery. 
 
 What is essential to the idea of a slave ? "We primarily think 
 of him as one who is owned by another. To be more than nominal, 
 however, the ownership must be shown by control of the slave's 
 actions — a control which is habitually for the benefit of the con- 
 troller. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he 
 labours under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation 
 admits of sundry gradations. Remembering that originally the 
 slave is a prisoner whose life is at the mercy of his captor, it 
 suffices here to note that there is a harsh form of slavery in which, 
 treated as an animal, he has to expend his entire effort for his 
 owner's advantage. Under a system less harsh, though occupied 
 chiefly in working for his owner, he is allowed a short time in 
 which to work for himself, and some ground on which to grow 
 extra food. A further amelioration gives him power to sell the 
 pi'oduce of his plot and keep the proceeds. Then we come to 
 the still more moderated form which commonly arises where, 
 having been a free man working on his own land, conquest turns 
 him into what we distinguish as a serf; and he has to give to his 
 owner each year a fixed amount of labour or produce, or both : 
 retaining the rest himself. Finally, in some cases, as in Russia 
 until recently, he is allowed to leave his owner's estate and work 
 or trade for himself elsewhere, under the condition that he shall 
 pay an annual sum. What is it which, in these cases, leads us to 
 .qualify our conception of the slavery as more or less severe ? 
 Evidently the greater or smaller extent to which effort is com- 
 pulsorily expended for the benefit of another instead of for self- 
 benefit. If all the slave's labour is for his owner the slavery is 
 heavy, and if but little it is light. Take now a further step. 
 Suppose an owner dies, and his estate with its slaves comes into 
 the hands of trustees ; or suppose the estate and everything on it to 
 be bought by a company ; is the condition of the slave any the better 
 if the amount of his compulsory labour remains the same ? Sup- 
 pose that for a company we substitute the community; does it 
 make any difference to the slave if the time he has to work for
 
 THE COMING SLiVVERY. 35 
 
 otliers is as great, and the time left for himself is as small, aa 
 before ? The essential question is — How much is he compelled to 
 labour for other benefit than his own, and how much can he laboul 
 for his own benefit ? The degree of his slavery varies according 
 to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that 
 which he is allowed to retain; and it mattors not whether his 
 master is a single person or a society. If, without option, he has 
 to labour for the society, and receives from the general stock such 
 portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the 
 society. Socialistic arrangements necessitate an enslavement of 
 this kind ; and towards such an enslavement many recent mea- 
 sures, and still more the measures advocated, are carrying us. 
 Let us observe, first, their proximate effects, and then their 
 ultimate effects. 
 
 The policy initiated by the Industrial Dwellings Acts admits of 
 development, and will develop. Where municipal bodies turn 
 house-builders, they inevitably lower the values of houses other- 
 wise built, and check the supply of more. Every dictation re- 
 specting modes of building and conveniences to be provided, 
 diminishes the builder's profit, and prompts him to use his capital 
 where the profit is not thus diminished. So, too, the owner, 
 already finding that small houses entail much labour and many 
 losses — already subject to troubles of inspection and interference, 
 and to consequent costs, and having his property daily rendered a 
 more undesirable investment, is prompted to sell ; and as buyers 
 are for like reasons deterred, he has to sell at a loss. And now 
 these still-multiplying regulations, ending, it may be, as Lord Grey 
 proposes, in one requiring the owner to maintain the salubrity of 
 his houses by evicting dirty tenants, and thus adding to his other 
 responsibilities that of inspector of nuisances, must further prompt 
 sales and further deter purchasers : so necessitating greater depre- 
 ciation. What must happen ? The multiplication of houses, and 
 especially small houses, being increasingly checked, there must 
 come an increasing demand upon the local authority to make up 
 for the deficient supply. More and more the municipal or kimired 
 body will have to build house^s, or to purchase houses rendered 
 unsaleable to private persons in the way shown — houses which, 
 greatly lowered in value as they must become, it will, in many 
 casefe, pay to buy rather than to build new ones. Nay, this, process 
 must w ork in a double way ; since every entailed increase of local 
 
 D 2
 
 36 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE, 
 
 taxation si ill further depreciates property.* And then, when in 
 towns this process lias gone so far as to make the local aathority 
 the chief owner of houses, there will be a good precedent for 
 publicly providing houses for the rural population, as proposed in 
 the Radical programme,t and as urged by the Democratic Federa- 
 tion ; which insists on " the compulsory construction of healthy 
 artisans' and agricultural labourers' dwellings in proportion to the 
 population." Manifestly, the tendency of that which has been 
 done, is being done, and is presently to be done, is to approach tho 
 socialistic ideal in which the community is sole house-proprietor. 
 
 Such, too, must be the effect of the daily-growing policy on 
 the tenure and utilization of the land. More numerous public 
 benefits, to be achieved by more numerous public agoncie?, at 
 the cost of augmented public burdens, must increasingly deduct 
 from the returns on land; until, as the depreciation in value 
 becomes greater and greater, the resistance to change of tenure 
 becomes less and less. Already, as every one knows, there is 
 in many places difficulty in obtaining tenants, even at greatly 
 reduced rents; and land of inferior fertility in some cases lies 
 idle, or when farmed by the owner is often farmed at a 
 loss. Clearly tho profit on capital invested in land is not such 
 that taxes, local and general, can be greatly raised to support 
 extended public administrations, without an absorption of it 
 which will prompt owners to sell, and make the best of what 
 reduced price they can get by emigrating and buying land not 
 subject to heavy burdens ; as, indeed, some are now doing. This 
 process, carried far, must have the result of throwing inferior land 
 out of cultivation ; after which there will be raised more generally 
 
 * If any one thinks such fears are groundless, let him contemplate the fact 
 that from 1867-8 to 1880-1, our annual local expenditure for the Unite I 
 Kingdom has grown from £36,132,831 to £63,276,283; and that during tho 
 same 13 years, the municipal expenditure in England and Wales alone, ha» 
 grown from 13 millions to 30 millions a year! How ihe increase of public 
 burdens will join with other causes in bringing about public ownership, is ^hown 
 by a statement mtide by Mr. W. Eathbone, M.P., to which my attentiiu hi* 
 been drawn since the above paragraph was in type, lie says, "within my own 
 experience, local taxation in New York has risen from 12.?. 6d. per cent, to 
 €2 12s. Gd. per cent, on the capital of its citizens — a charge which would more 
 ihan absorb the Avhole income of an average English lai.dlord." — yineteeuth 
 Century, February, 1883. 
 
 t Fortniahtly Review, Noyember, 1883, pp 619-20.
 
 THE COMING SLAVEllY. 37 
 
 the demand inade by Mr. Arch, who, addressing the Radical 
 Association of Brighton lately, and contending that existing landlords 
 do not make their land adequately productive for the public benefit, 
 said " he should like the present Government to pass a Compulsory 
 Cultivation Bill:" an applauded proposal which he justified by 
 instancing compulsory vaccination (thus illustrating the influence 
 of precedent). And this demand will be pressed, not only by the 
 need for making the land productive, but also by the need for 
 employing the rural population. After tlie Government has 
 extended the practice of hiring the unemployed to work on deserted 
 lands, or lands acquired at nominal prices, there will be reached a 
 stage whence there is but a small further step to that arrangement 
 which, in the programme of the Democratic Federation, is to follow 
 nationalization of the land — the " organization of agricultural and 
 industrial armies under State control on co-operative principles," 
 
 To one who doubts whether snch a revolution may be so reached, 
 facts may be cited showing its likelihood. In Gaul, during the decline 
 of the Roman Empire, " so numerous were the receivers in com- 
 parison with the payers, and so enormous the weight of taxation, that 
 the labourer broke down, the plains became deserts, and woods grew 
 where the plough had been."* In like manner, when the French 
 Revolution was approaching, the public burdens had become such, 
 that many farms remained uncultivated and many were deserted : 
 one quarter of the soil was absolutely lying waste; and in some 
 provinces one-half was in heath. f Nor have we been without 
 incidents of a kindred nature at home. Besides the facts that under 
 the old Poor Law the rates had in some parishes risen to half the 
 rental, and that in various places farms were lying idle, there is 
 the fact that in one case the rates had absorbed the whole proceeds 
 of the soil. 
 
 At Cholesbury, in Buckinghamshire, in 1832, the poor-rate " suddenly 
 ceased in consequence of the impossibility to continue its collection, the 
 landlords having given up their rents, the farmers their tenancies, and th3 
 clergyman his glebe and his tithes. The clergyman, Mr. Jeston, states that 
 in October, 1832, the parish officers threw up their books, and the poor 
 assembled in a body before his door while he was in bed, asking for advice 
 and food. Partly from his own small means, partly from the charity of 
 
 * Lactant. Be M. Persecut., cc. 7, 23. 
 
 t Taine, VAncien Regime, pp. 337-8 (in the English Translation).
 
 38, THE MAX VERSUS THE STATS. 
 
 neighbours, and partly by rates in aid, imposed on the neighbouring 
 parishes, they were for some time supported."* 
 
 And the Comrnissioners add that "the benevolent rector recommends 
 that the whole of the land should be divided among the able-bodied 
 paupers : " hoping that after help afforded for two years, they might 
 be able to mamtain themselves. These facts, giving colour to the 
 prophecy m;ide in Parliament that continuance of the old Poor Law 
 for anotlicr thirty years would throw the land out of cnitivation, 
 clearly show that incrense of public burdens may end in forced 
 cultivation under public control. 
 
 Then, ngain, comes State-ownership of railways. Already this 
 exists to a large extent on the Continent. Already we have had here 
 a few years ago loud advocacy of it. And now the cry, which was 
 raised by sundry politicians and publicists, is taken up afresh by the 
 Democratic Federation ; which proposes " State-appropriation of 
 railways, with or without compensation." Evidently, pressure 
 from above joined by pressure from below, is likely to effect this 
 change dictated by the policy everywhere spreading ; and with it 
 must come many a.ttendant changes. For railway-proprietors, at 
 first owners and workers of railways only, have become masters of 
 numerous businesses directly or indirectly connected with railways ; 
 and these will have to be purchased by Government when the rail- 
 ways are purchased. Already exclusive letter-carrier, exclusive 
 transmitter of telegrams, and on the way to become exclusive 
 carrier of parcels, the State will not only be exclusive carrier of 
 passengers, goods, and minerals, but will add to its present 
 various trades many other trades. Even now, besides erecting its 
 naval and military establishments and building harbours, docks, 
 breakwaters, &c., it does the work of shipbuilder, cannon-founder, 
 small-arms maker, manufacturer of ammunition, army-clothier and 
 bootmaker; and when the railways have been appropriated "with or 
 without compensation," as the Democratic Federationists say, it will 
 have to become locomotive-engine-builder, carriage-maker, tarpaulin 
 and grease manufacturer, passenger- vessel owner, coal-miner, stone- 
 quarrier, omnibus propietor, &c. Meanwhile its local lieutenants, the 
 municipal governments, already in many places suppliers of water, 
 gas-makers, owners and workers of tramways, proprietors of baths, 
 will doubtless have undertaken various other businesses. And w^hen 
 
 • Eeport of Commissioners for Inquiry into the Administration and Practical 
 Operation of the Poor Laws, p. 37. February 20, 1834.
 
 THE COMING SLAVERY. 39 
 
 the State, directly or by proxy, has thus come into possession of, or 
 has established, numerous concerns for wholesale production and for 
 wholesale distribution, there will be good precedents for extending 
 its function to retail distribution : following such an example, say. 
 as is offered by the French Government, which has long been a retail 
 tobacconist. 
 
 Evidently then, the changes made, the changes in progress, and 
 the changes urged, will carry us not only towards State-ownership 
 of land and dwellings and means of communication, all to be adminis- 
 tered and worked by State-agents, but towards State-usurpation of 
 all industries : the private forms of which, disadvantaged more and 
 more in competition with the State, which can arrange everything 
 for its own convenience, will more and more die away ; just as many 
 voluntary schools have, in presence of Board- schools. And so will 
 be brought about the desired ideal of the socialists. 
 
 And now when there has been compassed this desired ideal, which 
 *^ practical " politicians are helping socialists to reach, and which is 
 so tempting on that bright side which socialists contemplate, what 
 must be the accompanying shady side which they do not con- 
 template ? It is a matter of common remark, often made when a 
 mari-iage is impending, that those possessed by strong hopes habi- 
 tually dwell on the promised pleasures and think nothing of the 
 accompanying pains. A further exemplification of this truth is 
 supplied by these political enthusiasts and fanatical revolutionists. 
 Impressed with the miseries existing under our present social 
 arrangements, and not regarding these miseries as caused by the- 
 ill- working of a human nature but partially adapted to the social' 
 state, they imagine them to be forthwith curable by this or that re- 
 arrangement. Yet, even did their plans succeed it could only bor 
 by substituting one kind of evil for another. A little deliberate 
 thought would show that under their proposed arrangements, their 
 liberties must be surrendered in proportion as their material wel- 
 fares were cared for. 
 
 For no form of co-operation, small or great, can be carried on 
 without regulation, and an implied submission to the regulating 
 agencies. Even one of their own organizations for effecting social 
 changes yields them proof. It is compelled to have its councils, its 
 local and general officers, its authoritative leaders, who must be 
 obeyed under penalty of confusion and failure. And the experience
 
 40 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 of those who are loudest in their advocacy of a new social order 
 under the paternal control of a Government, shows that even in 
 private voluntarily-formed societies, the power of the regulative 
 organization becomes great, if not irresistible : often, indeed, causing 
 grumbling and restiveness among tliose controlled. Trades Unions' 
 which carry on a kind of industrial war in defence of workers' in- 
 lerests versus employers' interests, find that subordination almost 
 military in its strictness is needful to secure elKcient action : for 
 divided councils prove fatal to success. And even in bodies of co- 
 operators, formed for carrying on manufacturing or distributing 
 businesses, and not needing that obedience to leaders which is 
 required where the aims are offensive or defensive, it is still 
 found that the administrative agency gains such, supremacy that 
 there arise complaints about "the tyranny of organization." Judge 
 then what must happen when, instead of relatively small combina- 
 tions, to which men may belong or not as they please, we have 
 n national combination in which each citizen finds himself incor- 
 porated, and from which he cannot separate himself without leaving 
 the country. Judge what must under such conditions become the 
 despotism of a graduated and centralized officialism, holding in its 
 hands the resources of the community, and having behind it what- 
 •ever amount of force it finds requisite to carry out its decrees and 
 maintain what it calls order. Well may Prince Bismarck display 
 leanings to^rards State-socialism. 
 
 And then after recognizing, as they must if they think out their 
 scheme, the power possessed by the regulative agency in the new 
 social system so temptingly pictured, let its advocates ask them- 
 selves to what end this power must be used. Not dwelling exclu- 
 sively, as they habitually do, on the material well-being and the 
 mental gratifications to be provided for them by a beneficent 
 administration, let them dwell a little on the price to be paid. The 
 officials cannot create the needful supplies : they can but distribute 
 among individuals that which the individuals have joined to pro- 
 duce. If the public agency is required to provide for them, it must 
 reciprocally require them to furnish the means. There cannot be, 
 as under our existing system, agreement between employer and 
 employed — this the scheme excludes. There must in place of it 
 be command by local authorities over w^orkers, and acceptance by the 
 workers of that which the authorities assign to them. And this, in- 
 deed, is the arrangement distinctly, but as it would seeminidverter tly,
 
 THE COMING SLAVEllY. 41 
 
 pointed to by the members of the Democratic Federation. For 
 they propose that production should be carried on by " agricultural 
 and industrial armies under State-control : " apparently not re- 
 membering that armies pre-suppose grades of officers, by whom 
 obedience would have to be insisted upon ; since otherwise neither 
 order nor efficient work could be ensured. So that each would 
 fitand toward the governing agency in the relation of slave to 
 master. 
 
 " But the governing agency would be a master which he and 
 others made and kept constantly in check ; and one which therefore 
 would not control him or others more than was needful for the 
 benefit of each and all." 
 
 To which reply the first rejoinder is that, even if so, each 
 member of the community as an individual would be a slave to the 
 community as a whole. Such a relation has habitually existed in 
 militant communities, even under quasi-popular forms of govern- 
 ment. In ancient Grreece the accepted principle was that the 
 citizen belonged neither to himself nor to his family, but belonged 
 to his city — the city being with the Greek equivalent to the com- 
 munity. And this doctrine, proper to a state of constant warfare, 
 is a doctrine which socialism unawares re-introduces into a state 
 intended to be purely industrial. The services of ea^h will belong 
 to the aggregate of all ; and for these services, such returns will be 
 given as the authorities think proper. So that even if the adminis- 
 tration is of the beneficent kind intended to be secured, slavery, 
 however mild, must be the outcome of the arrangement. 
 
 A second rejoinder is that the administration will presently 
 become not of the intended kind, and tliat the slavery will not be 
 mild. The socialist speculation is vitiated by an assumption like 
 that which vitiates the speculations of the " practical " politician. 
 It is assumed that officialism will work as it is intended to work, 
 which it never does. The machinery of Communism, like existing 
 social machinery, has to be framed out of existing human nature ; 
 and the defects of existing human nature will generate in the one 
 the same evils as in the other. The love of power, the selfishness, 
 the injustice, the untruthfulness, which often in comparatively 
 short times bring private organisations to disaster, will inevitably, 
 where their effects accumulate from generation to generation, work 
 evils far greater and less remediable ; since, vast and complex and 
 possessed of all the resources, the administrative organization once
 
 42 THE ^lAN Vf:Ji<SUS THE STATE. 
 
 developed and consolidated, must become irresistible. And if there 
 needs proof, that the periodic exercise of electoral power would fail 
 to prevent this, it suffices to instance the French Government, 
 which, purely popular in origin, and subject at short intervals to 
 popular judgment, nevertheless tramples on the freedom of citizens 
 to an extent which the English delegates to the late Trades Unions . 
 Congress say " is a disgrace to, and an anomaly in, a Republican 
 nation." 
 
 The final result would be a revival of despotism. A disciplined 
 army of civil officials, like an army of military officials, gives 
 supreme power to its head— a power which has often led to usurpa- 
 tion, as in mediaeval Europe and still more in Japan — nay, has thus 
 so led among our neighbours, within our own times. The recent 
 confessions of M. de Maupas have shown how readily a constitu- 
 tibnal head, elected and trusted by the whole people, may, with the 
 aid of a few unscrupulous confederates, paralyze the representative 
 body and make himself autocrat. That those who rose to power 
 in a socialistic organization would not scruple to carry out their 
 aims at all costs, we have good reason for concluding. When we 
 find that shareholders who, sometimes gaining but often losing, have 
 made that railway- system by which national prosperity has been so 
 greatly increased, are spoken of by the council of the Democratic 
 Federation as having "laid hands" on the means of communica- 
 tion, we may infer that those who directed a socialistic administration 
 might interpret with extreme perversity the claims of individuals and 
 classes under their control. And when, further, we find members 
 of this same council urging that the State should take possession 
 of the railwa}s, " with or without compensation," we may suspect 
 that the hcatls of the ideal society desired, would be but little 
 deterred by considerations of equity from pursuing whatever policy 
 they thought needful : a policy'' which would always be one identi- 
 fied with their own supremacy. It would need but a war with an 
 adjacent society, or some internal discontent demanding forcible 
 suppression, to at once transform a socialistic administration into a 
 grinding tyranny like that of ancient Peru ; under which the mass 
 of the people, controlled by grades of officials, and leading lives 
 that were inspected out-of-doors and in-doors, laboured for the 
 support of the organisation which regulated them, and were left 
 with but a bare subsistence for themselves. And then would be 
 completely revived, under a different form, that regime of status-—
 
 THE COMING SLAVERY. 43 
 
 that system of compulsory co-operation, the decaying tradition of 
 which is represented by the old Toryism, and towards which the 
 new Toryism is carrying us back. 
 
 " But we shall be on our guard against all that — we shall take 
 precautions to ward off such disasters," will doubtless say the 
 enthusiasts. Be they " practical" politicians with their new regu- 
 lative measures, or communists with their schemes for re-organizing 
 labour, their reply is ever the same : — " It is true that plans of 
 kindred nature have, from unforeseen causes or adverse accidents. 
 or the misdeeds of those concerned, been brought to failure; but 
 this time we shall profit by past experiences and succeed." There 
 seems no getting people to accept the truth, which nevertheless is 
 conspicuous enough, that the welfare of a society and the justice of 
 its arrangements are at bottom dependent on the characters of its 
 members ; and that improvement in neither can take place with- 
 out that improvement in character which results from carrying on 
 peaceful industry under the restraints imposed by an orderly social 
 life. The belief, not only of the socialists but also of those so-called 
 Liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them, is that by 
 due skill an ill- working humanity may be framed into well-working 
 institutions. It is a delusion. The defective natures of citizens 
 will show themselves in the bad acting of whatevei^^social structure 
 they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which 
 you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts. 
 
 Note. — Two replies by socialists to the foregoing article have 
 appeared since its publication — Socialism and Slavery by H. M. 
 Hyndman and Herbert Spencer on Socialism by Frank Fairman. 
 Notice of tliem here must be limited to saying that, as usual with 
 antagonists, they ascribe to me opinions which I do not hold. 
 Disapproval of Socialism does not, as Mr. Hyndman assumes, 
 necessitate approval of existing arrangements. Many things he 
 reprobates I reprobate quite as much; but I dissent from his 
 remedy. The gentleman who writes under the pseudonym of 
 "Frank Fairman," reproaches me with having receded from that 
 sympathetic defence of the labouring-classes which he finds in 
 Social Statics ; but I am quite unconscious of any such change as 
 he alleges. Looking with a lenient eye upon the irregularities of 
 those whose lives are hard, by no means involves tolerance of good- 
 for-nothings.
 
 44 
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 
 
 Be it or be it not true that Man is sliapen in iniquity and con- 
 ceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten 
 of aggression and by aggression. In small undeveloped societies 
 where for ages complete peace has continued, there exists nothing 
 like what we call Government : no coercive agency, but mere 
 honorary headship, if any headsliip at all. In these exceptional 
 communities, unaggressive and from special causes unaggressed. 
 upon, there is so little deviation from the virtues of truthfulness, 
 honesty, justice, and generosity, that nothing beyond an occasional 
 expression of public opinion by informally-assembled elders is 
 needful.* Conversely, we find proofs that, at first recognized but 
 temporarily during leadership in war, the authority of a chief is 
 permanently established by continuity of war; and grows strong 
 where successful aggression ends in subjection of neighbouring 
 tribes. And thence onwards, examples furnished by all races put 
 beyond doubt the truth, that the coercive power of the chief, deve- 
 loping into king, and king of kings (a frequent title in the ancient 
 East), becomes great in proportion as conquest becomes habitual 
 and the union of subdued nations extensive. f Comparisons dis- 
 close a further truth which should be ever present to us — the 
 truth that the aggressiveness of the ruling power inside a society 
 increases with its aggressiveness outside the society. As, to mu.\e 
 an efficient army, the soldiers in their several grades must be 
 subordinate to the commander; so, to make an efficient fighting 
 community, must the citizens be subordinate to the ruling power. 
 
 • Political Imlilutions, §§ 437, 573. f Ihicl, §§ 471-3.
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 45 
 
 They nmst furnish recruits to tho extent demanded, and yield up 
 whatever property is required. 
 
 An obvious implication is that the ethics of Government, origi- 
 nally identical with the ethics of war, must long remain akin to 
 them ; and can diverge from them only as warlike activities and 
 preparations become less. Current evidence shows this. At pre- 
 sent on the Continent, the citizen is free only when his services as 
 a soldier are not demanded ; and during the rest of his life he is 
 largely enslaved in supporting the military organization. Even 
 among ourselves, a serious war would, by the necessitated con- 
 scription, suspend the liberties of large numbers and trench on the 
 liberties of the rest, by taking from them through taxes whatever 
 supplies were needed — that is, forcing them to labour so many days 
 more for the State. Inevitably the established code of conduct in 
 the dealings of Governments with citizens, must be allied to their 
 code of conduct in their dealings with one another. 
 
 I am not, under the title of this article, about to treat of the 
 trespasses and the revenges for trespasses, accounts of which consti- 
 tute the great mass of history; nor to trace the internal inequities 
 which have ever accompanied the external inequities. I do not 
 propose here to catalogue the crimes of irresponsible legislators ; 
 beginning with that of King Khufu, the stones of \yhose vast tomb 
 were laid in the bloody sweat of tens of thousands of slaves toiling 
 through long years under the lash ; going on to those committed 
 by conquerors, Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, Roman 
 and the rest ; and ending with those of Napoleon, whose ambition 
 to set his foot on the neck of the civilized world, cost not less than 
 two million lives.* !N^or do I propose hero to enumerate those sins 
 of responsible legislators seen in the long list of laws made in the 
 interests of dominant classes — a list coming down in our own 
 country to those under which there were long maintained slavery 
 and the slave-trade, torturing nearly 40,000 negroes annually by 
 close packing during a tropical voyage, and killing a large per- 
 centage of them, and ending with that of the corn-laws, by which,, 
 says Sir Erskine May, " to ensure high rents, it had been decreed 
 that multitudes should liunger."t 
 
 Not, indeed, that a presentation of the conspicuous misdeeds of 
 legislators, responsible and irresponsible, would be useless. It would 
 
 * Lanfrey. See also Study of Sociology, p. 42, and Appeiidix, 
 f Constitutional History of England, ii. p. 617.
 
 46 THE MAN VJ'^IiSUS THE STATE. 
 
 have several uses — one of them relevant to the truth above pointed 
 out. Such a presentation would make clear how that identity of 
 governmental ethics with military ethics which necessarily exists 
 during primitive times, when the army is simply the mobilized 
 society and the society is the quiescent army, continues through 
 long stages, and even now affects in great degrees our law-pro- 
 ceedings and our daily lives. Having, for instance, shown that in 
 numerous savage tribes the judicial function of the chief does not 
 exist, or is nominal, and that very generally during early stages of 
 European civilization, each man had to defend himself and rectify 
 his private wrongs as best he might — having shown that in medisDval 
 times the right of private war among members of the military 
 order was brought to an end, not because the head ruler thought 
 it his duty to arbitrate, but because private wars interfered witli 
 the efficiency of his army in public wars — having shown that tlie 
 administration of justice displayed through subsequent ages a 
 large amount of its primitive nature, in trial by battle carried on 
 before the king or his deputy as umpire, and which, among our- 
 selves, continued nominally to be an alternative form of trial down 
 to 1819 ; it might then be pointed out that even now there survives 
 trial by battle under another form : counsel being the champions 
 and purses the weapons. In civil cases, the ruling agency cares 
 scarcely more than of old about rectifying the wrongs of the injured; 
 but, practically, its deputy does little else than to enforce the rules 
 of the fight : the result being less a question of equity than a 
 question of pecuniary ability and forensic skill. Nay, so little 
 concern for the administration of justice is shown by the ruling 
 agency, that when, by legal conflict carried on in the presence of 
 its deputy, the combatants have been pecuniarily bled even to the 
 extent of producing pro&tration, and when an appeal being made 
 by one of them the decision is reversed, the beaten combatant is 
 made to pay for the blunders of the dejjuty, or of a preceding 
 deputy ; and not unf requently the wronged man, who sought pro- 
 tection or restitution, is taken out of court pecuniarily dead. 
 
 Adequately done, such a portrayal of governmental misdeeds of 
 commission and omission, proving that the partially-surviving code 
 of ethics arising in, and projoer to, a state of war, still vitiates 
 governmental action, might greatly moderate the hopes of those 
 who are anxious to extend governmental control. After observing 
 that along \vith the still-manifest traits of that primitive political
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATOKS. 47 
 
 structare which chronic militancy produces, there goes a still, 
 manifest survival of its primitive principles ; the reformer and the 
 philanthropist might be less sanguine in their anticipations of good 
 from its all-pervading ag^ency, and might be more inclined to trust 
 agencies of a non-governmental kind. 
 
 But leaving out the greater part of the large topic comprehended 
 under the title of this article, I propose here to deal only with a 
 comparatively small remaining part — those sins of legislators 
 vvhich are not generated by their personal ambitions or class in- 
 terests, but result from a lack of the study by which they are 
 morally bound to prepare themselves. 
 
 A druggist's assistant who, after listening to the description of 
 pains which he mistakes for those of colic, but which are really 
 caused by inflammation of the ccecum, prescribes a sharp purgative 
 and kills the patient, is found guilty of manslaughter. He is not 
 allowed to excuse himself on the ground that he did not intend 
 harm but hoped for good. The plea that he simply made a mis- 
 take in his diagnosis is not entertained. He is told that he had no 
 right to risk disastrous consequences by meddling in a matter con- 
 cerning which his knowledge was so inadequate. The fact that he 
 was ignorant how great was his ignorance is not accepted in bar of 
 judgment. It is tacitly assumed that the experience common to 
 all should have taught him that even the skilled, and much more 
 the unskilled, make mistakes in the identification of disorders and 
 in the appropriate treatment ; and that having disregarded the 
 warning derivable from common experience, he was answerable 
 for the consequences. 
 
 We measure the responsibilities of legislators for mischiefs 
 they may do, in a much more lenient fashion. In most cases, so 
 far from thinking of them as deserving punishment for causing 
 disasters by laws ignorantly enacted, we scarcely think of them as 
 deserving reprobation. It is held that common experience should 
 have taught the druggist's assistant, untrained as he is, not to inter- 
 fere ; but it is not held that common experience should have taught 
 the legislator not to interfere till he has trained himself. Though 
 multitudinous facts r.i'e before him in the recorded legislation of 
 our own country and of other countries, which should impress on 
 him the immense evils caused by wrong treatment, he is not con- 
 demned for disregarding these warnings against rash meddling.
 
 48 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATK 
 
 Contrariwise, it is tliouf]^lit meritorious in him wLen — perhaps 
 lately from college, perhaps fresh from keeping a pack of hounds 
 which made him popular in his count}'', perhaps emerging from a 
 provincial town where he acquired a fortune, perhaps rising from 
 the bar at which he has gained a name as an advocate — he enters 
 Parliament ; and forthwith, in quite a light-hearted way, begins to 
 aid or hinder this or that means of operating on the body politic. 
 In this case there is no occasion even to make for him the excuse 
 that he does not know how little he know^s ; for the public at large 
 agrees with him in thinking it needless that he should know any- 
 thing more than what the debates on the proposed measures tell 
 him. 
 
 And yet the mischiefs wrought by nninstructcd law-making, 
 enormous in their amount as compared with those caused by un- 
 instructed medical treatment, are conspicuous to all who do but 
 glance over its history. The reader must pardon me while I recall 
 a few familiar instances. Century after century, statesmen went 
 on enacting usury laws which made worse the condition of the 
 debtor — raising the rate of interest " from five to six when in- 
 tending to reduce it to four,"* as under Louis XV. ; and indirectly 
 producing undreamt of evils of many kinds, such as preventing the 
 reproductive use of spare capital, and " burdening the small pro- 
 prietors with a multitude of perpetual services." f So, too, the 
 endeavours which in England continued through five hundred 
 years to stop forestalling, and which in France, as Arthur Young 
 witnessed, prevented any one from buying "more than two bushels 
 of wheat at market," % went on generation after generation in- 
 creasing the miseries and mortality due to dearth ; for, as every- 
 body now knows, the wholesale dealer, who was in the statute 
 " De Pistoribus " vituperated as "an open oppressor of poor 
 people," § is simply one whose function it is to equalize the supply 
 of a commodity by checking unduly rapid consumption. Of 
 kindred nature was the measure which, in 1315, to diminish the 
 pressure of famine, prescribed the prices of foods, but which was 
 hastily repealed after it had caused entire disappearance of various 
 
 * Lecky, Eaiionalism, ii. 203-4. 
 
 t De Tocqucville, The Stale of Society in France he/ore tlte Levoluliois 
 p. 421. 
 
 Z Young's Travels, i. 123-9. 
 
 § Craik's History of British Commerce^ i. 134.
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATOr.S. 4.9 
 
 foods from tlie markets ; and also such measures, more continuously 
 operating, as those which settled by magisterial order " the 
 leasonable gains " of victuallers.* Of like spirit and followed by 
 allied mischiefs have been the mnny endeavours to fix wages, which 
 began witli the Statute of Labourers under Edward IIT., and 
 ceased only sixty years ago ; when, having long galvanized iu 
 Spitalfields a dccnying industry, and fostered there a miserable 
 population. Lords and Commons finally gave up fixing silk-weavers* 
 earnings by the decisions of magistrates. 
 
 Here I imagine an impatient interruption. "Wo know all 
 that ; the story is stale. The mischiefs of interfering with trade 
 have been dinned in our ears till Vv^e are weary; and no one needs 
 to be taught the lesson afresh." My first reply is that by the great 
 majority the lesson was never properly learnt at all, and that many 
 of those who did learn it have forgotten it. For just the same 
 pleas which of old were put in for these dictations, are again put 
 in. In the statute 35 of Edward III., which aimed to keep down 
 the price of herrings (but was soon repealed because it raised the 
 price), it was complained that people "coming to the fair ... do 
 bargain for herring, and every of them, by malice and envy, 
 increase upon other, and, if one proffer forty shillings, another Vv'ill 
 proffer ten shillings more, and the third sixty shillings, and so 
 everyone surmounteth other in the baigain."t And now the 
 *' higgling of the market," here condemned and ascribed to " malice 
 and envy," is being again condemned. The evils of competition 
 have all along been the stock cry of the Socialists ; and the council 
 of the Democratic Federation denounces the carrying on of 
 exchange under "the control of individual greed and profit." jMy 
 second reply is that interferences wdth the law of supply and 
 demand, which a generation ago were admitted to be habitually 
 mischievous, are now being daily made by Acts of Parliament in 
 new fields ; and that, as I shall presently show, they are in these 
 fields increasing the evils to be cured and producing fresh ones, as 
 of old they did in fields no longer intruded upon. 
 
 Returning from this parenthesis, I go on to explain that th© 
 ibove Acts are named to remind the reader that uninstructed 
 ■legislators have in past times continually increased human suffering 
 in their endeavours to mitigate it ; and I have now to add that if 
 these evils, shown to bs legislatively intensified or produced, 
 * Craik's H'Stori/ of British Commerce, i. 13G-7. t Craik, loc. cit., i. 137.
 
 50 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 be mnltipHed by ten or more, a conception will be formed c? 
 the aggregate evils caused by law-making unguided by social 
 science. In a paper read to the Statistical Society in May, 187^, 
 Mr. Janson, vice-president of the Law Society, stated that from the 
 Statute of Mcrton (20 Heniy III.) to the end of 1872, there hail 
 been passed 18,110 public Acts; of which he estimated that four- 
 fifths had been wholly or partially repealed. He also stated that 
 the number of public Acts repealed wholly or in part, or amended, 
 during the three years 1870-71-72 had been 3,532, of which 2,75i> 
 had been totally repealed. To see whether this rate of repeal has 
 continued, I have referred to the annually-issued volumes of " The 
 Public General Statutes" for the last three sessions. Saying- 
 nothing of the numerous amended Acts, the result is that in the 
 last three sessions there have been totally repealed, separately or 
 in groups, 650 Acts, belong 'ng to tJie present reign, besides many of 
 preceding reigns. This, of course, is gr'atly above the average 
 rate ; for there has of late been an active purgation of the statute- 
 book. But making every allowance, we must infer that within 
 our own times, repeals have mounted some distance into the 
 thousands. Doubtless a number of them have been of laws that 
 were obsolete ; others have been demanded by changes of circum- 
 stances (though seeing how many of them are of quite recent 
 Acts, this has not been a large cause) ; others simply because they 
 wore inoperative ; and others have been consequent on the con- 
 solidations of numerous Acts into single Acts. But unques- 
 tionably in multitudinous cases, repeals came because the Acts 
 had proved injurious. We talk glibly of such changes — we think 
 of cancelled legislation with indifference. We forget that before 
 laws are abolished they have generally been inflicting evils 
 more or less serious ; some for a few years, some for tens of years, 
 snme for centuries. Change your vague idea of a bad law into a 
 definite idea of it as an agency operating on 2:»eople's lives, and 
 you. see that it means so much of pain, so much of illness, so 
 much of mortality. A vicious form of legal procedure, for example, 
 either enacted or tolerated, entails on suitors, costs, or delays, or 
 defeats. What do these imply ? Loss of money, often ill-spared ; 
 great and prolonged anxiety ; frequently consequent illness ; unhap- 
 ness of family and dependents; children stinted in food and 
 clothing — all of them miseries which bring after them multi- 
 plied remoter miseries. Add- to which there are the far more
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATOPtS. 51 
 
 Dumerons cases of those who, lacking the means or the courage to 
 enter on law-suits, and therefore submitting to frauds, are im- 
 poverished ; and have similarly to bear the pains of body and mind 
 which ensue. Even to say that a law has been simply a hindrance, 
 is to say that it has caused needless loss of time, extra trouble, and 
 additional worry ; and among over-burdened people extra trouble 
 and worry imply, here and there, break-downs in health with their 
 entailed direct and indirect sufferings. Seeing, then, that bad 
 legislation means injury to men's lives, jadge what must be the 
 total amount of mental distress, physical pain, and raised mortality, 
 which these thousands of repealed Acts of Parliament represent ! 
 Fully to bring home the truth that law-making unguided by ade- 
 quate knowledge brings immense evils, let me take a special case 
 which a question of the day recalls. 
 
 Already I have hinted that interferences with the connexion be- 
 tween supply and demand, given up in certain fields after immense- 
 mischiefs had been done during many centuries, are now taking 
 place in other fields. This connexion is supposed to hold only 
 where it has been proved to hold by the evils of disregarding it : 
 so feeble is men's belief in it. There seems no suspicion that in 
 cases where it seems to fail, natural causatioji has beeu^traversed by 
 artificial hindrances. And yet in the case to which I now refer — 
 that of the supply of houses for the poor — it needs but to ask what 
 laws have been doing for a long time past, to see that the terrible 
 evils complained of are mostly law-made. 
 
 A generation ago discussion was taking place concerning the in-- 
 adequacy and badness of industrial dwellings, and I had occasion 
 to deal wdth the question. Here is a passage then written : — 
 
 " An architect and surveyor describes it [the Building Act] as having 
 worked after the following manner. In those districts of London consist- 
 ing of inferior houses built in tliMt unsubstantial fashion which the New 
 Building Act was to mend, there obtains an average rent, sufficiently re- 
 munerative to landlords whose houses were run up economically before 
 the New Building Act passed. This existing average rent fixes the rent 
 that must be charged in these districts for new houses of the same accom- 
 modation — that is the same number of rooms, for the people they are built 
 for do not appreciate the extra safety of living within walls strengthened 
 with hoop-iron bond. Now it turns out upon trial, that houses built in 
 accordance with the present regulations, and let at this established rate, 
 bring in nothing like a reasonable return. Builders have consequently 
 
 £ 2
 
 62 TIIL: MAN VERS us THE STATE. 
 
 confined themselves to erecting houses in better districts (where the possi- 
 bility of a profitable competition with pre-existing houses shows that those 
 pre-existing houses were tolerably substantial), and have ceased to erect 
 dwellings for the masses, except in the suburbs where no pressing sanitary 
 evils exist. Meanwhile, in the inferior districts above described, has re- 
 sulted an increase of overcrowding — half-a-dozen families in a house, a 
 score lodgers to a room. Nay, more than this has resulted. That state of 
 miserable dilapidation into which these abodes of the poor are allowed to 
 fill, is due to the absence of competition from new houses. Landlords do 
 not find their tenants tempted away by the offer of better accommodation. 
 Eepairs, being unnecessary for securing the largest amount of profit, 
 
 *\ve not made In fact for a large percentage of the ver}'- 
 
 horrors which our sanitary agitators are trying to cure by law, we have to 
 thank previous agitators of the same school ! " — Social Statics, p. 384 
 (edition of 1851). 
 
 These were not the only law-made causes of such evils. As shown 
 in the following further passage, sundry others were recognized: — 
 
 " Writing before the repeal of the brick-duty, the Builder says : — ' It is 
 feupposed that one-fourth of the cost of a dwelling which lets for 25. Qid. or 
 3s. a week is caused by the expense of the title-deeds and the tax on wood 
 and bricks used in its construction. Of course, the owner of such property 
 must be remunerated, and he therefore charges 1\d. or Qd. a week to cover 
 these burdens.' Mr. C. Gatliff, secretary to the Society for Improving the 
 Dwellings of the Working Classes, describing the effect of the window-tax, 
 SLiys : — 'Tlieyare now paying upon their institution in St. Pancras the sum 
 of £162 165. in window-duties, or 1 per cent, per annum upon the original 
 outlay. The average rental paid by the Society's tenants is bs. Qd. per 
 week, and the window-duty deducts from this Tjd per week.' " — Times^ 
 January 31, 1850. — Social Statics, p, 385 (edition of 1851). 
 
 Kcither is this all the evidence which the press of those days 
 afrnrded. There was published in the Times of December 7, 1850 
 (too late to be used in the above-named work, which I issued in 
 the last week of 1850), a letter dated from the Reform Club, and 
 • "signed " Architect," which contained the following passages : — 
 
 ' Lord Kinnaird recommends in your paper of yesterday the construc- 
 hon of model lodging-houses by throwing two or three houses into one. 
 
 " Allow me to suggest to his Lordship, and to his friend Lord Ashley 
 -to whom he refers, that if, — 
 
 " 1. The window-tax were repealed, 
 
 " 2. The Building Act repealed (excepting the clauses enacting that 
 party and external walls shall be fireproof), 
 
 -** 3. The timber duties either equalized or repealed, and,
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 53 
 
 "4. An Act passed to facilitate the transfer of property, 
 "There would be no more necessity for model lodging-houMes than 
 there is for model ships, model cotton-mills, or model steam-engines. 
 " The first limits the poor man's house to seven windows, 
 "The second limits the size of the poor man's house to 25 feet by 18 
 (about the size of a gentleman's dining-room), into which space the builder 
 has to cram a staircase, an entrance-passage, a parlour, and a kitchen 
 (walls and partitions included). 
 
 " The third induces the builder to erect the poor man's house of timber 
 unfit for building purposes, the duty on the good material (Baltic) being 
 fifteen times more than the duty on the bad or injurious article (Cana- 
 dian). The Government, even, exclude the latter from all their contracts. 
 " The fourth would have considerable influence upon the present miser- 
 able state of the dwellings of the poor. Small freeholds might then be 
 transferred as easily as leaseholds. The efi'ect of building leases has 
 been a direct inducement to bad building." 
 
 To guard against mis-statement or over-statement, I have taken 
 the precaution to consult a large East-end builder and contractor 
 of forty years' experience, Mr. C. Forrest, Museum Works, 17, 
 Victoria Park Square, Bethnal Green, who, being churchwarden, 
 member of the vestry, and of the board of guardians, adds exten- 
 sive knowledge of local public affairs to his extensive knowledge of 
 the building business. Mr. Forrest, who authorizesjne to give Iciia 
 name, verifies the foregoing statements with the exception of one 
 which he strengthens. He says that " Architect " understates the 
 evil entailed by the definition of " a fourth-rate house ; " since the^ 
 dimensions are much less than those he gives (perhaps in con- 
 formity with the provisions of a more recent Building Act). Mr. 
 Forrest has done more than this. Besides illustrating the bad 
 effects of great increase in ground-rents (in sixty years from £1 to 
 £8 105. for a fourth-rate house) which, joined with other causes, 
 had obliged him to abandon plans for industrial dwellings he had 
 intended to build — besides agreeing with "Architect" that this 
 evil has been greatly increased by the difficulties of land-transfer due 
 to the law-established system of trusts and entails ; he pointed out 
 that a further penalty on the building of small houses is inflicted 
 by additions to local burdens ("prohibitory imposts" he called 
 them) : one of the instances he named being that to the cost of each 
 new house has to be added the cost of pavement, roadway and 
 sewerage, which is charged according to length of frontage, and
 
 54 THE MAN vehsus tiiE state. 
 
 ■which, consequently, bears a far larger ratio to the value of a gmall 
 house than to the value of a large one. 
 
 From these law-produced mischiefs, which were great a gene- 
 ration ago and have since been increasing, let us pass to more recent 
 iaw-produccd mischiefs. The misery, the disease, the mortality in 
 " rookeries," made continually worse by artificial impediments to 
 the increase of fourth-rate houses, and by the necessitated greater 
 crowding of those which existed, having become a scandal. Govern- 
 ment was invoked to remove the evil. It responded by Artisans' 
 Dwellings Acts ; giving to local authorities powers to pull down bad 
 houses and provide for the building of good ones. What have been 
 the results ? A summary of the operations of the Metropolitan 
 Board of Works, dated December 21, 1883, shows that up to last 
 September it had, at a cost of a million and a quarter to ratepayers, 
 unhoused 21,000 persons and provided houses for 12,000 — the 
 remaining 9,000 to be hereafter provided for, being, meanwhile, left 
 houseless. This is not all. Another local lieutenant of the Govern- 
 ment, the Commission of Sewers for the City, working on the same 
 lines, has, under legislative compulsion, pulled down in Golden Lan-e 
 and Petticoat Square, masses of condemned small houses, which, 
 together, accommodated 1,734 poor people ; and of the spaces thus 
 cleared five years ago, one has, by State-authority, been sold for a 
 railway station, and the other Is only now being covered with 
 industrial dwellings which will eventually accommodate one-half of 
 the expelled population : the result up to the present time being that, 
 added to those displaced by the Metropolitan Board of Works, these 
 1,734 displaced five years ago, form a total of nearly 11,000 arti- 
 ficially made homeless, who have had to find corners for themselves 
 in miserable places that were already overflowing ! 
 
 See then what legislation has done. By ill-imposed taxes, 
 raising the prices of bricks and timber, it added to the costs of 
 houses ; and prompted, for economy's sake, the use of bad materials 
 in scanty quantities. To check the consequent production of 
 wretched dwellings, it established regulations which, in mediaeval 
 fashion, dictated the quality of the commodity produced : there being- 
 no perception that by insisting on a higher quality and therefore 
 higher price, it would limit the demand and eventually diminish the 
 supply. By additional local burdens, legislation has of late still 
 further hindered the building of small houses. Finally, having, by 
 successive measures, produced first bad houses and then a deficiency
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLA.TORS. 65 
 
 of better ones, it has at length iDuovIded for the artificially-increased 
 overflow of poor people by diminishing the house-capacity which 
 already could not contain them ! 
 
 Where then lies the blame for the miseries of the East-end ? 
 Against whom should, be raised " the bitter cry of outcast 
 London ? " 
 
 The German anthropologist Bastian, tells us that a sick native 
 of Guinea w^ho causes the fetish to lie by not recovering, is 
 strangled ;* and we may reasonably suppose that among the Guinea 
 people, any one audacious enough to call in question the power of 
 the fetish would be promptly sacrificed. In days when govern- 
 mental authority was enforced by strong measures, there was a 
 kindred danger in saying anything disrespectful of the political 
 fetish. Nowadays, however, the worst punishment to be looked foi 
 by one who questions its omnipotence, is that he will be reviled as a 
 reactionary who talks laissez-faire. That any facts he may bring 
 forward will appreciably decrease the established faith is not to be 
 expected ; for we are daily shown tliat this faith is proof against all 
 adverse evidence. Let us contemplate a small part of that vast 
 mass of it which passes unheeded. 
 
 "A Government-office is like an inverted filteif: you send in 
 accounts clear and they come out muddy." Such was the com- 
 parison I heard made many years ago by the late Sir Charles Fox, 
 who, in the conduct of his business, had considerable experience of 
 public de'partments. That his opinion was not a singular one, 
 though his comparison was, all men know. Exposures by the press 
 and criticisms in Parliament, leave no one in ignorance of the 
 vices of red-tape routine. Its delays, perpetually complained of, 
 and which in the time of Mr. Fox Maule went to the extent that 
 *' the commissions of officers in the army " were generally " abou'i, 
 two years in arrear," is afresh illustrated by the issue of the tir&l 
 volume of the detailed census of 1881, more than two years after 
 the information was collected. If we seek explanations of such 
 delays, we find one origin to be a scarcely credible confusion. In 
 the case of the census returns, the Registrar- General tells us that 
 " the difficulty consists not merely in the vast multitude of different 
 areas that have to be taken into account, but still more in the 
 bewildering complexity of their boundaries : '* there being 39,000 
 * Mensch, iii. p. 225.
 
 56 THE MAN VEHSUS THE STATE. 
 
 administrative areas of twenty-two different kinds which oierlap 
 one another — hundreds, parishes, boroughs, wards, petty sessional 
 divisions, lieutenancy divisions, urban and rural sanitary districts^ 
 dioceses, registration districts, &c. And then, as Mr. Rathbone. 
 M.P., points out,* these many superposed sets of areas with inter- 
 secting boundaries, have their respective governing bodies with 
 authorities running into one another's districts. Does any one ask 
 •why for each additional administration Parliament has established 
 n fresh set of divisions ? The reply which suggests itself is — To 
 preserve consistency of method. For this organized confusion cor- 
 responds completely with that organized confusion which Parlia- 
 ment each year increases by throwiug on to the heap of its old Acts 
 a hundred new Acts, the provisions of which traverse and qualify 
 in all kinds of ways the provisions of multitudinous Acts on to 
 which they are thrown : the onus of settling what is the law being 
 lett to private persons, who lose their property in getting judges* 
 interpretations. And again, this system of putting networks of 
 districts over other networks, with their conflicting authorities, is 
 quite consistent with the method under which the reader of- the 
 Public Health Act of 1872, who wishes to know what are the 
 powers exercised over him, is referred to 2G preceding Acts of 
 several classes and numerous dates. f So, too, with administrative 
 inertia. Continually there occur cases showing the resistance of 
 officialism to improvements; as by the Admiralty when use of the 
 electric telegraph was proposed, and the reply was — '* We have a 
 very good semaphore system ; " or as by the Post Office, which the 
 late Sir Charles Siemens years ago said had obstructed the em- 
 ployment of improved methods of telegraphing, and which since 
 then has impeded the use of the telephone. Other cases akin to the 
 case ot industrial dwellings, now and then show how the State 
 with one hand increases evils which with the other iiand it tries to 
 diminish; as when it puts a duty on fire-insurances and then makes 
 regulations for the better putting out of fires : dictating, too, cer- 
 tain modes of construction, which, as Captain Shaw shows, entail 
 additional dangers.;}; Again, the absurdities of official routine, rigid 
 
 * T/ie Nineteenth Ceniuri;, February, 18S3. 
 
 t "Tlie Stat-stics ot' Legislation." By F. H. Janson, Esq., F.L.S., Vice- 
 president of the Incorporated Law Society. [Read before tlie Statistical Society, 
 May, 1873.] 
 
 X Fire Survei/s ; or, a Summary of the Principles to he observed in, Usti' 
 mating the Risk of Build in.gs.
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 57 
 
 where it need not be and lax where it should be rigid, occasionally 
 become glaring enough to cause scandals; as when a secret State- 
 document of importance, put into the hands of an ill-paid copying 
 clerk wlio was not even in permanent Government employ, was made 
 public by him ; or as when the mode of making the Moorsom fusc» 
 which was kept secret even from our highest artillery officers, wns 
 taught to them by the Russians, who had been allowed to learn it ; 
 or as when a diagram showing the " distances at w^hich British and 
 foreign iron-clads could be perforated by our large guns," communi- 
 cated by an enterjDrisIng attache to his own Government, then 
 became known " to all the Governments of Europe," while Englisli 
 officers remained ignorant of the facts.* So, too, with State- super- 
 vision. Guaranteeing of quality by inspection has been shown, in 
 the hall-marking of silver, to be superfluous, while the silver trade 
 has been decreased by it;t and in other cases it has lowered the 
 quality by establishing a standard which it is useless to exceed : 
 instance the case of the Cork butter-market, where the hifjher 
 kinds are disadvantaged in not adequately profiting by their better 
 repute ; X ov, instance the case of herring-branding (now optiona') 
 the effect of w^hich is to put the many inferior curers who just 
 reach the level of official approval, on a par with the few^ better 
 ones who rise above it, and so to discourage these. But such 
 lessons pass unlearned. Even where the failure of inspection is 
 most glaring, no notice is taken of it; as instance the terrible 
 catastrophe by which a train full of people was destroyed along 
 with the Tay bridge. Countless denunciations, loud and unsparing, 
 were vented against engineer and contractor ; but little, if any- 
 thing, was said about the Government officer from whom the bridge 
 received State-approval. So, too, with prevention of disease. It 
 matters not that under the management or dictation of State- 
 agents some of the worst evils occur ; as when the lives of 87 wives 
 and children of soldiers are sacrificed in the ship Accrington ; ^ 
 or as when typhoid fever and diphtheria are diffused by a State- 
 ordered drainage system, as in Edinburgh ; || or as when officially- 
 
 • See Times, October 0, 1874, where otiier instances arc given. 
 
 t T^ s Stale in its Relation to Trade, by Sir Thomas Fai'rer, p. 147. 
 
 X ibid., p. 149. § Hansard, vol. clvi, p. 718, and vol. clvii. p. 4464. 
 
 II Letter of an Edinburgh M.D. in Times of 17th January, 187G, verifying 
 other testimonies ; one of which I had previously cited eoneerni'g Windsor, 
 wliere, as in Edinburgh, there was absolutely no tvplioid in tiie vmdiained parts, 
 while il was verj latal in the drained parts. — Study of Sociolojij, chap, i , notes.
 
 58 THE MAN VEESUS THE STATE. 
 
 enforced sanitary appliances, ever getting out of order, increase 
 ihe evils they were to decrease.* Masses of such evidence leave 
 unabated the confidence with which sanitary inspection is invoked 
 — invoked, indeed, more than ever ; as is shown in the recent 
 suggestion that all public schools should be under the supervision 
 of health- oflBcers. Nay, even when the State has manifestly caused 
 tlie mischief complained of, faith in its beneficent agency is not at 
 all diminished ; as we see in the fact that, havins: a generation ago 
 authorized, or rather required, towns to establish drainage systems 
 Avhich delivered sewage into the rivers, and having thus polluted 
 the sources of water-supply, an outcry was raised against the 
 water-companies for the impurities of their water — an outcry 
 which continued after these towns had been compelled, at vast 
 extra cost, to revolutionize their drainage systems And now, as the 
 only remedy, there follows the demand that the State, by its local 
 proxies, shall undertake the whole business. The State's 
 misdoings become, as in the case of industrial dwellings, reasons 
 for praying it to do more. 
 
 This worship of the legislature is, in one respect, indeed, less 
 excusable than the fetish- worship to which I have tacitly compared 
 it. The savage has the defence that his fetish is silent — does not 
 confess its inability. But the civilized man persists in ascribing to 
 this idol made with his own hands, powers which in one way or 
 other it confesses it has net got. I do not mean merely that the 
 debates daily tell us of legislative measures which have done evil 
 instead of good; nor do I mean merely that the thousands of Acts 
 of Parliament which repeal preceding Acts, are so many tacit 
 admissions of failuie. Neither do I refer only to such quasi- 
 governmental confessions as that contained in the report of the 
 Poor Law Commissioners, who said that — " We find, on the one 
 hand, that there is scarcely one statute connected with the adminis- 
 tration of public relief which has produced the effect designed by 
 the legislature, and that the majority of them have created new 
 evils, and aggravated those which they were intended to prevent. "f 
 1 refer rather to confessions made by statesmen, and by State-depart- 
 
 * I say this partly from personal knowledge ; having now before me 
 memoranda made 25 yca's ago concenung such results produced under my own 
 observation. Verifying facts have recently been given by Sir Richard Cross iis 
 the Nineteenth Century for January, 1881, p. 155. 
 
 t Nicholl's History of Enylish I'uor Law, ii. p. 252.
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 59 
 
 ments. Here, for example, in a memorial addressed to Mr. Glad- 
 stone, and adopted by a highly-influential meeting held under the 
 chairmanship of the late Lord Lyttelton, I read : — 
 
 "We, the undersigned, Peers, Members of the House of Commons, 
 Ratepayers, and Inhabitants of the Metropolis, feeling strongly the truth 
 and force of your statement made in the House of Commons, in 1866, 
 that, ' there is still a lamentable and deplorable state of our whole arrange- 
 ments, with regard to public works — vacillation, uncertainty, costliness, 
 extravagance, meanness, and all the conflicting vices that could be 
 enumerated, are united in our present system,' " &c,, &c."^ 
 
 Here, again, is an example furnished by a recent minute of the 
 Board of Trade (November, 1883), in which it is said that since 
 " the Shipwreck Committee of 1836 scarcely a session has passed 
 without some Act being passed or some step being taken by the 
 legislature or the Government with this object " [prevention of 
 shipwrecks] ; and that " the multiplicity of statutes, Avhich were 
 all consolidated into one Act in 185i, has again become a scandal 
 and a reproach : " each measure being passed because previous ones 
 had failed. And then comes presently the confession that " the 
 loss of life and of ships has been greater since 1876 than it ever 
 was before." Meanwhile, the cost of administration has been 
 raised from £17,0G0 a year to £73,000 a year.f 
 
 It is surprising how, spite of better knowledge, the imagination 
 is excited by artificial appliances used in particular ways. We see 
 it all through human history, from the war-paint with which the 
 savage frightens his adversary, down through religious ceremonies 
 and regal processions, to the robes of a Speaker and the wand of 
 an officially- dressed usher. I remember a child who, able to look 
 with tolerable composure on a horrible cadaverous mask while it 
 was held in the hand, ran away shrieking when his father put it 
 on. A kindred change of feeling comes over constituencies when, 
 from boroughs and counties, their members pass to the Legislative 
 Chamber. While before them as candidates, they are, by one or 
 other party, jeered ar, lampooned, "heckled," and in all ways 
 
 * See Times, March 31, 1873. 
 
 t In these paragraplis are contained just a few additional examples. Num- 
 bers which I hare before given in books and essays, will be found in Social 
 Statics (1851); "Over-Legislation" (1853); " Kepresentative Government" 
 (1857); "Specialized Administration" (1871); Studi/ of Social o(/i/ (1873), and 
 Postscript to ditto (1880) ; besidei cases in smaller essays.
 
 60 THE MAX VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 treated with utter disrespect. But as soon as they assemble at 
 Westminster, those against whom taunts and invectives, charn^es 
 of incompetence and folly, had been showered from press and 
 platform, excite unlimited faith. Judging from the prayers made 
 to them, there is nothing which their wisdom and their power 
 cannot compass. 
 
 The reply to all this will doubtless be that nothing better than 
 guidance by " collective wisdom " can be had — that the select men 
 of the nation, led by a re-selected few, bring their best powers, 
 enlightened by all the knowledge of the time, to bear on the matters 
 before them. " What more would you have ? " will be the question 
 asked by most. 
 
 M}' answer is that this bsst knowledge of the time with which 
 legislators are said to come prepared for their duties, is a know- 
 ledge of which the greater part is obviously irrelevant, and that 
 they are blameworthy for not seeing what is the relevant know- 
 ledge. No amount of the linguistic acquirements by which many 
 of them are distinguished will help their judgments in the least; 
 nor will they be appreciably helped by the literatures these acquire- 
 ments open to them. Political experiences and speculations coming 
 from small ancient societies, through philosophers who assume that 
 war is the normal state, that slavery is alike needful and just, and 
 that women must remain in jD^rpetual tutelage, can yield them but 
 small aid in judging how Acts of Parliament will work in great 
 nations of modern types. They may ponder on the doings of all 
 the great men by whom, according to the Carlylean theory-, society 
 is framed, and they may spend years over those accounts of inter- 
 national conflicts, and treacheries, and intrigues, and treaties, which 
 fill historical works, without being much nearer understanding the 
 how and the why of social structures and actions, and the ways in 
 which laws affect them. Nor does such information as is picked up 
 at the factory, on 'Change, or in the justice lOom, go far towards 
 the required preparation. 
 
 That which is really needed is a systematic study of natural 
 causation as displayed among human beings socially aggregated. 
 Though a distinct consciousness of causation is the last trait which 
 intellectual progress brings — though Avith the savage a simple 
 mechanical cause is not conceived as such — though even among the 
 Greeks the flight of a spear was thought of as guided by a god —
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 61 
 
 fcliough iroTTi tlieir times clown almost to our own, epidemics 
 iifive been habitually regarded as of supernatural origin — and 
 though among social phenomena, the most complex of all, causal 
 relations may be expected to continue longest unrecognized ; yet in 
 our days, the existence of such causal relations has become clear 
 enough to force on all who think, the inference that before meddling 
 Avith them they should be diligently studied. The mere facts, now 
 familiar, that there is a connexion between the numbers of births, 
 <leaths, and marriages, and the price of corn, and that in the same 
 /society during the same generation, the ratio of crime to popula- 
 tion varies within narrow limits, should be sufficient to make all see 
 that human desires, using as guide such intellect as is joined with 
 them, act with approximate uniformity. It should be inferred that 
 among social causes, those initiated by legislation, similarly 
 operating with an average regularity, must not only change men's 
 actions, but, by consequence, change their natures — probably in 
 ways not intended. There should be recognition of the fact that 
 social causation, more than all other causation, is a fructifying 
 causation ; and it should be seen that indirect and remote effects are 
 no less inevitable than proximate eifects. I do not mean that there 
 is denial of these statements and inferences. But there are beliefs 
 and beliefs — some which are held nominally, some which influence 
 conduct in small degrees, some which sway it irresislibly under all 
 circumstances ; and unhappily the beliefs of law-makers respecting 
 causation in social affairs, are of the superficial sort. Let us look 
 at some of the truths which all tacitly admit, but which scarcely 
 any take deliberate account of in legislation. 
 
 There is the indisputable fact that each human being is in a 
 certain degree modifiable both physically and mentally. Every 
 theory of education, every discipline, from that of the arithmetician 
 to that of the prize-fighter, every proposed reward for virtue or 
 punishment for vice, implies the belief, embodied in sundry proverbs, 
 that the use or disuse of each faculty, bodily or mental, is followed 
 by an adaptive change in it — loss of power or gain of power, accord- 
 ing to demand. 
 
 There is the fact, also in its broader manifestations universally 
 recognized, that modifications of Nature in one way or other produced, 
 are inheritable. No one denies that by the accumulation of small 
 changes, generation after generation, constitution fits itself to condi- 
 tions ; so that a climate which is fatal to other races is innocuous to
 
 62 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 the adapted race. No one denies that peoples who belong to the 
 same original stock but have spread into ditfnrcnt habitats where 
 they have led different lives, have acquired in course of time 
 different aptitudes and different tendencies. No one denies that 
 under new conditions new national characters are even now being 
 moulded ; as witness the Americans. And if no one denies a 
 process of adaptation everywhere and always going on, it is a 
 manifest implication that adaptive modifications must be set up by 
 every change of social conditions. 
 
 To which there comes the undeniable corollary that every law 
 which serves to alter men's modes of action — compelling, or restrain- 
 ing, or aiding, in new ways — so affects them as to cause in course 
 of time adjustments of their natures. Beyond any immediate 
 effect wrought, there is the remote effect, wholly ignored by most — 
 a re-moulding of the average character : a re-moulding which may 
 be of a desirable kind or of an undesirable kind, but which in any 
 case is the most important of the results to be considered. 
 
 Other general truths which the citizen, and still more the 
 legislator, ought to contemplate until they become wrought into his 
 intellectual fabric, aie disclosed when we ask how social activities 
 are produced; and when we recognize the obvious answer that they 
 are the aggregate results of the desires of individuals who are 
 severally seeking satisfactions, and ordinarily pursuing the ways 
 which, with their pre-existing habits and thoughts, seem the 
 easiest — following the lines of least resistance : the truths of 
 political economy being so many sequences. It needs no proving 
 that social structures and social actions must in some way or other 
 be the outcome of human emotions guided by ideas — either those 
 of ancestors or those of living men. And that the right interpre- 
 tation of social phenomena is to be found in the co-operation of 
 these factors from generation to generation, follows inevitably. 
 
 Such an interpretation soon brings ns to the inference that of 
 the aggregate results of men's desires seeking their gratifications, 
 those which have prompted their private activities and their spon- 
 taneous co-operations, have done much more towards social 
 development than those which have worked through governmental 
 agencies. That abundant crops now grow where once only wild 
 berries could be gathered, is due to the pursuit of individual sr.tis- 
 factions through many centuries. The progress from wigwams to 
 good houses has resulted from wishes to inciease personal welfare ;
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 63 
 
 and towns have arisen under the like promptings. Beginning with 
 traflBc at gatherings on occasions of religious festivals, the trading 
 organization, now so extensive and complex, has been produced 
 entirely by men's efforts to achieve their private ends. Perpetually 
 Governments have thwarted and deranged the growth, but have in 
 no way furthered it; save by partially discharging their proper 
 function and maintaining social order. So, too, with those advances 
 of knowledge and those improvements of appliances, by which 
 these structural changes and these increasing activities have been 
 made possible. It is not to the State that we owe the multitudinous 
 useful inventions from the spade to the telephone ; it was not the 
 State which made possible extended navigation by a developed 
 astronomy ; it was not the State which made the discoveries in 
 physics, chemistry, and the rest, which guide modern manufacturers ; 
 it was not the State which devised the machinery for producing 
 fabrics of every kind, for transferring men and things from place to 
 place, and for ministering in a thousand ways to our comforts. The 
 world-wide transactions conducted in merchant's offices, the rush 
 of traffic filling our streets, the retail distribating system which 
 brings everything within easy reach and delivers the necessaries of 
 life daily at our doors, are not of governmental origin. All these 
 are results of the spontaneous activities of citizens, separate or 
 grouped. Nay, to these spontaneous activities Governments owe 
 the very means of performing their duties. Divest the political 
 machinery of all those aids which Science and Art have yielded 
 it — leave it with those only which State-officials have invented ; 
 and its functions would cease. The very language in which its 
 laws are registered and the orders of its agents daily given, is 
 nn instrument not in the remotest degree due to the legislator ; 
 but is one which has unawares grown up during men's inter- 
 course while pursuing their personal satisfactions. 
 
 And then a truth to which the foregoing one introduces us, is 
 that this spontaneously-formed social organization is so bound 
 together that you cannot act on one part without acting more or 
 less on all parts. We see this unmistakably when a cotton-famine, 
 first paralyzing certain manufacturing districts and then affecting 
 the doings of wholesale and retail distributors throughout the 
 kingdom, as well as the people they supply, goes on to affect the 
 makers and distributors, as well as the wearers, of other fabrics — • 
 woollen, linen, &c. Or we see it when a rise in the price of
 
 64 Tin: MA.s" VEnsu6' the state. 
 
 coal, brsic^es influencing domestic life everywhere, In'ndcrs tlie 
 greater part of our industries, raises the prices of the commodities 
 produced, alters the consumjDtion of them, and changes the habits 
 of consumers. What we see cle<arljin these marked cases happens 
 in every case, in sensible or in insensible ways. And manifestly, 
 Acts of Parliament are among those factors which, beyond the 
 elrects directly produced, have countless other effects of multi- 
 tudinous kinds. As I heardremarkedby a distinguished professor, 
 whose studies give ample means of judging — " When once you 
 bosrin to interfere with the order of Nature there is no knowinf? 
 v.'here the results will end." And if this is true of that sub- 
 human order of Nature to which he referred, still more is it true 
 of that order of Nature existing in the social arrangements pro- 
 duced by aggregated human beings. 
 
 And now to carry home the conclusion that the legislator should 
 bring to his business a vivid consciousness of these and other sucn 
 broad truths concerning the human society with which he proposes 
 to deal, let me present somewhat more fully one of them not yot 
 mentioned. 
 
 The continuance of every higher species of creature depends on 
 conformity, now to one, now to the other, of two radicall^'-opposed 
 principles. The early lives of its members, and the adult lives of 
 its members, have to be dealt with in contrary ways. We will 
 contemplate them in their natural order. 
 
 One of the most familiar facts is that animals of superior types, 
 comparatively slow in reaching maturity, are enabled when they 
 have reached it, to give more aid to their offspring than animals of 
 inferior types. The adults foster their young during periods more 
 or less prolonged, while yet the young are unable to provide for 
 themselves ; and it is obvious that maintenance of the sp?cies can 
 be secured only by a parental care adjusted to the need consequent 
 on imperfection. It requires no proving that the blind uniiedged 
 hedge-bird, or the young puppy even after it has acquired sight, 
 would forthwith die if it had to keep itself warm and obtain its 
 own food. The gratuitous parental aid must be great in propor- 
 tion as the young one is of little worth, either to itself or to others; 
 and it may di-minish as fast as, by increasing development, the 
 young one acquires worth, at first for self-sustentation, and by-and- 
 by for suiitcntution of others. That is to say, during immaturity,
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 65 
 
 benefits received must be inversely as the power or ability o£ tlie 
 receiver. Clearly if during this first part of life benefits were 
 proportioned to merits, or rewards to deserts, the species would 
 -disappear in a generation. 
 
 From this regime of the family-group, let us turn to ihc regime 
 of that larger group formed by the adult members of the species. 
 Ask what happens when the new individual, acquiring complete 
 use of its powers and ceasing to have parental aid, is left to itself. 
 ]Sow there comes into play a principle just the reverse of that 
 nbove described. Throughout the rest of its life, each adult gets 
 benefit in proportion to merit — reward in proportion to desert: 
 merit and desert in each case being understood as ability to fulfil 
 all the requirements of life — to get food, to secure shelter, to 
 escape enemies. Placed in competition with members of its own 
 species and in antagonism with members of other species, it 
 dwindles and gets killed off, or thrives and propagates, according 
 as it is ill-endowed or well-endowed. Manifestly an opposite 
 regime, could it be maintained, would, in course of time, be fatal 
 to the species. If the benefits received by each individual were 
 proportionate to its inferiority — if, as a consequence, multiplica- 
 tion of the inferior was furthered and multiplication of the supe- 
 rior hindered, progressive degradation would result; and eventually 
 the degenerate species would fail to hold its ground in presence 
 of antagonistic species and competing species. 
 
 The broad fact then, here to be noted, is that Nature's modes 
 of treatment inside the family-group and outside the family-group 
 are diametrically opposed to one another ; and that the intrusion 
 of either mode into the sphere of the other, would be fatal to the 
 species either immediately or remotely. 
 
 Does ftny one think that the like does not hold of the human 
 species? He cannot deny that within the human family, as within 
 any inferior family, it would be fatal to proportion benefits to 
 merits. Can he assert that outside the family, among adults, there 
 should not be a proportioning of benefits to merits ? Will he con- 
 tend that no mischief will result if the lowly endowed are enabled 
 to thrive and multiply as much as, or more than, the highly 
 endowed ? A society of men, standing towards other societies in 
 relations of either antagonism or competition, may be considered 
 as a species, or, more litei.'ally, as a vax-iety of a species; and it must 
 be true of it as of otner species or varieties, that it "•ivill be anab?e 
 
 9
 
 66 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 to hold its own in the struii^G^'c with other societies, if it disad- 
 vantages its superior units tl'.'it it may advantage its inferior units. 
 Surely none can fail to see that were the principle of family life to 
 be adopted and fully carried out in social life — were reward always 
 great in proportion as desert was small, fatal results to the society 
 would quickly follow; and if so, then even a partial intrusion of 
 the family rejinw into the regime of the State, will be slowly fol- 
 lowed by fatal results. Society in its corporate capacity, cannot 
 without immediate or remoter disaster interfere with the play of 
 these opposed principles under which every species has reached 
 such fitness for its mode of life as it possesses, and under which it 
 niaint-tins that fitness. 
 
 I say advisedly — society in its corporate capacity: not intending 
 to exclude or condemn aid given to the inferior by the superior in 
 their individual capacities. Though when given so indiscriminately 
 as to enable the inferior to multiply, such aid entails mischief ; yet 
 in the absence of aid given by society, individual aid, more gene- 
 rally demanded than now, and associated with a greater sense of 
 responsibility, would, on the average, be given with the effect of 
 fostering the unfortunate worthy rather than the innately un- 
 worthy : there being always, too, the concomitant social benefit 
 arising from culture of the sympathies. But all this may be 
 admitted while asserting that the radical distinction between 
 family-ethics and State-ethics must be maintained ; and that while 
 generosity must be the essential principle of the one, justice must 
 be the essential principle of the other — a rigorous maintenance of 
 those normal relations among citizens under which each gets in 
 return for his labour, skilled or unskilled, bodily or mental, as 
 much as is proved to be its value by the demand for it : such 
 return, therefore, as will enable him to thrive and rear offspring in 
 proportion to the superiorities which make him valuable to himself 
 and others. 
 
 And yet, notwithstanding the conspicuousness of these t^'uths, 
 which should strike every one who leaves his lexicons, and his law- 
 deeds, and his ledgers, and looks abroad into that natural order of 
 things under which we exist, and to which we must conform, there 
 is continual advocacy of paternal government. The intrusion of 
 family-ethics into the ethics of the State, instead of being regarded 
 as socially injurious, is more and more demanded as the only 
 efficient means to social benefit. So far has this delusion now gone,
 
 THE SIXS OF LEGTSLATOKS. 67 
 
 tliat it vitiates tlie beliefs of those who might, more than all others, 
 be thought safe from it. In the essay to which the Cobden Club 
 rewarded its prize in 1880, there occurs the assertion that " the 
 t ruth of Free Trade is clouded over by the laissez-faire fallacy ;" 
 find we are told that " wc need a great deal more paternal govern- 
 ment — that bugbear of the old economists."* 
 
 Vitally important as is the truth above insisted upon, since- 
 acceptance or rejection of it affects the entire fabric of political' 
 conclusions formed, I may be excused if I emphasize it by here- 
 quoting certain passages contained in a work I published in 1851 : 
 ])remising, only, that the reader must not hold me committed to 
 such teleological implications as they contain. After describing 
 "that state of universal warfare maintained throughout the lower- 
 creation,*' and showing that an average of benefit results from it, I 
 have continued thus : — 
 
 ''Note further, that their carnivorous enemies not only remove from 
 herbivorous herds individuals past their prime, but also weed out the 
 sickly, the malformed, and the least fleet or powerful. By the aid of 
 which purifying process, as v.^ell as by the fighting so universal in the- 
 pairing season, all vitiation of the race through the multiplication of its 
 inferior samples is prevented ; and the maintenance of a constitution com- 
 pletely adapted to surrounding conditions, and therefore most productive- 
 of happiness, is ensured. 
 
 " The development of the higher creation is a progress towards a form . 
 of being capable of a happiness undiminished by these drawbacks. It is 
 in the human race that the consummation is to be accomplished. Civili- 
 zation is the last stage of its accomplishment. And the ideal man is the- 
 man in whom all the conditions of that accomplishment are fulfilled. 
 Meanwhile, the well-being of existing humanity, and the unfolding of it 
 into this ultimate perfection, are both secured by that same beneficient, 
 though severe discipline, to which the animate creation at larg(' is subject : 
 a discipline which is pitiless in the working out of good : a felicily-pursuing 
 law which never swerves for the avoidance of partial and temporary suf- 
 fering. The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the 
 imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the 
 weak by the strong, which leave so many ' in shallows and in miseries,' are 
 the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence." 
 
 ** To become fit for the social state, man has not only to lose his saviigeness, 
 
 * On the Value of Political Economy to Mankind. 'Bj A. N. Gumming, 
 pp. 47, 4S. 
 
 S 2
 
 68 THE MAN VEP^US THE STATE. 
 
 but he Laa to acquire the capacities needful for civilized life. Powor o! 
 application must be developed ; such modification of the intellect as shall 
 qualify it for its new tasks must take place ; and, above all, there must 
 be gained the ability to sacrifice a small immediate gratification for a 
 future great one. The state of transition will of course be an unhappy 
 state. Misery inevitably results from incongruity between constitution 
 and conditions. All these evils which afflict us, and seem to the uninitiated 
 the obvious consequences of this or that removable cause, are unavoidable 
 attendants on the adaptation now in progress. Humanity is being pressea 
 against the inexorable necessities of its new position — is being moulded 
 into harmony with them, and has to bear the resulting unhappiness as 
 ^est it can. The process must be undergone, and the sufferings must bo 
 •endured. No power on earth, no cunningly-devised laws of statesmen, no 
 world-rectifying schemes of the humane, no communist panaceas, no 
 reforms that men ever did broach or ever will broach, can diminish them 
 one jot. Intensified they may be, and are ; and in preventing their inten- 
 .sification, the philanthropic will find ample scope for exertion. But there 
 is bound up with the change a normal amount of suffering, which cannot 
 lit: lessened without altering the very laws of life." 
 
 " Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the 
 ■spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be 
 mitigated : albeit there is unquestionably harm done when sympathy u 
 shown, without any regard to ultimate results. But the drawbacks hence 
 .arising are nothing like commensurate with the benefits otherwise con- 
 ferred. Only when this sympathy prompts to a breach of equity — only 
 when it originates an interference forbidden by the law of equal freedom 
 — only when, by so doing, it suspends in some particular department of 
 life the relationship between constitution and conditions, does it work 
 pure evil. Theu, however, it defeats its own end. Instead of diminishing 
 eufi'ering, it eventually increases it. It favours the multiplication of those 
 worst fitted for existence, and, by consequence, hinders the multiplication 
 of those best fitted for existence — leaving, as it does, less room for them. 
 It tends to fill the w orld with those to whom life will bring most pain, and 
 tends to keep out of it those to whom life will bring most pleasure. It 
 inflicts positive misery, and prevents positive happiness." — Social SiaticSy 
 pp. 322-5 and pp. 380-1 (edition of 1851). 
 
 The lapse of a third of a century since these passages were pub- 
 lished, has brought me no reason for retreating from the position 
 taken up in them. Contrariwise, it has brought a vast amount of 
 evidence strengthening that position. The beneficial results of the 
 Bnrvival of the fittest, prove to be immeasurably greater than those 
 cbovG indicated. The process of "natural selection," as Mr. Darwin
 
 HIE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 69 
 
 called it, co-operating with a tendency to variation and to inheri- 
 tance of variations, he has shown to be a chief canse (though not, 
 I believe, the sole cause) of that evolution through which all living 
 things, beginning with the lowest and diverging and re-diverging 
 as they evolved, have reached their present degrees of organization 
 and adaptation to their modes of life. So familiar has this trath 
 become that some apology seems needed for naming it. And yet, 
 strange to say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated 
 people — now that the beneficent working of the survival of the 
 fittest has been so impressed on them that, much more than people 
 in past times, they might be expected to hesitate before neutralizing 
 its action — now more than ever before in the history of the world, 
 are they doing all they can to further survival of the unfittest ! 
 
 But the postulate that men are rational beings, continually leads 
 one to draw inferences which prove to be extremely wide of the 
 mark.* 
 
 " Yes truly ; your principle is derived from the lives of brutei?,- 
 and is a brutal principle. You will not persuade me that men are- 
 to be under the discipline which animals are under. I care nothing 
 for your natural-history arguments. My conscience shows me that 
 the feeble and the suffering must be helped; and if.selfish people 
 won't help them, they must be forced by law to help them. Don't 
 tell me that the milk of human kindness is to be reserved for the 
 relations between individuals, and that Governments must be the 
 administrators of nothing but hard justice. Every man with 
 
 * The saying of Emerson that most people can understand a principle only 
 when its light falls on a fact, induces me here to cite a fact Avhich may carry 
 home the above principle to those on whom, in its abstract form, it will produce no 
 effect. It rarely happens that the amount of evil caused by fostering the vicious 
 and good-for-nothing can be estimated. But in America, at a meeting of the 
 States Charities Aid Association, held on December 18, 1874, a starthng instance 
 was given in detail by Dr. Harris. It was furnished by a county on the Upper 
 Hudson, remarkable for the ratio of crime and poverty to population. G-ene- 
 rations ago there had existei a certain " gutter-child," as she would be here called^ 
 known as " Margaret," who proved to be the prolific niotlier of a prolific race. 
 Besides great numbers of idiots, imbeciles, drunkards, lunatics, paupers, and pros- 
 titutes, " the county records show two hundred of her descendants who have 
 been criminals." Was it kindness or cruelty which, generation after generation,, 
 enabled these to rauliply and become an increasing curse to the society around 
 them ? [For particulars see The Juices : a Study in Crime, Pauperism, Bin' 
 fuse and Rereaifij. By R. L. Dugdale. New York : Putnams.l
 
 70 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 sympathy in him must feel that hunger and pain and squalor must 
 be prevented ; .ind that if private agencies do not suffice, then public 
 agencies must be established." 
 
 Such is the kind of response which I expect to be made by nine 
 out of ten. In some of them it will doubtless result from a fellow- 
 feeling so acute that they cannot contemplate human misery 
 without an impatience which excludes all thought of remote 
 results. Concerning the susceptibilities of the rest, wc may, how- 
 ever, be somewhat sceptical. Persons who, now in this case and 
 now in that, are angry if, to maintain our supposed national "in- 
 terests " or national '^jjvcstvje,'' those in authority do not promptly 
 send out some thousands of men to be partially destroyed while 
 destroying other thousands of men whose intentions we suspect, or 
 whose institutions we think dangerous to us, or whose territory our 
 colonis!s want, cannot after all be so tender in feeling that contem- 
 plating the hardships of the poor is intolerable to them. Little 
 admiration need be felt for the professed sympathies of people who 
 urge on a jDolicy which breaks up progressing societies ; and who 
 then look on with cynical indifference at the weltering confusion 
 left behind, with all its entailed suffering and death. Those who, 
 when Boers asserting their independence successfully resisted us, 
 were angry because British "honour "was not maintained by fight- 
 ing to avenge a defeat, at the cost of more mortality and misery to 
 •our own soldiers and their antagonists, cannot have so much " en- 
 thusiasm of humanity " as protests like that indicated above would 
 lead one to expect. Indeed, along with this sensitiveness which they 
 profess will not let them look with patience on the pains or "the 
 battle of life " as it quietly goes on around, they appear to have a 
 ^callousness which not only tolerates but enjoys contemplating the 
 pains of battles of the literal kind ; as one sees in the demand for 
 illustrated papers containing scenes of carnage, and in the greedi- 
 ness with which detailed accounts of bloody engagements are read. 
 We may reasonably have our doubts about men whose feelings are 
 Buch that they cannot bear the thought of hardships borne, mostly 
 by the idle and the improvident, and who, nevertheless, have de- 
 manded thirty-one editions of "The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the 
 World," in which they may revel in accouni s of slaughter. Nay, even 
 still more remarkable is the contrast between the professed tender- 
 heartedness and the actual hard-heui'tedness of those who would 
 reverse the normal course of things that immediate niiscriea may
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 71 
 
 be prevented, even at the cost of greater miseries heieafter pro- 
 duced. For on other occasions you may hear them, with utter dis- 
 regard of bloodshed and death, contend that in the interests of 
 humanity at large it is well that the inferior races should be ex- 
 terminated and their places occupied by the superior races. So 
 that, marvellous to relate, though they cannot think with calmness 
 of the evils accompanying the struggle for existence as it is carried 
 on without violence among individuals in their own society, they 
 contemplate with contented equanimity such evils in their intense 
 und wholesale forms, when inflicted by fire and sword on entire 
 communities. Not worthy of luuch respect then, as it seems to me, 
 is this generous consideration of the inferior at home which is 
 accompanied by unscrupulous sacrifice of the inferior abroad. 
 
 Still less respectable appears this extreme concern for those of 
 our own blood which goes along with utter unconcern for those 
 of other blood, when we observe its methods. Did it prompt per- 
 sonal effort to relieve the suffering, it would rightly receive approv- 
 ing recognition. Were the many who express this cheap pity like 
 the few who patiently, week after week and year after year, devote 
 large parts of their time to helping and encouraging, and occasion- 
 ally amusing, those who, in some cases by ill-fortnne and in other 
 cases by incapacity or misconduct, are brought to lives of 
 hardship, they would be worthy of unqualified admiration. The 
 more there are of men and women who help the poor to hel.) 
 themselves — the more there are of those whose sympathy is 
 exhibited directly and not by proxy, the more we may rejoice, 
 But the immense majority of the persons who wish to mitigate by 
 law the miseries of the unsuccessful and the reckless, propose to 
 do this in small measure at their own cost and mainly at the cost 
 of others — sometimes with their assent but mostly without. 
 More than this is true ; for those who are to be forced to do so 
 much for the distressed, often equally or more require something 
 doing for them. The deserving poor are among those who arc 
 burdened to pay the costs of caring for the undeserving poor. As, 
 under the old Poor Law, the diligent and provident labourer had 
 to pay that the good-for-nothings might not suffer, until 
 frequently under this extra burden he broke down and himself 
 took refuge in the workhouse — as, at present, it is admitted that 
 the total rates levied in large towns for all public purposes, have 
 Qow reached such a height that they " canuofc be exceeded
 
 72 THE MAN VE12SUS THE STATF.. 
 
 without infllctinf^ great hardship on the small shopkeepers acd 
 artisans, who already find it diliicult enoui^h to keep themselves 
 free from the pauper taint;"* so in all cases, the policy is one 
 which intensifies the pains of those most deserving of pity, that 
 the pains of those least deserving of pity may be mitigated. In 
 short, men who are so sympathetic that they cannot allow the 
 struggle for existence to bring on the unworthy the sufferings 
 consequent on their incapacity or misconduct, are so un- 
 sympathetic that they can, without hesitation, make the struggle 
 for existence harder for the Avorthy, and infl.ict on them and their 
 children artificial evils in addition to the natural evils they have 
 to bear ! 
 
 And here we are brought round to our original topic — the sins 
 of legislators. Here there comes clearly before us the commonest of 
 the transgressions which rulers commit — a transgression so common, 
 and so sanctified by custom, that no one imagines it to be a trans- 
 gression. Here we see that, as indicated at the outset, Government, 
 begotten of aggression and by aggression, ever continues to betray 
 its original nature by its aggressiveness ; and that even what on 
 its nearer face seems beneficence only, shows, on its remoter face, 
 not a little maleficence — kindness at the cost of cruelty. For is it 
 not cruel to increase the sufferings of the better that the sufferings 
 of the worse may be decreased ? 
 
 It is, indeed, marvellous how readily we let ourselves be deceived 
 by words and phrases which suggest one aspect of the facts while 
 leaving the opposite aspect nnsuggested. A good illustration of 
 this, and one germane to the immediate question, is seen in the use 
 of the words " protection " and " protectionist " by the antagonists 
 of free-trade, and in the tacit admission of its propriety by free- 
 traders. While the one party has habitually ignored, the other 
 party has habitually failed to emphasize, the truth that this so- 
 called protection always involves aggression ; and that the name 
 aggressionist ought to be substituted for the name protectionist. 
 For nothing can be more certain than that if, to maintain A's 
 pro6t, B is forbidden to buy of C, or is fined to the extent of the 
 duty if he buys of C, B is aggresssed upon that A may be 
 " protected." Kay, " aggressionists " is a title doubly more 
 applicable to the anti-free-traders than is the euphemistic title 
 • Mr. Chaoiberlain in Fortnightly Review^ December, 1883, p. 772.
 
 THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. T6 
 
 " protectionists ; " since, tliat one producer may gain, ten con- 
 sumers arc fleeced. 
 
 Now jusb tlio like confusion of ideas, caused by looking at one 
 face onlj'- of the transaction, may be traced throughout all the 
 legislation which forcibly takes the property of this man for the 
 purpose of giving gratis benefits to tliat man. Habitually when 
 one of the numerous measures thus characterized is discussed, the 
 dominant thought is concerning the pitiable Jones who is to be 
 jorotected against some evil ; while no thought is given to the 
 liard-rworking Brown who is aggressed upon, often much more to 
 be pitied. Money is exacted (either directly or through raised 
 rent) from the huckster who only by extreme pinching can pay 
 her way, from the mason thrown out of work by a strike, from 
 the mechanic whose savings are melting away during an illness, 
 from the widow who washes or sews from dawn to dark to feed 
 her fatherless little ones ; and all that the dissolute may be saved 
 from hunger, that the children of less impoverished neighbours 
 Tuay have cheap lessons, and that various people, mostly better ofP, 
 may read newspapers and novels for nothing ! The error of 
 nomenclature is, in one respect, more misleading than that which 
 allows aggressionists to be called protectionists ; for, as just 
 shown, protection of the vicious poor involves aggression on the 
 virtuous poor. Doubtless it is true that the greater part of the 
 money exacted comes from those who are relatively well-off. But 
 this is no consolation to the ill-off from whom the rest is exacted. 
 Nay, if the comparison be made between the pressures borne by 
 the two classes respectively, it becomes manifest that the case is 
 even worse than at first appears ; for while to the w^ell-off the 
 exaction means loss of luxuries, to the ill-ofF it means loss of 
 necessaries. 
 
 And now see the Nemesis which is threatening to follow this 
 chronic sin of legislators. They and their class, in common with 
 all owners of property, arc in danger of suffering from a sweeping 
 application of that general principle practically asserted by each 
 of these confiscating Acts of Parliament. For what is the tacit 
 assumption on which such Acts proceed ? It is the assumption 
 that no man has any claim to his property, not even to thai; which 
 he has earned by the sweat of his brow, save by permission of the 
 community ; and that the community may cancel the claim to any 
 extent it thinks fit. No deience can be mado for this appropria-
 
 74 IIIE MAN V£Ji^'U>S THE .STATE. 
 
 tion of A's possessions for the benefit of B, save one which sets 
 out with the postulate that society as a whole has an absolute 
 right over the possessions of each member. And now this 
 doctrine, which has been tacitly assumed, is being openly pro- 
 claimed. Mr. George and his friends, Mr. Hyndman and his 
 supporters, are pushing the theory to its logical issue. They have 
 been instructed by examples, yearly increasing in number, that 
 the individual has no rights but what the commnnity may 
 equitably over- ride ; and they are now saying — " It shall go hard 
 bat we will belter the instruction," and over-ride individual rights 
 altogether. 
 
 Legislative misdeeds of the classes above indicated are in 
 large measure explained, and reprobation of them mitigated, when 
 we look at the matter from afar off. They have their root in the 
 error that society is a manufacture ; whereas it is a growth. 
 Neither the culture of past times nor the culture of the present 
 time, has given to any considerable number of people a scientific 
 conception of a society — a conception of it as having a natural 
 structure in which all its institutions, governmental, religious, 
 industrial, commercial, &c. &c., are inter-dependently bound — a 
 structure w^hich is in a sense organic. Or if such a conception is 
 nominally entertained, it is not entertained in such way as to be 
 operative on conduct. Contrariwise, incorporated humanity is 
 very commonly thought of as though it were like so much dough 
 which the cook can mould as she pleases into pie-crust, or puff, or 
 tartlet. The communist shows us unmistakably that he thinks of 
 the body politic as admitting of being shaped thus or thus at will; 
 and the tacit implication of many Acts of Parliau;ent is that 
 aggregated men, twisted into this or that arrangement, will 
 remain as intended. 
 
 it may indeed be said that even irrespective of this erroneous 
 conception of a society as a plastic mass instead of as an organized 
 body, facts forced on his attention hour by hour should make 
 every one sceptical as to the success of this or that proposed way 
 of changing a people's actions. Alike to the citizen and to the 
 legislator, home-experiences daily supply proofs that the conduct 
 of human beings baulks calculation. He has given up the thought 
 of managing his wife and lets her manage him. Children on 
 whom, he has tried now reprimand, now panishment, nmv jbuaiiion,
 
 THE SINiS OF LEGISLATU::S. 75 
 
 now reward, do not respond satisfactorily to any method ; and no 
 expostulation prevents their mother from treating them in ways 
 he thinks mischievous. So, too, his dealings with his servants, 
 whether by reasoning or by scolding, rarely succeed for long : 
 the falling short of attention, or punctuality, or cleanliness, or 
 sobriety, leads to constant changes. Yet, difficult as he finds it to 
 deal with humanity in detail, he is confident of his ability to deal 
 with embodied humanity. Citizens, not one-thousandth of whom 
 he knows, not one-hundredth of whom he ever saw, and the great 
 mass of whom belong to classes having habits and modes of 
 thought of which he has but dim notions, he feels sure will act 
 in certain ways he foresees, and fulfil ends he wishes. Is there 
 not a marvelloas incongruity beiween premises and conclusion ? 
 
 One might have expected that whether they observed Li:e 
 implications of these domestic failures, or whether they cc:7- 
 templated in every newspaper the indications of a social life too 
 vast, too varied, too involved, to be even vaguely pictured in 
 thought, men would have entered on the business of law-makii g 
 with the greatest hesitation. Yet in this more than in anythii g 
 else do they show a confident readiness. Nowhere is there bO 
 astoundiug a contrast between the difticulty of the task and the 
 unpreparedness of those who undertake it. Unquestionably 
 among monstrous beliefs one of the most monstrous is that while 
 for a simple handicraft, such as shoe-making, a long apprenticeship 
 is needful, the sole thing which needs no apprenticeship is making 
 a nation's laws ! 
 
 Summing up the results of the discussion, may we not reason- 
 ably say that there lie before the legislator several open secrets, 
 which yet are so open that they ought not to remain secrets to oco 
 who undertakes the vast and terrible responsibility of dealiii;:;- 
 with millions upon millions of human beings by measures whicl;,] 
 if they do nob conduce to their happiness, will increase their 
 miseries and accelerate their deaths ? 
 
 There is first of all the undeniable truth, conspicuous and yet 
 absolutely ignored, that there are no phenomena which a society 
 presents but what have their origins in the phenomena of indi- 
 vidual human life, which again have their roots in vital phe- 
 nomena at large. And there is the inevitable implication that 
 unless these vital phenomena, bcdily and mental, are chaotic in
 
 7b THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE, 
 
 their relations (a supposition excluded by the very maintenance of 
 life) the resulting phenomena cannot be wholly chaotic : thero 
 must be some kind of order in the phenomena which grow out of 
 them when associated human beings have to co-operate. Evidently, 
 tlien, Avhen one who has not studied such resulting phenomena of 
 social order, undertakes to regulate society, he is pretty certain to 
 work mischiefs. 
 
 In the second place, apart from a priori reasoning, this con 
 elusion should be forced on the legislator by comparisons of 
 societies. It ought to be sufficiently manifest that before med- 
 dling with the details of social organization, inquiry should be 
 made whether social organization has a natural history ; and that 
 to answer this inquiry, it would be well, setting out with the 
 simplest societies, to see in what respects social structures agree. 
 Such comparative sociology, pursued to a very small extent, shows 
 a substantial uniformity of genesis. The habitual existence of 
 chieftainship, and the establishment of chiefly authority by war ; 
 the rise everywhere of the medicine man and priest ; the presence 
 of a cult having in all places the same fundamental traits; the 
 traces of division of labour, early displayed, which gradually 
 b3Come more marked; and the various complications, political, 
 ecclesiastical, industrial, which arise as groups ai'e compounded 
 and re-compounded by war ; quickly prove to any who compares 
 them that, apart from all their special differences, societies have 
 general resemblances in their modes of origin and development. 
 Theyi^resenfc traits of structure showing that social organization 
 has laws which over-ride individual wills ; and laws the disregard 
 of which must be fraught with disaster. 
 
 And then, in the third place, there is that mass of guiding 
 information yielded by the records of legislation in our own 
 country and in other countries, which still more obviously demands 
 attention. Here and elsewhere, attemj)ts of multitudinous kinds, 
 made by kings and statesmen, have failed to do the good intended 
 and have worked unexpected evils. Century after century new 
 measures like the old ones, and other measures akin in principle, 
 have again disappointed hopes and again brought disaster. And 
 yet it is thought neither by electors nor by those they elect, that 
 tliere is any need for systematic study of that law-making which 
 in bygone ages went on working the ill-being of the people when 
 it tried to achieve their AveJl-bcing. Su.cly there can be no fitness
 
 TiiE SINS OF LEC.ISLATOKS. 77 
 
 for lesrislative functions wiUicut "wldc knowledge of those legislative 
 experiences which the past has bequeathed. 
 
 Reverting, then, to the analogy drawn at the outset, we must 
 say that the legislator is morally blameless or morally blameworthy, 
 according as he has or has not acquainted himself with these 
 several classes of facts. A physician who, after years of study, 
 has gained a competent knowledge of physiology, pathology and 
 therapeutics, is not held criminally responsible if a man dies under 
 liis treatment: he has prepared himself as well as he can, and has 
 acted to the best of his judgirjent. Similarly the legislator whose 
 measures produce evil instead of good, notwithstanding the exten- 
 sive and methodic inquiries which helped him to decide, cannot be 
 held to have committed more than an error of reasoning. Contrari- 
 wise, the legislator who is wdiolly or in great part uninformed 
 concerning these masses of facts which he must examine before his 
 opinion on a proposed law can be of any value, and who nevertheless 
 helps to pass that law, can no more be absolved if misery and 
 mortality result, than the journeyman druggist can be absolved 
 when death is caused by the medicine he ignorantly prescribes.
 
 iH 
 
 THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 
 
 The great political superstition of the past was the divine right 
 of kings. The great political superstition of the present is the 
 divine right of parliaments. The oil of anointing seems unawares 
 to have dripped from the head of the one on to the heads of the 
 many, and given sacredness to them aJso and to their decrees. 
 
 However irrational we may think the earlier of these beliefs, 
 we must admit that it was more consistent than is the latter. 
 Whether we go back to times when the king was a god, or to 
 times when he was a descendant of a god, or to times when he 
 was god-appointed, we see good reason for passive obedience to his 
 will. "When, as under Loais XIV., theologians like Bossuet taught 
 that kings " are gods, and share in a manner the Divine indepen- 
 dence," or when it was thought, as by our own Tory party in old 
 days, that " the monarch was the delegate of heaven ;" it is clear 
 that, given the premise, the inevitable conclusion was that no 
 bounds could be set to governmental commands. But for the 
 modern belief such a warrant does not exist. Making no preten- 
 sion to divine descent or divine appointment, a legislative body 
 can show no su23ernatural justification for its claim to unlimited 
 authority; and no natural justification has ever been attempted. 
 Hence, belief in its unlimited authority is without that consistency 
 which of old characterized belief in a king's unlimited authority. 
 
 It is curious how commonly men continue to hold in fact, 
 doctrines which they have rejected in name — retaining the substance 
 after they have abandoned the form. In Theology an illustration 
 is supplied by Carlyle, who, in his student days, giving up, as he 
 thought, the creed of his fathers, rejected its shell only, keeping 
 the contents ; and was proved by his conceptions of the woild, 
 and man, and conduct, to be still among the sternest of Scotch
 
 THE GEEAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 7\) 
 
 Calvirists, Similarly, Science furnislies an instance in one viho 
 united naturalism in Geology with supernaturalism in Biology — 
 Sir Charles Lyell. While, as the leading expositor of the uniformi- 
 tarian theory in Geology, he ignored wholly the Mosaic cosmogony, 
 he long defended that belief in special creations of organic types, 
 for which no other source than the Mosaic cosmogony could be 
 assigned ; and only in the latter part of his life surrendered to the 
 arguments of Mr. Darwin. In Politics, as above implied, we havo 
 an analogous case. The tacitly-asserted doctrine, common to 
 Tories, Whigs, and Radicals, that governmental authority is 
 unlimited, dates back to times when the law-giver was supposed to 
 have a warrant from God ; and it survives still, though the belief 
 that the law-giver has God's warrant has died out. " Oh, an Act 
 of Parliament can do anything," is the reply made to a citizen who 
 questions the legitimacy of some arbitrary State-interference; and 
 the citizen stands paralyzed. It does not occur to him to ask the 
 how, and the when, and the w^hence, of this asserted omnipotence 
 bounded only by physical impossibilities. 
 
 Here we will take leave to question it. In default of the justi- 
 fication, once logically valid, that the ruler on Earth being a deputy 
 of the ruler in Heaven, submission to him in all things is a duty, 
 let us ask what reason there is for asserting the duty of submission 
 in all things to a ruling power, constitutional or repujplican, which 
 has no Heaven-derived supremacy. Evidently this inquiry com- 
 mits us to a criticism of past and present theories conc-erning 
 political authority. To revive questions supposed to be long since 
 settled, may be thought to need some apology ; but there is a 
 sufficient apology in the implication above made clear, that the 
 theory commonly accepted is ill-based or unbased. 
 
 1 he notion of sov ereignty is that which first presents itseir ; 
 and a critical examination of this notion, as entertained by those 
 who do not postulate the supernatural origin of sovereignty, carries 
 us back to the arguments of Hobbes. 
 
 Let us grant Hobbes's postulate that, " during the time men 
 live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in 
 that conditio Q which is called war .... of every man against 
 every man ;"* though this is not true, since there are some small 
 uncivilized societies in which, without any "common power to keep 
 * Hobbes, Collected Works, vol. iii. pp. 112-13.
 
 80 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 them all in awe," men maintain peace and harmony better than it 
 IS maintained in societies where such a power exists. Let us sup- 
 pose him to be right, too, in assuming that the rise of a ruling 
 power over associated men, results from their desires to preserve 
 order among themselves ; though, in fact, it habitually arises from 
 the need for subordination to a leader in war, defensive or offensive, 
 and has originally no necessary, and often no actual, relation to 
 the preservation of order among the combined individuals. Once 
 more, let us admit the indefensible assumption that to escape the 
 evils of chronic conflicts, which must otherwise continue among 
 them, the members of a community enter into a " pact or covenant," 
 by which they all bind themselves to surrender their primitive 
 freedom of action, and subordinate themselves to the will of a ruling 
 power agreed upon :* accepting, also, the implication that their 
 descendants for ever are bound by the covenant which remote 
 ancestors made for them. Let us, T say, not object to these data^ 
 but pass to the conclusions Hobbes di^aws. He says : — 
 
 *' For where no covenant hath preceded, there hath no light been trans- 
 ferred, and every man has right to every thing ; and consequently, no action 
 can be unjust. But when a covenant is made, then to break it is unjust : 
 and the definition of injustice, is no other than the not performance of 
 
 covenant Therefore before the names of just and unjust can iiave 
 
 place, there must be some coercive power, to compel men equally to the 
 performance of their covenants, by the terror of some punishment, greater 
 than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenant.' t 
 
 Were people's characters in Hobbes's day really so bad as to 
 warrant his assumption that none would perform their covenants 
 in the absence of a coercive power and threatened penalties ? In 
 our day "the names of just and unjust can have place" quite 
 fipart from recognition of any coercive power. Among my friends 
 I could name half a dozen whom I would implicitly trust to per- 
 form their covenants without any " terror of some punishment ;" 
 and over whom the requirements of justice would be as imperative 
 in the absence of a coercive power as in its presence. Merely 
 noting, however, that this unwarranted assumption vitiates Hobbes's 
 argument for State-authority, and accepting both his premises and 
 conclusion, we have to observe two significant implications. One is 
 that State-authority as thus derived, is a means to an end, and has 
 no validity save as subserving that end : if the end is not subserved, 
 
 • Hobbes, Collected Works, vol. iil. p. 159. f Ibid. pp. 130-1.
 
 THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 81 
 
 the authority, by the hypothesis, does not exist. The other is that 
 the end for which the authority exists, as thus specified, is the en- 
 forcement of justice — the maintenance of equitable relations. The 
 reasoning yields no warrant for other coercion over citizens than 
 that which is required for preventing direct aggressions, and those 
 i ndircct aggressions constituted by breaches of contract ; to which, 
 it* we add protection against external enemies, the entire function 
 implied by Hobbes's derivation of sovereign authority is compre- 
 hended. 
 
 Hobbes argued in the interests of absolute monarchy. His 
 modern admirer, Austin, had for his aim to derive the authority 
 of law from the unlimited sovereignty of one man, or of a number 
 of men, small or large compared with the whole community. 
 Austin was originally in the army ; and it has been truly remarked 
 that " the permanent traces left " may be seen in his Province of 
 Jurisprudence. When, undeterred by the exasperating pedan- 
 tries — the endless distinctions and definitions and repetitions — 
 which serve but to hide his essential doctrines, we ascertain what 
 these are, it becomes manifest that he assimilates civil authority to 
 military authority: taking for granted that the one, as the other,, 
 is above question in respect of both origin and range. To get 
 justification for positive law, he takes us back to the absolute 
 sovereignty of the power imposing it — a monarch, an aristocracy, 
 or that larger body of men who have votes in a democracy ; for 
 such a body also, he styles the sovereign, in contrast with the 
 remaining portion of the community which, from incapacity or 
 other cause, remains subject. And having affirmed, or, rather,, 
 taken for granted, the unlimited authority of the body, simple or 
 compound, small or large, which he styles sovereign, he, of course,, 
 has no difficulty in deducing the legal validity of its edicts, which 
 he calls positive law. But the problem is simply moved a step 
 further back and there left unsolved. The true question is — 
 Whence the sovereignty? What is the assignable warrant for 
 this unqualified supremacy assumed by one, or by a small number, 
 or by a large number, over the rest ? A critic might fitly say — 
 " We will dispense with your process of deriving positive law from 
 unlimited sovereignty : the sequence is obvious enough. But first 
 prove your unlimited sovereignty." 
 
 To this demand there is no response. Analyze his assumption,, 
 and the doctrine of Austin proves to ha"V'e no better basis than that 
 
 G
 
 82 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 of Hobbes. In the absence of admitted divine descent op appoint- 
 ment, neither single-headed ruler nor many-headed ruler can 
 produce such credentials as the claim to unlimited sovereiguty 
 implies. 
 
 "But surely," will come in deafening chorus the reply, "there 
 is the unquestionable right of the majority, which gives un- 
 questionable right to the parliam.ent it elects." 
 
 Yes, now we are coming down to the root of the matter. The 
 divine right of parliaments means the divine right of majorities. 
 The fundamental assumption made by legislators and people alike, 
 is that a majority has powers to which no limits can be put. This 
 is the current theory Avhich all accept Avithout proof as a self- 
 evident truth. Nevertheless, criticism will, I think, show that 
 this current theory requires a radical modification. 
 
 In an essay on "Railway Morals and Railway Policy,*' pub- 
 lished in the Edinhun/h Review for October, 1854, I had occasion 
 
 -to deal with the question of a majority's powers as exemplified in 
 the conduct of public companies; and I cannot better prepare the 
 
 -way for conclusions presently to be drawn, than by quoting a 
 passage from it: — 
 
 " Under whatever circumstances, or for whatever ends, a number of 
 men co-operale, it is held that if ditference of opinion arises among them, 
 justice requires that the will of the greater number shall be executed 
 rather than that of the smaller number ; and this rule is supposed to be 
 uniformly applicable, be the question at issue what it may. So confirmed 
 is this conviction, and so little have the ethics of the matter been con- 
 sidered, that to most this mere suggestion of a doubt will cause some 
 astonishment. Yet it needs but a brief analysis to show that the opinion 
 is little better than a political superstition. Instances may readily be 
 selected which prove, by reduciio ad absurd /nn, that the right of a 
 majority is a purely conditional right, valid only within specific limits. 
 Let us take a few. Su|)i)0se that at the general meeting of some philan- 
 thropic association, it was resolved that, in addition to relieving distress 
 tlie association should employ home-missionaries to preach down popery. 
 Might the subscriptions of Catholics, who had joined the body with 
 ^liaritable views, be rightfully used for this end ? Suppose that of the 
 iriembers of a book-club, the greater number, thinking that under existing 
 circumstances rifle-practice was more important than reading, should 
 decide to change the puri)ose of tlieir union, and to apply the funds in 
 hand for the purclia.se of ])Owder, ball, and targets. Would the rest be 
 bound by this decision ? Suppose that under the excitement of news from
 
 THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPEKSTITIOX. 83 
 
 Australia, l:lie majority of a Freehold Land Society should determine, not 
 simply to start in a body for the gold-diggings, but to use their acicnmulated 
 capital to provide outfits. Would this appropriation of property be just 
 U) the minority ? and must these join the expedition ? Scarcely anyone 
 would venture an affirmative answer even to the first of these questions ; 
 iiiiich less to the others. And why? Because everyone must perceive 
 that by uniting himself with others, no man can equitably be betrayed 
 into acts utterly foreign to the purpose for which he joined them. Each 
 of these supposed minorities would properly reply to those seeking to 
 coerce them : — ' "We combined with you for a defined object ; we gave 
 money and time for the furtherance of that object ; on all questions thence 
 arising we tacitly agreed to conform to the will of the greater number ; but 
 we did not agree to conform on any other questions. If you induce us to 
 join you by professing a certain end, and then undertake some other end 
 of which we were not apprised, you obtain our support under false pre- 
 tences ; you exceed the expressed or understood compact to which we 
 committed ourselves ; and we are no longer bound by your decisions.' 
 Clearly this is the only rational interpretation of the matter. The general 
 principle underlying the right government of every incorporated body, is, 
 that its members contract with each other severally to submit to the will 
 of the majority in all matters concerning the fulfilment of the objects for 
 which they are incorporated ; but in no others. To this extent only can 
 the contract hold. For as it is implied in the very nature of a contract, 
 that those entering into it must know what they contract to do ; and as 
 those who unite with others for a specified object, cannot oontemplate all 
 the unspecified objects which it is hypothetically possible for the union to 
 undertake ; it follows that the contract entered into cannot extend to such 
 unspecified objects. And if there exists no expressed or understood 
 contract between the union and its members respecting unspecified objects, 
 then for the majority to coerce the minority into undertaking them, is 
 nothing less than gross tyranny." 
 
 Naturally, if such a confusion cf ideas exists in respect of the 
 powers of a majority where the deed of incorporation tacitly 
 limits those powers, still more must there exist such a confusion 
 where there has been no deed of incorporation. Nevertheless tlie 
 same principle holds. I again emphasize the proposition that the 
 members of an incorporated body are bound " severally to submit 
 to the will of the majority in all matters concerning the fulfilment of 
 the objects for which they are incoryorated ; hut in no others.''' And 
 1 contend that this holds of an incorporated nation as mucii as of 
 an incorporated company. 
 
 "Yes, but," comes the obvious rejoinder, "as there is no deed 
 \)j which the members of a nation are incorporated —as therg 
 
 G 2
 
 84 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATS. 
 
 neither is, nor ever was, a specification of purposes for wliieh the 
 anion was formed, there exist no limits ; and, consequently, tho 
 power of the majority is unlimited." 
 
 Evidently it must bo admitted that the hypothesis of a social 
 contract, either under the shape assumed by Hobbes or under tlio 
 shape assumed by Rousseau, is baseless. Nay more, it must be 
 admitted that even had such a ooutract once been formed, it could 
 not be bindmg on the posterity of those who formed it. Moreover, 
 if any say that in the absence of those limitations to its powers 
 which a deed of incorporation might imply, there is nothing to 
 prevent a majority from imposing its will on a minority by force^ 
 assent must be given — an assent, however, joined with the com- 
 ment that if the superior force of the majority is its justification^ 
 then the superior force of a despot backed by an adequate army, 
 is also justified : the problem lapses. What we here seek is some 
 higher warrant for the subordination of minority to majority than 
 that arising from inability to resist physical coercion. Even 
 Austin, anxious as he is to establish the unquestionable authority 
 of positive law, and assuming, as he does, an absolute sovereignty 
 of some kinil, monarchic, aristocratic, constitutional, or popular, a* 
 the source of its unquestionable authority, is obliged, in the last 
 resort, to admit a moral limit to its action over the community. 
 While insisting, in pursuance of his rigid theory of sovereignty, 
 that a sovereign body originating from the people '"is legally free 
 to abridge their political liberty, at its own pleasure or discre- 
 tion," he allows that "a government may be hindered hy positive 
 morality from abridging the political liberty which it leaves or 
 grants to its subjects."* Hence, we have to fiind, not a physical 
 justification, but a moral justification, for the supposed absolute 
 power of the majority. 
 
 This will at once draw forth the rejoinder — " Of course, in the 
 absence of any agreement, Avith its implied limitations, the rule of 
 the majority is unlimited; because it is more just that the majority 
 should have its way than that the minority should have its way." 
 A very reasonable rejoinder this seems until there comes the 
 re-rejoinder. We may oppose to it the equally tenable proposition 
 that, in the absence of an agreement, the supremacy of a majority 
 over a minority docs not exist at all. It is co-operation of some 
 kind, from which there arise these powers and obligations of 
 H The Province of Jwiaprudence Determined (second cdilion), p. 2-4L
 
 THE GKEAT POLITICAL SUrERSTITION. 85 
 
 anajority and minority ; and in the absence of any aorreemcnt to 
 ■co-operate, such powers and obligations are also absent. 
 
 Here the argument apparently ends in a dead lock. Under the 
 ■existing condition of things, no moral origin seems assignable 
 either for the sovereignty of the majority or for the limitation of 
 its sovereignty. But further consideration reveals a solution of 
 the difficulty. For if, dismissing all thought of any hypothe- 
 tical agreement to co-operate heretofore made, we ask what 
 would be the agreement into which citizens would now enter 
 with practical unanimity, we get a sufficiently clear answer ; 
 and with it a sufficiently clear justification for the rule of the 
 majority inside a certain sphere, but not outside that sphere. Let 
 US first observe a few of the limitations which at once become 
 apparent. 
 
 Were all Englisbmeii now asked if they would agree to 
 co-operate for the teaching of religion, and would give the majority 
 power to fix the creed and the forms of worship, there would come 
 a very emphatic '' No " from a large part of them. If, in pursuance 
 of a proposal to revive sumptuary laws, the inquiry were made 
 whether they would bind themselves to abide by the will of the 
 majority in respect of the fashions and qualities of their clothes, 
 nearly all of them would refuse. In like manner if. (to take an 
 p.ctnal question of the day) people were polled to ascertain whether, 
 in respect of the beverages they drank, they would accept the 
 decision of the greater number, certainly half, and probably 
 more than half, would be unwilling. Similarly with respect to 
 many other actions which most men now-a-days regard as of 
 purely private concern. Whatever desire there might be to co' 
 operate for carrying on, or regulating, such actions, would be far 
 from a unanimous desire. Manifestly, then, had social co-opera- 
 tion to be commenced by ourselves, and had its purposes to be 
 specified before consent to co-operate could be obtained, there 
 would be large parts of human conduct in respect of which co- 
 operation would be declined ; and in respect of which, consequently, 
 no authority by the majority over the minority could be rightfully 
 exercised. 
 
 Turn now to the converse question — For what ends would all 
 men agree to co-operate ? None will deny that for resisting invasion 
 the agreement would be practically unanimous. Excepting only the 
 •Quakers, who, having done highly useful work in their time, are
 
 t^6 THE MAN VF.RSCS THE STATE. 
 
 now dying out, all would unite for defensive war (not, however, for 
 offensive war) ; and they would, by so doing, tacitly bind themselves 
 to conform to the will of the majority in respect of measures directed 
 to that end. There would be practical unanimity, also, in the agree- 
 ment to co-operate for defence against internal enemies as against 
 external enemies. Omitting criminals, all must wish to have person 
 and. property adequately protected. In short, each citizen desires 
 io preserve liis life, to preserve those things which conduce to 
 maintenance of his life and enjoyment of it, and to preserve intact 
 his liberties both of using these things and getting further such. 
 It is obvious to him that he cannot do all this if he acts alone. 
 Against foreign invaders he is powerless unless he combines with 
 his fellows ; and the business of protecting himself against domestic 
 invaders, if he did not similarly combine, would be alike onerous, 
 dangerous, and inefficient. In one other co-operation all are 
 interested — use of the territory they inhabit. Did the primitive 
 communal ownership survive, there would survive the primitive 
 communal control of the uses to be made of land by individuals or 
 by groups of thera ; and decisions of the majority would rightly 
 prevail respecting the terms on which portions of it might be 
 employed for raising food, for making means of communication, 
 and for other purposes. Even at present, though the matter has 
 been complicated by the growth of private landovvnership, yet, since 
 the State is still supreme owner (every landowner being in law a 
 tenant of the Crowm) able to resume possession, or authorize com- 
 pulsory purchase, at a fair price ; the implication is that the will 
 of the majority is valid respecting the modes in which, and con- 
 ditions under which, parts of the surface or sub-surface, may be 
 utilized: involving certain agreements made on behalf of tho 
 public with private persons and companies. 
 
 Details are not needful here ; nor is it needful to discuss that 
 border region lying between these classes of cases, and to say how- 
 much is included in the last and how much is excluded with the 
 first. For present purposes, it is sufficient to recognize the un- 
 deniable truth that there are numerous kinds of actions in respect 
 of which men would not, if they were asked, agree with anything 
 like unanimity to be bound by the will of the majority ; while 
 there are some kinds of actions in respect of which they would 
 almost unanimously agree to be thus bound. Here, then, we fi.nd a 
 definite warrant for enforcing the will of the majority within cer-
 
 THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 87 
 
 tain limits, and a definite warrant for denying the authority of its 
 will beyond those limits. 
 
 But evidently, when analyzed, the question resolves itself into 
 the further question — What are the relative claims of the aggre- 
 gate and of its units ? Are the rights of the community univer- 
 sally valid against the individual ? or has the individual some 
 rights which are valid against the community ? The judgment 
 given on this point underlies the entire fabric of political con- 
 victions formed, and more especially those convictions which 
 concern the proper sphere of government. Here, then, I propose 
 to revive a dormant controversy, with the expectation of reaching 
 a different conclusion from that which is fashionable. 
 
 Says Professor Jevons, in his work, The State in Eelation to 
 Labour, — " The first step must be to rid our minds of the idea 
 that there are any such things in social matters as abstract rights." 
 Of like character is the belief expressed by Mr. Matthew Arnold^ 
 in his article on copyright:—" An author has no natural right to a 
 property in his production. But then neither has he a natural 
 right to anything whatever which he may produce or acquire."* 
 So, too, I recently read in a weekly journal of high repute, that 
 "to explain once more that there is no such thin^ as 'natural 
 right ' would be a waste of philosophy." And the view expressed 
 in these extracts is commonly uttered by statesmen and lawyers 
 in a way implying that only the unthinking masses hold any- 
 other. 
 
 One might have expected that utterances to this effect wouhi 
 have been rendered less dogmatic by the knowledge that a whole 
 school of legists on the Continent, maintains a belief diametrically 
 opposed to that maintained by the English school. The idea of 
 Natur-recht is the root-idea of German jurisprudence. Now what- 
 ever may be the opinion held respecting German philosophy at 
 large, it cannot be characterized as shallow. A doctrine current 
 among a people distinguished above all others as laborious in- 
 quirers, and certainly not to be classed with superficial thinkers, 
 should not be dismissed as though it were nothing more than a 
 popular delusion. This, however, by the way. Along with the 
 proposition denied in the above quotations, there goes a counter- 
 
 • Fortnic/htlij liccietv in 1880, vol. xxrii. p. 323.
 
 88 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 proposition affirmed. Let us see what it is ; and what results when 
 we go behind it and seek its warrant. 
 
 On reverting to Bentham, we find this counter-proposition 
 overtly expressed. He tells us that government fulfils its office 
 *'bv creating riijhts which it confers upon individuals: rights of 
 personal security ; rights of protection for honour ; rights of pro- 
 perty ; " &c* Were this doctrine asserted as following from the 
 divine right of kings, there would be nothing in it manifestly in- 
 congruous. Did it come to us from ancient Peru, where the Ynca 
 *' was the source from which everything flowed •,"t or from Shoa 
 (Abyssinia), where " of their persons and worldly substance he 
 [the king] is absolute master ;":}: or from Dahome, where " all men 
 are slaves to the king ; "§ it would be consistent enough. But 
 Bentham, far from being an absolutist like Hobbes, wrote in the 
 interests of popular rule. In his Constitutional Code || he fixes 
 the sovereignty in the whole people ; arguing that it is best 
 " to give the sovereign power to the largest possible portion of 
 those whose greatest happiness is the proper and chosen object," 
 because " this proportion is more apt than any other that can be 
 proposed " for achievement of that object. 
 
 Mark, now, what happens when we put these two doctrines 
 together. The sovereign people jointly appoint representatives, 
 and so create a government ; the government thus created, creates 
 rights ; and then, having created rights, it confers them on the 
 separate members of the sovereign people by which it was itself 
 created. Here is a marvellous piece of political legerdemain ! 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold, contending, in the article above quoted, that 
 " property is the creation of law," tells us to beware of the 
 "metaphysical phantom of property in itself." Surely, among 
 metaphysical phantoms the most shadowy is this which supposes a 
 thing to be obtained by creating an agent, which creates the 
 thing, and then confers the thing on its own creator ! 
 
 From whatever point of view we consider it, Bentham's pro- 
 position proves to be unthinkable. Government, he says, fulfils 
 itsoffice "by creating rights" Two meanings may be given to 
 
 * Bentham's Works (Bowring's edition) , vol. i. p. 301. 
 
 t Prcscott, Conquest of Pent, bk. i. ch. i. 
 
 X Harris, Highlands of Ethiopia, ii. 94. 
 
 § Burton, Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome^ i. p. 226. 
 
 II Bentham's Works, vol. ix. p. 07
 
 THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 89 
 
 the word *' creating." It may be supposed to mean the production 
 of something out of nothing; or it may be supposed to mean the 
 giving form and structure to something which already exists. 
 There are many who think that the production of something out 
 of nothing cannot be conceived as effected even by omnipotence : 
 and probably none will assert that the production of something 
 out of nothing is within the competence of a human government. 
 The alternative coni^eption is that a human government creates 
 only in the sense that it shapes something pre-existing. In that 
 case, the question arises — " What is the something pre-existing 
 which it shapes? " Clearly the word "creating " begs the whole 
 question — passes off an illusion on the unwary reader. Bentham 
 was a stickler for definiteness of expression, and in his Booh of 
 Fallacies has a chapter on " Impostor-terms." It is curious that 
 he should have furnished so striking an illustration of the per- 
 verted belief which an impostor-term mny generate. 
 
 But now let us overlook these various impossibilities of thought, 
 and seek the most defensible interpretation of Bentham's view. 
 
 It may be said that the totality of all powers and rights, 
 originally existed as an undivided whole in the sovereign people ; 
 and that this undivided whole is given in trust (as Austin would 
 say) to a ruling power, appointed by the sovereign people, for the 
 purpose of distribution. If, as we have seen, the proposition that 
 rights are created is simply a figure of speech ; then the only 
 intelligible construction of Bentham's view is that a multitude of 
 individuals, who severally wish to satisfy their desires, and have, 
 as an aggregate, possession of all the sources of satisfaction, ag 
 well as power over all individual actions, appoint a government, 
 which declares the ways in which, and the conditions under which, 
 individual actions may be carried on and the satisfactions obtained. 
 Let us observe the implications. Each man exists in two capacities. 
 In his private capacity he is subject to the government. In his 
 public capacity he is one of the sovereign people who appoint the 
 government. That is to say, in his private capacity he is one 
 of those to whom rights are given ; and in his public capacity 
 he is one of those who, through the government they appoint, give 
 the rig-hts. Turn this abstract statement into a concrete state- 
 ment, and see what it means. Let the community consist of a 
 million men, who, by the hypothesis, are not only joint possessors 
 of the inhabited region, but joint possessors of all liberties of
 
 90 THE MAN VK/iSUS THE ST. IE. 
 
 action and appropriation : tlie only right recognized being that of 
 the aggregate to everytliing. What Ibllows ? Each person, while 
 not owning any product of his own labour, has, as a unit in the 
 sovereign body, a millionth part of the ownership of the products 
 of all others' labour. This is an unavoidable implication. As tht 
 government, in Bentham's view, is but an agent; the rights it 
 'jojifers are rights given to it in trust by the sovereign people. H 
 so, such rights must be possessed en bloc by the sovereign people 
 before the government, in fulfilment of its trust, confers them on 
 individuals ; and, if so, each individual has a millionth portion of 
 these rights in his public capacity, while he has no rights in his 
 private capacity. These he gets only when all the rest of the 
 million join to endow him with them; while he joins to endow 
 with them every other member of the million ! 
 
 Thus, in whatever way we interpret it, Be'htham's proposition 
 leaves us in a plexus of absurdities. 
 
 Even though ignoring the opposite opinion of German writers 
 on jurisprudence, and even without an analysis which proves their 
 own opinion to be untenable, Bentham's disciples might have beevi 
 led to treat less cavalierly the doctrine of natural rights. For 
 sundry groups of social phenomena unite to prove that this 
 doctrine is well warranted, and the doctrine they set against it 
 unwarranted. 
 
 Tribes in various parts of the world show us that before definite 
 government arises, conduct is regulated by customs. The 
 Bechuanas are controlled by " long acknowledged customs." * 
 Among the Koranna Hottentots, who only "tolerate their chiefs 
 rather than obey them,"t " when ancient usages are not in the 
 way. every man seems to act as is right in his own eyes. "J The 
 Araucanians are' guided by "nothing more than primordial usages 
 or tacit conventions. "§ Among the Kirghizes the judgments of 
 the elders are based on " universally-recognized customs. "|| So, 
 
 * Burchell, W. J., Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa, vol. i. 
 p. 544. 
 
 t Arboussot and Daumas, Voyage of Exploration, p. 27. 
 
 X Thompson, G-., Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa, vol. ii., p. 30. 
 
 § Thompson, G. A., Alcedo's Geographical and Historical Dictionary of 
 America, vol. i. p. 405. 
 
 II Mitchell, Alex., Siberian Overland Route, p. 213,
 
 THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 91 
 
 too, of tlie Dyaks, Rajah Brooke tells ns that "custom seems 
 simply to have become the law ; and breaking custom leads to a 
 fine."* So sacred are immemorial customs with the primitive 
 man, that he never dreams of questioning their authority ; and 
 when government arises, its power is limited by them. In Mada- 
 gascar the king's word suffices only " where there is no law, 
 custom, or precedent."t Raffles tells us that in Java "the 
 customs of the country "J restrain the will of the ruler. In 
 Sumatra, too, the people do not allow their chiefs to " alter their 
 ancient usages. "§ Nay, occasionally, as in Ashantee, " the 
 attempt to change some customs" has caused a king's dethrone- 
 ment. || Now, among the customs which we thus find to be pre- 
 governmental, and which subordinate governmental power when 
 it is established, are those which recognize certain individual 
 rights — rights to act in certain ways and possess certain things. 
 Even where the recognition of property is least developed, there 
 is proprietorship of weapons, tools, and personal ornaments; and, 
 generally, the recognition goes far beyond this. Among such 
 North-American Indians as the Snakes, who are without govern- 
 ment, there is private ownership of horses. Bj^the Chippewayans, 
 " who have no regular government," game taken in pi-ivate traps 
 *' is considered as private property."^ Kindred facts concerning 
 huts, utensils, and other personal belongings, might be brought in 
 evidence from accounts of the Ahts, the Comanches, the Esqui- 
 maux, and the Brazilian Indians. Among various uncivilized 
 peoples, custom has established the claim to the crop grown on a 
 cleared plot of ground, though not to the ground itself ; and the 
 Todas, who are wholly without political oi^ganization, make a like 
 distinction between ownership of cattle and of land. Kolff's 
 statement respecting " the peaceful Arafuras " well sums up the 
 evidence. They "recognize the right of property, in the fullest 
 sense of the word, without there being any [other] authority 
 among them than the decisions of their elders, according to the 
 
 * Brooke's, C, Ten Tears in Sarawak, voL i. p. 129. 
 t Ellis, History of Madagascar, voL i. p. 377. 
 X Raffles, Sir T. S., History of Java, i. 274. 
 § Marsden, W.. History of Sumatra, p. 217. 
 II Beecham, J., Ashantee and the Gold Coast, p. 90. 
 
 ^ Schoolcraft, H. R., 'Expedition to the Sources of the MIs.si.ssippi Ritvr^ 
 V. 177.
 
 92 THE MAN VEnSUS THE STATE. 
 
 customs of fclieir forefathers."* But even without seeking proa's 
 among the uncivilized, sufliclent proofs are furnished hj early 
 stages of the civilized. Benthara and liis followers seem to have 
 forgotten that our own common law is mainly an embodiment 
 of " the customs of the realm." It did but give definite shape to 
 that which it found existing. Thus, the fact and the fiction are 
 exactly opposite to what they allege. The fact is that propeity 
 was well recognized before law existed ; the fiction is that " pro- 
 perty is the creation of law." 
 
 Considerations of another class might alone have led them to 
 pause had they duly considered their meanings. Were it true, as 
 alleged by Bentham, that Government fulfils its office " by creating 
 rights which it confers on individuals ; '* then, the implication 
 would be, that there should be nothing approaching to uniformity 
 in the rights conferred by different governments. In the absence 
 of a determining cause over-ruling their decisions, the probabilities 
 would be many to one against considerable correspondence among 
 their decisions. But there is very great correspondence. Look 
 where we may, we find that governments interdict the same kinds 
 of aggressions; and, by implication, recognize the same kinds of 
 claims. They habitually forbid homicide, theft, adultery: thus 
 asserting that citizens may not be trespassed against in certain 
 ways. And as society advances, minor individual claims are 
 protected by giving remedies for breach of contract, libel, false 
 witness, &c. In a word, comparisons show that though codes of 
 law differ in their details as they become elaborated, they agree 
 in their fundamentals. What does this prove ? It cannot be by 
 chance that they thus agree. They agree because the alleged 
 creating of rights was nothing else than giving formal sanction 
 and better definition to those assertions of claims and recognitions 
 of claims which naturally originate from the individual desires of 
 men who have to live in presence of one another. 
 
 Comparative Sociology discloses another group of facts having 
 the same implication. Along with social progress it becomes in 
 an increasing degree the business of the State, not only to give 
 formal sanction to men's rights, but also to defend them against 
 aggressors. Before permanent government exists, and in many 
 cases after it is considerably developed, the rights of each individuaJ 
 
 • Earl's Koljjr's Voyage of the Domaa, n ICl.
 
 THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 93 
 
 are asserted and maintained by himself, or by his family. Alike 
 umong savage tribes at present, among civilized peoples in the- 
 past, and even now in unsettled parts of Europe, the punishment 
 for murder is a matter of private concerii : " the sacred duty of 
 blood revenge " devolves on some one of a cluster of relatives. 
 Similarly, comiDcnsations for aggressions on property and for in- 
 juries of other kinds, are in early states of society independently 
 sought by each n)an or family. Bat as social organization 
 advances, the central ruling power undertakes more and more to- 
 secure to individuals their personal safety, the safety of their 
 possessions, and, to some extent, the enforcement of their claims 
 established by contract. Originally concerned almost exclusively 
 with defence of the society as a whole against other societies, 
 or Avith conducting its attacks on other societies, Government has- 
 come more and more to discharge the function of defending in- 
 dividuals against one another. It needs but to recall the days 
 when men habitually carried weapons, or to bear in mind the 
 greater safety to person and property achieved by improved police- 
 administration durino: our own time, or to note the increased 
 facilities now given for recovering small debts, to see that the 
 insuring to each individual the unhindered pursuit of the objects- 
 of life, within limits set by others' like pursuits, is more and more 
 recognized as a duty of the State. In other words, along with social 
 progress, there goes not only a fuller recognition of these which 
 we call natural rights, but also a better enforcement of them by 
 Government: Government becomes more and more the servant to 
 these essential pre-requisites for individual welfare. 
 
 An allied and still more significant change has accompanied 
 this. In early stages, at the same time that the State failed to 
 protect the individual against aggression, it was itself an aggressor 
 in multitudinous ways. Those ancient societies which progressed 
 enough to leave records, having all been conquering societies, show 
 us everywhere the traits of the militant regime. As, for the effec- 
 tual organization of fighting bodies, the soldiers, absolutely obedient, 
 must act independently only when commanded to do it ; so, for the 
 cff'ectual organization of fighting societies, citizens must have their 
 individualities subordinated. Private claims are over-ridden by 
 public claims ; and the subject loses much of his freedom of action. 
 One result is that the system of regimentation, pervading the 
 society as well as the army, causes detailed reguhition of conducts
 
 'J4 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 The dictates of the ruler, sanctified by ascription of them to his 
 divine ancestor, are unrestrained by any conception of individual 
 liberty ; and they specify men's actions to an unlimited extent — 
 down to kinds of food eaten, modes of preparing them, shaping of 
 beards, fringing of dresses, sowing of grain, &c. This omnipresent 
 control, which the ancient Eastern nations in general exhibited, 
 was exhibited also in large measure by the Greeks ; and was carried 
 to its greatest pitch in the most militant city, Sparta. Similarly 
 during mediaeval days throughout Europe, characterized by chronic 
 warfare with its appropriate political forms and ideas, there were 
 scarcely any bounds to Governmental interference : agriculture, 
 manufactures, trade, were regulated in detail ; religious beliefs and 
 observances were imposed ; and rulers said by whom alone furs 
 might be worn, silver used, books issued, pigeons kept, &c. &c. 
 But along with increase of industrial activities, and implied substi- 
 tution of the regime oi contract for the regime oi status, and growth 
 of associated sentiments, there went (until the recent reaction 
 nccompanying reversion to militant activity) a decrease of meddling 
 with people's doings. Legislation gradually ceased to regulate the 
 cropping of fields, or dictate the ratio of cattle to acreage, or 
 s^pecify modes of manufacture and materials to be used, or fix 
 wages and prices, or interfere with dresses and games (except 
 where there was gambling), or put bounties and penalties on im- 
 ports or exports, or prescribe men's beliefs, religious or political, or 
 prevent them from combining as they pleased, or travelling vvhere 
 they liked. That is to say, throughout a large range of conduct, 
 the right of the citizen to uncontrolled action has been made good 
 against the pretensions of the State to control him. While the 
 ruling agency has increasingly helped him to exclude intruders 
 from that private sphere in which he pursues the objects of life, it 
 has itself retreated from that sphere ; or, in other words — decreased 
 its intrusions. 
 
 Not even yet have we noted all the classes of facts which tell 
 the same story. It is told afresh in the improvements and reforms of 
 law itself; as well as in the admissions and assertions of those who 
 have effected them. " So early as the fifteenth century," says 
 Professor Pollock, "we find a common-law judge declaring that, 
 as in a case unprovided for by known rules the civilians and 
 canonists devise a new rule according to ' the law^ of nature which 
 is the ground of all laws,' the Courts of Westminster can and wiU
 
 THE GREAT POLITICAL SLTEUSTITION. 95 
 
 do the like."* Again, our system of Equity, introduced and deve- 
 loped as it was to make up for the shortcomings of Common- law, 
 or rectify its inequities, proceeded throughout on a recognition of 
 men's claims considered as existing apart- from legal warrant. And 
 the changes of law now from time to time made after resistance, 
 are similarly made in pursuance of current ideas concerning the 
 requirements of justice : ideas which, instead of being derived from 
 the law, are opposed to the law. For example, that recent Act 
 which gives to a married woman a riglit of property in her own 
 earnings, evidently originated in the consciousness that the natural 
 connexion between labour expended and benefit enjoyed, is one 
 which should be maintained in all cases. The reformed law did 
 not create the right, but recognition of the right created the 
 reformed law. 
 
 Thus, historical evidences of five different kinds unite in teaching 
 that, confused as are the popular notions concerning rights, and 
 including, as they do, a great deal which should be excluded, yet 
 they shadow forth a truth. 
 
 It remains now to consider the original source of this truth. 
 In a previous paper I have spoken of the open secret, that there 
 can V>e no social phenomena but what, if we analyze them to 
 the bottom, bring us down to the laws of life; and that there can 
 be no true understanding of them without reference to the laws of 
 life. Let us, then, transfer this question of natural rights from the 
 court of politics to the court or iscience — the science of life. The 
 reader need feel no alarm : its simplest and most obvious facts will 
 suffice. We will contemplate first the general conditions to indi- 
 vidual life ; and then the general conditions to social life. "We shall 
 find that both yield the same verdict. 
 
 Animal life involves waste ; waste must be met by repair; re- 
 pair implies nutrition. Again, nutrition presupposes obtainment of 
 food ; food cannot begot without powers of prehension, and, usually, 
 of locomotion ; and that these powers may achieve their ends, tliere 
 must be freedom to move about. If you shut up a mammal in a 
 small space, or tie its limbs together, or take from it the food it has 
 procured, you eventually, by persistence in one or other of these 
 courses, cause its death. Passing a certain jooint, hindrance to the 
 
 * "The Metliocls of Jurisprndoncc : an Ic.troductory Lc-tiirc at University 
 College, London," October 31. 1882.
 
 96 THE MAN VEIiSUS THE STATE. 
 
 fulfilment of these requirements is fatal. And all this, which holds 
 of the higher animals at large, of course holds of man. 
 
 If we adopt pessimism as a creed, and with it accept the impli- 
 cation that life in general being an evil should be put an end to, 
 then there is no ethical warrant for these actions by which life is 
 maintained : the whole question drops. But if we adopt either the 
 optimist view or the meliorist view — if we say that life on tho 
 whole brings more pleasure than pain; or thai it is on the way 
 to become such that it will yield more pleasure than pain ; then 
 these actions by which life is maintained are justified, and there 
 results a warrant for the freedom to perform them. Those who 
 hold that life is valuable, hold, by implication, that men ought not 
 to be prevented from carrying on life-sustaining activities. In 
 other words, if it is said to be " right " that they should carry them 
 on, then, by permutation, we get the assertion that they " have a 
 right" to carry them on. Clearly the conception of " natural rights "" 
 originates in recognition of the truth that if life is justifiable, there 
 must be a justification for the performance of acts essential to its 
 preservation ; and, therefore, a justification for those liberties and 
 claims which make such acts possible. 
 
 But being true of other creatures as of man, this is a proposi- 
 tion lacking ethical character. Ethical character arises only with 
 the distinction between what the individual may do in can-ying or 
 his life-sustaining activities, and what he may not do. This dis- 
 tinction obviously results from the presence of his fellows. Among 
 those who are in close proximity, or even at some distance apart, the 
 doings of each are apt to interfere with the doings of others ; and 
 in the absence of proof that some may do what they will without; 
 limit, while others may not, mutual limitation is necessitated. The 
 non-ethical form of the right to pursue ends, passes into the ethicaJ 
 form, when there is recognized the difference between acts which 
 can be performed v.'ithout transgressing the limits, and others which 
 cannot be so performed. 
 
 This, which is the d priori conclusion, is the conclusion yielded 
 d poster tori, yvhen we study the doings of the uncivilized. In its- 
 vaguest form, mutual limitation of spheres of action, and the ideas 
 and sentiments associated with it, are seen in the relations of groups 
 to one another. Habitually there come to be established, certain 
 bounds to the territories within which each tribe obtains its liveli- 
 hood ; and these bounds, when not respected, arc defended. Among-
 
 THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. 97 
 
 the Wood-Veddahs, who have no political organization, the small 
 .clans have their respective portions of forest ; and " these conven- 
 tional allotments are always honourably recognized."* Of the 
 ungoverned tribes of Tasmania, we are told that " their hunting 
 grounds were all determined, and trespassers were liable to 
 :f».ttack."t And, manifestly, the quarrels caused among tribes by 
 intrusions on one another's territories, tend, in the long run, to fix 
 bounds and to give a certain sanction to them. As with each in- 
 habited area, so with each inhabiting group. A death in one, 
 rightly or wrongly ascribed to somebody in another, prompts 
 "the sacred duty of blood-revenge ; " and though retaliations are 
 thus made chronic, some restraint is put on new aggressions. 
 Like causes worked like effects in those early stages of civilized 
 societies, during which families or clans, rather than individuals, 
 were the political units ; and during which each family or clan had 
 to maintain itself and its possessions against others such. This 
 mutual restraint, which in the nature of things arises between small 
 communities, similarly arises between individuals in each com- 
 munity ; and the ideas and usages appropriate to the one are more 
 or less appropriate to the other. Though within each group there 
 is ever a tendency for the stronger to aggress on the weaker ; yet, 
 in most cases, consciousness of the evils resulting from p.ggressivo 
 conduct serves to restrain. Everywhere among pri«iitive peo^jles, 
 trespasses are followed by counter-trespasses. Says Turner of the 
 Tannese, " adultery and some other crimes are kept in check by the 
 fear of club-law. ";]: Fitzroy tells us that the Patagonian, "if he 
 does not injure or offend his neighbour, is not interfered with by 
 others : "§ personal vengeance being the penalty for injury. We 
 read of the Uaupes that " they have very little law of any kind ; 
 but what they have is of strict retaliation, — an eye for an eye and 
 a tooth for a tooth." || And that the lex talioim tends to establish 
 a distinction between what each member of the community may 
 safely do and what he may not safely do, and consequently to give 
 sanctions to actions within a certain range but not beyond that 
 range, is obvious. Though, says Schoolcraft of the Chippewayans, 
 ihQj " have no regular government, as every man is lord in his 
 
 * Tennant, Ceylon ; an Account of the Island, Sfc, ii. 440. 
 
 + Bonwick, J., Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians, 83. 
 
 X Polynesia, p. 86. 
 
 § Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, ii. 167. 
 
 II Wallace, A. R., Travels on Amazon and Rio Negro, p. '193. 
 
 u
 
 98 THE MAX VEnSUS THE STATE. 
 
 own family, they are influenced more or less by certain principles- 
 which conduce to their general benefit : "* one of the principles 
 named being recognition of private property. 
 
 How mutual limitation of activities originates the ideas and 
 sentiments implied by the phrase " natural rights," we are shown 
 most distinctly by the few peaceful tribes which have either 
 nominal governments or none at all. Beyond those facts which 
 illustrate scrupulous regard for one another's claims among tha 
 Todas, Santals, Lepchas, Bodo, Chakmas, Jakuns, Arafuras, &c., 
 we have the fact that the utterly uncivilized Wood-Veddahs,. 
 without any social organization at all, " think it perfectly incon- 
 ceivable that any person should ever take that which does not 
 belong to him, or strike his fellow, or say anything that is- 
 untrue."t Thus it becomes clear, alike from analysis of causes and 
 observation of facts, that while the positive element in the right 
 to carry on life-sustaining activities, originates from the laws of 
 life, that negative element which gives ethical character to it,, 
 originates from the conditions produced by social aggregation. 
 
 So alien to the truth, indeed, is the alleged creation of rights 
 by government, that, contrariwise, rights having been established 
 more or less clearly before government arises, become obscured as- 
 government develops along with that militant activity which, both 
 by the taking of slaves and the establishment of ranks, produces- 
 status ; and the recognition of rights begins again to get definite- 
 ness only as fast as militancy ceases to be chronic and govern- 
 mental power declines. 
 
 When we turn from the life of the individual to the life of the 
 Bociety, the same lesson is taught us. 
 
 Though mere love of companionship prompts jjrimitive men tc 
 live in groups, yet the chief prompter is experience of the advan- 
 tages to be derived from co-operation. On what condition only 
 can Co-operation arise? Evidently on condition that those who 
 join their efforts severally gain by doing so. If, as in the simplest 
 oases, they unite to achieve something w^hich each by himself can- 
 not achieve, or can achieve less readily, it must be on the tacit 
 understanding, either that they shall share the benefit (as wheD- 
 
 * Schoolcraft. ^Expedition to the Sources of the Mississippi, v. 177. 
 t B. F. Hai'tshorne, Fortnightly Review^ March 1876. See also H. C. Sirr^. 
 Ceylon and the Ceylonese^ ii. 219,
 
 THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPEESTITIOX. yy 
 
 erarae is caught by a party of them) or that if one reaps all the 
 benefit now (as in building a hut or clearing a plot) the others 
 shall severally reap equivalent benefits in their turns. When, 
 instead of efforts joined in doing the same thing, different things 
 are effected by them — when division of labour arises, with accom- 
 panying barter of products, the arrangement implies that each, in 
 return for something which he has in superfluous quantity, gets 
 an approximate equivalent of something which he wants. If he 
 hands over the one and does not get the other, future proposals to 
 exchange will meet with no response. There will be a reversion 
 to that rudest condition in which each makes everything for him- 
 self. Hence the possibility of co-operation depends on fulfilment 
 of contract, tacit or overt. 
 
 Now this which we see must hold of the very first step towards 
 that industrial organization by which the life of a society is main- 
 tained, must hold more or less fully throughout its development. 
 Though the militant type of organization, with its system of status 
 produced by chronic war, greatly obscures these relations of con- 
 tract, yet they remain partially in force. They still hold between 
 freemen, and between the heads of those small groups which form 
 the anits of early societies; and, in a measure, they still hold within 
 theso small groups themselves ; since survival of them as groups, 
 implies such recognition of the claims of their fhembers, even 
 when slaves, that in return for their labours they get sufficiencies 
 of food, clothing, and protection. And when, with diminution of 
 warfare and growth of trade, voluntary co-operation more and 
 more replaces compulsory co-operation, and the carrying on of 
 social life by exchange under agreement, partially suspended for a 
 time, gradually re-establishes itself; its re -establishment makes 
 possible that vast elaborate industrial organization by which a 
 ^reat nation is sustained. 
 
 For in proportion as contracts are unhindered and the perform- 
 ance of them certain, the growth is great and the social life 
 active. It is not now by one or other of two individuals who con- 
 tract, that the evil effects of breach of contract are experienced. 
 In an advanced society, they are experienced by entire classes of 
 producers and distributors, which have arisen through division of 
 labour; and, eventually, they are experienced by everybody. Ask 
 on what condition it is that Birmingham devotes itself to manu- 
 facturing hardware, or part of Staffordshire to making pottery, or 
 
 H 2
 
 100 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 Larxcasliire txD weaving cotton. Ask how the rural people who here 
 grow wheat and there pasture cattle, find it possible to occupy 
 themselves in their special businesses. These groups can sevei-ally 
 thus act only if each gets from the others in exchange for its own 
 surplus product, due shares of their surplus products. No longer 
 directly effected by barter, this obtainment of their respective 
 shares of one another's products is indirectly effected by money ; 
 and if we ask how each division of producers gets its due amount 
 of the required money, the answer is — by fulfilment of contract. 
 If Leeds makes woollens and does not, by fulfilment of contract, 
 receive the means of obtaining from agricultural districts the 
 needful quantity of food, it must starve, and stop producing 
 woollens. If South Wales smelts iron and there comes no equi- 
 valent agreed upon, enabling it to get fabrics for clothing, its 
 industry must cease. And so throughout, in general and in 
 detail. That mutual dependence of parts which we see in social 
 organization, as in individual organization, is possible only on con- 
 dition that while each part does the particular kind of Avork it has 
 become adjusted to, it receives its proportion of those materials 
 required for repair and growth, which all the other parts have 
 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.
 
 108 
 
 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
 
 112 THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. 
 
 in ecclesiastical squabbles about the ceremonies of its humane cult, 
 cares so little about the essence of that cult that fillibustering in its 
 colonies receives applause rather than reprobation, and is not 
 denounced even by the priests of its religion of love, is a nation 
 which must continue to suffer from internal aggressions, alike of 
 individuals on one another and of the State on individuals. It is 
 impossible to unite the blessings of equity at home with the 
 commission of inequities abroad. 
 
 Of course there will arise the question — Why, then, enunciate 
 and emphasize a theory at variance with the theory adapted to our 
 present state ? 
 
 Beyond the general reply that it is the duty of every one who 
 regards a doctrine as true and important, to do what he can 
 towards diffusing it, leaving the result to be what it may be, there 
 are several more special replies, each of which is sufficient. 
 
 In the first place an ideal, far in advance of practicability 
 though it may be, is always needful for right guidance. If, amid 
 all those compromises which the circumstances of the times 
 necessitate, or are thought to necessitate, there exist no true 
 conceptions of better and worse in social organization — if nothing 
 beyond the exigencies of the moment are attended to, and the 
 proximately best is habitually identified with the ultimately best; 
 there cannot be any true progress. However distant may be the 
 goal, and however often intervening obstacles may necessitate 
 deviation in our course towards it, it is obvionsly requisite to know 
 whereabouts it lies. 
 
 Again, while something like the present degree of subjection 
 of the individual to the State, and something like the current 
 political theory adapted to it, may remain needful in presence of 
 existing international relations ; it is by no means needful that this 
 subjection should be made greater and the adapted theory 
 strengthened. In our days of active philanthropy, hosts of i^eople 
 eager to achieve benefits for their less fortunate fellows by the 
 shortest methods, are busily occupied in developing administrative 
 arrangements of a kind proper to a lower type of society — are 
 bringing about retrogression while aiming at progression. The 
 normal difficulties in the way of advance are sufficiently great, and 
 it is lamentable that they should be made greater. Hence, something 
 well worth doing may be done, if philanthropists can be shown
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 113 
 
 that tliey are in many cases insuring the future ill- being of men 
 while eagerly pursuing their present well-being. 
 
 Chiefly, however, it is important to impress on all the great 
 truth, at present but little recognised, that a society's internal and 
 external policies are so bound together, that there cannot be an 
 essential improvement of the one without an essential improvement 
 of the other. A higher standard of international justice must be 
 habitually acted upon, before there can be conformity to a higher 
 standard of justice in our national arrangements. The conviction 
 that a dependence of this kind exists, could it be diffused among 
 civilized peoples, would greatly check aggressive behaviour towards 
 one another ; and, by doing this, would diminish the coerciveness of 
 their governmental systems while appropriately changing their 
 political theories. 
 
 Note. 
 [J?i some of the criiioisms on this worh, there has reappeared a 
 mistaken inference several times hefore draiun, that the doctrine of 
 evolution as applied to social affairs precludes philanthropic effort. 
 'How untrue this is, was shoivn by me in the Fortnightly Review 
 for February, 1875. Here I reproduce the essential part of that which 
 I there said.'] 
 
 I am chiefly concerned, however, to repudiate the conclusion 
 that the "private action of citizens" is needless or unimportant, 
 because the course of social evolution is determined by the natures 
 of citizens, as working under the conditions in which they are 
 placed. To assert that each social change is thus determined, is to 
 assert that all the egoistic and altruistic activities of citizens are 
 factors of the change ; and is tacitly to assert that in the absence of 
 any of these — say political aspirations, or the promptings of philan- 
 thropy — the change will not be the same. So far from implying 
 that the efforts of each man to achieve that which he thinks best, 
 are unimportant, the doctrine implies that such efforts, severally 
 resulting from the natures of the individuals, are indispensable 
 forces. The correlative duty is thus emphasized in § 34 of First 
 Principles : — 
 
 " It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some 
 principles and repugnance to others. He, with all his capacities, and 
 aspirations, and beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He 
 must remember that while he id a descendant of the past, he is a parent 
 
 I
 
 114 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 of tlie future ; and tliat Iiis tlioughts are as children born to him, wliich 
 he may not carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly 
 consider himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the 
 Unknown Cause ; and when the Unknown Cause produces in him a certain 
 belief, he is thereby authorized to profess and act out that belief. For, to 
 render in their highest sense the words of the poet, — 
 
 "... Nature is made better by no mean, 
 But nature makes that mean : over that art 
 Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
 That nature makes." 
 
 That there is no retreat from this view in the work Professor 
 Cairnes criticises, is sufficiently shown by its closing paragraph : — 
 
 " Thus, admitting that for the fanatic some wild anticipation is needful 
 as a stimulus, and recognizing the usefulness of his delusion as adapted to 
 liis particular nature and his particular function, the man of higher type 
 must be content with greatly-moderated expectations, while he perseveres 
 Avith undiminished efforts. He has to see how comparatively little can be 
 done, and yet to find it worth while to do that little ; so uniting philan- 
 thropic energy with philosophic calm." 
 
 I do not see how Professor Cairnes reconciles with such passages, 
 his statement that "accoi*ding to Mr. Spencer, the future of the 
 human race may be safely trusted to the action of motives of a 
 private and personal kind — to motives such as operate in the pro- 
 duction and distribution o£ wealth, or in the development of lan- 
 f^-uage." This statement is to the effect that I ignore the *' action 
 of motives" of a higher kind ; whereas these are not only necessarily 
 included by me in the totality of motives, but repeatedly insisted 
 upon as all-essential factors. I am the more surprised at this mis- 
 apprehension, because, in the essay on "Specialized Administra- 
 tion," to which Professor Cairnes refers (see Fortniglitlij EevieWj 
 for December, 1871), I have dwelt at considerable length on the 
 altruistic sentiments and the resulting social activities, as not 
 having been duly taken into account by Professor Huxley. 
 
 As Professor Cairnes indicates at the close of his first paper, 
 the difficulty lies in recognising human actions as, under one 
 aspect, voluntary, and under another pre-determlned. 1 have said 
 elsewhere all I have to say on this point. Here I wish only to 
 point out that the conclusion he draws from my premises is utterly 
 different from the conclusion I draw. Entering this caveat, ] 
 must leave all further elucidations to come in due course. 
 
 UAHKUON AMD SONS, rB-iNXKBS IM ORDINABT TU nrs MAJESTY, ST. UABTIN's LANIS.
 
 ^&'^zAeim/ l^miM @^U€an (Q/fdde€>ck^en. 
 
 66, Victoria Street, S.W.
 
 I