I am as strongly convinced as the most pronounced individualist can be,
that it is desirable that every man should be free to act in every way
which does not limit the corresponding freedom of his fellow-man. But
I fail to connect that great induction of political science with
the practical corollary which is frequently drawn from it: that the
State--that is, the people in their corporate capacity--has no business
to meddle with anything but the administration of justice and external
defence. It appears to me that the amount of freedom which incorporate
society may fitly leave to its members is not a fixed quantity, to be
determined _a priori_ by deduction from the fiction called
"natural rights"; but that it must be determined by, and vary with,
circumstances. I conceive it to be demonstrable that the higher and the
more complex the organization of the social body, the more closely is
the life of each member bound up with that of the whole; and the larger
becomes the category of acts which cease to be merely self-regarding, and
which interfere with the freedom of others more or less seriously.
If a squatter, living ten miles away from any neighbour, chooses to burn
his house down to get rid of vermin, there may be no necessity (in the
absence of insurance offices) that the law should interfere with his
freedom of action; his act can hurt nobody but himself. But if the
dweller in a street chooses to do the same thing, the State very
properly makes such a proceeding a crime, and punishes it as such. He
does meddle with his neighbour's freedom, and that seriously. So it
might, perhaps, be a tenable doctrine, that it would be needless, and
even tyrannous, to make education compulsory in a sparse agricultural
population, living in abundance on the produce of its own soil; but, in
a densely populated manufacturing country, struggling for existence with
competitors, every ignorant person tends to become a burden upon, and,
so far, an infringer of the liberty of, his fellows, and an obstacle to
their success. Under such circumstances an education rate is, in fact, a
war tax, levied for purposes of defence.