CHAPTER IV. The Outlook for Liberty

THE OUTLOOK FOR LIBERTY

Every study of freedom is a plea for toleration; and every plea for toleration is a vindication of the rights of reason. The chief danger which always confronts a society is the desire of those who possess power to prohibit ideas and conduct which may disturb them in their possession. They are rarely concerned with the possible virtues of novelty and experiment. They are interested in the preservation of a static society because in such an order their desires are more likely to be fulfilled. Their ideas of right and wrong lie at the service of those desires. The standards they formulate are nothing so much as methods of maintaining an order with which they are satisfied; and those they repress or resent, are equally methods of establishing a new order in which different demands would secure fulfilment.

But this is not a static world, and there is no means of making it so. Curiosity, discovery, invention, all of these jeopardize by their nature the foundations of any society to which their results are denied admission. Toleration is therefore not merely desirable in itself, but also politically wise, because no other atmosphere of activity offers the assurance of peaceful adjustment. If power is held by a few, happiness will be confined to a few also. Every novelty will seem a challenge to that confinement; and it will always accrete about itself the wills of those who are excluded from a share in its benefits. For this world is not only dynamic; it is also diverse. The path to happiness is not a single one. Men are not willing to yield the insight of their experience to other men’s insight merely because they are commanded to do so. They must be persuaded by reason that one vision of desire is better than another vision, the experience commended to them must persuade and not enforce, if they are to accept its implications with a sense of contentment.

This is, of course, a counsel of perfection. Men enjoy the exercise of power; no passion has a deeper hold upon human impulse. The willingness to admit the prospect of difference, the courage to see that one’s private truth is never commensurate with the whole truth, these are the rarest of human qualities. That is why the friends of liberty are always a minority in every society. That is why, also, the maintenance of liberty is a thing that has to be fought for afresh every day, lest an inert acceptance of some particular imposition make the field of action accessible to a general tyranny. For it is impossible to confine the area in which freedom may be permitted to some special and defined part of conduct. Those who have fought for the right to think freely in theology or the natural sciences are not less certainly the ancestors of political freedom. Without Bruno and Galileo there would have been neither Rousseau nor Voltaire.

Liberty, therefore, cannot help being a courage to resist the demands of power at some point that is deemed decisive; and, because of this, liberty, also, is an inescapable doctrine of contingent anarchy. It is always a threat to those who operate the engines of authority that prohibition of experience will be denied. It is always an assertion that he who has learned from life some lesson he takes to be truth will seek to live that lesson unless he can be persuaded of its falsehood. Punishment may persuade some to abandon the effort; and others may be driven by its imposition to conceal their impulse to act upon the view they take. But persecution, however thoroughgoing, will never, over any long period, be able to suppress significant truth. If the principles that are urged by a few correspond to some widespread experience those who recognize the expression of their experience will inevitably reaffirm it. It has been the historic character of persecution always to degrade the persecutor and to strengthen the persecuted by drawing attention to their claims. The only way to deal with novelty is to understand it, and the only way to deal with grievance is to seek a remedy for the complaint it embodies. To deny novelty or grievance a right of expression is a certain, if, indeed, an ultimate, validation of the truth they contain.

We have, it appears, to learn this anew in each generation. We grant toleration in one part of the field only to deny it in another. We grant it in religion to deny it in politics; we grant it in politics, to deny it in economic matters. Each age finds that the incidence of freedom is significant at some special point, and there, once more, the lesson of freedom has to be learned. Each age makes some idol in its own image and sacrifices upon its altar the freedom of those who refuse it worship. Ultimately, that denial is always made upon the same ground: it is insisted that the doctrines or practices attacked are subversive of the civil order. The intolerance may be Catholic, when it insists that a unity of outlook is essential for the preservation of society; or it may be Protestant when, as with Calvin and the Socinians, it holds that the blasphemous nature of the belief anathematized destroys the reverence upon which society depends. The essence of the persecuting position is always that the persecutor has hold of truth and that he would betray its service by allowing it to be questioned. He is able, accordingly, to indulge in the twofold luxury not only of preserving his own authority, but also of assisting the persons attacked to enter, if they so choose, the way of truth.

When attacks on liberty are political or economic, it is their motive rather than their nature that changes. A political pattern has the same hold upon its votaries as a religion; the enthusiasts of Moscow and of Rome differ only in the object of their worship. An economic system defends itself in just the same way: the devotees of Marxism in its extreme form have never doubted their right to impose their outlook upon the recalcitrant, even at the cost of blood. In a constitutional state like America the suppression of liberty is called the inhibition of license; in a dictatorship like Moscow it is termed resistance to the admission of incorrect “bourgeois” notions. Always the effort is to insist upon an artificial unity the maintenance of which is necessary to the desires of those who hold power. Suppression, doubtless, eases the way of authority, for scepticism is always painful, and to arrive at a conclusion after careful testing of evidence always involves the possibility that authority may have to admit that its conclusions are mistaken.

Yet it may still be maintained with some confidence that the only adequate answer to a principle which claims social recognition is the rational proof that it is untrue. It may even be argued that the world would be a happier world if this were the general theory underlying the activities of society. Civilization is strewn with the wrecks of systems which men at one time held for true; systems, also, in the name of which liberty was denied and pain needlessly inflicted. A scrutiny of history, moreover, makes it plain that the right to liberty will always be challenged where its consequence is the equalization of some privilege which is not generally shared by men. The more consciously, therefore, we can seek that equalization as a desirable object of social effort, the more likely we are to make attacks upon liberty more rare, the evil results of such attack less frequent. No man’s love of justice is strong enough to survive the right to inflict punishment in the name of the creed he professes; and the simplest way to retain his sense of justice is to take away the interest which persuades him of the duty to punish. Scepticism, it may be, is a dissolvent of enthusiasm; but enthusiasm has always been the enemy of freedom. The atmosphere we require, if we are to attain happiness for the multitude, is one in which we have everything to gain by the statement of experience and nothing to lose by the investigation of its convictions. That atmosphere is the condition of liberty and its quality is light rather than heat. For light permits of argument, and we cannot argue with men who are in a passion. Nothing is so likely to engender passion as the perception that they are called to sacrifice a privilege. The way, therefore, of freedom is to arrange the pattern of social institutions so that there are no privileges to sacrifice.

This kind of plea for liberty is built, after all, upon the simple consideration that the world is likely to be the more happy if it refuses to build its institutions upon injustice. And institutions are necessarily unjust if the impression they continually produce in the majority is a feeling of envy and hatred for the results they impose. There is something wrong in a system which, like ours, maintains itself not by the respect and affection it evokes, but by the sanctions to which it can appeal. What is wrong in them is their erection upon the basis of passion and their insistence that reason shall serve what that passion is seeking to protect. So long as that is true of our society, we shall continue to deny the validity of all principles which attack the existing disposition of social forces. Those principles may often be wrong; yet sometimes, at least, they represent the certainties of the future. It is always a hazardous enterprise to suppress belief which claims to be rooted in the experience of men.

For no outlook which has behind it the support of considerable numbers will ever silently acquiesce in its reduction to impotence. It will fight for its right to be heard whatever the price of the conflict. Here it has been urged that conflict of this kind is usually unnecessary and frequently disastrous. It has been claimed that truth can be established by reason alone; that departure from the way of reason as a method of securing conviction is an indication always of a desire to protect injustice. Where there is respect for reason, there, also, is respect for freedom. And only respect for freedom can give final beauty to men’s lives.

FOOTNOTES

Acton, History of Freedom, p. 57.

As Mr. Aldous Huxley, for instance, does with a quite unnecessary apparatus of scholarship in his Proper Studies, pp. 1-31.

All this has been put in classic form by the late Professor Hobhouse in his Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918).

Cf. Barker, Political Thought from Herbert Spencer to Today (1915), p. 80.

W. H. Taft, Our Supreme Magistrate and His Powers (1921), pp. 102-3.

See my detailed discussion of the point in 34 Michigan Law Review, p. 529.

189 U.S. 253.

(1915) A. C. 120.

38 Sup. Ct. Rep. 122.

(1923) 2 K. B. 61.

Cf. my Grammar of Politics, pp. 541 f.

Ibid.

Esprit des Lois, Bk. XI, Chap. VI.

Second Treatise, Sec. 12.

Cf. my paper on American Federalism in the volume entitled The Dangers of Obedience (1930).

Cf. Louis Post, The Deportations Delirium (1921).

250 U.S. 616.

See Taney’s Report.

I. W. Graham, Conscription and Conscience (1922), Chap. III.

Ibid., p. 209.

Ibid.

See, for example, Wickwar’s Freedom of the Press for an account of judicial mores in the early nineteenth century; and H. T. Buckle’s pamphlet on the Pooley case for similar conduct thirty years later.

Z. C. Chafee’s classic discussion in Freedom of Speech is the best account of this unhappy period.

Thereby laying himself open to FitzJames Stephen’s crushing attack.

Cf. my Grammar of Politics, Chap. VII.

Cf. my Grammar of Politics, p. 82 f.

A list is printed in Ernst and Segal, To the Pure (1929), pp. 296-302.

This is brought out well in Mr Nokes’ excellent book on the blasphemy laws.

53 G. III, C. 160.

Ut supra.

Cf. my Grammar of Politics, p. 554.

Cd. 1614 (1922).

Cf. my Grammar of Politics, pp. 256 f.

Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1.

Cf. my Authority in the Modern State, Chap. V.

Calwell, Life of Sir H. Wilson, Vol. II, passim.

Le Droit Social, Lect. III.

The Observer, 18 August 1929.

277 U.S. 438.

Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, Chap. XII.

Cf. Mr Lippmann’s excellent analysis in Liberty and the News.

I take my account from a summary in the Lantern (Boston), July 1929.

Lippmann, Public Opinion, pp. 379 f.

Cf. Lady Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners.

Cf. Frankfurter and Green, The Injunction in Labour Disputes (1930).

See the lecture on Equality in Mixed Essays.

See for instance, the very interesting letter of Mr MacDonald to Keir Hardie in W. Stewart, Life of Keir Hardie (1921), p. 92.

Mr Ramsay Muir in the Nation, 17 August 1929.

Preface to the World’s Classics edition of Bagshot’s English Constitution, p. xxiii.

On Liberty (People’s edition), p. 68.

Cf. my Grammar of Politics, Chap. XI.

Cf. Lauterpacht, Private Law Analogies in International Law, for a brilliant discussion of this question; and my paper ‘Law and the State’ in Economica, No. 27, pp. 267 f.

Kaufman, Das Wesen der Volkerrechts.