THE OUTLOOK FOR LIBERTY
Every study of freedom is a plea for toleration; and every plea for
toleration is a vindication of the rights of reason. The chief danger
which always confronts a society is the desire of those who possess
power to prohibit ideas and conduct which may disturb them in their
possession. They are rarely concerned with the possible virtues of
novelty and experiment. They are interested in the preservation of a
static society because in such an order their desires are more likely
to be fulfilled. Their ideas of right and wrong lie at the service of
those desires. The standards they formulate are nothing so much as
methods of maintaining an order with which they are satisfied; and
those they repress or resent, are equally methods of establishing a new
order in which different demands would secure fulfilment.
But this is not a static world, and there is no means of making it
so. Curiosity, discovery, invention, all of these jeopardize by their
nature the foundations of any society to which their results are denied
admission. Toleration is therefore not merely desirable in itself,
but also politically wise, because no other atmosphere of activity
offers the assurance of peaceful adjustment. If power is held by a few,
happiness will be confined to a few also. Every novelty will seem a
challenge to that confinement; and it will always accrete about itself
the wills of those who are excluded from a share in its benefits.
For this world is not only dynamic; it is also diverse. The path to
happiness is not a single one. Men are not willing to yield the insight
of their experience to other men’s insight merely because they are
commanded to do so. They must be persuaded by reason that one vision of
desire is better than another vision, the experience commended to them
must persuade and not enforce, if they are to accept its implications
with a sense of contentment.
This is, of course, a counsel of perfection. Men enjoy the exercise of
power; no passion has a deeper hold upon human impulse. The willingness
to admit the prospect of difference, the courage to see that one’s
private truth is never commensurate with the whole truth, these are
the rarest of human qualities. That is why the friends of liberty are
always a minority in every society. That is why, also, the maintenance
of liberty is a thing that has to be fought for afresh every day, lest
an inert acceptance of some particular imposition make the field of
action accessible to a general tyranny. For it is impossible to confine
the area in which freedom may be permitted to some special and defined
part of conduct. Those who have fought for the right to think freely in
theology or the natural sciences are not less certainly the ancestors
of political freedom. Without Bruno and Galileo there would have been
neither Rousseau nor Voltaire.
Liberty, therefore, cannot help being a courage to resist the demands
of power at some point that is deemed decisive; and, because of this,
liberty, also, is an inescapable doctrine of contingent anarchy. It
is always a threat to those who operate the engines of authority that
prohibition of experience will be denied. It is always an assertion
that he who has learned from life some lesson he takes to be truth will
seek to live that lesson unless he can be persuaded of its falsehood.
Punishment may persuade some to abandon the effort; and others may be
driven by its imposition to conceal their impulse to act upon the view
they take. But persecution, however thoroughgoing, will never, over any
long period, be able to suppress significant truth. If the principles
that are urged by a few correspond to some widespread experience those
who recognize the expression of their experience will inevitably
reaffirm it. It has been the historic character of persecution always
to degrade the persecutor and to strengthen the persecuted by drawing
attention to their claims. The only way to deal with novelty is to
understand it, and the only way to deal with grievance is to seek a
remedy for the complaint it embodies. To deny novelty or grievance a
right of expression is a certain, if, indeed, an ultimate, validation
of the truth they contain.
We have, it appears, to learn this anew in each generation. We grant
toleration in one part of the field only to deny it in another. We
grant it in religion to deny it in politics; we grant it in politics,
to deny it in economic matters. Each age finds that the incidence
of freedom is significant at some special point, and there, once
more, the lesson of freedom has to be learned. Each age makes some
idol in its own image and sacrifices upon its altar the freedom of
those who refuse it worship. Ultimately, that denial is always made
upon the same ground: it is insisted that the doctrines or practices
attacked are subversive of the civil order. The intolerance may be
Catholic, when it insists that a unity of outlook is essential for the
preservation of society; or it may be Protestant when, as with Calvin
and the Socinians, it holds that the blasphemous nature of the belief
anathematized destroys the reverence upon which society depends. The
essence of the persecuting position is always that the persecutor has
hold of truth and that he would betray its service by allowing it to be
questioned. He is able, accordingly, to indulge in the twofold luxury
not only of preserving his own authority, but also of assisting the
persons attacked to enter, if they so choose, the way of truth.
When attacks on liberty are political or economic, it is their motive
rather than their nature that changes. A political pattern has the same
hold upon its votaries as a religion; the enthusiasts of Moscow and of
Rome differ only in the object of their worship. An economic system
defends itself in just the same way: the devotees of Marxism in its
extreme form have never doubted their right to impose their outlook
upon the recalcitrant, even at the cost of blood. In a constitutional
state like America the suppression of liberty is called the inhibition
of license; in a dictatorship like Moscow it is termed resistance to
the admission of incorrect “bourgeois” notions. Always the effort is to
insist upon an artificial unity the maintenance of which is necessary
to the desires of those who hold power. Suppression, doubtless, eases
the way of authority, for scepticism is always painful, and to arrive
at a conclusion after careful testing of evidence always involves the
possibility that authority may have to admit that its conclusions are
mistaken.
Yet it may still be maintained with some confidence that the only
adequate answer to a principle which claims social recognition is the
rational proof that it is untrue. It may even be argued that the world
would be a happier world if this were the general theory underlying
the activities of society. Civilization is strewn with the wrecks of
systems which men at one time held for true; systems, also, in the
name of which liberty was denied and pain needlessly inflicted. A
scrutiny of history, moreover, makes it plain that the right to liberty
will always be challenged where its consequence is the equalization
of some privilege which is not generally shared by men. The more
consciously, therefore, we can seek that equalization as a desirable
object of social effort, the more likely we are to make attacks upon
liberty more rare, the evil results of such attack less frequent. No
man’s love of justice is strong enough to survive the right to inflict
punishment in the name of the creed he professes; and the simplest
way to retain his sense of justice is to take away the interest which
persuades him of the duty to punish. Scepticism, it may be, is a
dissolvent of enthusiasm; but enthusiasm has always been the enemy
of freedom. The atmosphere we require, if we are to attain happiness
for the multitude, is one in which we have everything to gain by the
statement of experience and nothing to lose by the investigation of
its convictions. That atmosphere is the condition of liberty and its
quality is light rather than heat. For light permits of argument, and
we cannot argue with men who are in a passion. Nothing is so likely to
engender passion as the perception that they are called to sacrifice a
privilege. The way, therefore, of freedom is to arrange the pattern of
social institutions so that there are no privileges to sacrifice.
This kind of plea for liberty is built, after all, upon the simple
consideration that the world is likely to be the more happy if it
refuses to build its institutions upon injustice. And institutions are
necessarily unjust if the impression they continually produce in the
majority is a feeling of envy and hatred for the results they impose.
There is something wrong in a system which, like ours, maintains itself
not by the respect and affection it evokes, but by the sanctions to
which it can appeal. What is wrong in them is their erection upon the
basis of passion and their insistence that reason shall serve what that
passion is seeking to protect. So long as that is true of our society,
we shall continue to deny the validity of all principles which attack
the existing disposition of social forces. Those principles may often
be wrong; yet sometimes, at least, they represent the certainties of
the future. It is always a hazardous enterprise to suppress belief
which claims to be rooted in the experience of men.
For no outlook which has behind it the support of considerable
numbers will ever silently acquiesce in its reduction to impotence.
It will fight for its right to be heard whatever the price of the
conflict. Here it has been urged that conflict of this kind is usually
unnecessary and frequently disastrous. It has been claimed that truth
can be established by reason alone; that departure from the way of
reason as a method of securing conviction is an indication always of a
desire to protect injustice. Where there is respect for reason, there,
also, is respect for freedom. And only respect for freedom can give
final beauty to men’s lives.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Acton, _History of Freedom_, p. 57.
[2] As Mr. Aldous Huxley, for instance, does with a quite unnecessary
apparatus of scholarship in his _Proper Studies_, pp. 1-31.
[3] All this has been put in classic form by the late Professor
Hobhouse in his _Metaphysical Theory of the State_ (1918).
[4] Cf. Barker, _Political Thought from Herbert Spencer to Today_
(1915), p. 80.
[5] W. H. Taft, _Our Supreme Magistrate and His Powers_ (1921), pp.
102-3.
[6] See my detailed discussion of the point in 34 Michigan Law Review,
p. 529.
[7] 189 U.S. 253.
[8] (1915) A. C. 120.
[9] 38 Sup. Ct. Rep. 122.
[10] (1923) 2 K. B. 61.
[11] Cf. my _Grammar of Politics_, pp. 541 f.
[12] _Ibid._
[13] _Esprit des Lois_, Bk. XI, Chap. VI.
[14] Second Treatise, Sec. 12.
[15] Cf. my paper on American Federalism in the volume entitled _The
Dangers of Obedience_ (1930).
[16] Cf. Louis Post, _The Deportations Delirium_ (1921).
[17] 250 U.S. 616.
[18] See Taney’s _Report_.
[19] I. W. Graham, _Conscription and Conscience_ (1922), Chap. III.
[20] _Ibid._, p. 209.
[21] _Ibid._
[22] See, for example, Wickwar’s _Freedom of the Press_ for an account
of judicial _mores_ in the early nineteenth century; and H. T. Buckle’s
pamphlet on the Pooley case for similar conduct thirty years later.
[23] Z. C. Chafee’s classic discussion in _Freedom of Speech_ is the
best account of this unhappy period.
[24] Thereby laying himself open to FitzJames Stephen’s crushing attack.
[25] Cf. my _Grammar of Politics_, Chap. VII.
[26] Cf. my _Grammar of Politics_, p. 82 f.
[27] A list is printed in Ernst and Segal, _To the Pure_ (1929), pp.
296-302.
[28] This is brought out well in Mr Nokes’ excellent book on the
blasphemy laws.
[29] 53 G. III, C. 160.
[30] _Ut supra._
[31] Cf. my _Grammar of Politics_, p. 554.
[32] Cd. 1614 (1922).
[33] Cf. my _Grammar of Politics_, pp. 256 f.
[34] _Coppage_ v. _Kansas_, 236 U.S. 1.
[35] Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, Chap. V.
[36] Calwell, _Life of Sir H. Wilson_, Vol. II, _passim_.
[37] _Le Droit Social_, Lect. III.
[38] _The Observer_, 18 August 1929.
[39] 277 U.S. 438.
[40] Hammond, _The Skilled Labourer_, Chap. XII.
[41] Cf. Mr Lippmann’s excellent analysis in _Liberty and the News_.
[42] I take my account from a summary in the _Lantern_ (Boston), July
1929.
[43] Lippmann, _Public Opinion_, pp. 379 f.
[44] Cf. Lady Constance Lytton, _Prisons and Prisoners_.
[45] Cf. Frankfurter and Green, _The Injunction in Labour Disputes_
(1930).
[46] See the lecture on Equality in _Mixed Essays_.
[47] See for instance, the very interesting letter of Mr MacDonald to
Keir Hardie in W. Stewart, _Life of Keir Hardie_ (1921), p. 92.
[48] Mr Ramsay Muir in the _Nation_, 17 August 1929.
[49] Preface to the World’s Classics edition of Bagshot’s _English
Constitution_, p. xxiii.
[50] _On Liberty_ (People’s edition), p. 68.
[51] Cf. my _Grammar of Politics_, Chap. XI.
[52] Cf. Lauterpacht, _Private Law Analogies in International Law_,
for a brilliant discussion of this question; and my paper ‘Law and the
State’ in _Economica_, No. 27, pp. 267 f.
[53] Kaufman, _Das Wesen der Volkerrechts_.