1 11.] THE ENGLISH IDEAL. 71 Milton: "The whole freedom of man," he writes in his Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, "consists either in spiritual or civil liberty. As for spiritual, who can be at rest, who can enjoy anything in this world with contentment, who hath not liberty to serve God and to save his soul? The other part of our freedom consists in the civil rights, and advancements of every person according to his merit." And again, in the Areopagitica: "This is not the liberty which we can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth; that let no man in this world expect but when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, there is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for." This-not household suffrage, not manhood suffrage, not any form of association in which the individual should obey no one but himself—is the ideal which is legibly written on every page of English constitutional history, and which our ancestors realised without troubling themselves with metaphysical discussions. And they called it "the liberty of the subject." Whether they wrested from a tyrant the privileges of Magna Charta, or overthrew the Star Chamber, or took from the Crown the power of arbitrary imprisonment, or passed the Habeas Corpus Act, or enacted the independence of the judges, or resisted general warrants, or abolished impressment for the sea and land service, or relieved insolvent debtors, "the liberty of the subject " was their end and aim. The phrase appears to me singularly happy as indicating that the condition of individual freedom is subjection to law. "True liberty" Trendelenburg has well said, "'inscribes upon its shield the knightly motto 'Ich dien."" We may be excused if we hesitate at the bidding of French Jacobins, or their English disciples, to exchange this "liberty of the subject” for the "rights of the man and the citizen." I say, then, that in political order, as in the physical and the moral, law, known and followed, is the instrument of Liberty: law not made by us, but issuing from the nature of things; law whose original is in that eos vous-as Plato speaks-that Divine Reason where all ideas are perfectly realised, and which may, more or less perfectly, be apprehended by man's reason and obeyed by man's will. Here is the true rationale of the authority exercised over us by the State. Man, as man, possesses no claim upon my obedience; only to the law of right, speaking through human ministers, is my submission due. And political freedom really means living under that law, for then we suffer no wrong. The stupidest of superstitions is the belief that Liberty, in the public order, is the necessary product of any constitutional machinery, of any form of government; and, in particular, that it is the inevitable result of government by numbers. Mr. Herbert Spencer is not without justification from current 11.] DEMOCRACY AND DESPOTISM. 71 history when he asserts, in his Study of Sociology, that "new democracy is but old despotism differently spelt." Long before him Hallam had written: "Popular, that is, numerous, bodies, are always prone to excess, both from the reciprocal influence of their passions and the consciousness of irresponsibility; for which reason a democracy, which is the absolute government of the majority, is, in general, the most tyrannical of all." To which we may add the judgment of one far greater than either of these: "Alle Freiheitsapostel, sie waren mir immer zuwider; Goethe's clear eyes discerned the truth about those apostles of freedom" who did so much, in his time, to retard the cause of Liberty in France. Their Liberalism, it has been well observed, was the diminutive of Liberty. They professed it much in the same way as that in which the sophists are said by Aristotle to have professed political philosophy, "without knowing what it is, and wherewithal it is concerned." Their practical application of it Rivarol rightly judged to consist in restricting the liberties of others. They had not the least glimpse of the great truth that Liberty is a moral good, having its root in the elemental reason, by virtue of which a man is a law unto himself. They supposed that it was a mere result of mechanism cunningly devised by constitution-mongers. Surely it is high time now for the world to learn the lesson that representative institutions, even if they are a reality, and not, as frequently happens, an imposture, can do no more than express the mind of the represented. They are but the instruments and pledges of Liberty; they are not Liberty. itself. A very clear and acute thinker, the late Mr. Bagehot, judged their chief advantage over despotism to lie in this, that they compel discussion before action is taken. Unquestionably, discussion is an invaluable security of political freedom, if it be rational, that is, if it recognize those "moral laws of nature and of nations" which afford the only true guarantees of individual right, the only effectual protection for the legitimate employment of the energies of human personality. To the ever-deepening apprehension of those laws, as the primary facts of public and of individual life, should we look for the growth of real freedom. Here, too, it holds good that " you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." "It is not mendacities, conscious or other, that the divine powers will patronize, or even, in the end, put up with at all. On the great scale, and on the small, and in all seasons, circumstances, scenes, and situations, where a son of Adam finds himself, that is true, and even a sovereign truth. Aud whoever does not know it, human charity to him (were such always possible) would be that he were II.] A PLEA FOR HANDCUFFS. 73 furnished with handcuffs as part of his outfit in the world, and put under guidance of those who do. Yes; to him, I should say, a private pair of handcuffs were much usefuller than a ballot-box, were the times once settled again, which they are far from being!" The intelligent reader, who will give his intelligence fair play, will find deeper meaning in these grim words of Mr. Carlyle than in all the tomes of Parliamentary eloquence ever printed.. |