In other books I have shown how individual liberty originated with
the Stoic philosophy and was developed under the Christian religion
and through the feudal system of medieval Europe. It was fostered by
Humanism; it was idealized by Puritans like Milton in the seventeenth
century and by the English writers and philosophers of the eighteenth
century. It was still further expanded by men like Jeremy Bentham and
John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century. From 1880 onwards, the
Collectivist Germanophil tendencies which Mr. Belloc has grouped
together under the general description of “The Servile State,” has
led to a contempt for human liberty due to the multiplication of
propertyless wage-earners living in huge cities and divorced from the
property-loving existence of the yeoman and peasant. This development
goes back to the industrial revolution. Democracy values equality more
than liberty, and the Great War destroyed many individual privileges
which have not yet been restored. Modern Puritanism similarly
reinforces the effort to impose on the Community a rigidly standardized
existence with no outlet for individual preferences in architecture or
food or drink. Every hour must be of the same pattern and everyone must
do everything at the same time.
The increasing Americanization of Great Britain may well breed despair
in anyone who wishes to see the ideals of the aristocrat, the humanist,
and the peasant preserved by law. It may be that the last refuge of
liberty will be found in the Catholic Church, which was the only
religious body with sufficient courage to resist Prohibition in the
United States, and that the Common Law of England, inspired throughout
by traditions of freedom, will be gradually extinguished by a multitude
of pettifogging Statutes, each destroying piecemeal some little vestige
of a period when a man could call his soul his own.
There is, perhaps, only one reassuring sign of the times, which is that
the lawyers both here and across the Atlantic have as yet shown no
disposition to repudiate the traditions of English jurisprudence and
efforts to increase the right of search in private houses (as in the
case of the Wireless Bill) have been stubbornly resisted in Parliament
on this side of the Atlantic.
We stand, perhaps, at the parting of the ways and it is difficult to
discern whether the old alliance of law and liberty will endure; but it
is to be hoped that the ordinary citizen will take to heart the obvious
truth that if liberty cannot exist without law, law equally depends on
liberty based on responsibility, for any law which weakens or destroys
liberty breeds anarchy. Recent history has confirmed this platitude
both in Russia and in the United States of America, so perhaps we may
hope for the best while not abating any vigilance. There are, however,
most disquieting signs in Great Britain of gross tyranny exerted by
our new bureaucracy against taxpayers and by the police against young
men and women――verging on blackmail in certain cases. The Victorian
ideal of liberty is dead and no other ideal has yet come to life. “Quis
custodiet custodes?”
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.