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 YALE LECTURES ON THE 
 RESPONSIBILITIES OF CITIZENSHIP 
 
 THE RELATIONS BETWEEN 
 
 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 IN THE EVOLUTION OF DEMOCRATIC 
 GOVERNMENT
 
 IN THE SAME SERIES. 
 
 THE RELATION BETWEEN FREEDOM 
 AND RESPONSIBILITY IN THE EVO- 
 LUTION OF DEMOCRATIC GOVERN- 
 MENT. By Arthur T. Hadlev, President 
 of Yale University. lamo. ;$i.oo net. 
 
 THE CITIZEN IN HIS RELATION TO 
 THE INDUSTRIAL SITUATION. By 
 Henry C. Potter, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of 
 New York. i2mo. $i.oo net. 
 
 AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP. By David J. 
 Brewer, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of 
 the United States, izmo. 75 cents net.
 
 THE RELATIONS BETWEEN 
 
 FREEDOM 
 
 AND 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 IN THE EVOLUTION 
 OF DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 
 
 PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITV 
 
 AUTHOR OF "economics," "RAILROAD TRANSPORTATION," 
 "the education of the AMERICAN CITIZEN" 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1903
 
 Copyright, 1903 
 By Yale University 
 
 Published, December, 1903 
 
 TROW DIRECTORY 
 
 PRINTINQ AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 
 
 NIW YORK
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 571 
 
 H II 
 
 no 
 
 TO 
 
 THE MEMORY OF 
 
 WILLIAM EARL DODGE 
 
 FOUNDER OF THE YALE LECTURES ON THE 
 
 RESPONSIBILITIES OF CITIZENSHIP 
 
 WHO HIMSELF ACCEPTED THOSE RESPONSIBILITIES 
 
 IN THE FULLEST MEASURE 
 
 AND WHO 
 
 BY HIS CHARACTER AND HIS EXAMPLE 
 
 INSPIRED OTHERS TO 
 
 DO LIKEWISE 
 
 \ 
 
 V
 
 PREFACE 
 
 For the successful conduct of a nation's affairs, 
 we must have a certain degree of conformity be- 
 tween its political institutions and the moral char- 
 acter of its members. There is one set of virtues 
 which fits men to be subjects of a monarchy; there 
 is another very different set which is requisite for 
 the citizens of a free commonwealth. 
 
 We find a tendency among many people at the 
 present day to claim the political rights of free citi- 
 zens without accepting the moral obligations which 
 go with them. But the attempt to assume the privi- 
 leges of freedom and disclaim its responsibilities 
 is fatal to the nation which tolerates it ; and theories 
 of law or schemes of social reform which ignore 
 this ethical basis of democracy are likely to prove 
 suicidal. 
 
 It is the object of this book to show what this 
 ethical basis of democracy is, how it has arisen, and 
 what happens if we try to ignore it.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Democracy in Theory and in Practice . 1 
 II. The Basis of Civil Liberty 26 
 
 III. Freedom as a Religious Conception . . 48 
 
 IV. Freedom as a Legal Institution ... 73 
 V. Freedom as a Foundation of Ethics . . 102 
 
 VI. The Limits of Individual Freedom . . 126 
 VII. The Outlook for the Future .... 150
 
 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND IN PRACTICE 
 
 The ordinary student of public affairs is content 
 to classify governments by their external form. He 
 calls them monarchies, aristocracies, or democra- 
 cies, according as the supreme authority rests in the 
 hands of an individual, a privileged class, or a large 
 body of citizens ; and having thus labelled a political 
 society with one of these three names, he thinks that 
 he knows something about its real character. 
 
 But the man who goes more deeply into the sub- 
 ject sees that the form of government is an unim- 
 portant thing as compared with the spirit in which 
 government is administered. A king or a privileged 
 class ruling in accordance with traditions and try- 
 ing to act for the interests of the people will give 
 a much larger measure of real freedom than is 
 possible under a democracy whose members have no 
 respect for the past and no higher aim than their 
 own selfish advancement. In 1793 France was a 
 
 1
 
 2 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 democracy, England an aristocracy ; but the actual 
 amount of liberty enjoyed in England was decidedly 
 greater than in France. The more a man knows of 
 political history, the more he will appreciate the 
 reasons which led Aristotle to divide all govern- 
 ments into two fundamentally distinct classes: the 
 legitimate and the illegitimate. Legitimate gov- 
 ernments are administered in the interest of the 
 whole body politic, under a system of traditions 
 whose gradual growth and preservation is the best 
 guarantee that this public interest is subserved. 
 Illegitimate governments are administered in the 
 interest of the governing body be it an individual, 
 a small group, or a large number of free citizens 
 with relatively little regard for the wider interests 
 of the body politic, and without any adequate re- 
 straints of tradition. This internal character or 
 spirit of a government is far more important than 
 any of its external characteristics. With unselfish 
 purpose and adherence to tradition any govern- 
 ment, whatever its form, may be said to exist by 
 the consent of the governed. Without such un- 
 selfish purpose and adherence to tradition, mon- 
 archy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into 
 oligarchy, democracy into populism. 
 
 As far as monarchy and aristocracy are con- 
 cerned, these dangers are sufficiently obvious. It
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 3 
 
 is easy to see that a monarch, acting for his own 
 selfish ends, may declare himself independent of 
 the law and become a tyrant. It is easy to see that 
 an aristocracy, preferring class interest to public 
 interest, may degenerate into the rule of an element 
 which is far from being the best in the state. It is 
 plain enough that a king or a nobleman does not 
 deserve to continue in office unless he regards polit- 
 ical power as a trust to be exercised in behalf of 
 society as a whole. But it has not always been 
 recognized that the same dangers exist in a democ- 
 racy, and that a democratic people needs to be 
 animated by the same sense of trusteeship in the 
 exercise of its political functions. 
 
 Some men believe that the mere existence of de- 
 mocracy renders it impossible that public affairs 
 should be administered in the interests of a class or 
 group. They think that government by popular 
 election will necessarily mean government for the 
 people. They hold that if a state, nominally dem- 
 ocratic, is managed for the benefit of a favored few, 
 it simply proves that the elections are being im- 
 properly conducted in other words, that we have 
 before us not a democracy, but an oligarchy mas- 
 querading under a false name. Men who look at 
 things in this way have urged an equalization of 
 political power among all classes as a sovereign
 
 4 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 remedy for public ills. Others, who do not go to 
 this extreme and are clear-headed enough to admit 
 the possibility of abuse of democratic authority, 
 nevertheless believe that with a proper legal ma- 
 chinery of checks and balances the dangers of this 
 abuse can be reduced to a minimum and perhaps 
 altogether avoided. They think that a constitution 
 can be framed in such a way that the people can 
 let their political life be governed by considerations 
 of self-interest without serious detriment nay, 
 perhaps with positive advantage to the necessities 
 of the republic as a whole. 
 
 Each of these views is erroneous, and may readily 
 become dangerous. The error in the second is less 
 obvious than in the first ; but the practical dangers 
 which arise from its prevalence are all the greater 
 on that account. It is probably quite as necessary 
 for the citizens of a democratic state to regard polit- 
 ical power as a public trust, to be exercised for the 
 benefit of others, as it is for a monarch or an aris- 
 tocrat. The acceptance of this responsibility and 
 trusteeship goes with the successful exercise of 
 every kind of freedom moral, social, or civil. Any 
 attempt to claim freedom and disclaim responsi- 
 bility, under whatever name or form of govern- 
 ment, proves illusory or self-destructive. 
 
 The danger of relying on unrestricted democracy
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 5 
 
 was most clearly illustrated at the time of the 
 French Revolution of 1789. The leaders of that 
 movement, when they swept away the evils which 
 had been incident to an outworn system of class 
 privileges, thought that it would be sufficient for 
 them to give equality of voting power in order to 
 have the government administered in the general 
 interest. They were so enamored of Rousseau's 
 phrases about the sovereignty of the people that 
 they neglected his warnings against short cuts 
 toward the exercise of that sovereignty. The conse- 
 quences which followed are only too well known. 
 Whoever at any given moment commanded the ma- 
 jority of votes in the National Assembly deemed 
 himself, for the time being, the exponent of the 
 public will, and regarded his personal judgment 
 as the index of public opinion. Each believed that 
 he was the accredited agent of the whole people. 
 At the end of the seventeenth century Louis XIV 
 had said, "I am the State." With equal fervor 
 of conviction Marat, or Danton, or Robespierre was 
 ready to pronounce those same words at the end 
 of the eighteenth. Louis XIV, in spite of his abso- 
 lute political authority, was subject to some re- 
 straints of custom and tradition. The revolutionary 
 leaders recognized no such restraints, and were for 
 that reason even more liable to abuse their power.
 
 6 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 That their government in theory represented the 
 will of the whole people only made matters worse 
 in practice, because it removed moral restraints 
 which would otherwise have made themselves felt. 
 The fact that Danton regarded himself as the com- 
 munity 's representative was the very thing which 
 rendered him most unsafe to the community. It has 
 been said that virtue is more dangerous than vice, 
 because its excesses are not subject to the restraints 
 of conscience. It was these excesses of supposed 
 virtue which made the Reign of Terror possible. 
 The men who, like St. Just, were most irreproach- 
 able in their private character, were the very ones 
 to be most unscrupulous in the use of judicial mur- 
 der for what they supposed to be the public interest. 
 It is easy to point out the fallacy in the views of 
 the French Revolutionary leaders. They did not 
 properly distinguish between the government and 
 the people. They supposed that when the people 
 elected the government, the members of that govern- 
 ment became, ipso facto, the mouthpieces of the 
 popular will. This of course did not follow. A 
 person who was elected to office might be a bad 
 man, whose wishes would be as tyrannical as those 
 of the most degraded monarch. Or he might be a 
 misguided man, who would mistake his own false 
 judgments for the opinion of the people as a whole.
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 7 
 
 Or and this is perhaps the hardest thing of all to 
 avoid even if he were honest and clear-headed, 
 and tried to carry out the wishes of the majority 
 who had elected him, this majority might have in- 
 terests of its own which it would use for the detri- 
 ment and the oppression of the minority. In none 
 of these cases would the government really repre- 
 sent the interests of the body politic. The more 
 unchecked the power of a political leader under any 
 of these circumstances, the greater was the proba- 
 bility of oppression and of class legislation. 
 
 The failure of the French to appreciate this dis- 
 tinction between the people and their elective offi- 
 cials was largely due to the fact that democratic 
 power was given to them too suddenly. They had had 
 no chance to experiment with its exercise in detail, 
 and could hardly fail to be misled by false theories 
 when they were suddenly called upon to apply it 
 on a large scale. In England and in the English 
 colonies of America, where the growth of freedom 
 was more gradual, the chance for experiments in 
 self-government had been larger, and the danger 
 from false theories was correspondingly less. So 
 long as our ancestors were stating principles, they 
 stated them very much as the French did. But 
 when they set out to apply them to the actual work 
 of government, they took pains to avoid the prac- 
 
 *-
 
 8 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 tical difficulties of which they had already had 
 experience. The Declaration of Independence con- 
 tains theories closely resembling those of Rousseau ; 
 but the Constitution of the United States is as 
 different from any of the French constitutions at 
 the close of the eighteenth century as a practical 
 machine is different from a whirligig. The English 
 and American liberals relied on restricted or con- 
 stitutional democracy as a means of avoiding the 
 evils which had sprung from monarchy or aristoc- 
 racy on the one hand, and from unrestrained popu- 
 lar power on the other. The framers of our Con- 
 stitution set out with a definite problem before 
 them ^the problem of constructing a working gov- 
 ernment which should give effect to the will of the 
 people and at the same time provide efficient safe- 
 guards for individual liberty. When their theories 
 seemed likely to secure this result, they stated them 
 boldly. When they seemed likely to interfere with 
 it, they quietly ignored them. 
 
 The main points which our ancestors had thus 
 learned from the history of the English Parliament 
 and from their own experience in the colonial as- 
 semblies may be summed up in a few words. 
 
 A representative assembly or convention, com- 
 posed of delegates from different sections of the 
 community, had its chief usefulness as a forum for
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 9 
 
 discussion and a means of forming public opinion. 
 For this purpose it was admirably adapted. For 
 conducting the real business of government it 
 was not well fitted. If it attempted to perform 
 this work itself it was vacillating in policy, and 
 arbitrary and irresolute by turns. This had been 
 exemplified in the sessions of the Continental Con- 
 gress. It had been almost equally conspicuous in 
 England during the struggle between the King and 
 Parliament in the middle of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. There are times when firmness of purpose 
 and promptitude of action, even though it be some- 
 what unwise, are preferable to the wisest delibera- 
 tion protracted to an undue length. Armies, says 
 Macaulay, have won victories under bad generals, 
 but no army ever won a victory under a debating 
 society. If, on the other hand, the convention or 
 parliament recognized these limitations, and did not 
 attempt to perform the actual work of administra- 
 tion, but found within its ranks some leader to 
 whom it was ready to delegate its powers, that 
 leader soon became strong enough to reduce the 
 assembly to a mere cipher and to exercise an author- 
 ity none the less despotic because decently veiled 
 under some of the forms of popular government. 
 This had been England's experience in the case of 
 Cromwell; and it is one which, on a larger or
 
 10 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 smaller scale, almost every democratic nation has 
 been forced to repeat. 
 
 To meet these dangers, the American Constitution 
 provided that the actual work of government should 
 not be performed either by the legislative assembly, 
 or by an appointee of that assembly, but by an 
 officer chosen through another body called the elec- 
 toral college. It was to be the duty of this college 
 to deliberate on the choice of president and vice- 
 president; and, having performed that duty, to 
 terminate its official life, leaving the president free 
 to act in the sphere of government assigned him, 
 while the legislature, within its own sphere, still 
 possessed its full force and had not abrogated or 
 delegated any of its powers. These powers of the 
 legislature, or Congress, under the American Con- 
 stitution, were similar to those which were actually 
 exercised at the time by the English Parliament. 
 It could pass laws after proper debate, and it could 
 exercise indirect control over the acts of the execu- 
 tive by its power of withholding supplies, and by 
 certain other means which the Constitution pro- 
 vided in order to prevent the president from arbi- 
 trarily disregarding the wishes of the people as 
 expressed in Congress. It was further provided 
 that the executive authority of the president and 
 the legislative authority of Congress were to be
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 11 
 
 exercised only within definite limits and under re- 
 strictions set by custom or rendered advisable by 
 experience. Some of these were incorporated in 
 the Constitution ; others were involved in the tacit 
 acceptance of English legal principles. Courts 
 were established, whose members were appointed by 
 the executive but whose tenure of office rendered 
 them independent of arbitrary whims of that ex- 
 ecutive, which could define the application of these 
 principles and prevent the President or the Con- 
 gress from transgressing them. 
 
 This is a picture, necessarily brief and imperfect, 
 but fair in its essential outlines, of the most im- 
 portant attempt which the world Has seen to provide 
 machinery of democratic self-government. It indi- 
 cates the dangers which the framers of our Consti- 
 tution anticipated and the methods which they 
 actually employed to meet them. In the light of a 
 full century of experience, what shall we say of 
 their success ? 
 
 In the main, they succeeded well. The specific 
 things which they set out to do they unquestionably 
 brought about. They established a government 
 sufficiently popular to prevent revolution, and yet 
 sufficiently conservative to secure prosperity. There 
 have been no dangerous acts of usurpation on the 
 part of the executive. This branch of the govern-
 
 12 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 ment has been always fairly strong, and in emer- 
 gencies exceedingly strong, without in general be- 
 coming arbitrary or oppressive. There has been 
 an independent activity of President, Congress and 
 courts which has, to some degree, followed the lines 
 which Hamilton and Madison had in mind. The 
 safeguards of traditional usage have been main- 
 tained ; and the courts have exercised a control over 
 arbitrary acts of the legislature, at once more ex- 
 tended and more salutary than was deemed possible 
 at the outset. 
 
 To a certain extent, then, the f ramers of the Con- 
 stitution may be said to have protected us against 
 the dangers of assumption of arbitrary power in 
 the interests of an individual or a class. But this is 
 true only to a certain extent. In providing against 
 one set of dangers which they could anticipate from 
 past experience they exposed us to another set which 
 they could not thus anticipate. 
 
 It was, I think, the tacit assumption of the mem- 
 bers of the Constitutional Convention that the 
 various representative bodies which it provided 
 the electoral college and the two houses of Congress 
 would be organs for the formation of public opin- 
 ion. Coming from different parts of the country, 
 their members would enlighten one another as to the 
 views and needs of American citizens in different
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 13 
 
 places, and would thus be able to arrive at a com- 
 mon understanding concerning the views and needs 
 of the nation as a whole, which they in turn would 
 report to their constituents and defend against local 
 criticism. This had been the essential character of 
 the English Parliament down to the close of the 
 eighteenth century. It was, as its name implied, a 
 parliament a place for debating. By its debates 
 it held up to public odium the tyrannical acts of 
 the king which otherwise might have escaped notice, 
 and created a common public sentiment which made 
 all parts of the kingdom ready to resist infringe- 
 ment on the liberties of any. In the earlier days 
 of Parliament, all its other achievements and powers 
 were small in comparison with this. But during 
 the course of the nineteenth century these debating 
 functions of the English Parliament, and of other 
 representative bodies modelled upon it, became 
 much less important. The post office, the news- 
 paper, the telegraph, caused public opinion to be 
 formed in advance, before any representative as- 
 sembly could meet. As soon as this change took 
 place, the importance of parliamentary discussion 
 almost necessarily died away. The electoral college 
 had been originally intended as a body for debate, 
 whose members should make up their minds, after 
 consultation, as to the candidate whose election
 
 14 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 would best subserve the interests of the whole body 
 politic ; but it soon became a mere machine for reg- 
 istering instructions previously given to its mem- 
 bers by the convention of the party which elected 
 them. A similar result has made itself felt in the 
 houses of Congress; more slowly and less com- 
 pletely, indeed, because it is impossible for a con- 
 vention to instruct its representatives as explicitly 
 on the various points of legislation which are likely 
 to arise as it can instruct them on the ballot to be 
 cast for a president or a vice-president, but none 
 the less inevitably. Congressional debate, which by 
 one generation of our statesmen was used as a means 
 of forming public opinion, became in the second 
 generation only a means of expressing or justifying 
 the attitude of a section, and in the third generation 
 is barely tolerated as a survival of ancient practices, 
 to be cut short whenever the exigencies of business 
 demand it. For, coincident with this decline in the 
 demand for debate, there has been an increase in 
 the amount of business to be done. A thousand de- 
 tails occupy the attention of each branch of our 
 legislature for one that might have come before it 
 a century ago. With so little time for public dis- 
 cussion, and so many practical measures to be 
 pushed through, it is not surprising that the average 
 congressman of today has ceased to regard it as his
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 15 
 
 primary duty to shape public opinion by his utter- 
 ances, his votes, and his personal influence. On 
 questions of party policy he deems himself com- 
 missioned to register the will of those who elected 
 him, and on all non-partisan matters to use his 
 utmost efforts to despatch such business as the in- 
 terests of his district most urgently demand. 
 
 In an assembly of this kind the work of govern- 
 ment tends to degenerate into a series of attempts 
 to promote partisan or local interests, rather than 
 to unite all persons in the pursuit of a common 
 interest. Even when legislators honestly strive 
 to resist this tendency, they are often powerless to 
 overcome it. The efforts of the leaders are, and of 
 necessity must be, directed toward the securing 
 of a majority, rather than toward the convincing of 
 a minority. The acts of a body under such leader- 
 ship are a series of negotiations rather than discus- 
 sions, looking toward compromise rather than toward 
 mutual enlightenment. It is urged by those who 
 defend the system that these negotiations and these 
 struggles are conducted on fair terms; that the 
 local and partisan efforts of some men in certain 
 directions are balanced by the equally free efforts 
 of other men in other directions; that a majority 
 which abuses its powers will soon find itself in a 
 minority; and that, in short, the free play of this
 
 16 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 conflict of parties and districts gives quite as equi- 
 table results as any other system which has been 
 devised. We have hardly time to stop and consider 
 how far these views are justified. Whatever may 
 be said in extenuation of the evils, it frequently 
 happens in the work of modern legislative assem- 
 blies that the fair claims of minorities are ruthlessly 
 sacrificed ; that those who would defend the public 
 treasury from the effects of extravagant appropria- 
 tion bills are overborne by a coalition of those who 
 see in a group of such bills a special advantage to 
 the interests which they represent; and that the 
 interests of those so organized that they can at the 
 moment command many votes are allowed to out- 
 weigh far weightier interests which are not so cir- 
 cumstanced. Whatever may be the final outcome of 
 the struggle, the immediate effort of the leaders of 
 our representative assemblies works toward what 
 Aristotle calls illegitimate government govern- 
 ment by a group in its own interest, rather than in 
 the interest of the whole body politic. 
 
 This effect is not peculiar to the United States. 
 It has been felt to a greater or less degree in Eng- 
 land, in France, and in Germany. But there is one 
 special set of conditions in the American Constitu- 
 tion which has made the change go farther in the 
 United States than anywhere else, and has rendered
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 17 
 
 the resulting problems very much more difficult 
 to meet. 
 
 The f ramers of our Constitution, in order to avoid 
 the danger of usurpation by the president, reduced 
 to a minimum the connection between the executive 
 and legislative departments of the government ; and 
 at the same time they so arranged the powers of each 
 of these departments that neither could be very 
 effective without the other. The legislative work of 
 Congress was subject to the president's veto. The 
 executive work of the president was dependent for 
 its effective prosecution upon the good-will of a 
 congressional, and especially of a senatorial, ma- 
 jority. Each department had it in its power to 
 thwart the efforts of the other. This was a good 
 thing in extreme cases, when either department 
 wished to violate the Constitution ; but in ordinary 
 cases, when we wanted to have the regular work of 
 government smoothly and effectively performed, it 
 was always inconvenient and sometimes bad. No 
 private corporation can be efficiently managed when 
 it is run by two independent sets of authorities at 
 the same time. What is true of a private corpora- 
 tion is equally true of a public corporation. Di- 
 vision of authority causes work to be done slowly, 
 and prevents people from fixing the responsibility 
 for its failure or inefficiency. In England, where
 
 18 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 the prime minister, representing a Parliamentary 
 majority, constitutes the real executive, we know 
 fairly well where to award the praise or blame for 
 what is going on. If Parliament passes the bills 
 which he desires, the prime minister takes the re- 
 sponsibility. If Parliament will not pass the bills 
 which he desires, he withdraws from office and 
 leaves some one else to do better if he can. But 
 in the United States we have a president, represent- 
 ing the people in one way, and Congress, repre- 
 senting the people in another way. If the two 
 powers are at issue each blames the other. 
 
 It will occasionally happen that the president can 
 dominate Congress by his ability, as did Washing- 
 ton or Lincoln. It will perhaps somewhat more 
 frequently happen that he can manage it by his 
 tact, as did McKinley. But unless he possesses ex- 
 ceptional power in one of these directions, some 
 special agency is needed for coordinating the work 
 of the two parts of the government which the Amer- 
 ican Constitution has not only left independent, but 
 has tried to force into a degree of independence 
 that is quite unnatural. 
 
 This agency is found in the party machinery. 
 
 If any business needs to be done which requires 
 the cooperation of both the executive and legislative 
 departments of the government, a quick way to get
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 19 
 
 at it and often the only way to get at it is to 
 see that it is approved in the regular channels of 
 party organization. If it secures this approval, all 
 goes smoothly. If it does not secure this approval, 
 it is blocked in all manner of unexpected ways. 
 That this state of things exists is quite generally 
 recognized. That it is a price we pay for the bene- 
 fits enjoyed under the Constitution of the United 
 States is not, I think, equally well recognized. 
 
 I do not, of course, mean that our constitutional 
 provisions are the cause for the existence of parties. 
 Political parties are formed in every legislative as- 
 sembly, among men of all races and all forms of 
 executive authority. Wherever one group of people 
 wants one set of measures carried, and another 
 group prefers another set, each will organize itself 
 in order to give effect and coherence to its views. 
 To any such organization a certain amount of party 
 machinery is incident. But where there is a lack 
 of proper connection between the executive and the 
 legislature, as there was in England in the eighteenth 
 century, or as there is in America under the Consti- 
 tution today, we find party organization taking a 
 peculiar character. We see parties primarily ar- 
 ranged, not to promote certain measures of legisla- 
 tion, but to do the work of government. The party 
 machine as an administrative body becomes the
 
 20 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 main thing ; the legislative measures with which it 
 is identified are only an incident. I believe this to 
 have been the usual condition in the United States, 
 especially in later years. Occasionally we find ex- 
 ceptions. The democratic party in the generation 
 preceding the war was influenced by men who cared 
 for state sovereignty as against centralization, and 
 were willing to sacrifice office rather than com- 
 promise this principle. The republican party from 
 1856 to 1870 was dominated by men who cared more 
 for free soil and for the Union than they did for 
 their own positions of authority or political power. 
 But these are hardly the normal types of American 
 party life. Under ordinary circumstances the work 
 of persuading the executive and legislature to work 
 in harmony under the somewhat strained conditions 
 presented by the United States Constitution seems 
 more important than the passing of any particular 
 measures; and that side of the party organization 
 naturally and inevitably comes to the front. 
 
 This method of government, whatever merits it 
 may have, is obviously not government by the peo- 
 ple and for the people. It is government by a 
 particular section of the people ; and, primarily at 
 any rate, for the Interests of that section. If the 
 voters who form a certain party are men of liberal 
 ideas and just principles, their leaders will of course
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 21 
 
 not go so far to oppress the minority as they 
 would if their constituents were narrow-minded 
 and reckless of moral restraint. But even at best 
 partisan majorities are quite inconsiderate of mi- 
 nority interests. I suppose all men, independent of 
 their traditional affiliations, can now see that the 
 democrats in the years immediately preceding the 
 war, and the republicans in the years immediately 
 following the war, were both rather unscrupulous in 
 the use of the machinery of government to promote 
 the interests of the sections which they chiefly rep- 
 resented. A party, as its very name implies, repre- 
 sents a part, and not the whole. The fact that it 
 has no recognized status in the Constitution makes 
 it all the more difficult to fix public responsibilities 
 upon its real leaders, because they do their work 
 without official recognition, and therefore without 
 the acceptance of those duties which such recogni- 
 tion usually brings. 
 
 There is no need of citing detailed instances of 
 wrong and oppression which come through the 
 machinery of party government, or of the tempta- 
 tions to corruption which the existence of such 
 machinery furnishes. We find quite enough of this 
 set forth at length in the columns of any newspaper 
 opposed to the dominant authority. I conceive that 
 there can be no doubt on the main propositions that
 
 22 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 parties are organized for the interests of a section 
 of the community rather than for the whole ; that 
 they have developed in a way not intended or ex- 
 pected by the framers of the Constitution; that 
 these organizations, representing class interests, are 
 things which it is extremely difficult to hold respon- 
 sible, legally or morally, in the way that a recog- 
 nized public official could be held responsible ; and 
 that for the sake of carrying an election they may 
 commit themselves to measures which are likely to 
 do great damage, not only to the minority but to 
 the interests of the community as a whole. In other 
 words, the separation of the legislative and execu- 
 tive branches of the government has offered no 
 adequate safeguard against the tyranny of the ma- 
 jority over the minority. The Reconstruction Acts 
 furnished a visible instance of such tyranny, from 
 which we have by no means recovered. The cor- 
 poration laws of certain states in the years following 
 the crisis of 1873 furnished another conspicuous 
 instance. Even in recent years there has been more 
 than one campaign fought out on an issue of class 
 interests, in which our escape from serious legisla- 
 tive dangers has been very narrow indeed. 
 
 Nor is it in Congress alone that we suffer from 
 this tyranny of the majority through the medium 
 of party organization. The increasing centraliza-
 
 DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 23 
 
 tion of all authority, industrial as well as political, 
 and the increased activity of communication be- 
 tween different parts of the body politic have caused 
 boards of councilmen or state legislatures to handle 
 matters which were formerly left to the individual, 
 and national authorities to deal with many prob- 
 lems which were formerly entrusted to local ones. 
 The rule that every man should mind his own 
 business is not so easy to follow as it once was; 
 and when a legislator is forced to mind other peo- 
 ple 's business, there is a great temptation to sacri- 
 fice interests which command only a few votes to 
 those which command a great many. 
 
 Neither in nation, nor in state, nor in city, have 
 these dangers of government interference been to 
 any appreciable degree avoided by the separation 
 of executive and legislative powers. For protection 
 against them we rely upon the courts. The work 
 of the courts in this respect, taking it as a whole, 
 has been extremely salutary. There have indeed 
 been times when the suspicion of partisanship has 
 attached to American judicial utterances ; but they 
 have been singularly few. On the whole, federal 
 and state courts alike have been not only a protec- 
 tion, but the one really efficient protection, of mi- 
 nority interests against oppression by the majority. 
 Our constitutional rights against deprivation of
 
 24 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 personal liberty, against the taking of property 
 without due process of law, and against the in- 
 fringement of contractual obligations not to speak 
 of others less habitually called in question 
 have been defined and administered by the courts 
 with a rare degree of success. It has more than 
 once happened that an impatient majority has de- 
 nounced these courts as instruments of partisan- 
 ship. The anti-slavery leaders, the soft money 
 leaders, and the labor leaders, have in turn taken 
 exception to their utterances, and even ventured 
 to impugn their motives. But I think that most in- 
 telligent men who know the history of the country 
 will say that our courts have been the real bulwarks 
 of American liberty ; and that while Hamilton and 
 his associates would be somewhat disappointed in 
 the working of the machinery of legislation and 
 administration if they could see it in its present 
 shape, they would be filled with admiration at the 
 work which has been accomplished by the judiciary. 
 I believe it to be the judgment of sober-minded men 
 that the courts have furnished the agency which has 
 guarded us against partisan excesses, and have 
 saved the American republic from the necessity of 
 repeating the successive revolutionary experiences 
 which France underwent before she could attain to 
 a stable democracy.
 
 DExMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 25 
 
 And yet this department of our government, which 
 has thus been essential to the preservation of liberty, 
 is precisely the one which represents restraint. This 
 is the distinctive function exercised by the courts. 
 Legislature and executive are means given to allow 
 the people to do what they please, under certain 
 constitutional forms. The judiciary is a means 
 given to prevent the people from doing what they 
 please. How can we explain the fact that these 
 judicial restrictions are of the very essence of free- 
 dom? I answer, because the law of the United 
 States, as defined and administered by its courts, 
 represents not only restraint, but se?/-restraint ; 
 and a kind of self-restraint which any nation must 
 be prepared to exercise, if it hopes permanently to 
 enjoy the advantages of political freedom.
 
 II 
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 
 
 We saw in the previous chapter that a democ- 
 racy, however well organized, is liable to degenerate 
 into government by a section of the people, admin- 
 istered primarily to suit the views and interests of 
 that section ; in other words, that the danger of the 
 tyranny of a majority is no less real than the danger 
 of the tyranny of a monarch or a ruling class. We 
 saw also that the machinery of the American Con- 
 stitution, which was intended to reduce this danger 
 by the separation of legislative and executive power, 
 had in some ways actually increased it, by the need 
 which it created for strong party organizations to 
 assist in the work of government; and that for a 
 really effective check upon the partisan attempts of 
 the majority to abridge the freedom of the minority 
 we had come to rely on the action of the courts. 
 
 But what gives the courts this power 1 What is 
 it that enables them to say to majorities, ' ' Thus far 
 shalt thou go, and no farther ' ' ? By what right do 
 they stand as an effective bar to president or con- 
 gress, to governor or general assembly? 
 
 26
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 27 
 
 Most people would reply: "They derive the 
 power from the Constitution of the United States 
 itself." To some extent this answer is a true one. 
 The Constitution specifically provides against cer- 
 tain abuses of authority on the part of the executive 
 or the legislature. No person may be deprived of 
 property without due process of law. The courts 
 are naturally the authorities to determine what con- 
 stitutes a person and what is due process of law. 
 No state may pass any statute impairing the obliga- 
 tion of contracts. The courts are at hand to say 
 what constitutes an obligation of contract, and are 
 directly charged with the duty of preventing its im- 
 pairment. In any case arising under either of these 
 heads and a very large number of pieces of class 
 legislation are included under the one or the other 
 the Constitution furnishes the clearest evidence that 
 the court has the right and duty to interfere. The 
 court can therefore rest its authority on that docu- 
 ment ; and it is extremely convenient for it to do so, 
 because the great majority of the people loyally 
 accept the Constitution, even when its results work 
 adversely to their own interests. 
 
 But it would, I think, be idle to pretend that 
 the Constitution was the cause of judicial author- 
 ity and of public self-restraint. The Constitution 
 does not cause self-restraint to be practised; self-
 
 28 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 restraint causes the Constitution to be obeyed. In 
 the absence of such voluntary self-restraint, con- 
 stitutional provisions would be a singularly in- 
 effective bar against aggression. If people whose 
 interests are adversely affected by our constitu- 
 tional limitations should choose to organize for the 
 purpose of bettering their legal position, they would 
 often find themselves numerous enough to secure 
 the necessary amendments. It is not in itself a very 
 difficult thing to get a change made in the United 
 States Constitution. Those parts of that instrument 
 which deal with our political machinery have been 
 repeatedly amended. But it is a significant and 
 interesting fact that those parts which deal with 
 private rights have not been altered, except in the 
 single case of the Fourteenth Amendment ; and this 
 alteration was largely unintentional, for the effect 
 of the Fourteenth Amendment in increasing the 
 immunity of corporations from adverse legislation 
 was not contemplated at the time of its passage. 
 People have shrunk from modifying a public docu- 
 ment to suit their own private interests. 
 
 Nor have the federal courts limited their activity 
 to those points where the Constitution provided 
 a specific warrant for its exercise. They have ap- 
 plied the traditional restraints and the traditional 
 methods of interpretation familiar to the law of
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 29 
 
 England in such a way as to limit the power of the 
 legislature, even where a statute did not come into 
 direct conflict with constitutional provisions. What 
 has been true of the federal courts has been equally 
 true of the state courts. No small part of the 
 judicial protection of minorities against the abuse 
 of the power of the majority has been accomplished 
 by means other than those directly prescribed in 
 the United States Constitution, and on grounds of 
 which that instrument takes no cognizance. 
 
 If we pass from the United States to England, 
 where there is no document corresponding to the 
 Constitution of the United States, but where the 
 habits of legal procedure and public activity closely 
 resemble our own, we shall find the courts exercising 
 a similar power in protecting the rights of the in- 
 dividual. This power has not the same theoretical 
 warrant for its exercise which exists in America. 
 The English theory is that Parliament is legally 
 omnipotent; and the existence of such a theory 
 causes no small anxiety to some of the conservative 
 interests in England at the present day. But the 
 English habit and practice is to insist rigidly on all 
 customary rights, whatever Parliament may say 
 about them ; and the effect of this usage in limiting 
 the power of legislation makes England far freer 
 than those countries which have more explicitly de-
 
 30 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 fined constitutional limitations but less habit of 
 exercising individual independence in the face of a 
 clamorous majority. 
 
 A written constitution serves much the same pur- 
 pose in public law which a fence serves in the defini- 
 tion and protection of private rights to real estate. 
 A fence does not make a boundary; it marks one. 
 If it is set where a boundary line has previously 
 existed by tradition and agreement, it forms an ex- 
 ceedingly convenient means of defending it against 
 encroachments. If it is set near the boundary 
 and allowed to stay there unchallenged, it may 
 in time become itself the accepted boundary. But 
 if the attempt is made to establish a factitious 
 boundary by the mere act of setting up a fence, the 
 effort fails. In like manner, a constitution which 
 simply defines the powers and limitations of gov- 
 ernmental authority furnishes an excellent means 
 of defending private rights against usurpation ; and 
 the provisions of such a constitution may cause 
 rights to become definite and defensible which pre- 
 viously were uncertain or inoperative. But a mere 
 paper constitution, established without reference to 
 previous usages and habits, is not effective in cre- 
 ating a new scheme of political and social order. 
 The constitution is the evidence of a limitation, not 
 its cause.
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 31 
 
 The real limitation to the unbridled power of 
 majorities is to be found in the habit of the Amer- 
 ican people of governing themselves by tradition 
 and reason. Not that this habit is confined to the 
 Ajnericans. It is equally exemplified among the 
 English, It is possessed, in greater or less measure, 
 by every nation which has succeeded in solving 
 problems of self-government. In order that men 
 may live peacefully and do business successfully 
 it is necessary that their dealings with one another 
 should be marked by a high degree of continuity 
 and a fair measure of good sense. These are the 
 assumptions on which civilized society rests. The 
 courts enable people to carry this way of doing 
 things into difficult cases where reason is blinded 
 by selfishness, and where possession of political 
 power tempts men to depart from tradition. The 
 American judiciary is the part of the United States 
 government which bases its authority upon the 
 assumption that people wish to be rational and con- 
 servative. A judicial decision does not, like a 
 statute, merely say what things must be done; it 
 states both precedents and reasons which show why 
 those things must be done. Sometimes, indeed, 
 these decisions seem to be too much based on prec- 
 edent alone, and too little on reason. They seem 
 to the more radical members of the community to
 
 32 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 preserve vested rights at the expense of public in- 
 terests. But this is the safe side on which to err. 
 Burke, in his Reflections on the French Revolution, 
 has well expressed one main reason for the per- 
 manence and success of the government of England, 
 when he says that Englishmen are afraid to cut 
 loose from prejudice and rely on individual reason 
 because they suspect that in each man the stock of 
 reason is small, and prefer to avail themselves of 
 the bank and capital of ages. 
 
 A judicial decision differs from other edicts of 
 the government in that it does not involve an ar- 
 bitrary expression of will. It puts the reasons for 
 the prescribed course of conduct in such a form as 
 to command general consent, first among the ex- 
 perts learned in the law, and next among the great 
 body of people who are not learned in the law, but 
 who have the habit of controlling themselves accord- 
 ing to custom and precedent. It may occasionally 
 happen that a legal question arises on which no 
 such general consensus is possible. In those cases 
 there will be some vacillation in the decisions of the 
 court. This is always unfortunate ; and most of the 
 difficulties which menace judicial authority arise 
 in connection with cases of this kind. Statutes 
 regarding corporations, or labor, or colonial posses- 
 sions, often deal with conditions which are so far
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 33 
 
 novel that it is not clear which legal precedents 
 most directly apply, or what relative weight should 
 be given to tradition on the one hand and inde- 
 pendent judgment on the other. But these points 
 of doubt are exceptional as compared with that 
 large corpus juris which is so well settled that peo- 
 ple accept it as an inevitable part of the conditions 
 of life, even when it happens to work against their 
 own private interests. 
 
 The more broadly we study the history of the 
 law, the more we are impressed with this essentially 
 rational character of public submission to judicial 
 authority. Decisions furnish precedents, and prec- 
 edents secure unquestioned acquiescence, because 
 the reason which dictated the first decision still 
 holds good with those who examine the matter 
 impartially in subsequent instances. The Pragto- 
 rian edict at Rome had at first no binding force on 
 any one, except possibly the single magistrate by 
 whom it was issued. But as time went on successive 
 praetors found it expedient and necessary to follow 
 the reasons which governed their predecessors, until 
 there grew up a mass of equity jurisprudence none 
 the less authoritative because of the somewhat in- 
 formal manner in which it had originated. There 
 is no lack of more recent examples of the same kind. 
 In some of the state appellate courts, notably that
 
 34 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 of Illinois, it is provided by statute that the de- 
 cisions of the judges shall furnish no precedent for 
 the action of their successors. But the judges pub- 
 lish reasons for their awards; and these reasons 
 continue to hold good until conditions have changed 
 or until some flaw in their logic can be found. The 
 very act which deprives these courts of the right 
 to create precedents serves only to show more 
 clearly the real nature of the authority which gives 
 precedent its force ^the authority which reason ex- 
 ercises upon civilized man. 
 
 There is a theory of judicial authority which 
 seems to conflict with this a theory that law de- 
 pends for its force, not upon reason, but upon the 
 command of a sovereign. I do not like this way of 
 stating the ground of legal authority, because it is 
 liable to be misunderstood. But when rightly 
 understood it does not oppose the other view; it 
 confirms it. Say, if you please, that American law 
 derives its force from the command of the sovereign. 
 From what sovereign ? From the President ? Any 
 one would scout the idea. From Congress? The 
 very essence of constitutional limitation is that Con- 
 gress cannot by its mere command make a law. 
 From the Supreme Court ? A member of that court 
 would be the last to claim that his ipse dixit, or the 
 ipsi dixerunt of the whole body of his colleagues,
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 35 
 
 was the source of the authority of his words. From 
 the Constitution? A constitution is not a person, 
 but an instrument; not an authority, but an evidence 
 of authority. The sovereign which stands behind 
 the authority of the law is the people of the United 
 States ; the people as a collective body, in the sense 
 in which that word was really meant by Jefferson 
 and by Rousseau.* Not a majority of the people 
 voting by state lines, as personified in the President ; 
 not a majority of the people voting by districts, as 
 personified in the House of Representatives; but 
 the people as represented by a common public senti- 
 ment which includes all good men, minorities as well 
 as majorities, who support the government not as 
 a selfish means for the promotion of their own 
 interest, but as a common heritage which they ac- 
 cept as loyal members of a body politic, in a spirit 
 which makes them ready to bear its burdens as well 
 as to enjoy its benefits. 
 
 In fact, the authority of the courts, instead of 
 going beyond the moral sense of the community, 
 
 * Especially by Eousseau. The purport of the Social Con- 
 tract has been gravely misunderstood by those who have read it 
 only at second hand. Rousseau is very careful to distinguish 
 between that collective public sentiment which is the true will 
 of the people, and the majority vote which is but a makeshift 
 for trying to ascertain that will as well as we can.
 
 36 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 and establishing obligations more severe than those 
 which its members would impose upon themselves, 
 as a rule keeps well within the limits set by that 
 moral sense. It seems very doubtful whether a 
 free community could exist unless the great ma- 
 jority of the members accepted moral duties much 
 wider than the legal duties imposed upon them by 
 judicial decisions. The obligation of a man to sup- 
 port his family is, to some degree, laid down by the 
 government and enforced by it ; but unless nineteen- 
 twentieths of the community had more industrial 
 ambition for themselves and their families than is 
 represented by this minimum which the government 
 prescribes, industrial progress or prosperity would 
 be out of the question. What holds true in this 
 field holds true in a dozen others. The vast majority 
 of citizens find in their own personal sympathies 
 and habits and consciences sufficient motive to com- 
 pel them to perform most of their duties to society. 
 What the courts do is to define those duties for the 
 minority who do not understand them, and to pro- 
 vide an orderly means of compelling their accept- 
 ance by the yet smaller minority which repudiates 
 them after they have been defined. When these 
 minorities are not small, but large, the effort of the 
 court to define and impose an obligation upon the 
 recalcitrant community is apt to be futile. Nothing
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 37 
 
 was plainer than the decision in the Dred Scott 
 case ; yet the Fugitive Slave Law was habitually set 
 at nought when a slave reached Northern soil. You 
 can compel ignorant men to accept a statute; you 
 can force bad men to obey it when they do not want 
 to ; but if a statute or a judicial decision passes the 
 line of those duties which good and intelligent men 
 as a body accept and impose upon themselves, it is 
 at once nullified. The process of nullifying law 
 has sometimes been called "passive resistance." It 
 is in the majority of instances sufficiently described 
 as the withdrawal of active support. In either case 
 the result demonstrates that most of the work of 
 government is done by men who govern themselves 
 and say nothing about it. For if any considerable 
 portion of these men cease to govern themselves in 
 accordance with the law, its ineffectiveness becomes 
 at once manifest. 
 
 When people live together in towns and cities 
 and nations, they have to do certain things which 
 they do not like. Bad governmental machinery 
 may increase the number of these things, good 
 governmental machinery may diminish them; 
 but the necessity for doing some of them is 
 always there. The ideal, so fondly cherished 
 by the philosophers of a hundred years ago, of 
 a complete system of organized non-interference,
 
 38 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 has proved impracticable. What is for the in- 
 terest of the whole is often going to be against 
 the convenience of some of the parts. There are in 
 the last resort two means of inducing a member of 
 the community, when thus adversely affected, to 
 subordinate his private interest to the general 
 good, his own conscience, and the policeman's 
 club. If a large majority of people are ready to 
 be governed by their consciences, the exercise of 
 the policeman's club becomes unnecessary, except 
 upon that small minority who are recognized as law- 
 breakers. Then, and only then, can we have real 
 democracy. 
 
 Whenever a serious political emergency arises, 
 we find that the majority of the American people 
 stand ready to be governed by their consciences, 
 rather than by the more obvious dictates of self- 
 interest. This was repeatedly proved in various 
 stages of the anti-slavery struggle. It was proved 
 under the perilous strain of the Electoral Commis- 
 sion case of 1876, when the defeated party sacrificed 
 personal advantage and acquiesced in what seemed 
 a violation of justice for the sake of that general 
 stability of institutions which is essential to preva- 
 lence of right in the long run. And it is just 
 because the American people as a body are thus 
 prepared to accept the obligations and bear the
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 39 
 
 burdens of self-government that American democ- 
 racy has been able to maintain itself. 
 
 But what would happen if a large part of our 
 people refused to accept the principle of self-gov- 
 ernment in the true sense of the word, and under- 
 took to assume the privileges of freedom without 
 understanding its responsibilities ? 
 
 This question came up in practice more than 
 thirty years ago, and received an unexpected 
 answer ; an answer which confirms, in rather start- 
 ling fashion, the view that, even under a democratic 
 constitution, responsibility is a condition precedent 
 to the exercise of freedom. At the close of our Civil 
 War a race which had previously been held in the 
 most abject slavery found itself suddenly emanci- 
 pated. The proclamations of President Lincoln, 
 followed by the Thirteenth Amendment of the Con- 
 stitution, secured its members personal liberty. 
 The Fourteenth Amendment almost immediately 
 afterward gave them civil rights ; and a little later 
 the Fifteenth Amendment admitted them to full 
 political power. 
 
 The first use which they made of their freedom 
 was disappointing. Some abandoned their families ; 
 a much larger number abandoned their work for 
 longer or shorter periods. Many tried to secure 
 public offices for the performance of whose duties
 
 40 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 they were unfit. Almost all allowed their votes to 
 be utilized by unscrupulous men as a means of 
 establishing a corrupt and irresponsible govern- 
 ment. The evils of this misuse of freedom became 
 so great that after the lapse of a few years the 
 political power of the Southern negro was abolished 
 by a systematic nullification of the laws intended 
 to give him the franchise; and, although many of 
 his personal rights were allowed to remain un- 
 challenged, he was made to feel that his freedom 
 was a very different thing from that which he and 
 some of his friends had anticipated. He had to 
 begin at the bottom of the social scale and work out 
 a capacity for freedom before he could enjoy its 
 privileges. 
 
 As we look back on the history of the years suc- 
 ceeding the war, it is astonishing that men could 
 have expected any other course of events than that 
 which actually took place. It was not the fault of 
 the negro ; it was the fault of those who so unwisely 
 gave him political rights without previous prepara- 
 tion. The history of every country of the world 
 shows that sudden grants of liberty are followed by 
 periods of license. This was the case in Germany 
 at the time of the Reformation, with the advent of 
 religious liberty; it was the case in France in the 
 last years of the eighteenth century, with the advent
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 41 
 
 of political liberty ; it was the case in Russia in 1863, 
 with the advent of industrial liberty. All these 
 instances show the impossibility of granting uncon- 
 trolled freedom to those who will not take the re- 
 sponsibilities that go with it. The attempt on the 
 part of any large group of men to claim the privi- 
 leges of liberty without assuming its burdens proves 
 so destructive to the community that it has to be 
 stopped. The North did not realize this at the close 
 of the Civil War. The people of the North had 
 accepted as an axiom the dictum of the Declaration 
 of Independence that all men are created with equal 
 rights to liberty. They of course restricted those 
 rights in the case of minors and of insane persons. 
 But aside from these exceptions, based, apparently 
 at least, on physiological grounds, they recognized 
 no limits to the principle of liberty and equality. 
 The influx of uneducated masses into large cities 
 had strained the application of this principle, but 
 it had not forced men to abandon it or modify their 
 habitual way of stating it. The population of the 
 North, even in the cities, was so ambitious indus- 
 trially that it could be persuaded to work for a 
 living without the compulsion of a taskmaster, and 
 so intelligent politically that the efforts of corrupt 
 politicians to mislead the voters had generally been 
 kept within moderate bounds. When the North saw
 
 42 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 that these conditions did not exist in the South it 
 acquiesced in the suppression of the negro vote and 
 in the nullification of many of the Reconstruction 
 Acts. The North did it reluctantly; but the re- 
 markable thing is that the North should have done 
 it at all, at a time when war memories were so fresh 
 and the passions and misjudgments of the war were 
 so strong. The fact that under these circumstances 
 the liberty of the negro was actually restricted 
 proves more clearly than anything else could that 
 such restriction was necessary and inevitable. How 
 long this restriction can continue is another ques- 
 tion. The recent industrial progress of the negro 
 race or at any rate of very considerable numbers 
 of that race puts the matter on a new basis. It 
 looks as if we had entered an even more difficult 
 phase of the problem than that which confronted us 
 after the war. I shall not attempt to predict the 
 outcome, nor to give unasked advice to those who 
 face its difficulties most closely and understand 
 them most clearly. But one thing should be said, 
 and said plainly. The error of those who thirty 
 years ago supposed that political rights could be im- 
 mediately given to the negro before he had achieved 
 industrial responsibility or moral independence was 
 probably no greater than the error of those who to- 
 day believe that political rights can be perma-
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 43 
 
 nently withheld from the negro after he shall have 
 achieved such responsibility and independence. 
 
 We have thus learned that the abstract doctrine 
 that every one had a right to political freedom is 
 subject in practice to certain important exceptions. 
 We have learned that where a group of men misuse 
 their freedom on a large scale they cannot be al- 
 lowed to retain it unchallenged. But we may 
 properly go one step farther. Instead of laying 
 down the principle of an absolute right to freedom, 
 and then trying to describe certain exceptional 
 cases where this absolute right must be suspended, 
 I believe that it will be at once more logical and 
 more salutary if we regard the right to freedom 
 as something proportionate to a man's capacity to 
 use his freedom for the benefit of the community. 
 The case of the Southern negro differs from that of 
 many groups of white men in degree rather than in 
 kind.* The negroes are not the only group of men 
 who are nominally free, but really so irresponsible 
 as to be incapable of the intelligent exercise of 
 
 At least in its political aspect. The physiological danger 
 of mixture of the two races is another matter. It is hard to 
 separate these two aspects of the negro problem in our discus- 
 sions or even in our thoughts ; but I believe that the habitual 
 confusion between them does a great deal of harm to our clear- 
 ness of judgment, and that we ought to keep them as distinct as 
 we can.
 
 44 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 freedom. Whenever this combination exists it in- 
 volves grave dangers, both to the individual and to 
 the community. Freedom enables an intelligent 
 and good man to do better things than he could do 
 without it; and when it is thus used it stimulates 
 progress, and intelligence, and goodness. But it 
 must be remembered that this same freedom allows 
 an unintelligent or bad man to do worse things than 
 he could do without it ; and that if this happens on 
 a large scale it may prove destructive to the re- 
 sources, and even to the safety, of the common- 
 wealth. In doubtful cases, we should extend free- 
 dom rather than restrict it ; for freedom, even when 
 accompanied by some abuses, stimulates progress 
 and makes each succeeding generation more capable 
 of exercising it intelligently. But we cannot regard 
 unrestrained individual liberty either as an abstract 
 principle of political philosophy, or as an ultimate 
 goal of human progress. It is essentially a means 
 rather than an end; an institution rather than a 
 principle; a help to the realization of public mo- 
 rality, rather than a postulate of public morality 
 itself. 
 
 Freedom, regarded in this way, becomes a con- 
 structive force. It is not simply the absence of 
 restraint, as is alleged by Schopenhauer and other 
 writers who look at the subject from the standpoint
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 45 
 
 of the metaphysician rather than that of the his- 
 torian. It is the substitution of self-restraint for 
 external restraint; the substitution of a form of 
 restraint which promotes progress for a form 
 which represses it. Political freedom means either 
 self-government or anarchy. In the latter case it 
 speedily wrecks the nation that practises it. In 
 the former case only does it last long enough to 
 attain the dignity of a political institution. The 
 kind of freedom which means anarchy stands con- 
 demned by its self-destructive character. The kind 
 which means self-restraint is justified by its effect 
 in combining order and progress. 
 
 Political thinkers are beginning to see this. We 
 are coming to look at human history as a struggle 
 for existence between different methods of thought 
 and systems of morals, and to find the justification 
 for our systems of thought and morals in the fact 
 that they contribute to the survival and develop- 
 ment of the race which holds them. We are coming 
 to regard political liberty not as an abstract right, 
 to be demanded for its own sake, as Rousseau 
 would have demanded it ; nor as a dangerous dream 
 of unbalanced minds, to be resisted by all cham- 
 pions of order, as Metternich would have resisted 
 it ; but as an institution which, as different nations 
 have worked it out for themselves, enables them to
 
 46 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 combine order with progress better than any other 
 political system which has hitherto been devised. 
 We have learned to judge the merits of a free gov- 
 ernment by the degree in which it realizes this com- 
 bination. 
 
 But we can apply this method of analysis to other 
 forms of freedom besides political liberty. The man 
 who recognizes that political liberty is an institu- 
 tion to be judged by its results, but who at the same 
 time regards liberty of judgment in morals as an 
 abstract and absolute right, has apprehended but 
 half the truth. He involves himself in contradic- 
 tions at every turn. A people's politics and a peo- 
 ple 's morals are closely interdependent. The causes 
 which justify the exercise of liberty of action in 
 the one field are closely connected with those which 
 justify the exercise of liberty of judgment in the 
 other. Slavery goes hand in hand with fatalism, 
 private property with private judgment. The at- 
 tempts of Socrates and his successors to teach people 
 the use of private judgment in morals were ham- 
 pered by the fact that these people lived under 
 a system of slavery, and had not acquired the habit 
 of doing unpleasant labor for a remote end. The 
 efforts of Alexander, two thousand years later, to 
 emancipate the Russian serfs, were hampered by 
 the fact that these serfs were fatalists, who recog-
 
 THE BASIS OF CIVIL LIBERTY 47 
 
 nized no moral motive save the motive of compul- 
 sion. 
 
 The history of free institutions is a record of 
 the gradual acceptance of the duties of self-govern- 
 ment, moral as well as political, wherein each nation 
 proves its right to receive freedom by accepting the 
 responsibilities that go with it. 
 
 It is the purpose of this book to show the his- 
 torical connection between liberty and responsi- 
 bility in every domain of human thought. As the 
 first and most fundamental step, we shall trace 
 from its beginnings the theory of moral freedom ; 
 and we shall then be in a position to understand 
 the significance of the various means used to re- 
 alize this freedom, in law or in religion, in industry 
 or in politics.
 
 Ill 
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 
 
 There is among members of human society an 
 assumption of freedom, which is apparently older, 
 and certainly more widespread, than the chance for 
 using that freedom under protection of the law. 
 Its exercise may be contrary to public opinion in 
 primitive communities; its principles may be con- 
 trary to scientific theory in advanced ones. But 
 the individual does, as a matter of fact, assume that 
 he has a choice of lines of action and that he exer- 
 cises self-control in some shape in preferring one 
 to another. More than this: society, from a very 
 early period, in its theory of offences and penalties 
 treats him as free and demands that he control 
 himself accordingly. Even if the actual use of 
 liberty be rendered impossible by law, and the 
 theory which underlies it be pronounced an absurd- 
 ity by science, the mere conception of freedom of 
 the will is a social institution of the first impor- 
 tance. Call it a legal fiction, if you please its 
 importance in the history of civilization is no less 
 real on that account. 
 
 48
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 49 
 
 This assumption of freedom, and the conscious- 
 ness of self-restraint which goes with it, appear to 
 be peculiar to the human race. It is very doubtful 
 whether animals in their wild state have any cor- 
 responding feelings or habits. Of course they do a 
 great many things involving physical inconvenience 
 or pain which their instinct has taught them to 
 undergo for a remote end ; and they may even sacri- 
 fice their individual lives for the benefit of their 
 families and their associates. The cat will incur 
 unbounded danger and suffering to protect her 
 kittens. The bee will die the most painful of deaths 
 rather than subject the hive to pollution. But 
 underlying all these actions there is, as far as we are 
 able to judge, that remarkable adaptation* of struc- 
 ture to activity which produces what we call in- 
 stinct. There is a uniformity about the bee 's habits 
 of self-sacrifice, which is far different from any- 
 thing that characterizes the human race. Where 
 animals have been modified by domestication the 
 situation is altered. We see in such cases a reflec- 
 tion of human lives and human habits. But with 
 animals in their wild state, where mental processes 
 and physical coordinations have developed side by 
 side in the course of hundreds of generations, the 
 two have become closely connected; and it often 
 seems to be a physical impossibility for the indi-
 
 50 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 vidual to evade the act of self-sacrifice which has 
 proved beneficial to the species. 
 
 With members of the human race it is far differ- 
 ent. The physical structure does not compel the 
 individual to conform to the code of social ethics. 
 Among the lower animals each peculiarity of cus- 
 tom or habit is associated with a well marked 
 difference of physical organism ; in the human race 
 great differences of custom subsist side by side with 
 the very closest physical resemblance. Among the 
 animals different systems of ethics are commonly 
 associated with differences of species, of genus, and 
 of order ; in the human race vast varieties of differ- 
 ence exist within the limits of what is physiolog- 
 ically a single species. In some way or other man 
 has acquired the possibility of forming groups 
 which vary their customs without correspondingly 
 varying their structure. His ethical development 
 has not had to wait for a corresponding physiolog- 
 ical development. It is this characteristic which 
 distinguishes the evolution of mankind from the 
 evolution of the lower animals. The main differ- 
 ence is not, as is so frequently said, that the human 
 struggle for existence is a struggle between groups 
 instead of individuals ; for in more highly organized 
 forms of animal life the subordination of the indi- 
 vidual to the group is just as marked as in any
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 51 
 
 section of the human race. The main difference is 
 that the evolution of these human groups is a mental 
 rather than a physical process, to be traced by the 
 historian rather than by the neurologist, and to be 
 explained by the study of institutions rather than 
 by the study of tissues. 
 
 Whether there may be in the world of insect life 
 developments more or less similar to those which 
 are going on in human ethics, is a point which it 
 would be difficult to settle. We have too little 
 power of understanding the sensations of the ant 
 or the bee to hazard a guess at the nature of their 
 mental processes. We can see the community life 
 of insect bodies, and can study their complex ethical 
 system with great interest; but whether it can be 
 accompanied, like ours, by an individual reason and 
 individual conscience, is a matter beyond our ken. 
 Be this as it may, in the vertebrate world, at any 
 rate, there is nothing which at all approximates to 
 the mental experience of the human species. 
 
 Man's power of forming distinct ethical groups 
 in advance of marked physiological changes has its 
 advantages and disadvantages. It has the ad- 
 vantage of giving the members of the human species 
 far greater flexibility of action, and of securing 
 the power of rapid progress which goes with it. 
 A group of men can in fifty years make changes of
 
 62 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 habit which an animal species except under do- 
 mestication would hardly accomplish in five thou- 
 sand. The different groups of which the race is 
 composed can try a hundred experiments, good, 
 bad, and indifferent, and give a chance for survival 
 to that which proves best ; while the animal species 
 is restricted to those slow adaptations which are 
 forced upon it by constant pressure of external 
 circumstance. In human evolution the constructive 
 force of imitation has been added to the destructive 
 force of elimination which characterizes the devel- 
 opment of the lower animals, and has proved itself 
 much more varied and more rapid in its effects. 
 
 But all this gain is attended with some loss. The 
 things that make the progress of the animals slow 
 make it sure. The things which make the progress 
 of mankind quick make it precarious. If a group 
 of men follow a new example through sheer force 
 of imitation, and develop a custom without waiting 
 for changes in their structure to make it in a man- 
 ner compulsory upon them, they are liable to cease 
 to follow the new custom when it becomes disagree- 
 able, and to lose whatever good results may have 
 been gained from its adoption. In other words, the 
 opportunity of progress is accompanied by the 
 danger of reversion. To prevent such reversion 
 social restraint becomes a necessity. If the body
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 53 
 
 politic would preserve its ethical structure, it must 
 prevent the individual from recklessly following 
 out the impulses imposed by his physical structure. 
 It is a matter of vital interest to every man to 
 restrain himself and each of his fellows from those 
 lapses against which his physiological constitution 
 affords no protection to which, indeed, it makes 
 him perpetually liable. 
 
 The means habitually exercised to secure this 
 restraint have been well described or perhaps we 
 should rather say well conjectured by Walter 
 Bagehot in his Physics and Politics. They are 
 based upon the savage 's belief in a complex system 
 of magical relations, friendly or hostile, between 
 his tribe and the various plants, animals, and ghosts, 
 of which he has known or dreamed. All these 
 curiously related beings, living or unliving, real or 
 imaginary, are watchful to reward observance of 
 the tribal traditions, and yet more watchful to 
 punish their neglect. Under this system it becomes 
 possible to invest with a supernatural sanction un- 
 pleasant observances which have proved beneficial 
 to the community. The freedom from pestilence 
 which is enjoyed by a tribe that occasionally washes 
 is attributed to the will of some spirit related to the 
 tribe, which insists upon this disagreeable and ap- 
 parently meaningless ceremony a spirit which will
 
 54 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 protect the members if they wash and punish them 
 if they do not wash. For no less potent than the 
 supernatural sanction is the collective character of 
 the penalty. It is visited upon innocent and guilty 
 alike. "There is no 'limited liability' in the polit- 
 ical notions of that time ; the early tribe or nation is 
 a religious partnership, on which a rash member by 
 a sudden impiety may bring utter ruin. If the state 
 is conceived thus, toleration becomes wicked : a per- 
 mitted deviation from the transmitted ordinances 
 becomes simple folly, it is a sacrifice of the hap- 
 piness of the greatest number; it is allowing one 
 individual, for a moment's pleasure or a stupid 
 whim, to bring terrible and irretrievable calamity 
 upon all." 
 
 In the application of this principle, the self- 
 interest of all the other members of the tribe was 
 enlisted to crush the offender who through selfish- 
 ness or thoughtlessness was tempted to disregard 
 the tradition. However arbitrary might be the rule, 
 however unintentional the infraction, all violation 
 was remorselessly punished by the whole tribe ; for 
 the whole tribe was taught to feel that the death of 
 the offender was necessary in order to prevent the 
 spirits from visiting upon the tribe the offence done 
 to their authority by any single member thereof. 
 In this stage of society the one necessary thing,
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 55 
 
 more necessary than all else put together, was to 
 build up respect for law and obedience to custom. 
 However wasteful the process, however irrational 
 the means used, the end justified the means and 
 made the process necessary; for when once the 
 savage tribe began to treat the law lightly, the 
 result was anarchy and destruction. 
 
 But at a very early period, if not at the begin- 
 ning, this external restraint upon individual con- 
 duct was supplemented by observances intended to 
 promote the spirit of self-restraint. It is not 
 enough for men to impose obedience to tribal custom 
 upon others. They must be led to impose that 
 obedience upon themselves. If they show unwill- 
 ingness to do so under ordinary conditions, they 
 must be occasionally brought back to a state where 
 they are especially susceptible to supernatural 
 terrors and promises. The well-fed, full-blooded, 
 self-sufficient man is in perpetual danger of dis- 
 regarding the obligations of a custom to which his 
 physiological adaptation is imperfect ; and if there 
 are many such men in a tribe the physical penalties 
 for violation of custom may not be sufficiently 
 prompt to secure the implicit observance which is 
 essential to the authority of law over the savage 
 mind. They must be brought out of that condi- 
 tion of well-fed contentment. If a man is told
 
 56 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 that he should do a disagreeable thing because the 
 spirit of his grandfather commands it, he must 
 occasionally be brought back to the state where he 
 sees, or thinks he sees, the spirit of his grandfather. 
 This is the common element and purpose of the 
 manifold forms of religious observance on the part 
 of half-civilized peoples,* It may be accomplished 
 by fasting, or it may be accomplished by intoxica- 
 tion. It may be accomplished by music and dancing, 
 or by constrained posture and enforced vigil. The 
 variety of means involved shows the necessity, even 
 in this early stage of society, for something which 
 shall counteract the daily instincts of the natural 
 man and give force to the spiritual precepts by 
 which the authority of custom is enforced. 
 
 But the instant we make use of self-restraint to 
 supplement external restraint, we pave the way for 
 the assumption of moral freedom on the part of the 
 individual. The very observances which are used 
 to prevent the exercise of freedom act as a recogni- 
 tion of its possibility. If a man is asked to restrain 
 himself, or even put into a state where that which 
 seemed natural and possible at one moment is made 
 to seem unnatural and impossible at another mo- 
 ment, the consciousness of a choice is irresistibly 
 
 * Henry Rutgers Marshall, Instinct and Reason. New York, 
 1898, Chapter i, The Function of Religious Expression.
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 57 
 
 brought home to him. He differs from the mere 
 animal in having, as St. Paul says, a law in his 
 members which is at war with the law of the spirit. 
 The physiological adjustments inherited from re- 
 mote ancestors drive him one way ; the ethical rules 
 growing up out of the recent development of his 
 tribe drive him another way. Even though all 
 violation of these rules be sternly repressed, the 
 conflict of emotions still exists. It is this duality of 
 adjustment, this separation of ethical demands and 
 physical demands, which is the distinctive feature 
 of human consciousness. This word consciousness 
 has two quite distinct meanings. Sometimes it 
 means continuous sensitiveness a series of nervous 
 actions which leave a permanent record in the brain 
 of some organism. In this sense it forms no pecul- 
 iarity of the human race, but is possessed in greater 
 or less measure by a large part of the animal king- 
 dom. But that other and narrower kind of con- 
 sciousness, which implies an observation of his own 
 mental processes on the part of the sentient indi- 
 vidual, seems to originate in this conflict between 
 the progressive demands of a tribal ethics and the 
 impulses of an individual organism which has not 
 been modified in accordance with those demands. 
 Human consciousness grows out of the alternative 
 or choice apparently presented by the operation of
 
 58 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 these two sets of motives ; and the religious means 
 which are used to make the ethical motive dominant 
 emphasize the existence of this alternative and 
 strengthen the sense of choice. 
 
 But though this subjective sense of freedom must 
 have been present at a very early stage of society, 
 as soon as a man separated ethical from physical 
 motives, the objective idea of freedom as a practical 
 possibility was still very far from being realized or 
 admitted. Even if a man felt himself to be free-, 
 he did not tolerate such freedom on the part of 
 others, nor did others allow its exercise on his part. 
 Liberty was a danger to be repressed, not an agency 
 to be utilized. From the standpoint of the tribe the 
 mere recognition of freedom was extremely peril- 
 ous. Its exercise by any one member might involve 
 the tribe as a whole in the supernatural dangers of 
 the wrath of the gods. The resulting evil to the 
 tribe was about equally great whether that wrath 
 was actually manifested or not. In the former case 
 the tribe suffered, or thought it suffered, from the 
 anger of the gods ; in the latter case it suffered from 
 the contempt of law which was engendered by the 
 neglect of the gods to punish its violation. And, 
 wholly aside from these supernatural dangers, there 
 was a constant risk that the savage, freed from the 
 restraint of absolute authority, would do things
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 59 
 
 which were dangerous to discipline in times of war, 
 and to public safety and comfort in times of peace. 
 Both these perils had to be avoided before moral 
 freedom could develop from a mere conception to 
 an institution. A large part of the history of moral 
 progress is connected with the development of 
 means for the avoidance of these two dangers. 
 
 The chief method devised to avoid the super- 
 natural dangers from violation of tribal morality 
 was the system of expiation a system which should 
 satisfy the offended majesty of the gods without re- 
 quiring the death of each offending member of the 
 tribe. The change of conception did not allow 
 violations of law to go unpunished, or imply that 
 the offended gods could be satisfied with anything 
 less than the death penalty. But it became possible 
 to apply the death penalty vicariously to appease 
 the spirits by the blood, not of a member of the 
 offending tribe, but of some one of the animals 
 which were supposed to bear close kinship to that 
 tribe and its members. This was the origin of the 
 expiatory sacrifice the sin offering of the Old 
 Testament as distinct from the honorific sacrifice 
 or thank offering. 
 
 Judged by modern ideas, the whole theory of 
 sacrificial atonement is unjust and almost sacri- 
 legious. It is based on the assumption of divine
 
 60 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 vindictiveness. The majesty of outraged law de- 
 mands a victim. If the right person can be pun- 
 ished, well and good ; if not, the next best thing is 
 to punish the wrong person. But to the savage mind 
 this vicarious punishment had a real use, in allowing 
 the life of the accidental transgressor to be saved 
 without producing contempt for law in his mind 
 and the mind of others. The savage had reached a 
 mental stage where the process of atonement or 
 expiation could be allowed; and a certain degree 
 of mental freedom was given him thereby. For the 
 violation of tribal custom, instead of being a thing 
 which separated the offender forever from fellow- 
 ship, was now regarded as a possible incident of 
 life always to be deplored, but not always to be 
 prevented. The absolute rigidity of a religious sys- 
 tem which tolerated no lapses on the part of any 
 individual, gave place to the greater freedom of 
 one which provided possibilities of atonement and 
 forgiveness to him who had transgressed its pro- 
 visions. 
 
 This development was rapidly followed by an- 
 other, or rather by two others which have inter- 
 mixed in varying proportions in the history of 
 different races. One was the separation of law 
 from morals ; the other was the recognition of per- 
 sonal responsibility, in distinction from tribal re-
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 61 
 
 sponsibility, as the groundwork of our theory of 
 punishment. 
 
 The separation of law from morals began as soon 
 as sacrificial procedure was cljarly defined and 
 ordered. The attempt to provide means by which 
 one set of crimes could be expiated led people to 
 distinguish them from that other set of crimes which 
 could not be expiated ; to make a difference between 
 things which offended the gods more obviously than 
 they endangered the tribe, and things which en- 
 dangered the tribe more obviously than they offend- 
 ed the gods. Prominent among the latter class were 
 those offences which interfered with military disci- 
 pline in time of war and with public security 
 in time of peace. They jeopardized the community ; 
 atonement was therefore insufiicient and punish- 
 ment was necessary. This punishment was, how- 
 ever, no longer executed by the whole tribe, but 
 by the military authorities, acting more or less 
 directly under the advice of the priests.* The 
 offender was punished, not because he had alienated 
 the gods this reason was given only in case of 
 certain acts of sacrilege or impiety but because 
 
 * This Tiew holds good whether we accept the theory of Sa- 
 Tigny, that this development of law was an orderly and sponta- 
 neous process, or the theory of Ihering, that it was accomplished 
 by a succession of governmental acts which seemed revolution- 
 ary.
 
 62 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 he had jeopardized the public security ; not because 
 he had involved the members of the tribe in a col- 
 lective wrong, but because he had done a personal 
 wrong to the other members of the tribe. 
 
 This idea of personal responsibility, as distinct 
 from tribal responsibility, spread very rapidly and 
 altered the whole character of the penological sys- 
 tem. If offences against public security in war and 
 in peace were personal matters, it was natural to 
 regard many other offences in the same light, and to 
 deal with the offender, not as a man who had in- 
 volved the tribe in a quarrel with the gods, and 
 must therefore be put to death to avert divine dis- 
 pleasure, but as a man who had done a greater or 
 less degree of personal wrong, and whose penalty 
 could be made heavy or light according to his degree 
 of guilt. Intentional violations of tribal customs 
 were still punished by death. They were regarded 
 as acts of sacrilege ; as sins against the Holy Ghost, 
 which could not be forgiven. But accidental viola- 
 tions of law or custom, where the intent to affront 
 the gods was absent, could be expiated by lighter 
 penalties and forgiven by the offended deities. 
 
 The progress from polytheism to monotheism 
 and, in spite of many reversions and lapses, the 
 history of civilization is marked by such progress 
 inclined people more and more toward this rational
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 63 
 
 classification of offences and penalties. If there 
 were many gods, at war with one another, each god 
 was necessarily anxious to vindicate his authority 
 against the least appearance of neglect or contempt. 
 Where there was but one god, his authority was too 
 strong to be jeopardized by accidental pieces of 
 neglect, and the penalties of such a religion could 
 be reserved for those who habitually or intention- 
 ally violated the more serious articles of the moral 
 code. 
 
 And thus out of the old chaos of tribal customs, 
 which were neither law in the modern sense nor 
 morals in the modern sense, there was developed a 
 systematic set of penalties for specific offences. 
 Where these offences endangered military disci- 
 pline they were defined by military authorities. 
 Where they endangered public safety in time of 
 peace, the military and the religious authorities 
 shared in defining them ^the former influence being 
 generally stronger among the nations of the West- 
 ern world, and the latter among those of the Eastern 
 world. Where they affected the foundations of 
 morality rather than the immediate needs of disci'- 
 pline or public security, the definition was almost 
 completely in the hands of the priests. But in all 
 these cases there was a tendency to use the organized 
 military force of the community for the punish-
 
 64 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 ment and represssion of these offences. In place 
 of the old-fashioned lynch law, administered by the 
 whole tribe under the influence of blinding passion, 
 there was an orderly proof of guilt and an orderly 
 application of the corresponding penalty. 
 
 This system of penalties for offences against pub- 
 lic security, of procedure for proving them, of 
 definitions of wrong for which the various penalties 
 would be visited, and of definitions of right cor- 
 responding to these definitions of wrong, received 
 the name of law. The residuum which was left of 
 the old body of tribal customs, for whose violation 
 no specific penalty could be provided other than 
 disapproval or ostracism on the part of the tribe 
 and personal displeasure on the part of the gods, 
 received the name of morals. 
 
 Morality, after law has thus been separated from 
 it, differs from the older body of tribal morality in 
 several ways. It has less visible force behind it. It 
 allows the individual greater chance to break its 
 rules. But it can at the same time extend those 
 rules over a far wider sphere of human activity than 
 would be possible if it relied primarily on physical 
 force and took cognizance only of those offences 
 where the slightest deviation from its code could 
 be summarily punished. There is a story of an Eton 
 head master, in the old days when flogging was
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 65 
 
 constant and universal, who expounded Scripture 
 as follows: *' 'Blessed are the pure in heart.' 
 Mind that, boys. The Bible says it is your duty to 
 be pure in heart. If you are not pure in heart, I '11 
 flog you." This exposition represents perfectly 
 the mental attitude of the savage world, which saw 
 no sense in a precept that went beyond the domain 
 of outward acts to be required and of physical pen- 
 alties for non-compliance. But a large part of the 
 morality of civilized nations deals with spheres of 
 conduct where it is not always possible to prevent 
 deviations from the standard, to prove the existence 
 of offences, or to visit adequate physical penalties. 
 The fact that modern society has law as well as 
 morals that it has means of preventing or repress- 
 ing acts which furnish a direct menace to public 
 security allows it to tolerate a number of acts 
 which it disapproves but which do not menace pub- 
 lic security. It can without overwhelming danger to 
 itself sit still and wait for the slow working out of 
 the more subtle moral penalties which are to visit 
 the offender. 
 
 "What is this moral penalty for violations of 
 public sentiment of which the law cannot take cog- 
 nizance ? 
 
 In early times people thought that it was the 
 displeasure of the gods, as manifested by retribu-
 
 66 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 tion in this life. In this theory there was the great 
 difficulty that the good man did not always enjoy 
 external prosperity. The whole book of Job is an 
 interesting illustration of the difficulties which this 
 fact presented when people begun to reason about 
 it. And yet it is significant that after all the really 
 able reasoning in the book of Job, the author finally, 
 finds it necessary to make good the loss of Job's 
 children, and give him twice as many cattle as he 
 possessed before the days of his adversity, show- 
 ing a certain want of confidence in his moral con- 
 clusions unless they are emphasized by a tangible 
 token of return to favor. In a later stage of 
 thought, some men have looked to a future life as 
 a place where matters should be set right where 
 the bad who had enjoyed worldly prosperity should 
 be punished, and the good who had suffered ad- 
 versity should be rewarded ; and others, who have 
 not found their minds able to accept the evidence 
 of such a system of future rewards and punish- 
 ments, have thought that the good man might seek 
 his reward in the approval of good men, even where 
 they were relatively few ; and in the approval of his 
 own conscience, where there was none but himself 
 good. 
 
 But whatever the sanction and whatever the 
 means of enforcement of moral law, there is in all
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 67 
 
 these modern systems an acceptance of nay, an in- 
 sistence upon moral responsibility. You are pun- 
 ished for your offences not, as was the case under 
 the old system, because an outraged god wishes to 
 take vengeance upon the tribe, and you are sacri- 
 ficed to his rage ; but because you, as an individual, 
 have the choice between doing right and doing 
 wrong, and have done wrong. You are allowed to 
 take the choice, because a wider and higher morality 
 can be worked out in this way than in any 
 other. The conflict between selfish and unselfish 
 motives in the human heart is frankly recognized, 
 and is used as an instrument for bringing ethical 
 obligation home to the individual. We no longer 
 live under a moral despotism which says: ''You 
 must do this ; you must do that. ' ' Precepts which 
 take this shape are not morality, they are law ; and, 
 as we shall see in a subsequent lecture, only a por- 
 tion of the law at that. Within the domain of 
 morality a man is told : ' ' You may do this, or you 
 may do that. You may choose the selfish side, you 
 may choose the unselfish side. Yours is the re- 
 sponsibility of deciding, yours the guilt if you de- 
 cide in the way which religion or morality disap- 
 proves." This is the process of education used by 
 parents on a small scale as soon as their children 
 are old enough to take responsibility. It is used
 
 68 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 by the community on a larger scale in judging the 
 action of its members in public and private business, 
 as long as they have the strength and intelligence 
 to exercise independence of judgment. To a few 
 who are notably deficient in ordinary brain power 
 the community gives the name of insane persons. 
 It releases them from responsibility, and in case of 
 need subjects them to physical restraint as a means 
 of preventing harm to themselves and others. The 
 rest of the world it treats as morally free and holds 
 morally responsible. 
 
 In so doing it accomplishes two ends. In the first 
 place, it secures more intelligent conduct than is 
 possible when every one is held in leading strings. 
 In some cases the moral authority of the community 
 loses by the process, in others it gains ; but on the 
 whole the gain is much greater than the loss. Re- 
 lieve a boy or man from tutelage, and you make 
 it possible for him to become much worse than he 
 otherwise might ; but if he will control himself by 
 force of his own will, without waiting for yours to 
 dominate him, you not only save wasteful effort 
 on your own part, but you can rely on him to carry 
 his goodness into a number of fields where your 
 supervision would be inadequate and fruitless. In 
 matters of law, the man who always has a policeman 
 to watch him may be relied upon to be good in the
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 69 
 
 policeman 's presence. You cannot tell what would 
 happen when the policeman goes to sleep, or when 
 the man can run faster than the policeman. The 
 analogy holds perfectly in the matter of morality, 
 and is one of the reasons why theories of personal 
 responsibility and freedom of the will are not only 
 tolerated, but actually taught. 
 
 There is, however, another reason, and perhaps 
 an equally powerful one, for insistence upon these 
 theories. As has been already said, the principle of 
 equity, of justice, of payment for personal merit or 
 demerit, is prominent in our whole judicial system. 
 But you cannot, without violation of this theory of 
 justice, punish a man for a thing for which he is 
 not responsible. If the malefactor was compelled 
 by a higher power to commit wrongs, it is not for 
 this higher power to condemn him. If the sinner 
 sins, not by his own choice but under the influence 
 of irresistible motives, the ruler that punishes him 
 in this world, and the god that punishes him in the 
 next, are both guilty of violations of justice. We 
 may try to explain our penological system as a 
 method for the prevention of crime, our theological 
 system as an explanation of the order of a universe, 
 and disclaim in either case any obligation to be just 
 to individuals. But the moral sense of those who 
 reason about these things today demands some dis-
 
 70 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 tributive fairness in the allotment of rewards and 
 punishments. If a man really has a choice this 
 necessity is met. To save its sense of justice, while 
 imposing physical penalties and preaching moral 
 ones, society asserts the existence of such a choice 
 and of the responsibility that goes with it. These 
 facts go far to explain the general teaching and 
 general acceptance of the theory of freedom of the 
 will. From the standpoint of modern science this 
 theory is little short of an absurdity. From the 
 standpoint of modern morals, it is little short of a 
 necessity. The community must compel its members 
 to exercise self-control, and must justify itself for 
 punishing them when they fail to exercise it. Both 
 of these results are secured by the teaching of the 
 freedom of the will. 
 
 This theory, which regards the freedom of the 
 will as an institution rather than as a metaphysical 
 conception, finds much to justify it in history. 
 While it is very difficult to enter into the thoughts 
 and feelings of peoples in a state of civilization 
 less advanced than our own, it seems quite clear 
 that the teaching and acceptance of free will has 
 gone hand in hand with the development of self- 
 control and sense of justice. This historical ex- 
 planation of the idea of free will seems more 
 satisfactory than the psychological explanation
 
 FREEDOM AS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION 71 
 
 current among a group of writers of whom Leslie 
 Stephen may serve as an example. These writers 
 regard the freedom of the will as an inference which 
 we draw from our own mental uncertainty. We do 
 not know, for instance, whether it will be our right 
 hand or our left hand which we next lift ; and from 
 our own ignorance on this point we assume that it 
 is altogether and wholly undetermined. Now it 
 may very well he that this sort of uncertainty has 
 its effect in securing more ready and universal ac- 
 ceptance of the theory than would otherwise have 
 been possible. It is quite conceivable that a few 
 men, reasoning on a basis of this uncertainty, might 
 have worked out for themselves a metaphysical 
 theory of free will on that basis alone. But its 
 universal acceptance as a working hypothesis in 
 daily life, even on the part of those who do not 
 assent to it as a scientific principle, is due primarily 
 to its overwhelming importance in the history of 
 morals. By the imposition of that sense of re- 
 sponsibility which goes with the assumption of free- 
 dom, society is able to extend its moral restraints 
 over those spheres of action which can only be 
 regulated by self-control ; and is able also to impose 
 the necessary penalties, spiritual or temporal, upon 
 wrong-doers of various classes, without violating its 
 own sense of justice. The theory of freedom of the
 
 72 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 will is a legal conception devised and adapted for 
 this purpose. It is not an inference which a man 
 draws from his own uncertainty as to what he is 
 going to do. It is a thing which has been taught 
 him by the community, and which he in turn teaches 
 to other members of the community as a means of 
 securing responsibility and rational conduct over 
 a wider range of fields than has been possible under 
 any other intellectual system. Judged in this way, 
 the freedom of the will is not a postulate of all 
 thinking, as its advocates would have us believe, 
 nor an absurdity destructive of all scientific think- 
 ing, as would be charged by its opponents; but a 
 legal conception, developed in the history of the 
 human race as a means of securing that moral re- 
 sponsibility which is necessary for the exercise of 
 all forms of legal and industrial freedom in the 
 complex life of civilized communities.
 
 IV 
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 
 
 A HUNDRED years ago a great deal was said about 
 the gradual passage of the human race from a sys- 
 tem of authority to a system of liberty. It was 
 supposed that in early ages different tribes and 
 peoples had been subjected to compulsion which 
 prevented them from doing what they wanted to 
 do and had a natural right to do ; but that in later 
 times they gradually came to the enjoyment of that 
 right and gained the power to act as they pleased. 
 As long as democracy was not tried on a large scale, 
 this theory of the nature of political progress did 
 little harm. But whenever it was extensively put 
 in practice whenever, in short, nations undertook 
 to exercise freedom without self-imposed responsi- 
 bility it made trouble. As long as the so-called 
 democracies of Greece were really aristocracies, 
 managed by conservative men who lived in the fear 
 of the gods, matters went fairly well, although or 
 perhaps because the amount of liberty actually 
 enjoyed in such communities was not very great. 
 73
 
 74 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 But when the influences of luxury and the teachings 
 of sophistical philosophers led the Athenian youth 
 to make their own inclinations the real guide of 
 their conduct as well as the nominal one, the 
 Athenian state went to pieces. Similar conse- 
 quences have followed the irresponsible exercise of 
 liberty in all other places, whether it worked in the 
 direction of self-indulgence, as at Rome, or of re- 
 ligious fanaticism, as at Miinster, or of political 
 violence, as at Paris. The result was in each case 
 suicidal. 
 
 A better statement of the history of modern free- 
 dom, and one which would command more universal 
 assent among critical observers at the beginning of 
 the twentieth century, is that it represents a passage 
 from a system of obligations imposed by the com- 
 munity to a system of self-imposed obligations. 
 Duty, in the early stages of society, is enforced by 
 lynch law. In the later stages of society it is en- 
 forced by the individual conscience. It is not that 
 the obligations recognized are narrower or less ex- 
 acting in the latter case than in the former. They 
 tend in fact to become wider and more exacting. 
 But the method of enforcement allows the indi- 
 vidual to get at things in his own way with less 
 interference from others. We have passed from a 
 system of status, where each man was born into a
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 75 
 
 set of legal rights and duties imposed upon him for 
 all time, to a system of contract, where each man's 
 rights and duties are largely those which he has 
 made for himself. This change has not enabled a 
 man to relieve himself from obligations to his fellow 
 men. It has allowed those obligations to take forms 
 suited to the varied powers of the individual and 
 the varied needs of society. 
 
 In one sense, this system of self-imposed obliga- 
 tions is a mere corollary of the theory of moral 
 freedom as developed in the last lecture. But it is 
 a corollary or inference which it is not always easy 
 for people to draw. It is one thing to accept the 
 theory that each man is responsible for his own 
 conduct. It is a very different thing to sit calmly 
 by and see him indulge in conduct at variance with 
 our preconceived notions. In other words, the 
 recognition of freedom of the will does not carry 
 with it either civil liberty or religious toleration. 
 It is often treated as an abstract principle, useful 
 in preaching to others the duty of self-control, or in 
 justifying us for punishing them when they do not 
 control themselves in the manner which society ap- 
 proves, but not compelling us to grant them any 
 actual freedom of deed, of speech, or even of 
 thought. 
 
 Indeed, the notion of basing real liberty of
 
 76 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 thought or action upon personal responsibility is a 
 comparatively modern one. In the early stages 
 of society most of the liberty which existed was 
 based upon irresponsibility. If a man enjoyed free- 
 dom of action, it was because he was too strong to 
 be subjected to the laws. Deeds of violence, for 
 which the weak man would have been put to death, 
 in the case of the strong man went unpunished or 
 were condoned for a wholly inadequate fine. And 
 if a man was allowed any freedom of thought or 
 any freedom in the expression of his thoughts it 
 was for a somewhat similar reason. It was because 
 the contagious influence of his frenzy compelled 
 the priesthood to tolerate his utterances, whether 
 they would or no. 
 
 What were the steps by which society passed 
 from this early condition, where all freedom, legal 
 and moral, lay outside of the domain of normal law, 
 to one like the present, where freedom of action 
 is greatest for him who can furnish the most se- 
 curity for abiding by the law, and where freedom 
 of thought is largest to him who is most rational in 
 its expression? 
 
 It is not easy to answer such large questions as 
 these within the limits of a single lecture. But we 
 can at least trace some of the stages in this double 
 process of evolution.
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 77 
 
 It is a characteristic of all early communities that 
 each man was born into a certain set of rights 
 and duties from which he could never free himself. 
 This system of status, or caste, is a survival of the 
 old tribal organization when law and morals were 
 undistinguished; when social arrangements existed 
 by the authority of the gods ; and when any attempt 
 to disturb them was an act of impiety or sacrilege. 
 When law was first separated from morals, many of 
 the arrangements and the penalties remained for 
 the moment unchanged. 
 
 But it was not long before an alteration in the 
 character of the legal penalties began to take place. 
 Where one man had wronged another unintention- 
 ally, it became possible not only to inflict punish- 
 ment, but to exact compensation. Instead of the 
 fine which was exacted for an offence against public 
 order, the community could compel the payment of 
 damages to make good the loss to the person in- 
 jured. Even where the wrong was intentional, the 
 idea of compensation could enter into the penalty 
 or supplement it. When once the legal authorities 
 grasped this possibility of using a civil remedy in- 
 stead of a criminal one, it became possible to allow 
 to any man who could pay substantial damages a 
 degree of personal liberty which was not possible 
 under a system where every infraction of others'
 
 78 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 rights, even when accidental, must be treated as a 
 crime and visited with criminal penalties to prevent 
 its recurrence. 
 
 From the development of civil damages it was 
 but a short step to the system of contracts. The 
 essential idea of a contract is that one or both of the 
 parties thereto agrees to perform a certain service 
 at a future time. The obligation which a man 
 assumes in a contract is voluntary until he has made 
 the agreement. After he has made the agreement 
 society will compel him to pay damages for its 
 breach, just as it would compel him to pay damages 
 for the breach of any of the other rights of his 
 fellow citizens. It is therefore, in its very essence, 
 a combination of freedom and responsibility. It 
 is a means which the community can adopt for 
 getting work done by the voluntary assumption of 
 obligations on the part of its members. These ob- 
 ligations they can be compelled to perform, or at 
 the very worst they can be compelled to furnish 
 compensation to the other party for their non-per- 
 formance. Among the many brilliant contributions 
 of the Roman lawyers to the progress of civiliza- 
 tion, there was probably none so wide-reaching as 
 their development of the theory of contracts. For 
 wherever this theory was applied it taught people 
 that the exercise of freedom involved the assump-
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 79 
 
 tion of responsibility, and could be safely combined 
 with it. 
 
 This lesson was not easy to learn, and the Roman 
 lawyers did not succeed in teaching it to the civ- 
 ilized world for all time. The irruption of the 
 barbarians into Europe brought with it, under the 
 feudal system, a nearly complete return to the old 
 theory of status or congenital obligation. But with 
 the close of the feudal period the ideas of the Roman 
 law were taken up and widely expanded. The 
 power of making a contract under the old Roman 
 empire had been practically, though not theoret- 
 ically, limited to a few men ; to those men, namely, 
 who could furnish security for the performance of 
 their part of the obligation. A could not give B a 
 present consideration for the sake of B's future 
 promise, unless he was sure that B could either 
 perform his promise or could compensate A for the 
 failure. The mere criminal remedy of putting B in 
 prison would not protect A, nor offer him sufficient 
 inducement for furnishing B with that considera- 
 tion which was the basis of the contract. Under the 
 economic conditions which prevailed in the Roman 
 world, the power of making contracts belonged 
 chiefly to freemen, and indeed to that minority of 
 the freemen who enjoyed the benefits of slavery, 
 the planters of Rome, as distinct from the poor
 
 80 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 whites. At the close of the Middle Ages, however, 
 the reintroduetion of the idea of contractual obliga- 
 tion as a basis for social order was accompanied by 
 a system of emancipation complete in some coun- 
 tries, partial in others which gave the laborer a 
 certain amount of property right in the product of 
 his toil. This substitution of industrial for military 
 tenure put a much larger number of people in a 
 position to furnish security for the performance of 
 contracts. It enabled the people as a whole, instead 
 of a privileged few, to enjoy the system of education 
 in responsibility which marks the growth of con- 
 tract law. 
 
 For our modern law of contract is a most valuable 
 system of moral education, operating alike upon 
 lawyers and upon laymen, and enabling us to make 
 progress both in our judicial ethics and in our gen- 
 eral tone of public morality. The whole English 
 commercial law of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries, with its distinctions, sometimes fine drawn 
 but always well drawn, in matters like agency or 
 warranty, competence or negligence, involves a 
 systematic enforcement of responsibility under the 
 forms of freedom. If we wish to see what this legal 
 development has accomplished in the way of intro- 
 ducing responsibility, we have only to contrast our 
 standards of practice and ethics in those lines where
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 81 
 
 commercia] law has been developing for centuries 
 with those where its application is comparatively 
 new. If I sell a cow on the basis of certain repre- 
 sentations, and these representations prove to be 
 false, the law holds me to an implied contract of 
 warranty, even if I have explicitly disclaimed any 
 intention to warrant the animal. If I sell a railroad 
 under similar circumstances the law offers the suf- 
 ferer no corresponding remedy; and no small sec- 
 tion of the public applauds the seller for the 
 shrewdness which he has displayed in the trans- 
 action. If I use an individual position of trust to 
 enrich myself at the expense of others, the law will 
 compel me to make restitution, even where criminal 
 intent was absent. But if I profit by similar errors 
 in the management of a corporate trust, the diffi- 
 culty of bringing the responsibility home is very 
 great indeed. 
 
 These facts and the evils connected with them are 
 notorious. Any improvement in these matters 
 which shall bring the conduct of associations 
 whether public or private, of capitalists or of labor- 
 ers up to the same moral level which characterizes 
 the conduct of individuals, involves a combined 
 legal and moral process. The same conception of 
 the duty of agents and trustees which now prevails 
 in the dealings of individuals with one another, and
 
 82 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 constitutes part of our standards of morality and 
 gentlemanly honor, must be adopted by the courts 
 and accepted by the people in dealing with the 
 affairs of corporations. There has already been a 
 decided movement in that direction. The standards 
 of corporation law and morals were better in 1880 
 than they were in 1860. They were better in 1900 
 than they were in 1880. Much, however, remains 
 to be accomplished before they reach a satisfactory 
 stage. Until this process is complete we shall wit- 
 ness alternations between reckless license of cor- 
 porate management on the one hand and socialistic 
 agitation for control on the other. The problem 
 will not be solved until, by the gradual acceptance 
 of responsibility, we have achieved that combina- 
 tion of liberty and self-control which is the basis of 
 freedom as a legal institution. When corporate 
 agents assume the same kind of moral duties and 
 responsibilities that are now assumed by private 
 individuals, then and not till then may we ex- 
 pect that they will have the same immunity from 
 legislative interference. 
 
 It is the ideal of a free community to give liberty 
 wherever people are sufficiently advanced to use 
 it in ways which shall benefit the public, instead of 
 in ways which will promote their own pleasure at 
 the public expepse. And it has been the practice
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 83 
 
 of the most successful communities to go farther 
 than this, and give freedom somewhat in advance 
 of this ethical development, wherever, by suits for 
 damages or enforcement of contractual obligations, 
 the losses arising from misuse of freedom could be 
 so far brought home to the individual offender as to 
 prevent him from repeating his error at public ex- 
 pense. Liberty is directly advantageous wherever 
 the ethical development of the community fits peo- 
 ple for its use; it is likely to prove indirectly ad- 
 vantageous wherever there is a fair promise that 
 they can be taught to improve their ethical stand- 
 ards in the immediate future. 
 
 This statement of the limits of civil liberty differs 
 somewhat, in theory at least, from that of John 
 Stuart Mill. Mill makes a fundamental distinction 
 between self-regarding actions, which affect almost 
 exclusively the individual immediately concerned, 
 and actions which are not primarily or chiefly self- 
 regarding, so that they affect the community more 
 than they do the individual. In the former case, 
 he says, we can allow the very widest degree of 
 liberty; in the latter case we must have a much 
 larger degree of restriction. With all deference to 
 the eminent writers by whom this theory has been 
 upheld, I cannot think that it is possible thus to set 
 apart any group of actions as self-regarding.
 
 84 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 Every kind of act may affect others overwhelm- 
 ingly. The utterance of a thought would be con- 
 sidered a self-regarding action; the picking of a 
 pocket an action which affected others. Yet it will 
 not infrequently happen that one man by express- 
 ing his real thoughts to another may do him and 
 do the community a more irreparable harm than 
 if he had picked the other man 's pocket. The ques- 
 tion of the degree of liberty which can be allowed in 
 any given field turns more upon the character of 
 the actors than upon the character of the acts. The 
 system of legal arrangements for the promotion of 
 liberty attempts not so much to divide men 's actions 
 into different classes, in one of which liberty can be 
 allowed and in the other of which it cannot be 
 allowed, as to take account of men's characteristics 
 in such a way as to leave the people free or to edu- 
 cate them for freedom in those fields where such 
 freedom or education is possible. 
 
 The difficulty of applying Mill's classification is 
 seen when we look at the history of freedom of 
 thought. If there is one form of activity which 
 more than all others Mill and his school would treat 
 as self -regarding, it is the activity of a man's brain. 
 Yet freedom of thought has been of slower growth 
 than freedom of action; and even to the present
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 85 
 
 day it presents harder problems for the theorist 
 to deal with. 
 
 In the earliest stages of social development, free 
 thought was obviously not a self -regarding action. 
 It was not tolerated, and it could not be ; because it 
 was the very thing which most offended the gods, 
 and thus brought destruction upon every member 
 of the tribe. It was worse than illegal conduct. 
 For conduct which violated the code of tribal cus- 
 tom might be a mere accident in which case the 
 gods would perhaps be satisfied with some expiation 
 short of the death of the offender. But a thought 
 which was at variance with the theory on which 
 these tribal customs were supported was not acci- 
 dental. It was a bold and deliberate defiance of the 
 authority of the gods an act of sacrilege of the 
 worst form. The effect of this view is manifested 
 in the terrible frenzy and cruelty which, down to 
 comparatively modern times, has characterized re- 
 ligious persecution. 
 
 But the very observances which were adopted as 
 a means for securing the authority of the priests 
 over the tribe paved the way for occasional defiance 
 of this authority. The fastings and ceremonies 
 which strengthened the influence of the priesthood 
 provided also a receptive audience for persons,
 
 86 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 within that priesthood or outside of it, who might 
 believe themselves possessed of new revelations to 
 communicate. If a man was placed in the condition 
 where he would see the spirit of his grandfather, he 
 was likely to see some other things not dreamed nor 
 intended by those who brought him to this state. 
 A time of frenzy gave every opportunity for an 
 innovator to say things which at soberer times peo- 
 ple would not have dared to listen to, and which 
 he himself might not have dared to think.* A man 
 of oratorical temperament, who at other seasons 
 would have been stoned to death as a blasphemer, 
 might now be welcomed as a prophet. This was the 
 beginning of liberty of teaching. Where the priests 
 represented scientific conservatism, the prophets 
 represented scientific progress. It is needless to say 
 that there was none too much love between priests 
 and prophets. The former would as a rule will- 
 ingly have exterminated the latter. But over and 
 over again it is related that "they feared the peo- 
 ple. " The new word which the prophet had uttered 
 had received such a hearing that there was greater 
 
 * This was the one thing which gave progressive men and 
 progressive views a fair chance. It was probably on this prin- 
 ciple that tlie ancient Macedonians based their custom, which 
 so impressed Herodotus, of never taking any important action 
 till they had discussed it twice once when they were sober and 
 once when they were drunk.
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 87 
 
 danger to the priestly authority in its suppression 
 than in the unwilling toleration of its con- 
 tinuance. 
 
 But how should this toleration be justified with- 
 out weakening the whole authority of the law ? The 
 case could not be met by a system of sacrificial ex- 
 piation. In the first place, if the progressive thought 
 of the prophets was an offence, no expiation would 
 have been sufficient to atone for it; and even if it 
 had been sufficient, the prophets would have been 
 the last ones to cooperate in making such atonement. 
 The very essence of their claim, which gave them 
 their hold over the people, was that they were pos- 
 sessed of a divine revelation which it was a merit 
 and not a sin to preach. Under these circumstances 
 the priests adopted the simple method of treating 
 the prophet as legally irresponsible. They said, in 
 short, that he was crazy ; and this explanation was 
 quite readily accepted. Even at the present day, 
 the majority of hard-headed business men believe 
 that poets, professors, and other classes of idealists 
 have a bee in their bonnets ; and if this is true now, 
 when men of these classes are held amenable to the 
 law of the land, much more necessarily was it the 
 case when they were openly proclaimed as madmen 
 and encouraged, if not compelled, to adapt their 
 conduct to the character thus thrust upon them.
 
 88 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 It may be remarked in passing that this ancient 
 conception of insanity was not so totally different 
 from the modern one, regarded from the legal side. 
 We have a theory that the question of insanity in 
 murder trials is proved by medical examination. 
 But in a very large number of cases the diagnosis is 
 based on the circumstances of the murder itself. 
 We use the term insanity as a convenient excuse for 
 men whose acts and feelings are so remote from the 
 usual run of human experience as to lead the jury 
 to think that the authority of the law will be better 
 upheld by excusing them than by hanging them. 
 The difference between ancient and modern con- 
 ceptions lies rather in the degree of liberty which 
 we propose to allow the insane man afterward. The 
 ancient priesthood held that if a man was insane 
 and could not be punished he was therefore free; 
 the modern court holds that if a man is insane and 
 cannot be punished his freedom must be restricted 
 on that account, in order to prevent a recurrence of 
 the dangerous act. 
 
 Free thought based on the claim of insanity was 
 better than no free thought at all. But it gave an 
 unfortunate sort of monopoly of the privileges of 
 liberty to those who were least competent to use 
 them wisely. If a leader arrived who was obvious- 
 ly not insane, but clear-headed and of sound judg-
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 89 
 
 ment, who did not take the guise of a madman but 
 accepted the obligations and duties of daily life, the 
 religious system provided no place for him. The 
 very qualities which distinguished Jesus of Naza- 
 reth above the prophets who had preceded him as a 
 religious reformer stood in the way of his accept- 
 ance among the Jewish authorities of his genera- 
 tion. People began by reviling him ; they ended by 
 crucifying him. "John came neither eating nor 
 drinking, and ye say, He hath a devil. The Son of 
 Man came eating and drinking, and ye say. Behold 
 a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of publicans 
 and sinners. ' ' Over and over again among the peo- 
 ples of the East the dangers which arose from hav- 
 ing leaders of thought more or less insane, or at any 
 rate compelling them to pretend to be more or less 
 insane, have manifested themselves, and still mani- 
 fest themselves down to the present day. The sys- 
 tem causes the Oriental armies to be commanded by 
 fanatics, capable at times of rousing their follow- 
 ers to violent acts, but incapable of sustained judg- 
 ment in directing the employment of means toward 
 a practical end. It causes Oriental society to be 
 burdened with vast numbers of half insane and 
 wholly irresponsible mendicants religious zealots, 
 who have something of the external characteristics 
 of prophets, but very little of their internal char-
 
 90 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 acter. The system prevents moral stagnation, but 
 at the more or less habitual sacrifice of public order, 
 public economy, and public security. 
 
 When our religious thinkers had advanced far 
 enough for us to regard sin as a personal offence, 
 which brought down the wrath of God upon the 
 individual, rather than as a collective offence, 
 which caused God to punish the whole tribe without 
 discrimination, the way was open for tolerating free 
 thought among men who were not insane. Even 
 those who regarded progressive ideas as acts of im- 
 morality on the part of the thinker did not find 
 themselves compelled to kill him in order to prevent 
 the penalty of his impiety from being visited upon 
 themselves. The progressive thinker could be treat- 
 ed as one who did not jeopardize the safety of all 
 his associates by his irreligious utterances. Per- 
 haps it might prove that his teaching was not so 
 wholly wrong after all. The authorities might 
 safely say concerning the innovators, as Gamaliel 
 said in the trial of the Apostles: "Refrain from 
 these men and let them alone : for if this counsel or 
 this work be of men it will come to nought ; but if 
 it be of God ye cannot overthrow it : lest haply ye 
 be found even to fight against God." Where the 
 separation of legal and moral authority had become 
 at all complete where, in other words, a change of
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 91 
 
 mythology did not weaken public security ^this 
 was the logical and natural ground to take. 
 
 But even when we have accepted this theoretical 
 view of the case, we may fall far short of the actual 
 toleration of free thought. We may admit that the 
 impiety of an individual does not in itself constitute 
 a danger to public security, and that the holding of 
 a wrong opinion constitutes in itself no menace to 
 social order, and nevertheless be extremely in- 
 tolerant of these opinions in practice either be- 
 cause we think that the holding of opinions which 
 we consider wrong will harm the individual himselff 
 or because we think that the inevitable expression 
 of those opinions will harm the community. 
 
 In early stages of society, or with undevel- 
 oped systems of legal procedure, the first of these 
 ideas is the dominant one. Where law is imper- 
 fectly separated from morals, and where the powers 
 of church and state are closely intermingled, it is 
 inevitable that this should be the case. If a man puts 
 himself in danger of eternal punishment by a cer- 
 tain line of thought, it is not an evidence of breadth 
 of mind, but an evidence of scandalous indifference 
 to his fate, to leave him to pursue that line of 
 thought undisturbed. Galileo was forbidden to 
 teach that the earth revolved around the sun be- 
 cause it was believed to be wrong for him to think
 
 92 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 that the earth revolved around the sun. Socrates 
 was condemned to lose his life, not so much because 
 he kept a school in which the youth were systemat- 
 ically instructed ^though this played a part in the 
 proceedings but because the daemonism which he 
 was supposed to teach savored of impiety to those 
 who had been brought up with conservative re- 
 ligious ideas. There are always misguided friends 
 of the free thinker who are so concerned about his 
 future welfare that they cannot let him subject him- 
 self to the penalties of his impiety without doing 
 their utmost to interfere friends who will impose 
 legal restraints upon him if they can, and failing 
 this, will use to the utmost extent the less tangible 
 but no less effective restraints of personal entreaty 
 or of public disapproval. Those of us who claim to 
 be most enlightened in this matter of toleration of 
 opinion cannot rid ourselves of the habits of intoler- 
 ance inherited from our ancestors. If we are in- 
 clined for a moment to doubt this last proposition, 
 we have only to consider how much of our own time 
 has been spent in indignation against other people 
 for holding views which were different from our 
 own, even in cases where there was no particular 
 chance that the views of either of us would have 
 any influence on the external acts of the other. 
 Neither philosophers nor scientists are exempt from
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 93 
 
 this difficulty. The odium theologicum extends to 
 every school of thought. Professor W. K. Clifford 
 argues that the right of private judgment is an 
 absolute one, with an almost vituperative scorn of 
 those who exercise private judgment to the extent 
 of differing with him in this opinion. The diffi- 
 culty of learning to mind our own business in the 
 matter of interference with other people 's thoughts 
 is so great, even where we find actual tolerance of 
 differences of religious or scientific opinion, that we 
 are only too apt to discover that this is the result 
 of apathy rather than of intelligence. 
 
 But as the conception of law has become more 
 and more clearly defined, and the line between 
 church and state more distinct, there has been an 
 increasing reluctance on the part of the government 
 to lend its aid in suppressing opinions which, how- 
 ever dangerous they may be to the souls of those 
 who hold them, do not constitute an immediate men- 
 ace to public security and social order. And slowly 
 but surely this increasing conservatism in the use of 
 legal penalties leads to a corresponding conserva- 
 tism in the administration of theological penal- 
 ties. Where the law will hang a man for every 
 affront to civil authority, real or supposed, the 
 theologians have no difficulty in persuading people 
 that the gods will punish all transgressors in an
 
 94 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 equally bloodthirsty spirit. There is in every tribe 
 and every nation an almost necessary correspond- 
 ence between its moral system and its legal system. 
 The character of its chiefs will be reflected in the 
 character of its gods, and vice versa. If the system 
 of legal penalties is vindictive and arbitrary, the 
 system of spiritual penalties will be vindictive and 
 arbitrary also. If the system of legal penalties is 
 rational, judging the offender by his intent and giv- 
 ing him fair opportunity to argue his case, this 
 habit will be reflected in the theological arguments 
 and the conception of the divine penalty. In the 
 Jokes of the Lacedaemonians, Plutarch if it really 
 be Plutarch who made this curious collection of 
 ancient wit ^tells how a Lacedaemonian remarked, 
 as they passed the contribution box, "I have no 
 use for gods that are poorer than I am. ' ' No nation 
 can accept a morality on the part of its spiritual 
 rulers inferior to that which characterizes its earth- 
 ly ones. Rational law carried with it the develop- 
 ment of rational theology. It relieved us from the 
 fear that the good man would be eternally punished 
 for a mistake of doctrine. It made the eradication 
 of those mistakes no longer a duty which a man 
 owed to his friends, but a matter of private judg- 
 ment, to be decided on questions of expediency. It 
 deprived our habits of intolerance of the justifica-
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 95 
 
 tion which they had when they were part of a legal 
 and theological system, and left them standing iso- 
 lated in the modern world as an anomalous survival 
 of ancient prejudices. 
 
 But even under the most advanced legal systems 
 and the most logical methods of thought, it is im- 
 possible to make toleration of differences of opinion 
 as absolute a right as some people assume. For 
 freedom to hold an opinion is meaningless unless it 
 carries with it freedom to express the opinion. Na- 
 tions with advanced legal systems very rarely inter- 
 fere with opinion in its former aspect. In the latter 
 aspect they frequently have occasion to restrict or 
 suppress it. The Roman law persecuted the Chris- 
 tians, not so much for their religious opinions as 
 for their habit of holding irresponsible public 
 assemblies. This was a thing of which the Ro- 
 man authorities were always jealous; and they 
 were especially jealous of these assemblies of the 
 Christians because the theories of divine sover- 
 eignty therein set forth often seemed to menace 
 the legal right of the emperor. The persecution, or 
 alleged persecution, of scientific men in some of 
 our modern communities is not, in general, an at- 
 tempt to prevent them from holding such opinions 
 as they please concerning the evolution of species, 
 or the proper material for a dollar, or the physio-
 
 96 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 logical effects of alcohol, but to prevent them from 
 making use of official position to teach these opin- 
 ions, and drawing a salary for so doing. 
 
 All these instances show how hard it is to sep- 
 arate the question of the right of free thought from 
 the question of illegal activity, or even to be quite 
 sure which of these things is being infringed and 
 restricted. If a man is deprived of a teaching posi- 
 tion because he advocates the Darwinian theory or 
 the silver standard, his friends will regard it as an 
 attack upon liberty of thought; his enemies will 
 consider it a protection of public morality. The 
 trustees who remove such an officer will probably 
 make the mistake of under-estimating the possi- 
 bility of good which results from freedom, but they 
 will be right in considering the act of teaching as 
 being not a self -regarding one but one whose good 
 or bad use involves good or evil to others besides 
 the teacher, and as regarding themselves as having 
 special duties of interference if evil is done in the 
 exercise of this function. The remedy for this state 
 of things is not to be found by trying to draw more 
 clearly the line between actions which concern the 
 teacher himself and actions which concern others. 
 This is an impossibility. Things which might be 
 harmless if uttered by a teacher of one subject to 
 pupils of advanced age might be utterly demoral-
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 97 
 
 izing if set forth by a teacher of another subject 
 to pupils of another stage of training. Nor can 
 we attempt to mitigate the evil by changing the 
 character of the board of trustees. The particular 
 form of the board of control makes a difference 
 with the direction in which the restraint is exer- 
 cised, rather than with the amount of such re- 
 straint. The trustees of an ecclesiastical college 
 concern themselves chiefly with religious opinions, 
 those of a state college with political opinions, those 
 of a private foundation with economic opinions; 
 but the actual degree of liberty allowed depends 
 upon the stage of intellectual development which 
 has been reached by the teacher and by the com- 
 munity about him. The amount of freedom which 
 can be tolerated depends upon the responsibility 
 of the speaker, and perhaps to a yet greater degree 
 upon the responsibility of the community in making 
 use of the doctrines which he preaches. 
 
 There was a time when a considerable part of the 
 anarchists of America advocated doctrines of forci- 
 ble resistance to authority which were not consonant 
 with the American Constitution. For many years 
 they were allowed to do this without molestation. 
 It was supposed that the utterance of these senti- 
 ments did little harm that they were mere talk, 
 and nothing more. But when the people who heard
 
 98 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 these speeches began to murder officials, the case 
 was different. The public expression of certain 
 views was summarily stopped by treating the men 
 who expressed them as guilty of the crime of in- 
 citement to murder. It was in vain for these men 
 to plead, as they perhaps could conscientiously do, 
 that they were simply uttering theories about the 
 government, and that a man had a right to utter 
 any theory he pleased. This sentiment would hold 
 good as long as the audience was sufficiently ra- 
 tional not to try to put the theories in practice. 
 When this condition ceased to exist, the possibility 
 of freedom was diminished. 
 
 This case of the anarchists is important as illus- 
 trating quite clearly the conditions which limit the 
 exercise of toleration. Speaking broadly, there is 
 no question that toleration is a good thing. The 
 argument of Carlyle, that nine men out of ten will 
 judge badly, and that they should therefore follow 
 a leader who can judge well, instead of pursuing 
 independent courses of their own, proves less than 
 it appears to; for the mistakes that the nine men 
 make serve as a warning to prevent others from 
 following their example, while the good judgment 
 of the tenth man is a permanent contribution to 
 progress. As Morley well says, the system of tol- 
 eration lays down the main condition of finding
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 99 
 
 your hero ; to leave all ways open to him, because 
 no man knows by which way he should come. But 
 there is this important truth to be emphasized on the 
 other side: that the amount of private judgment 
 which the members of a nation can advantageously 
 or even safely exercise depends upon their own 
 moral character. That degree of freedom which in 
 one stage of society, or among men of one kind, 
 serves as a means to progress, would in another 
 stage and with other men loosen all foundations 
 of social cohesion and constitute a relapse into 
 anarchy. 
 
 To a certain extent, every one recognizes this 
 truth. Every one sees that discussion with young 
 children or with immature races must be handled 
 in a different fashion from that which would be 
 permissible with men of more advanced age or 
 civilization. It is the central idea of Bagehot's 
 Physics and Politics that institutions and habits of 
 thought had to be so arranged as to produce cohe- 
 sion before there was any room for liberty. What 
 Bagehot perhaps inadequately realizes, and what 
 many other political writers far more conspicu- 
 ously fail to realize, is that this need of maintaining 
 social cohesion is a perpetual one. It is not a thing 
 which has been established once for all in the course 
 of prehistoric or early historic ages, and may now
 
 100 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 be left to take care of itself. We have not by the 
 labors of our ancestors attained a degree of disci- 
 pline which makes society permanently safe from 
 disorganization, Athens was a well established and 
 highly organized state ; yet the teachings of Socrates 
 at Athens were followed by a Macedonian conquest. 
 The Italian republics had well developed traditions 
 and were under the authority of a powerful church ; 
 but the revival of learning in Italy was followed, 
 at no very long interval, by a decadence in all that 
 had made Italy great. The nineteenth century has 
 witnessed a third experiment in introducing simi- 
 lar theories of self-interest and private judgment. 
 This experiment is made under more favorable con- 
 ditions than its predecessors, because the greater 
 distribution of property, the wider understanding 
 of contractual obligations, and the habits taught by 
 the Protestant churches of exercising private judg- 
 ment on matters outside the domain of selfish in- 
 terest have increased our power of using the freest 
 thought without interfering with that discipline 
 which is necessary to the work of civilized society. 
 But with all these advantages, it is going to be a 
 very critical experiment to teach the people as a 
 body that they are free to think what they like and 
 to do what they like. Just as the possibility of in- 
 dustrial freedom depends upon a man's readiness
 
 FREEDOM AS A LEGAL INSTITUTION 101 
 
 to assume the obligations of contract and his re- 
 sponsibility in standing up to them, even when they 
 work to his own inconvenience, so the possibility ot 
 intellectual liberty is dependent upon a man's 
 readiness to accept the responsibilities involved in 
 the use of private judgment. He must be prepared 
 to exercise that judgment on a Stoic rather than an 
 Epicurean basis; making the good of society the 
 standard of his moral conduct even when this 
 standard shall work to his own inconvenience or 
 hurt.
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 
 
 The liberals, or champions of liberty, include two 
 somewhat distinct groups : the advocates of tolera- 
 tion and the advocates of individualism. The 
 former group believes in allowing people a large 
 measure of liberty in managing their own affairs, 
 because it thinks that their errors as well as their 
 successes will teach the community a lesson for the 
 future, and thus contribute indirectly to its prog- 
 ress. The latter group believes in allowing people 
 a still larger measure of liberty, even in affairs 
 which are not distinctly their own, because it thinks 
 that the enlightened selfishness of individuals con- 
 tributes directly to the good of the body politic. 
 The former would allow people to be free to make 
 their own mistakes, in the belief that temporary 
 error is self -corrective ; the latter would encourage 
 people to pursue their own interests, in the be- 
 lief that enlightened selfishness promotes the com- 
 mon interest. The former group, which makes 
 freedom a means of progress, is represented by men 
 102
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 103 
 
 like Mill and Morley; the latter, which makes it a 
 basis of ethics, is represented by men like Bastiat 
 and Clifford. 
 
 Of course these two groups are not wholly sep- 
 arate. There are a great many men who believe 
 both in toleration and in self-interest, and can with 
 fairness base their advocacy of liberty on either 
 ground which may prove more convenient. But 
 the two lines of argument, though often confused, 
 are essentially distinct. Those who represent in the 
 highest degree the spirit of tolerance are, as a rule, 
 somewhat sceptical about the operations of self- 
 interest ; and those who lay most stress on the uni- 
 versal beneficence of self-interest are apt to reduce 
 their belief in toleration to a theory rather than 
 a practice. 
 
 We have thus far been considering the subject of 
 liberty from the former of these two standpoints. 
 We have shown how freedom of thought and action 
 has been developed by civilized communities, under 
 safeguards which look toward the use of that free- 
 dom for public purposes. Those who represent 
 this view cherish no illusions as to the results of the 
 freedom they advocate. They know that the exer- 
 cise of freedom means mistakes; ^'Es irrt der 
 MenscJi, so lang er streht^' Error is incident to 
 every serious effort at human progress; but they
 
 104 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 see that these mistakes are relatively unimportant 
 in comparison with the improvement which is at- 
 tained if we allow them and prevented if we do 
 not allow them. The doctrine of liberty, says Mor- 
 ley, rests on the belief that there are in the great 
 seed plot of human nature a vast number of unde- 
 veloped germs, not tares and not wheat, whose 
 properties we have not yet had a full chance to 
 ascertain ; and if you are over-anxious to pluck up 
 the tares you pluck up these untried possibilities of 
 human excellence, and are very likely to injure the 
 growing wheat as well. Where this theory of tol- 
 eration has taken root and it has taken root to a 
 greater or less extent among all the civilizations of 
 modern Europe there will be many acts which 
 public sentiment judges harmful, but which it re- 
 frains from repressing because the evil of tyran- 
 nical interference outweighs the probable good to 
 be gained ; and there will be a vastly greater number 
 of acts of which the community will not trouble 
 itself to decide collectively whether the harm out- 
 weighs the good or not, because it prefers the slow 
 process of experiment to any premature application 
 of social judgment and administrative repression. 
 This system of toleration may be carried to such 
 an extreme that it becomes a sort of political in- 
 difference. When it reaches this stage, it gives rise
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 105 
 
 to an easy-going doctrine of political liberty which 
 is as Tinhistorical as the doctrines of freedom of 
 the will or of liberty of private judgment already 
 alluded to ^the so-called laissez faire doctrine that 
 if you can only let people sufficiently alone matters 
 will somehow work themselves out all right, and 
 that the highest goal of jurisprudence is an or- 
 ganized policy of non-interference, where each in- 
 dividual's privacy is fully respected. But a far 
 larger part of the advocacy of the policy of non- 
 interference, especially in its extreme forms, comes 
 from another quarter. It comes from men who are 
 not content with tolerating the exercise of individ- 
 ual selfishness as harmless, but give it their positive 
 approval as a means, and commonly a most effective 
 means, to the attainment of the general good. 
 
 The conduct of the business of any civilized 
 society involves the doing of a great many things 
 which are unpleasant and disagreeable to the indi- 
 viduals involved. Society has at its command sev- 
 eral agencies for making its individual members 
 assume these necessary inconveniences and pains. 
 It can rely on constraint, either physical or moral, 
 on sympathy, or on self-interest. In the earlier 
 stages of civilization it makes very large use of 
 constraint. In all stages, early and late, sympathy 
 is an important factor in securing the results de-
 
 106 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 sired. The systematic use of self-interest as a means 
 to this end is of subsequent origin. But as time 
 goes on and civilization advances, constraint falls 
 into the background. In a thoroughly civilized 
 community the physical penalties of the law are 
 invoked only in exceptional instances, and the moral 
 terrors are much mitigated. The fear of the anger 
 of the gods gives place to the fear of public opinion ; 
 and for the majority of the citizens, this public 
 opinion is based on views and sentiments which they 
 themselves feel so strongly that its demands do not 
 produce the feeling of constraint which they other- 
 wise would. The precepts of such a public opinion 
 fall in line with a man's own sympathies; so that 
 in a really well developed community it is often im- 
 possible to draw any sharp line between the two and 
 undertake to say where the motive of sympathy 
 ceases and that of obedience to public opinion 
 begins. 
 
 All this relaxation of constraint gives the indi- 
 vidual more room to exercise choice as to his con- 
 duct, and makes it increasingly important to enlist 
 his self-interest on the side of public service and 
 social order. To a certain extent this is an easy 
 thing to do. If a man has made any progress in 
 civilization, his sympathies with his children are so 
 strong that he will be sure of regarding their inter-
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 107 
 
 ests as his own, and will promote their welfare and 
 enjoyment as an essential element in his personal 
 gratification. What holds true of his dealings with 
 his children is true, though to a less extent, of his 
 dealings with his relatives and friends. Their 
 pleasure is his pleasure; and even on grounds of 
 mere selfishness he would not be likely to do that 
 which would give them pain or do them harm, on 
 account of the indirect distress to himself which 
 would be caused thereby. Indeed, the same prin- 
 ciple applies to his wider relations with the general 
 public. The approbation of his fellow men has 
 become so far a valuable object to him personally 
 that he is not going to shirk inconveniences or run 
 away from dangers if by so doing he will forfeit 
 that approbation. 
 
 There have been many philosophers, both ancient 
 and modern, who were disposed to base their theory 
 of morals on the assumption of this identity of self- 
 interest and public interest. ''Nihil Jionestum 
 quod non idem utile" there is no moral good 
 which cannot be proved advantageous to the indi- 
 vidual this was the theme which Cicero discussed 
 in his De Oflficiis, and to which he gave a qualified 
 assent. The same theme was discussed and the 
 same qualified assent repeated by Herbert Spencer, 
 in his Data of Ethics, nearly two thousand years
 
 108 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 afterward. The philosophers who hold this view 
 of morals argue somewhat as follows : All our rea- 
 soning about conduct is based upon the assumption 
 that an individual has a choice between different 
 courses of action, and is to exercise his private judg- 
 ment in preferring one to another. If he makes a 
 choice and uses his reason, he is by the very neces- 
 sities of the case bound to choose that course of 
 conduct which he regards as more advantageous 
 for himself. Of course this does not mean that he 
 chooses that line whose advantages are more ob- 
 vious. On the contrary, if he is at all intelligent, 
 he will be led to give greater weight to remote ends 
 than a less intelligent man would give, and will 
 care more for the higher pleasures in comparison 
 with the lower ones. He will lay less stress upon 
 physical enjoyments, and more upon the pleasures 
 of sympathy, of public approbation, and of that 
 content which is found only in the approval of his 
 own conscience. But after making all these expla- 
 nations, the philosophers tell us the fact remains 
 that calculated conduct is, in the very nature of the 
 case, selfish conduct; and that under such circum- 
 stances the good, as distinct from the bad, repre- 
 sents the more enlightened and intelligent conduct, 
 as distinct from the more shortsighted and self -de- 
 structive. The pursuit of physical pleasure speed-
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 109 
 
 ily brings satiety and pain. The pursuit of ease 
 and cowardice brings public contempt. Therefore 
 voluptuousness and cowardice are bad. The love 
 of one's family and friends, the reward of social ap- 
 probation, and best of all, the peace of mind which 
 is engendered by a good conscience, are lasting 
 pleasures, which have in them a depth which the 
 voluptuary or the coward cannot understand. They 
 therefore can be called good; and we can appeal 
 to men to prefer them to shortsighted pleasure seek- 
 ing on grounds of mere intelligence. Nay more ; if 
 we admit the fact of choice and the possibility of 
 calculation, this is the only logical ground on which 
 to make such an appeal.* Such was the reasoning 
 of the Epicureans ; such has been the reasoning of 
 no small part of the philosophic students of ethics, 
 whether in the ancient or the modern world. 
 But there is an obvious difficulty in this system 
 
 * This argument is sometimes carried to the extent of imply- 
 ing that every man is really actuated by considerations of his 
 own happiness, even when he thinks he is working for others 
 that if he sacrifices himself for his friend, it is because he is so 
 constituted that it gives him more pain to see his friend suffer 
 than to put his own life in peril. But this line of reasoning in- 
 volves a fallacy. It is true that a man always obeys the strong- 
 est motive ; it is not true that strength of motive and quantity 
 of happiness are the same thing. Strength of motive is matter 
 of pure intensity ; quantity of happiness involves intensity and 
 duration both. If we believe that a certain course of conduct
 
 110 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 of ethics which laid it open to criticism from the 
 outset. Not all men, nor a majority of them, are 
 of such intelligence as to render it safe for them 
 to make their own happiness a conscious end or 
 standard of right. The parallelism of a man 's own 
 selfish interests with those of the community, im- 
 portant as it sometimes may prove, is very incom- 
 plete except in the case of those men who have 
 attained a high degree of advancement in civiliza- 
 tion or excellence of personal character. There are 
 unfortunately some people who abuse their children 
 in order to give comfort to themselves, a still larger 
 number who evade their obligations to their rela- 
 tives for the sake of their own personal convenience, 
 and an enormous number with whom the dictates 
 of convenience or cowardice if that cowardice is 
 not going to be too prominently exposed outweigh 
 the love of social approbation. Under such circum- 
 stances, there is grave danger that conduct dictated 
 
 will give us happiness, this belief strengthens the intensity of 
 our motive to choose that line of conduct; hut the liappiness is 
 not the same thing as the motive, nor is it the only thing which 
 determines the motive's intensity. If a man has much self-con- 
 sciousness and little sympathy, his own future happiness will 
 affect him intensely, and that of others but slightly ; if he is less 
 self-conscious and more sympathetic, other people's pleasure or 
 pain, especially if visible, may cause far greater intensity of 
 motive than does the prospect of his own future happiness or 
 unhappiness.
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 111 
 
 by self-interest will be selfish in the bad sense of 
 the word will be used to promote the interests of 
 the individual at the expense of those of the com- 
 munity. 
 
 In the face of this difficulty, ancient writers have 
 held somewhat different views from modern ones. 
 The ancient philosophers generally considered that 
 free thought was to be the privilege of the few 
 rather than the common heritage of the many. It 
 was to be confined to those whose legal position was 
 such that they could readily identify the interests 
 of the body politic with their own, and whose in- 
 telligence was sufficient to make them prefer the 
 higher and more permanent pleasures to the lower 
 and more transient ones. The study of justice was 
 to be the monopoly of an intellectual aristocracy. 
 For the great bulk of the community, the banausoi 
 or base mechanicals, it was necessary to preach the 
 virtues of courage and self-restraint and sympathy 
 virtues which did not involve an exercise of the 
 intellect; virtues which influenced choice in the 
 direction of the public welfare, instead of empha- 
 sizing its character as an individual act of selfish 
 reason. 
 
 This limitation of the freedom of choice, which 
 seemed natural enough to the philosophers of the 
 ancient world, has not been accepted in modern
 
 112 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 times. This is partly because our increasing democ- 
 racy of intellect has led us to feel that a theory of 
 morals which is good for anything must be couched 
 in terms sufficiently general to let us preach it to 
 everybody ; but still more because the modern world 
 has witnessed an extraordinary economic develop- 
 ment in which the self-interest of individuals has 
 actually been turned to the benefit of the community 
 in unexpected ways. This economic history has 
 been so striking that people have not only accepted 
 its teachings, but exaggerated them. Self-interest 
 in the industrial field has been made to do so much 
 that many thinkers overestimate its benefits, and 
 are quite prepared to extend it to other fields where 
 its applicability is more doubtful. It has accom- 
 plished so much in one line that people are prcne 
 to believe that it would do everything that society 
 needs, in that line and in all others, if it only had 
 a fair chance. 
 
 The course of events in this industrial history 
 may be summarized as follows : 
 
 Down to the close of the thirteenth century peo- 
 ple looked to compulsion rather than to freedom 
 to public authority rather than to personal interest 
 as a means of getting the world's work done. 
 Men were forced to labor by fear of the lash oi 
 the prison, instead of being encouraged to labor by
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 113 
 
 the opportunity of bettering their social condition. 
 Property right in these early days was essentially 
 a military tenure, established for the sake of public 
 security. People were given holdings of land in 
 consideration of the service as soldiers which they 
 had rendered or could render to the government. 
 The land which they thus held these landholders 
 did not till or improve. It was tilled for the most 
 part by villeins, who, in return for the privilege of 
 being allowed to occupy a part of the land, and call 
 it in a measure their own, gave one-half of their 
 time in compulsory labor for the military chieftain 
 or feudal lord. 
 
 In the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth 
 centuries, however, a large portion of the English 
 villeins were allowed to substitute money payments 
 for compulsory labor as a condition of holding 
 their land. The immediate motive for this change 
 was the need of the feudal lords for money ; but its 
 ultimate effect was a very great increase in the 
 wealth of the country, public as well as private. 
 Under the old system of compulsory labor the peas- 
 ant had no motive to increase his production. He 
 did as little as he could without being punished. 
 Under the new system he had every motive to do as 
 much as he could ; for whatever he produced above 
 the fixed money rent was a benefit to him individ-
 
 114 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 ually. In other countries the change was not car- 
 ried so far as in England. In Italy, for instance, 
 the peasant, instead of paying the feudal lord a 
 fixed money rent, generally agreed to pay him one- 
 half of the produce. Thus he got only one-half 
 the benefit of his increased activity, instead of the 
 whole ; and the effect in stimulating labor was but 
 half as good as that of the English system. But in 
 every European country, as far as the change 
 was carried out, it increased the laborer's feeling 
 of personal independence and his contribution to 
 the public wealth. 
 
 For the benefit resulting from increased produc- 
 tion did not stop with the first owner of the product. 
 It distributed itself throughout the community. 
 The accumulation of food supplies afforded a re- 
 serve on which the nation could fall back in time 
 of war or famine or any other event which strained 
 its economic resources. And when there was no 
 war or famine the surplus could be used for paying 
 men who were engaged in the work of agricultural 
 improvement, in the development of machinery, in 
 the building of shops, or in the production of poems 
 and plays. The existence of capital made invention 
 possible; and the chief benefit of these inventions 
 went, not to the owner or investor of the capital, 
 but to the public as a whole. The England of the
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 115 
 
 thirteenth century had been a country of unim- 
 proved farms, whose methods of production were 
 rude and whose inhabitants lived from hand to 
 mouth. The England of the eighteenth century 
 was a country of highly improved land, with well 
 developed industrial arts, producing much larger 
 amounts both of food and of other things that made 
 life worth living than it did five hundred years 
 before. The chief thing that made the change 
 possible was that system of industrial emancipation 
 which gave men a selfish motive to work hard and 
 to invest their capital in improvements. Of course 
 this change was not unaccompanied with hardship. 
 There were some men whose lot under the new sys- 
 tem was worse than under the old ; but of its good 
 effect on the power and prosperity of the nation as 
 a whole there can be no doubt whatever. 
 
 Neither the laborers nor the capitalists who con-; 
 tributed to this change were actuated by any philan- 
 thropic motive. They were trying to make all the 
 money that they could. The significant thing is, 
 that by letting them make all the money they 
 could the community had helped instead of hin- 
 dered its general prosperity. Selfishness had been 
 made to contribute to the common good. In some 
 commercial transactions the coincidence between 
 individual selfishness and common good was so un-
 
 116 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 expected that the community had to reverse its old 
 ethics completely. Take, for instance, the system 
 of interest. In the thirteenth century this was uni- 
 versally condemned. Nothing could appear, at first 
 sight, more avariciously selfish than the attempt to 
 make a man who borrowed money of you pay back 
 more than he had borrowed, simply because he was 
 in present trouble and could not help himself. For 
 this reason our forefathers called all interest by the 
 opprobrious name of usury. The mediaeval church 
 condemned it as a sin ; the medieval courts punished 
 it as a wrong. If you wanted any return on your 
 money you were told to invest it yourself, and con- 
 tent yourself with profits actually earned. But the 
 advantage to the community of having capital con- 
 trolled by men who really knew how to manage it 
 by men who were progressive without being reck- 
 less was so great that it was found desirable to 
 encourage people to lend their money to such men 
 instead of investing it themselves. The system of 
 interest was a means of giving this encouragement. 
 It allowed the lender, who had accumulated capital 
 but had no special ability in managing it, to get the 
 assurance of a moderate return ; it allowed the bor- 
 rower, who assumed the risk and responsibility of 
 directing large business enterprises, to obtain the 
 surplus gain which was due to his superior talent.
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 117 
 
 And, most important of all, it gave the community 
 the chance to have its disposable stock of goods used 
 in a way to produce the maximum of industrial 
 progress. 
 
 But the most striking instance of the harmony 
 between intelligent self-interest and public advan- 
 tage was seen in connection with the sales and prices 
 of goods. 
 
 The old theory of value was that every article 
 had a just price; that the buyer would naturally 
 try to pay less than that prioe, the seller to ex- 
 act more; that whichever man succeeded gained a 
 slight earthly advantage at corresponding peril to 
 his soul ^this peril being especially great in the case 
 of the seller, because he was usually more skilful 
 than the buyer and was likely to make this unfair 
 gain a means of livelihood. For the double purpose 
 of protecting the buyer against dangers in this life 
 and the seller against dangers in the life to come, it 
 was habitual for the authorities to fix prices on 
 many of the articles of common use, and to exact 
 severe penalties for any variation from these prices. 
 If the authorities thought that a loaf of bread ought 
 to cost two pence, they set the price accordingly 
 and cut off the ears of the offending baker who 
 should undertake to charge more. Of course the 
 result of this was to fix the price at two pence. No
 
 118 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 baker was going to jeopardize his soul's salvation 
 and his ears at the same time. The effect of this 
 low price was that the consumers used bread as 
 freely as before, instead of economizing it; and 
 that after a few weeks, in place of the slight de- 
 ficiency of supply which was tending to cause the 
 increase in price, the community found itself face 
 to face with an actual scarcity of the necessaries of 
 life. The artificial system of price regulation had 
 intensified the very evil that it was intended to pre- 
 vent, A far wiser thing to do was to recognize that 
 the high price was the symptom of an evil, rather 
 than the cause of evil itself. If the baker was allowed 
 to advance his price to two and a half pence, this in 
 the first place caused economy of bread ; and thus, 
 by exercising a little care at the beginning, the com- 
 munity avoided the terrible evils of famine at the 
 end. But this was not all. The advance of price to 
 two and a half pence tended to attract supplies of 
 wheat and flour from other communities where 
 there had been no such scarcity. By refusing to 
 allow any increase of price, you prevented people 
 in other places from coming to your assistance. By 
 allowing the increase you encouraged them to re- 
 lieve the scarcity ; so that after a brief period the 
 price of bread in open market tended to return 
 nearly to the former level. The high price was but
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 119 
 
 a symptom of a temporary or local scarcity. The 
 man who attempted to lower the price by law was 
 like the physician who should attempt to treat a 
 disease by repressing its manifestations. The man 
 who let things take care of themselves was dealing 
 with the disease by the more enlightened method 
 of providing natural means for the removal of its 
 cause. 
 
 This experience with sales and prices was the 
 basis of the principle of competition, which has 
 taken such a hold on modern industrial life. If 
 goods are scarce we let the buyers bid against one 
 another; holding that by this process of selection 
 we shall put such supplies as we have in the place 
 where they are most urgently needed, and shall 
 stimulate real economy in the use of the article by 
 the temporary increase in its price. If the seller 
 thus obtains a considerable gain, we regard this 
 gain as fairly due to his forethought in providing 
 the market with a supply of goods which would 
 otherwise have been absent ; and we interfere only 
 when, by some combination or monopoly, he has 
 produced an artificial scarcity instead of helping 
 to meet one which already existed from natural 
 causes. We believe also that the best remedy for 
 a scarcity is to stimulate competition on the part 
 of other producers who will devote their energies
 
 120 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 toward bringing new supplies to market ; and who, 
 if the scarcity is widespread or long continued, will 
 invest new capital in the production of the goods 
 thus urgently needed. We believe that the ex- 
 ceptional profit which these producers obtain until 
 the deficiency of supply has been made good is but 
 a natural and normal means of stimulating them 
 to the utmost exertions in making good the defi- 
 ciency and of rewarding them for their foresight 
 in doing it rightly. 
 
 Thus the pursuit of self-interest is not always to 
 be monopolized by the few, as the ancient philoso- 
 phers supposed. These last two matters interest 
 and prices were things where the ancient writers 
 believed the exercise of selfishness most unsafe, 
 and its results most destructive; and yet these are 
 two cases where it does the clearest public good. 
 
 There can, I think, be no reasonable doubt that 
 the world is far better served under this competitive 
 system than under any other system of industrial 
 regulation which has hitherto been tried. The 
 effect has been so marked that modern law ^the 
 English first and the Continental afterward ^has 
 gradually adjusted itself to the conception that 
 prices should be let alone wherever competition can 
 regulate them ; that a price obtained in open market, 
 without fraud or artificial monopoly, is ipso facto
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 121 
 
 a fair price; and that a man does no wrong to 
 those with whom he deals if he buys as cheaply as 
 he can and sells as dearly as he can. These legal 
 principles have been reflected in our ethical con- 
 ceptions. We assume that a competitive price is a 
 morally just price; that what a man can obtain 
 for an article in open market at the moment repre- 
 sents its present value ; and that the average price 
 which he can obtain in the long run represents its 
 true or permanent value. We believe that under 
 ordinary conditions the business man does his duty 
 by the community if he observes the rules of the 
 game of competition, as thus laid down; because 
 by a general adoption of these rules the collective 
 interest of the industrial community has been well 
 served. 
 
 The strength of this theory of competition has 
 been increased because of the fact that its oppo- 
 nents have rarely done it full justice. They have 
 been so impressed by certain incidental evils con- 
 nected with the system smaller capitalists pushed 
 to the wall by larger capitalists; intelligent work- 
 men thrown out of employment by the process of 
 industrial readjustment to make room for those 
 cheaper and less skilled that they have shut their 
 eyes to its essential excellences. They have said 
 that competition was nothing but a new name for
 
 122 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 the Darwinian struggle for existence as applied in 
 modern business ; that it was a glorification of the 
 principle of survival of the strongest. This is a 
 very imperfect view of the case. Competition is 
 something essentially different in character from 
 the struggle for existence among the lower animals. 
 It is a struggle so ordered that outside parties reap 
 a benefit, instead of suffering an injury. This is 
 its conspicuous and distinctive feature. If cats are 
 struggling to get the same bird, and bosses are 
 struggling to get the same workmen, the relation 
 of the cats to one another bears some analogy to the 
 relation of the bosses to one another. But there is 
 this radical difference in the whole transaction: 
 that the more cats there are, the worse for the bird ; 
 while the more bosses there are, the better for the 
 workmen. Competition is what its name implies a 
 concurrent petition; an effort on the part of differ- 
 ent people to do the best they can for somebody 
 else, in order to induce him to enter into dealings 
 with them. 
 
 Unfortunately, it is not only the opponents of 
 competition who fail to recognize this as its essen- 
 tial feature. The advocates of the system are prone 
 to make a somewhat similar mistake. They apply 
 the substantially sound theory that the value of a 
 thing is what it will bring in open market to cases
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 123 
 
 where conception of open market is not accurate 
 sometimes because the market is not open, and some- 
 times because the thing is not marketable. They 
 go so far as to assume that any adjustment which is 
 the result of free play among a mixture of conflict- 
 ing social elements, strong and weak, is presumably 
 right, and should be interfered with only when the 
 resulting evils are so clear as to furnish the most 
 obvious grounds for state action. Starting from 
 the theory which is probably correct ^that a busi- 
 ness which pretends to be managed on better prin- 
 ciples than those of self-interest usually turns out 
 to be managed on worse principles, they draw the 
 unwarranted conclusion that this same theory will 
 hold true of other departments of life where the 
 special conditions affecting business competition are 
 absent. They permit self-interest to be the dom- 
 inant guide in a man's public relations, and some- 
 times even in his personal relations also. They take 
 the principle of the ancient philosophers, that the 
 individual will be governed by selfish motives when- 
 ever he tries to calculate the results of his conduct ; 
 and, seeing that the application of this theory works 
 out good results in commercial life, they conclude 
 that we can find ways of making it bring out equally 
 good results everywhere else. The account of ra- 
 tional egoism in Herbert Spencer's Data of Ethics
 
 124 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 may serve as a good example of this mental attitude. 
 The author feels that the increasing exercise of en- 
 lightened selfishness is inevitable; and with this 
 probability in view, he does all he can to prove it 
 to be beneficial. Whatever may be thought of this 
 book and its conclusions, there can be no doubt 
 that it represents the attitude of a very large body 
 of intelligent readers toward questions of practical 
 and theoretical morality. 
 
 The modern world cannot accept the position of 
 the ancient philosophers in treating egoism as a 
 moral theory to be monopolized by a few highly 
 educated philosophers or jurists. The world de- 
 mands that whatever its theories are, they should 
 be of a nature to be preached in the market place. 
 If we claim that self-interest is a correct principle, 
 we must give the people a chance to act on it and see 
 what comes thereof. If evil and destruction come, 
 it will prove that we must modify our statement of 
 the theory. The actual everyday morality of each 
 generation is determined by the degree of success 
 which has attended the operation of principles 
 which were tried experimentally by the generations 
 immediately preceding. Down to about 1850 the 
 complete extension of self-interest over the eco- 
 nomic field and its partial extension into other 
 fields produced an amount of good which far out-
 
 FREEDOM AS A FOUNDATION OF ETHICS 125 
 
 weighed the incidental evil. Therefore the body of 
 thinking men in the last generation was disposed 
 to consider it an excellent theory to accept. Our 
 experience of its further development in the last 
 half of the nineteenth century has been more 
 doubtful; and there is a corresponding doubt 
 whether the next generations are going to accept 
 individualistic theories as unreservedly as most 
 men do today.
 
 VI 
 
 THE LIMITS OP INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 
 
 The theory that individual selfishness could be 
 trusted to promote the common good was so com- 
 fortable a doctrine that it found very strong pre- 
 possessions in its favor. Those who were solicitous 
 for the common good were pleased to think that it 
 could be attained by so easy a method. Those who 
 believed that intelligent people were likely to be 
 selfish whenever they reasoned concerning their 
 conduct were glad to be assured that this practice 
 would do good rather than harm to the public. 
 Our experience during the first half of the nine- 
 teenth century seemed to justify the advocates of 
 individualism in these optimistic hopes. Most of 
 the restrictions upon trade which had been inher- 
 ited from previous centuries were so bad that their 
 removal paved the way for a better state of things. 
 By giving each man liberty to choose the line of 
 life which best suited him, we added to our indus- 
 trial efficiency. By encouraging the investment of 
 capital wherever any one saw a chance for profit, 
 126
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 127 
 
 we stimulated invention and enabled the arts to 
 develop as they had never done before. By allow- 
 ing competition to regulate prices, we provided for 
 better economy in the distribution of the world's 
 products and for greater enjoyment in their con- 
 sumption. There were indeed marked instances of 
 evil in the midst of this general good. The abuse 
 of labor, and particularly of child labor, under long 
 hours and uncomfortable conditions of work re- 
 quired special legislation to suppress it. But on 
 the whole, the evils incident to the change seemed 
 so few and the advantages so many that people's 
 minds dwelt upon the latter to the exclusion of the 
 former. Under these circumstances, men were dis- 
 posed to regard the principle of non-interference 
 not as a principle of administration, but as a 
 fundamental rule of social action ; not as a maxim 
 of experience, but as a postulate of thought. 
 
 This dogmatism in stating the principles of indi- 
 vidual liberty, and this optimism in believing its 
 results to be universally good, naturally provoked 
 a reaction. About 1830 there arose a school of 
 thought which cast doubt upon the economic ad- 
 vantage of the unrestricted liberty of each man to 
 do as he pleased, and which set up a principle of so- 
 cialism as opposed to that of individualism. These 
 writers, scattered through France and Germany,
 
 128 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 emphasized the need of organized collective activ- 
 ity. That freedom which the advocates of non-in- 
 terference regarded as the final stage in economic 
 history was, to the members of this new school, only 
 an intermediate step in the course of economic 
 progress. Before the revolution of 1789, said 
 Ferdinand Lassalle, one of the leaders of this new 
 socialistic movement, Europe had solidarity with- 
 out freedom. Since that date it has had free- 
 dom without solidarity. A third stage of evolution 
 will combine the two, and give the poor man some- 
 thing more than the mere name of freedom, which 
 under present conditions is little more than the 
 assurance of being crushed to the wall. The spread 
 of these ideas was for the moment checked by 
 the revolution of 1848, with which most of the 
 leaders of European socialism were identified, and 
 whose failure involved them in a certain measure 
 of discredit. But after a brief interval ideas sim- 
 ilar to those of Lassalle began to take root in many 
 different quarters among practical men as well as 
 theorists, conservatives as well as agitators. The 
 philanthropist demanded special laws to regulate 
 factories in the public interest, because self-interest 
 provided no remedy against excessive hours and did 
 not prevent the use of methods of manufacture dan- 
 gerous to life and health. The railroad manager
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 129 
 
 was inclined to favor the principle of monopoly in 
 industries like his own, because he saw the waste 
 of capital and irregularity of organization which 
 was consequent upon the building of parallel roads. 
 The trades unionist was still more frankly in favor 
 of regulations looking toward the monopoly of 
 labor, both for his own special ends and for the 
 sake of what he believed to be the good of the work- 
 ing classes as a whole. The protectionist, however 
 much he might desire to see free competition within 
 each country, made such sweeping exceptions to 
 this principle in the trade between different coun- 
 tries as to weaken its hold upon the public mind; 
 and it is well known that with the increase of na- 
 tional feeling among different countries in the last 
 two generations there has been a great increase in 
 the protectionist sentiment. And even those who 
 were not greatly affected by any of these move- 
 ments who were neither reformers nor monop- 
 olists, trades unionists nor protectionists have 
 been forced to recognize that competition and non- 
 interference act less perfectly than was once sup- 
 posed, and must be applied with more reservations 
 than some of our fathers assumed. Take for in- 
 stance the point at which competition was supposed 
 to work best the regulation of prices. The price 
 theory of Adam Smith and Ricardo was based upon
 
 130 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 the idea that if prices were unfairly low, producers 
 could withdraw from business until the supply was 
 so reduced that the price returned to a remunera- 
 tive level; and conversely, that if prices were too 
 high, new producers could enter into competition 
 until the supply was increased and the rate of profit 
 reduced to a reasonable figure. But in industries 
 requiring large permanent investment neither of 
 these conditions is realized. If the supply of 
 products from a certain factory is inadequate to 
 meet the demand for its goods, we must wait months 
 before we can expect to have relief from a com- 
 peting factory ; if the supply of transportation over 
 a certain railroad is inadequate to meet the demand 
 for its services, we must wait years before relief 
 can be reached by a competing railroad. If, on 
 the other hand, prices are too low, it is almost im- 
 possible for a factory or a railroad already existing 
 to withdraw from competition. The capital re- 
 mains, whether business goes on or not. It involves 
 worse loss to let it go wholly to waste than to sell 
 goods or services below cost. Under conditions like 
 these we see great fluctuations in rates, which com- 
 petition is powerless to prevent. 
 
 Nay, such competition as there is tends to increase 
 these fluctuations by the irregular and spasmodic 
 character of its action. If it acts at some places and
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 131 
 
 not at others we have discrimination, usually in 
 favor of the large city and against the country 
 town or farming locality a thing which intensifies 
 the dangerous drift toward the large cities which 
 is characteristic of recent years. If it acts at some 
 times and not at others, we have those alternations 
 between periods of high price and low price which 
 form one of the most unfortunate features in a com- 
 mercial crisis. Such spasmodic competition is fierce 
 while it lasts, and it has the effect of teaching the 
 different competitors to exert themselves to the ut- 
 most to meet the needs of the public. But it does 
 not have the effect of steadying prices, nor ensuring 
 equal treatment to the different consumers. It has 
 retained its force as a stimulus ; it has lost its force 
 as a regulator of charges. 
 
 But there are many lines in which even this 
 partial and imperfect competition is becoming a 
 thing of the past. In some forms of business the 
 masses of capital needed for the successful use of 
 modern inventions are so large that this fact of 
 itself creates a monopoly. In others, the evils 
 arising from the irregular and spasmodic competi- 
 tion just described are so serious that different per- 
 sons engaged in the same line of business arrange to 
 form a monopoly, by the consolidation, virtual or 
 actual, of all the competing concerns. When this
 
 132 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 result has been brought about, the social machinery 
 on which our fathers relied for securing fair prices 
 has fallen to the ground. It may be that the new 
 mechanism which has come in its place will ulti- 
 mately prove as good as the old; but it is, at any 
 rate, wholly different in character. Where we had 
 competing concerns engaged in supplying the mar- 
 ket, the consumer was immediately and directly 
 protected by the fact that if one man did not serve 
 him properly he could go to another ; and the knowl- 
 edge that the consumer had this resource compelled 
 the several competitors to consult his interests 
 rather than their own. Where consolidation has 
 been brought about, there is no such immediate 
 protection. The producer knows that the consumer 
 has no other equally good source of supply to 
 which he can go, and this fact makes a difference 
 in his whole mental attitude and that of his agents. 
 He may be, and in the case of our best leaders of 
 industry probably will be, anxious to do what the 
 public really needs and do it well. He will feel 
 that his interests, in the long run, cannot be differ- 
 ent from those of the public; that the size of his 
 investment of capital makes a large market impera- 
 tive ; that this large market can be secured only by 
 a system of low prices ; and that the economy which 
 results from his improvements in machinery and
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 133 
 
 organization must therefore be used for the benefit 
 of the public, in order that it may prove in the long 
 run to be any economy at all. Of our large indus- 
 trial monopolies some, including the most successful 
 ones, have been managed with this principle in view. 
 But there are others which have not been thus man- 
 aged whose directors have been more concerned 
 to keep prices high than to increase their volume of 
 traffic, and have tried to retain a large share of the 
 benefits of their economy for themselves and give 
 only a small share to the public. A large number 
 of men who have been charged with the manage- 
 ment of consolidated industries, and a still larger 
 number of their subordinate agents, have assumed 
 that it was right for them to consult their own 
 immediate interests under a system of monopoly 
 as freely as they would have done under the old 
 system of competition. They have not realized that 
 the widening power, both for good and for evil, 
 which was given them by their new positions ren- 
 dered it imperatively necessary for them to take 
 a wider view of their duties and obligations to the 
 public than was needed under the old system, and 
 to apply the principle of self-interest with more 
 circumspection than was necessary in previous gen- 
 erations. 
 
 The danger to the consumer which is incident to
 
 134 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 our present industrial conditions is most clearly 
 illustrated when we have two monopolies in conflict 
 with one another, blocking the public service for 
 their own strategic ends. Two opposing railroads 
 in the same territory, for instance, will arrange 
 their trains so that they do not connect with one 
 another each being more concerned with injuring 
 its rival than with meeting the wishes of the travel- 
 ling public. Here we see a Darwinian struggle for 
 supremacy, with little or nothing of that service to 
 third parties which is the essential feature in the 
 competitive system. The most marked cases of this 
 kind occur in connection with those large strikes 
 when a monopoly of labor on the one side is arrayed 
 against a monopoly of capital on the other. The 
 telegraph service was thus interrupted in 1883. The 
 railroad transportation of large sections of the com- 
 munity was tied up in 1877 and 1886 and 1894. In 
 1902 the whole production of anthracite coal was 
 brought practically to a standstill in one of these 
 conflicts, with no regard to the interests of the con- 
 sumers, and with great suffering to many of them. 
 I shall not at this moment inquire into the rela- 
 tive merits of the case of the coal companies on the 
 one hand or of the men on the other. "We are not 
 concerned with awarding praise or blame to the 
 parties in dispute. We are concerned with a much
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 135 
 
 broader question the question of awarding praise 
 or blame to society for its economic system. We are 
 being called upon to decide whether the operation of 
 individual self-interest is a safe agency for ensuring 
 public service and meeting public necessities. In 
 this case we find that it was not. We look in vain in 
 the records of either side of the anthracite coal con- 
 troversy for any recognition of the special obligation 
 of the coal producers to supply the public with a 
 sufficient quantity of coal which was incident to their 
 character as monopolies of capital and labor, if mo- 
 nopolies of capital and labor were to be allowed to 
 exist at all. Both parties to the controversy claimed 
 the right to do everything which they could prop- 
 erly have done if competition had existed. Of intel- 
 ligent preparation to have adequate supplies in the 
 hands of the consumers there was very little in- 
 deed. The operators, instead of encouraging the 
 importation of coal from abroad at an early period, 
 in order to forestall the market's needs, kept saying 
 up to the very last moment that the strike was on 
 the point of coming to its end. The unions, instead 
 of treating the public distress as something for 
 which they were at least partly responsible, seemed 
 chiefly concerned to aggravate it as a means of 
 putting greater pressure upon the authorities to in- 
 tervene. The breaches of the obligation of contract
 
 136 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 that did occur, and the threat, happily unfulfilled, 
 of a monumental breach of contract by a sympathet- 
 ic strike in the bituminous coal regions, show clearly 
 the unfitness of many of the persons concerned 
 to be relieved from the industrial control of compe- 
 tition, until some other means of control has been 
 provided in its stead. The principle of self-interest 
 conspicuously failed to protect the public in the 
 anthracite coal strike. We may expect recurrent 
 failures of this sort unless we can either modify our 
 industrial conditions or our principles of ethics. 
 
 Can we thus modify the industrial conditions ? 
 
 Among the many means which have been sug- 
 gested for doing this, three deserve special atten- 
 tion : First, an extension of the system of contracts 
 between companies and their operatives, so that 
 incorporated capital shall deal with incorporated 
 labor in a responsible fashion. Second, an exten- 
 sion of the conspiracy laws so that combinations 
 adverse to the interest of the consumers as a body 
 can be treated as criminal and suppressed by the 
 organized force of the community. Third, an ex- 
 tension of the principle of direct government 
 management the so-called socialistic principle to 
 those industries where continuous production or 
 continuous service is a matter of vital public 
 .necessity.
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 137 
 
 The extension of the system of long-time con- 
 tracts, with proper arrangements for arbitration in 
 case of misunderstanding, is on its face the simplest 
 of these three remedies. If we could assume that 
 such a contract would be kept when once made, and 
 that the decision of such a board of arbitration, 
 when once established, would meet cheerful acqui- 
 escence, no better solution could be devised. But 
 we are far from being able to make that assumption. 
 It will be remembered that some of the mines which 
 were closed in the recent coal strike already had in 
 operation such a system of contracts, and that these 
 agreements were broken by the laborers. To give 
 us a really effective system of contract and arbitra- 
 tion, one of two things must happen. Either we 
 must have a rigid law compelling all labor unions 
 to be incorporated, and requiring them to furnish 
 adequate security for the performance of their con- 
 tracts ; or we must educate the laborers themselves 
 to a higher sense of the obligation of contract and 
 the necessity of carrying it out, even to their own 
 apparent disadvantage. 
 
 Each of these alternatives involves us in some 
 difficulty. If we deny the right of unincorporated 
 bodies of laborers to make collective bargains for 
 their work, we take away a great deal of liberty 
 which already exists ; and this process is always an
 
 138 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 exceedingly difficult one. We are not situated as 
 we should be if our labor had previously been com- 
 pulsory and we now, as a concession in the direction 
 of freedom, allowed the laborers to make contracts 
 if they could furnish pecuniary security for their 
 performance. Having once left them free to make 
 these bargains without the restriction, it is going 
 to be very difficult to reimpose it by statute. 
 It is almost equally hard, under the circum- 
 stances, to add sacredness to the labor contract 
 in the mind of the workman himself. A con- 
 tract for wages connected with future service deals 
 with economic conditions which shift very rapidly, 
 and afford continual grounds for demanding read- 
 justment. Sometimes these readjustments are of a 
 kind where the reasons for the arbitrators' award 
 are clear; sometimes they are not. If we have 
 taught the workman by precept and example that 
 it is his economic right and duty to look out for 
 himself, there is very grave danger that under any 
 system of arbitration, however carefully guarded, 
 he will find sufficient pretext to justify himself in 
 his own mind for disregarding the award. Only 
 as part of a general movement toward increased 
 sacredness of obligations to others, and diminished 
 sacredness of the obligations of self-interest, can we 
 expect to see any considerable reform in the work-
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 139 
 
 man's conception of his duties under wage contracts 
 for the future. 
 
 The second means proposed for preventing the 
 recurrence of difficulties like the anthracite coal 
 strike is a stricter definition of the laws of con- 
 spiracy. But here we are met by the inquiry, 
 Which is the conspirator ! The workman considers 
 the combination of mine owners as an attempt to 
 establish a monopoly to the detriment of the welfare 
 of the state, and regards the efforts of his union to 
 organize the laborers as being at the very worst a 
 legitimate effort to fight fire with fire. The repre- 
 sentatives of the corporations, on the other hand, 
 see in their own organizations responsible creatures 
 of the law, working under legal forms; while the 
 union is to them an intruder, a counter-organiza- 
 tion without equal historical or legal standing, ar- 
 ranged for the purpose of producing artificial 
 scarcity of labor. Each party is so occupied behold- 
 ing motes in its brother 's eye that it is unable to see 
 the beam which is in its own eye, or to take any 
 steps for plucking it out. I very gravely doubt the 
 possibility, under ordinary conditions, of bringing 
 home either to trades unions or to industrial cor- 
 porations the guilt of conspiracy against the public. 
 For as long as the public recognizes self-interest as 
 a dominant motive, to be pursued to the exclusion
 
 140 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 of other motives, so long will it look with toleration 
 on combined or organized acts of self-interest, and 
 will resent any demand to punish as criminal con- 
 spiracies the organizations which perpetrate them. 
 It is not indeed difficult to formulate a theory of 
 the law of conspiracy which will allow us to regard 
 certain actions, which would be innocent and proper 
 if they came separately, as being wrong when done 
 in concert. Stanley Jevons, in his book on The 
 State in Relation to Labor, gives a good illustration 
 of this distinction. For a man to walk through the 
 streets of one of our large cities is a perfectly inno- 
 cent act. The street is provided for this very pur- 
 pose. But if ten thousand men preconcertedly walk 
 through a certain section of the street at the same 
 hour it becomes a public nuisance ; and if they have 
 arranged this action with a view of obstructing 
 traffic it becomes an offence against the law. Never- 
 theless it is noticeable that the courts and the police 
 are reluctant to interfere with such crowds if they 
 can possibly avoid it ; and as for punishing individ- 
 ual men who are concerned in the manifestation, or 
 trying to make them walk elsewhere, it often seems 
 to transcend the power of the state. It can be done 
 in monarchies, but at the cost of great unrest. In 
 democracies it can hardly be done at all ; for we are 
 very reluctant to punish men for a thing in groups
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 141 
 
 which we do not consider bad when done by in- 
 dividuals. 
 
 Any real reform in conspiracy law must come 
 from a new conception of public responsibility. 
 The readiness, either on the part of capitalist or 
 laborer, to sacrifice the consumers' interests to his 
 own, is itself morally bad. The prevalence of com- 
 petition has permitted this truth to fall into the 
 background, because it prevents the development 
 of this evil possibility among persons of ordinary 
 intelligence. Combination permits and encourages 
 the evil, unless those who control the combination 
 are more clear-headed than the average of mankind. 
 Taking business as we find it, and human intelli- 
 gence as we fimd it, we need some new standards 
 of business morals in order to prevent industrial 
 monopoly from degenerating into industrial con- 
 spiracy. If we stop short of this higher conception 
 of industrial responsibility, and continue to hold 
 to the idea of self-interest as a paramount industrial 
 good, we cannot effectively deal with the abuses of 
 monopoly, because we shall be simply attempting to 
 punish someone else for doing effectively on a large 
 scale what we, on our own part, have been trying 
 to do much less effectively on a small one. But if 
 we can really go to the root of the matter by chang- 
 ing our standards, we can establish a theory of con-
 
 142 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 spiracy which we shall not be afraid to put to the 
 test of practice. 
 
 The third means suggested to avoid the recur- 
 rence of dangers like that of the anthracite coal 
 strike is the direct control and operation of produc- 
 tive industry by the government in other words, 
 a system of socialism. 
 
 This would doubtless modify very greatly the 
 form which our conflicts would take ; but it is by no 
 means easy to prove that these conflicts would be 
 wholly avoided thereby. Indeed, with democracies 
 managed as they are at present, where one district 
 is pitted against another, each seeking its own sec- 
 tional interests; or where president stands on one 
 side and congressman on another, each ready to face 
 the dangers of a deadlock for the sake of the policy 
 which he and those behind him represent ; the dan- 
 ger of disregard of public needs in the pursuit of 
 private interests would be increased rather than 
 diminished.* The more intelligent among the 
 
 * A failure to act responsibly in handling a public corporation 
 is not brought home to the managers as directly as a similar 
 failure is brought home in the case of an ordinary private cor- 
 poration or of an incorporated labor organization. When a so- 
 cialistic experiment fails, the leader may be in some degree dis- 
 credited ; but the loss is so distributed over the whole body of 
 the taxpayers, some of whom are probably the very ones who 
 opposed the experiment from the first and are least responsible
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 143 
 
 socialists recognize the danger of this sort of dead- 
 lock and conflict as government is managed at 
 present ; and they say that one of the benefits which 
 they seek in giving additional powers to government 
 is that it will compel people, in mere self-defence, 
 to be more accurate in watching the details of its 
 management. But the difficulty of exercising effec- 
 tive oversight under such conditions is very great 
 indeed; and the chance for an outside observer to 
 secure protection to public interests is even smaller 
 than at present. For under present conditions the 
 state comes in as an independent authority and 
 checks the property owners if they go too far ; but 
 under a socialistic system, if once a ring came into 
 power it would control politics and industry alike, 
 and there would be no outside means of checking 
 it except through the agency of revolution. If we 
 grant that a socialistic state is managed by citizens 
 who subordinate their own interests to the common 
 interest, and hold their power as a public trust, 
 most of the evils under which we now suffer would 
 
 for its failure, that the lesson is not brought home as it should 
 be. In fact, there is danger that the distribution of these bur- 
 dens on the responsible and irresponsible alike will teach ex- 
 actly the wrong lesson, and lead people to think that power and 
 freedom are privileges to be grasped by those who can get them, 
 rather than trusts to be administered by those who can furnish 
 the community security for their responsible exercise.
 
 144 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 be avoided. But so they would under the present 
 conditions of capitalistic enterprise if we had this 
 habitual exercise of public spirit and recognition 
 of public obligation. Without this spirit neither 
 the restraint of conspiracy law nor the application 
 of public ownership will go to the heart of the diffi- 
 culty. So far as the development of private prop- 
 erty helps to make people recognize public obliga- 
 tions, it is a good thing. So far as the extension of 
 a system of contracts to labor disputes can help it, 
 it will be a good thing. And, so far as socialism can 
 help it, socialism will be a good thing. But modern 
 socialism tends to get at this matter from the wrong 
 end. It relies too much on mere machinery and too 
 little on the force which is behind it. It is an 
 attempt to use collective power for individual hap- 
 piness, when what we want is an attempt to enlist 
 individual power in the interest of collective 
 happiness. 
 
 It seems as if a man's preferences between indi- 
 vidualism and socialism were generally determined 
 not on the basis of principle but on the basis of 
 personal interest. His opinion on matters like pub- 
 lic control and ownership of corporations is not so 
 much influenced by an intelligent study of the 
 relative effect of these two methods upon public 
 service and public convenience as upon the basis
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 145 
 
 of its relation to his own industrial power. If he 
 is a rich man, and controls more money than votes, 
 he is likely to be in favor of private management. 
 If he is a poor man, and controls relatively more 
 votes than money, he is likely to be in favor of 
 public action. He prefers the form which gives to 
 him individually, and to those situated like him, 
 relatively greater means of making their voices 
 heard, without having taken the trouble to assure 
 himself that the things which he and his friends can 
 say will really contribute to the best interests of the 
 community. 
 
 It has been one of the unfortunate results of the 
 industrial progress of the nineteenth century that 
 our standards of public morals have been, so to 
 speak, commercialized, that we value things on a 
 money basis, whether they are of a kind that ought 
 to be bought and sold or not, and measure a man's 
 position not by service which he has been able to do 
 his fellow men so much as by the extent to which 
 he has been able to compel them to render him a 
 return. I am afraid that nine-tenths of the world 
 rates the inventor or scientific discoverer who has 
 rendered a public service lower than the patentee 
 who has succeeded in making the public pay him 
 for it. And this character of our standards would 
 not be essentially altered by the transfer of indus-
 
 146 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 try to the hands of government officials, as some of 
 the socialists think. We should be measuring a 
 man's value by his control of votes instead of his 
 control of dollars. So long as this spirit prevails 
 we shall be subject in an extreme form to those 
 political dangers described in the first lecture. We 
 shall see government take the shape of organized 
 efforts to use the resources of the community as a 
 whole for the interest of some larger or smaller 
 part thereof. We shall see the spirit of trusteeship 
 sink into abeyance, and be replaced by the spirit of 
 appropriation for selfish or local or short-sighted 
 ends. While these standards prevail and these con- 
 ditions last, it seems difficult to expect any real pre- 
 ventive of disastrous internal conflict. Each new 
 complexity in our organization of industry, and 
 each extension of the functions of government 
 which puts the individual into contact with his 
 fellows at more points than he had a generation ago, 
 simply intensifies the evil and necessitates some 
 really radical step toward its cure. In industry 
 and in politics alike we must get back to the con- 
 ception of some higher motive than self-interest and 
 some better measure of value than self-aggrandize- 
 ment. 
 
 Man, as Aristotle has well said, is a political 
 animal. His power of forming communities, in
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 147 
 
 which the individual shall be subordinated to the 
 interests of the group, is one of his most distinctive 
 qualities. His power of forming free communities, 
 in which each individual shall by his own judgment 
 direct his efforts to a public end, is a characteristic 
 yet more distinctive ; and this form of social organi- 
 zation gives him his greatest strength. But if self- 
 government is not used enough to promote the re- 
 sources of a community as a whole, but to divert 
 those resources into individual channels, it becomes 
 a source of weakness instead of strength whether 
 that weakness come in the form of enervation, as 
 in Greece and Italy, or of incapacity for discipline, 
 as in Poland, or of ambition and misdirected or- 
 ganization, as in France under the old regime. 
 
 We have traced step by step the lesson that free- 
 dom, moral, civil, religious, or industrial, is success- 
 fully given only in connection with the assumption 
 of responsibility. It is for us to see that this present 
 counter-current in the stream of our progress, which 
 leads some to claim the privileges of freedom with- 
 out assuming its responsibilities, be only momen- 
 tary ; and to insist on the duty of American citizens 
 to accept the lessons of history and the responsibili- 
 ties of freedom. If the thinking men of the country 
 really take this view of the matter and carry it out 
 even when it works to their own burden and detri-
 
 148 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 ment, the unthinking men will follow. There are 
 fashions in reasoning, as well as in everything else ; 
 and those who can take the lead are given the lead. 
 If they neglect this opportunity to give the right 
 direction to thought, theirs will be the responsibility 
 for the succession of political failures which must 
 ensue. But if they insist, for themselves first, and 
 by their example for others, that freedom shall be 
 prized as a means of public service; that wealth 
 shall be valued, and valued only, as an indication 
 of services performed in the past and of the power 
 to do similar service in the future ; that public office 
 is a public trust for the same end ; then, and not till 
 then, may we claim for our American democracy 
 the merit of having solved, so far as human fore- 
 sight can see, the problem of combining the liberty 
 of the individual with the promotion of the public 
 good. 
 
 In the centuries immediately past we have had 
 to deal with the problem of securing liberty. To 
 day we have to face the problem of preserving it. 
 It is a great mistake to assume that the problem of 
 today is the easier of the two. The hardships and 
 dangers connected with it are less tangible ; but they 
 are on that account all the more difficult to assume. 
 We no longer have to face the peril of the scaffold or 
 the privation of the revolutionary camp ; but we
 
 LIMITS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM 149 
 
 have to face and accept the peril and privation of 
 imposing upon ourselves standards of conduct 
 higher and duties more burdensome than those 
 which we have hitherto recognized either in law or 
 morals. Freedom has always required the exercise 
 of courage to defend it from the assaults of its 
 adversaries. It today requires the exercise of pub- 
 lic spirit and personal self-restraint to guard 
 against the excesses of those who deem themselves 
 to be its friends. Only by the acceptance of this 
 widened sense of responsibility and by the growth 
 of this public spirit can we hope that the freedom, 
 so laboriously wrought out in the centuries past, 
 may be successfully preserved through those to 
 come.
 
 VII 
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE. 
 
 For the successful conduct of the affairs of a free 
 people two things are necessary: an organization 
 which enables each man to use his powers for the 
 benefit of himself and his fellows with only the 
 minimum of necessary interference; and a spirit 
 among the individual members of the community 
 which will lead them to take the responsibility 
 which goes with this method of organization, and 
 to make good use of it. 
 
 Each of these things is important in its way, but 
 the second is the one which we need to watch more 
 closely. The machine and the force that drives it 
 are both essential to the doing of work ; but a bad 
 machine with plenty of power will usually accom- 
 plish better results than a good machine with in- 
 adequate power. If there is a proper spirit of 
 political responsibility, defects in the social organi- 
 zation will be made good. If there is not this spirit 
 on the part of the citizens, no machinery, however 
 well devised, can be trusted to run continuously. 
 150
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE 151 
 
 A few years ago the agent of a manufacturing 
 company received a visit from a man who desired to 
 buy a pump which should provide for the watering 
 of his stock. When the agent inquired where he 
 was to get the power to drive the machine, the 
 visitor replied that he proposed to put in an instru- 
 ment large enough to pump not only the water 
 which he needed for his cattle, but an additional 
 supply sufficient to run the machine itself. When 
 he was told that this was impossible he expressed 
 great disappointment. "It seems as though you 
 ought to be able to do this for me, ' ' he said. " I am 
 prepared to put a good deal of capital into this 
 machine." We smile at the simplicity of a man 
 who makes such a demand on our mechanicians; 
 and yet it is paralleled every day in the writings 
 and teachings of social reformers. They have a 
 feeling that if the political mechanism were only 
 good enough it would relieve them of the responsi- 
 bility of running it would, in short, furnish its 
 own power. This misconception is not confined to 
 professional reformers. It is reflected in the mental 
 attitude of a large part of our citizens. They think 
 that it is the business of constitutional lawyers to 
 devise a government which shall give us the utmost 
 freedom, and at the same time reduce our share in 
 the actual work of running it to a minimum. They
 
 152 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 not only tolerate but encourage the use in our 
 schools of text-books on civics which lay stress on 
 the description of administrative details, and say 
 almost nothing of the force of public opinion 
 which tell much of the methods of voting and the 
 organization of legislative assemblies, but give no 
 hint of the fact that a voter must be prepared to 
 subordinate his own interests to those of the body 
 politic, and a legislator to prefer the good of the 
 country to the good of his district, if our republic 
 is to continue a really free state. We are losing 
 sight of the lessons of history as it used to be taught 
 in the old-fashioned days. There is an appreci- 
 able danger that modern methods in the study of 
 politics will give us little of what we need to learn 
 concerning the real spirit which makes nations 
 great. 
 
 As far as the mechanism of our social organiza- 
 tion goes, we have no reason to complain of our lot. 
 The family, the church, the school, not to speak of 
 other less important agencies, provide for the devel- 
 opment of sound personal relations. The complex 
 agencies for the production and sale of goods the 
 market, the exchanges, and the banking system 
 provide the necessary framework for our industrial 
 relations. Government, local, state, and national, 
 in its various branches provides a means for the
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE 153 
 
 ordering of our political relations. We may at 
 times have occasion to complain of the way in which 
 the different parts of this mechanism work. One 
 man thinks that the teaching in the schools is bad ; 
 another complains that the banks do not furnish 
 an elastic currency; a third criticises the rules 
 which govern the action of the United States Con- 
 gress. But these are mere details ^unimportant 
 defects in a complex piece of machinery which is 
 the product of ages of experience, and which is on 
 the whole well adapted to the work in hand. Let 
 us turn our attention to that more important part 
 of our inquiry which deals, not with the character 
 of the machine, but with the way in which it is 
 managed. Let us inquire in what spirit and by 
 what power we, as individual citizens, undertake 
 to operate this vast social organization. It is de- 
 vised to give us the power of governing ourselves. 
 Do we take the opportunity which it gives us, and 
 actually exercise the privilege of self-government 
 in a way to preserve, instead of jeopardizing, this 
 social structure ? 
 
 So far as concerns our personal relations, it can 
 be safely said that we do. In our dealings with our 
 families, our relatives, and our friends, we use our 
 freedom not for the sake of self-aggrandizement, 
 but as a means of giving pleasure to those about us.
 
 154 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 We have learned to restrain our passions, not be- 
 cause somebody else compels us to, but as a matter 
 of courtesy and self-respect. We have learned to 
 consult others' happiness, not on grounds of calcu- 
 lation but on grounds of affection. We have 
 trained ourselves, and have by our example been 
 able to train others, in a system of personal morality 
 where murder and robbery are almost unknown and 
 where on an increasing scale chastity takes the place 
 of license, courtesy moderates passion, and friendly 
 devotion overcomes the temptations of indolence. 
 Amid changes of religious belief we have preserved 
 these habits, not only undiminished but actually 
 increased; so that these parts of our morality no 
 longer require the supernatural terrors of religion 
 to enforce them, but are cheerfully assumed as vol- 
 untary duties toward our fellow men, in which the 
 fear of future punishment counts for no more than 
 the fear of the policeman. There are, indeed, points 
 at which our personal morality is subject to a cer- 
 tain degree of danger. The increasing laxity of 
 divorce, for instance, is thought by some to menace 
 that acceptance of personal responsibility for the 
 training of children which the old-fashioned view 
 of the marriage contract so properly emphasized. 
 But after making ail possible exceptions, it is fair 
 to say that in this twentieth century men and worn-
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE 155 
 
 en in their personal relations assume a full measure 
 of that responsibility which is necessary to the ex- 
 ercise of freedom. 
 
 In industrial relations the case is different. In 
 those things which people regard as matters of busi- 
 ness, the community relies on self-interest to take 
 the place of self-government. Of course we do not 
 carry this pursuit of self-interest to a point where 
 it would violate our code of personal morality. We 
 do not tolerate the ordinary and commonplace 
 forms of lying and cheating. "We do not use our 
 commercial power to oppress individuals whom we 
 know. We do not commit serious breaches of trust 
 where the interests of some specific person have been 
 placed in our charge. Commercial society would 
 not tolerate any of these things; and even if it 
 did, our own instincts of personal morality would 
 prevent us from doing them. But when the per- 
 sonal relation does not come so prominently into the 
 foreground; when the people who are injured by 
 our conduct are not certain definite persons whom 
 we see, but an unknown and indefinite body which 
 we do not see; when we lay our plans to deceive, 
 not some specific individual or group of individuals, 
 but large sections of the public; when the trust 
 which we are exercising, and which we have it in 
 our power to break, is not in the name of some
 
 156 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 specific ward, but on behalf of a general body of 
 stockholders or bondholders then our standards 
 are much less satisfactory. Many a man who would 
 despise a grocer for using false measures in selling 
 commodities will himself use false measure in sell- 
 ing securities. He deems it wrong to water milk, 
 and right to water stock. He will not deceive an 
 individual, but he has no scruples about deceiving 
 the investing public. Nor are the men who indulge 
 in those practices to be so severely blamed as would 
 appear at first sight. If you could properly bring 
 the blame home to the men you could stop the prac- 
 tice; for no man who is ambitious for real leader- 
 ship in a community is going to do things which 
 the conscience of that community can condemn. 
 The blame rests upon the people as a whole. The 
 commercial public has seen so much good arising 
 from competition that it has come to rely upon this 
 as a means of checking the evil effects of individual 
 selfishness, and to regard it as far more power- 
 ful and universal than it really is. It has come 
 to consider business as a game, to be played by 
 each man in his own interest, subject to certain 
 well defined rules or conventions of business life, 
 but involving no special obligations outside of 
 those rules. The public has assumed that if each 
 man played this game fairly, with a view to secur-
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE 157 
 
 ing all he could for himself, the general interests 
 of industry and commerce would be well sub- 
 served. 
 
 We are, I think, beginning to be dissatisfied with 
 this view of commercial ethics; and I regard this 
 growing dissatisfaction as one of the most fortunate 
 signs of the times. We are beginning to recognize 
 that it is not enough to insist that the game of busi- 
 ness should be played fairly, or to modify the ethics 
 of that play by personal sentiment in those cases 
 where we see the individual injury done, and those 
 alone. We are recognizing that business is some- 
 thing more than a game which each man can play 
 to win. In its modern shape commercial business 
 for all its leaders represents a trust. I do not, of 
 course, mean that it has become subject to that 
 particular form of consolidation which the name 
 trust at first sight suggests. Some of our corporate 
 business is of that form; a far larger part is not. 
 But, whatever be its external form or arrangement, 
 its essential character is that the interests of a 
 great number of people are entrusted to the hands 
 of a president and board of directors. Upon the 
 sagacity of this president and these directors de- 
 pends the prosperity of hundreds of investors, 
 thousands of operatives, and perhaps millions of 
 consumers. If these men manage that trust pri-
 
 158 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 marily for their own interests, instead of for the 
 interests of those whom they represent, it always 
 results in evil, and sometimes in disaster. We can- 
 not rely upon competition to prevent these conse- 
 quences. Where it acts regularly and smoothly it 
 may do a great deal toward preventing them ; but 
 the cases where competition acts smoothly and regu- 
 larly are the exception rather than the rule in the 
 large industries of the present day. Nor will the 
 law reach these evils at least until the community 
 has modified its moral conceptions as well as its 
 legal ones. A law which attempts to do more than 
 the moral sense of the community really desires, 
 and which undertakes to punish corporations for 
 doing on a large scale things which people tolerate 
 when done on a smaller scale, will inevitably become 
 a dead letter. 
 
 One essential feature of a trust is that those to 
 whom it is given have a discretionary power for 
 good or evil. The law cannot prescribe exactly 
 what they shall do and punish all deviations 
 from the lines thus prescribed. It leaves them free 
 to use their power well or ill, subject to the control 
 of their own consciences and the moral sense of the 
 community. In this sense modern industrial com- 
 binations are most clearly trusts. The means of 
 providing for their proper exercise are moral ones.
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE 159 
 
 The force of public opinion is the one really effec- 
 tive agency in this matter. 
 
 The improvement in the relations of directors to 
 investors which was effected in the course of the 
 nineteenth century was not primarily nor chiefly 
 due to changes in the statutes. It was due to 
 changes of public opinion in the business world. 
 These changes started from men who were not al- 
 ways the wealthiest, but whose reputation and char- 
 acter enabled them to impose upon others whatever 
 standards they voluntarily enforced upon them- 
 selves. Men do not as a rule desire money for its own 
 sake. They desire it for the sake of the consideration 
 which it brings. If the making of money by ques- 
 tionable methods causes them to receive less con- 
 sideration than they otherwise would from people 
 whose judgment they respect, they will abandon 
 those methods. 
 
 The reforms in the relations of directors to the 
 public represent only a beginning of what we need ; 
 but the fact that a beginning has been made shows 
 that we have means of reform at command, if only 
 we will use them. There are indications that we are 
 going to use them more than we have done hitherto. 
 There are signs of a demand for an increased recog- 
 nition of the principle of trusteeship in the hand- 
 ling of wealth. Those events which for the moment
 
 160 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 seem most disastrous fluctuations in the value of 
 investments, and strikes which involve stoppage of 
 production and commerce bring home to the peo- 
 ple the fact that our industrial system does not 
 serve society as well as we supposed ; that if these 
 things grow much worse the time may come when 
 it will be put on trial for its life ; and that we must 
 seriously set to work toward its betterment. Of 
 course nine-tenths of the schemes proposed for such 
 betterment are impracticable, or worse. The men 
 who are most ready to suggest panaceas are usually 
 the ones who know least of the difficulties of the 
 case. But we have it in our power to carry out a 
 slow but thorough reform of industrial relations if 
 we simply keep this conception in view: that the 
 amount of money made in business does not repre- 
 sent the real measure of a man 's business power or 
 business achievement. Our ethical standards in re- 
 cent years have led us to place too high a valuation 
 upon success in money-making as a test of a man 's 
 commercial and industrial efficiency. Money, after 
 all, is but a tool of trade. It is an important means 
 of service to society; and its possession or control 
 may be important evidence that a man has rendered 
 such service. But if we regard money as an end 
 instead of a means, or confound the evidence of suc- 
 cess with the success itself, we have made a most se-
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE 161 
 
 rious mistake in the arrangement of our standards. 
 If a man gets money in ways which prove injurious 
 to society instead of beneficial, this furnishes no 
 more reason for giving him social consideration 
 than it does in the case of the burglar or forger who 
 has managed to escape state 's prison by a technical- 
 ity of the law. If men of good character, business 
 sense, and clear-headed ethics can insist upon the 
 duty of rendering continuous service to the public 
 at reasonable rates, and by methods which prevent 
 disastrous fluctuations in the value of securities, 
 and regard wealth which is made by a sacrifice of 
 these standards as prima facie evidence of moral 
 weakness rather than of industrial power, the prob- 
 lem will be solved. I believe that there is no other 
 way to its solution ; and that in the present temper 
 of the American people and the present power of 
 public opinion, there is a very strong hope of mak- 
 ing progress toward a solution on the lines here 
 suggested. 
 
 Passing from industry to politics, we still find the 
 same tendency to rely on self-interest not so open- 
 ly, perhaps, as in industrial life, but to a degree 
 which involves the community in very considerable 
 danger. Our system of commercial ethics has had 
 a strong effect on our system of political ethics. I
 
 162 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 suspect that in ordinary times voters, so far as they 
 do any thinking at all, are guided by personal con- 
 siderations more than by public ones especially 
 when matters are under discussion which are not 
 party measures. And what is true of voters is true 
 of their representatives. The congressman is more 
 closely busied about the interests of his district than 
 about the interests of the public at large. Indeed, 
 he will tell you frankly that when every other con- 
 gressman is pushing the claims of his locality and 
 his friends, it would cause confusion rather than 
 advantage if he alone should sacrifice local and per- 
 sonal interests for those of the commonwealth. He 
 would be in such a hopeless minority that he could 
 accomplish little for the nation as a whole, and 
 would simply prevent his constituents from getting 
 an equitable share of the benefits of government. 
 Where voters and their representatives are actuated 
 by considerations like these, it is inevitable that pol- 
 itics should be regarded as a game in the same sense 
 that business is regarded as a game. It will be 
 characterized by effort on the part of individuals to 
 advance their own interests, in the complacent be- 
 lief that somehow or other, in the general scramble 
 of a large number of men working in different 
 directions, no great unfairness can result in the 
 long run. I do not mean that this theory is as
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE 163 
 
 universally accepted in politics as it has been in 
 business. A large number of men go into politics 
 with the intent of serving the public first, their 
 friends next, and themselves, in any selfish fashion, 
 not at all. But, with general conditions and gen- 
 eral standards of political ethics as they exist at 
 present, the difficulty of living up to this conception 
 is very great. 
 
 In all these matters the analogy between indus- 
 trial and political ethics is very close indeed. In 
 our industrial ethics, we have come to regard the 
 making of money as the test of power and the object 
 of ambition. In our political ethics we regard the 
 control of votes and the offices which they bring as 
 furnishing a similar test. When once this standard 
 is accepted, and this conception of politics as a game 
 becomes universal, there is a tendency even on the 
 part of the best men to look with leniency on all 
 means tolerated by the rules of the game for secur- 
 ing votes necessary to nominate and elect a man to 
 office ; and to regard as quixotic the views of those 
 who insist on the moral duty of sacrificing votes for 
 the sake of convictions. It is not the office-seekers 
 who are primarily to blame, but the community as 
 a whole, because its general system of political 
 ethics makes it difficult for a good man to pursue 
 high standards without sacrificing his chances for 
 political efficiency.
 
 164 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 We see a great many attempts to meet this evil 
 by superficial remedies. Some persons believe that 
 much can be accomplished by independent voting. 
 They say that if there is a group of electors who, 
 instead of being attached to a particular party, 
 will vote for the candidates who represent higher 
 principles and better methods, politicians will be 
 compelled to advocate good measures and nominate 
 good officers. The men who hold this view are 
 trying to apply the principle of competition to 
 political affairs. They would let the persons who 
 desire to hold office compete for the votes of those 
 who do not. In local affairs this habit of non-par- 
 tisan voting has become far more general than it 
 once was, and has on the whole had distinctly good 
 effects. ' * We are occasionally compelled to pander 
 to the moral sense of the community, ' ' said an old- 
 time politician, regretfully, as he surveyed the fig- 
 ures of an independent vote at a local election. But 
 the importance of parties in the actual work of 
 government in the United States renders it difficult 
 to adopt a theory of politics which places the most 
 intelligent and independent voters outside of the 
 framework of party organization, and thus for the 
 sake of an occasional influence at elections deprives 
 them of the continuous influence within the councils 
 of the party which they ought to have, and other- 
 wise would have.
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE 165 
 
 Another remedy proposed is exactly the reverse 
 of this. It is suggested that there should be a 
 greater participation of good men in the direct 
 business of politics. It is urged that the men who 
 have an interest in good government are more 
 numerous than those who have an interest in bad 
 government, and that it is the fault of these men if 
 they do not make their influence felt. To a certain 
 extent this point is well taken. Readiness on the 
 part of disinterested men to accept the burdens of 
 public service is always salutary. But until we get 
 some better conceptions of political ethics than we 
 now have, the amount which can be accomplished 
 in this way is small in proportion to the magnitude 
 of the effort. Where politics is a game, those who 
 make it their life work to play the game, even if 
 they be few in number, have the overwhelming ad- 
 vantage which the professional always has in deal- 
 ing with the amateur. A great number of men 
 giving a portion of their time to any game can 
 scarcely deal on equal terms with a few men who 
 give their whole time to the acquisition of special 
 skill. When the pessimist was told, by way of en- 
 couragement, that God was stronger than the devil, 
 he replied sadly that the devil made up for his 
 inferior strength by his superior activity. This 
 sort of obstacle stands in the way of the efforts of
 
 166 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 our Good Government Clubs and Citizens' Leagues, 
 when they attempt to meet the professional poli- 
 tician on his own ground. To be permanently suc- 
 cessful, the general body of citizens must fight on 
 the ground where they are strongest; using public 
 opinion as their weapon, and so shaping that public 
 opinion that men will honor the politician not for 
 the offices which he gets but for the responsibilities 
 which he assumes. In politics, as well as in in- 
 dustry, we must substitute the conception of a trust 
 for that of a game. 
 
 There are signs that this change of public senti- 
 ment is taking place. The acquisition of dependen- 
 cies has emphasized, as nothing else could do, the 
 importance of the theory that public office is a 
 public trust. When we were occupied with the gov- 
 ernment of our own states and cities, appointment 
 of bad men to office, though it might cause loss and 
 waste, was not likely to produce wholesale spoliation 
 and oppression. But when we came to deal with the 
 inhabitants of the West Indies or the Philippine 
 Islands, who had neither the constitutional guaran- 
 tees nor the habits of political independence which 
 would have protected them, it became obviously 
 and imperatively necessary to have the right men 
 in command. The government of the Philippine 
 Islands could not be treated as a game. It was
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE 167 
 
 bound to be either a trust or a scandal. When our 
 dealings with dependent races had been on a small 
 scale and in our own back yard, as in the case of the 
 Indians, we had not infrequently allowed them to 
 become scandals. But with our assumption of new 
 and large responsibilities in the sight of the whole 
 world it became a matter both of pride and of 
 necessity to treat government of dependencies as a 
 public trust ; and to appoint to high offices, not the 
 men who wished to use those offices for selfish ends, 
 but men who could do the work best and who took 
 the positions because their services were impera- 
 tively needed. 
 
 There can be no doubt that this new understand- 
 ing of the duties of government in our dependencies 
 will have its effect upon our understanding of the 
 duties of government at home. The experience of 
 other nations gives us ground for this belief. When 
 England, at the close of the last century, came to 
 regard India not as a mine to be exploited but as an 
 empire to be administered, the effect did not stop 
 in India. It made its influence felt in the concep- 
 tion of the rights and duties of public officials in 
 England itself. We may expect to see the same 
 result in America not to be reached in a day or 
 in a year, but by the slow process of educating 
 the public opinion of the next generation. To the
 
 168 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 boys who are now growing up to manhood, the 
 public approval of the work of men like Taft in 
 the Philippine Islands will be a lesson in political 
 ethics, worth more than a hundred sermons or 
 treatises. It will teach them to apply similar stand- 
 ards in judging what really constitutes political 
 success at home. They will learn that the highest 
 type of honor is not to be obtained by playing a 
 game under certain well defined rules, and abstain- 
 ing from acts which those rules forbid, but by the 
 subordination of personal convenience and of some 
 of the more obvious forms of personal interest to 
 the needs of public service. 
 
 The negative virtue of conforming to the decisions 
 of the courts and abiding by the authority of the 
 law is sufficient for the subjects of a monarchy. It 
 may possibly be sufficient for the members of a 
 democracy where population is so scattered that 
 each man is necessarily occupied in doing nearly 
 everything for his family and relatively little for 
 his neighbors. But when population becomes denser 
 and society more complex, the citizen of a demo- 
 cratic community cannot be content with the mere 
 abstinence from unlawful action. If we would 
 maintain the theory, which is of the very essence 
 of democracy, that every citizen is a gentleman, 
 our citizens must be prepared to accept the respon-
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE 169 
 
 sibilities which go with that claim, to assume 
 positive duties which they enforce upon themselves 
 without waiting for the control of some outside 
 authority. They must be prepared to subordinate 
 their own personal needs to the needs of the com- 
 munity. When public opinion has frankly accepted 
 this standard of civic duty, then and not till then 
 we can have real reform in politics. 
 
 The possibilities and the difficulties of political 
 reform are singularly like those of industrial re- 
 form. If we condemn a boss when he governs in 
 his interest and in that of his friends, because we 
 would rather govern in our interest and in that of 
 our friends, people will laugh at us. But when we 
 are prepared, so far as opportunity is given us, to 
 use political power in the public interest, at the 
 sacrifice of our own convenience and our own per- 
 sonal advantage, then our condemnation begins to 
 count for something. By the time a large number 
 of sensible men have learned to look at matters in 
 this way, this condemnation will count for every- 
 thing. It is the voice of such disinterested public 
 opinion, and that alone, which makes the perma- 
 nent success of democracy possible. 
 
 In emergencies America has always enjoyed the 
 benefit of disinterested service from its citizens. In 
 the gravest crises of our national life we have found
 
 170 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 men like Washington and Lincoln to lead us. Both 
 these men had detractors, who desired to see them 
 removed from power, and organized bitter opposi- 
 tion against them. But it was plain to the great 
 body of freemen that Washington and Lincoln 
 were subordinating individual interest to public 
 duty, and that it was a good thing that men who 
 had this conception of public duty should be placed 
 in office and kept there. It is for us to see that this 
 conception of public oiBce be continuously applied 
 in peace as well as in war. For as the importance 
 of the functions of government increases, the char- 
 acter of the men who administer it from day to 
 day becomes a matter of correspondingly increased 
 importance. We shall be told that we are pursuing 
 impossible ideals; that men's political and indus- 
 trial actions will necessarily be guided by self-in- 
 terest ; that the conception of politics and industry 
 as games, though it may not be the profoundest or 
 most desirable one, is the only one which we can 
 expect to see realized ; and that modification in the 
 rules of the game, by which selfishness shall be 
 turned into less harmful channels, is the best thing 
 that we can expect. We need not be discouraged 
 by these criticisms. Still less need our actions be 
 affected thereby. If these statements are true it 
 means that the days of our democracy are num-
 
 THE OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE 171 
 
 bered, and that we have before us a fate like that 
 of the Italian republics at the close of the Middle 
 Ages, where wealthy and unscrupulous citizens 
 gained absolute control over the affairs of the state 
 preserving, indeed, in many instances the forms 
 of a commonwealth, but without either the actual 
 liberty or the actual morality which is essential 
 thereto. But we do not need to look forward to this 
 fate as the probable one. There is every reason to 
 hope that our best men can so influence the com- 
 munity that we shall demand in public affairs the 
 same standards of morality which we voluntarily 
 impose upon ourselves in private ones. We have 
 passed the time when a man's family and personal 
 relations were mere matters of sport. There are, 
 indeed, men who still hold that view ; and these are 
 the very ones who are most cynical about the pros- 
 pects of reform in our industrial or political life. 
 But these men dare not publicly avow those stand- 
 ards of personal morality which would have passed 
 muster a few centuries ago. We have proved the 
 possibility in private life of making the conception 
 of a gentleman's duty at once democratic and 
 Christian of recognizing his obligations to render 
 sympathy and justice not merely to a few men and 
 women of his own class but to all human beings with 
 whom he comes in contact. It remains for us only
 
 172 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 to extend this standard of self-imposed obligation 
 so that it shall affect our dealings with masses as 
 well as with separate persons ; to be as unwilling to 
 tolerate the oppression of a helpless body of people 
 over whose destinies we have control as we now are 
 to practise cruelty or extortion against those people 
 as individuals ; and to demand that our rulers shall 
 recognize these obligations to the public as urgently 
 as we now demand that they shall recognize the 
 obligations of common every-day morality. With 
 this higher standard of industrial and political 
 ethics, a beginning has already been made. In both 
 of these fields we appreciate more fully than our 
 fathers did the importance of political and indus- 
 trial trusts, and the wide range of duties which the 
 acceptance of such trusts carries with it. If we will 
 use our utmost endeavors to see straight, to think 
 clearly, and to govern ourselves by the same stand- 
 ards which we seek to impose upon others, we can 
 look forward with confidence to the perpetuation 
 of personal liberty, and to the permanence of demo- 
 cratic institutions.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Anarchists, toleration of, 
 
 97, 98 
 Arbitration, 137-139 
 Aristotle's political theories, 
 
 2, 146 
 Atonement, conception of, 
 
 59, 60 
 
 Bagehot, Physics and Poli- 
 tics, 53, 54, 99 
 
 Cablyle on Liberty, 98 
 
 Checks and balances, effect 
 of, 17, 18 
 
 Civil remedies, 77, 78 
 
 Coal combinations, 134-140 
 
 Combinations, management 
 of, 133-136 
 
 Commercial standards of 
 morals, 145, 146 
 
 Competition, 119-123, 158; 
 difficulties of, 128-136; in 
 politics, 164 
 
 Congress, change in func- 
 tions of, 14-16 
 
 Consciousness, 49, 57, 58 
 
 Conspiracy, 139-142 
 
 Contract, system of, 75, 78- 
 
 81, 136-139 
 Constitution of the United 
 
 States, 10-18 
 Constitutional limitation, 
 
 character of, 30 
 Corporation law and ethics, 
 
 81, 82, 157-160 
 
 Debate in legislative bodies, 
 
 13-15 
 Directors, duties of, 159, 160 
 
 Economic freedom, 116-120 
 Egoism, rational, 107-110 
 Emancipation, 46 ; mediseval, 
 
 112-115 
 English constitutional the- 
 ory, 29 ; political morality, 
 167, 168 
 Ethics, origin of, 50-54 
 Evolution, in man and in 
 
 the lower animals, 50-52 
 Expiation, 59 
 
 Freedom of teaching, 95- 
 
 98; of the will, 48-72 
 French Revolution, 5-7 
 
 173
 
 174 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Government management of 
 industry, 142-144 
 
 Illegitimate government, 2 
 Individualism, 102 ; limits 
 
 of, 12G-144 
 Industrial morality, modern, 
 
 155-157 
 Insanity, conception of, 87- 
 
 89 
 Instinct, 49-51 
 Interest, ethics of, 116 
 
 Pakliamentaby government, 
 
 9 
 Party machinery in the 
 
 United States, 18-23 
 Passive resistance, 37 
 Personal responsibility, 62 
 Political ethics, modern, 161- 
 
 164 
 Populism, 2-7 
 Precedent, authority of, 33, 
 
 34 
 Private judgment, 46 
 Prophets, work of, 87-89 
 
 Jevons on combination, 140 
 Judiciary, American, 23, 24 
 
 Eaissez faire, 105 
 Lassalle, 128 
 
 Law, evolution of, 63, 64 ; 
 separated from morals, 01 
 Legitimate government, 2 
 
 Marshall, H. R., on re- 
 ligious observance, 56 
 
 Mediaeval economic changes-, 
 112-115 
 
 Merit, 69 
 
 Mill on Liberty, 83, 84 
 
 Morality, ancient, 64, 65 : 
 modern, 153-155 
 
 Morley, doctrine of liberty, 
 98, 99, 104 
 
 Negro suffrage. 39-43 
 Nullification, 37 
 
 Religion, origin of, 53-58 
 Religious observance, 55, 
 
 56, 85, 86 
 Remedies, civil and criminal, 
 
 77, 78 
 Responsibility, personal, 62 
 Reversion, 52 
 Roman law of contracts, 78, 
 
 79 
 Rousseau on sovereignty, 5, 
 
 35 
 
 Sacrifice, 50, GO 
 Self-regarding acts, 84, 85 
 Self-restraint the basis of 
 
 liberty, 25, 27, 45 
 Socialism, 142-146 
 Sovereignty, theory of, 34, 
 
 35 
 Status, system of, 74-77 
 
 Teaching, freedom of, 95- 
 
 98 
 Toleration, 58, 87, 102, 103
 
 INDEX 175 
 
 Trusts, ethical aspect of, Value, ethical theory of, 
 
 157-160; political, 166- 117-120 
 
 168 
 
 Wabbanty, 81 
 Usury, 116 Will, freedom of, 48-72
 
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