_THAT A FREE MAN IS A SOVEREIGN, BUT THAT A SOVEREIGN CANNOT TAKE
"TIPS."_
A free man, a free country, liberty, and equality are terms of constant
use among us. They are employed as watchwords as soon as any social
questions come into discussion. It is right that they should be so
used. They ought to contain the broadest convictions and most positive
faiths of the nation, and so they ought to be available for the
decision of questions of detail.
In order, however, that they may be so employed successfully and
correctly it is essential that the terms should be correctly defined,
and that their popular use should conform to correct definitions. No
doubt it is generally believed that the terms are easily understood,
and present no difficulty. Probably the popular notion is, that liberty
means doing as one has a mind to, and that it is a metaphysical or
sentimental good. A little observation shows that there is no such
thing in this world as doing as one has a mind to. There is no man,
from the tramp up to the President, the Pope, or the Czar, who can do
as he has a mind to. There never has been any man, from the primitive
barbarian up to a Humboldt or a Darwin, who could do as he had a mind
to. The "Bohemian" who determines to realize some sort of liberty of
this kind accomplishes his purpose only by sacrificing most of the
rights and turning his back on most of the duties of a civilized man,
while filching as much as he can of the advantages of living in a
civilized state. Moreover, liberty is not a metaphysical or sentimental
thing at all. It is positive, practical, and actual. It is produced and
maintained by law and institutions, and is, therefore, concrete and
historical. Sometimes we speak distinctively of civil liberty; but if
there be any liberty other than civil liberty--that is, liberty under
law--it is a mere fiction of the schoolmen, which they may be left to
discuss.
Even as I write, however, I find in a leading review the following
definition of liberty: Civil liberty is "the result of the restraint
exercised by the sovereign people on the more powerful individuals and
classes of the community, preventing them from availing themselves of
the excess of their power to the detriment of the other classes." This
definition lays the foundation for the result which it is apparently
desired to reach, that "a government by the people can in no case
become a paternal government, since its law-makers are its mandatories
and servants carrying out its will, and not its fathers or its
masters." Here we have the most mischievous fallacy under the general
topic which I am discussing distinctly formulated. In the definition of
liberty it will be noticed that liberty is construed as the act of the
sovereign people against somebody who must, of course, be
differentiated from the sovereign people. Whenever "people" is used in
this sense for anything less than the total population, man, woman,
child, and baby, and whenever the great dogmas which contain the word
"people" are construed under the limited definition of "people," there
is always fallacy.
History is only a tiresome repetition of one story. Persons and classes
have sought to win possession of the power of the State in order to
live luxuriously out of the earnings of others. Autocracies,
aristocracies, theocracies, and all other organizations for holding
political power, have exhibited only the same line of action. It is the
extreme of political error to say that if political power is only taken
away from generals, nobles, priests, millionaires, and scholars, and
given to artisans and peasants, these latter may be trusted to do only
right and justice, and never to abuse the power; that they will repress
all excess in others, and commit none themselves. They will commit
abuse, if they can and dare, just as others have done. The reason for
the excesses of the old governing classes lies in the vices and
passions of human nature--cupidity, lust, vindictiveness, ambition, and
vanity. These vices are confined to no nation, class, or age. They
appear in the church, the academy, the workshop, and the hovel, as
well as in the army or the palace. They have appeared in autocracies,
aristocracies, theocracies, democracies, and ochlocracies, all alike.
The only thing which has ever restrained these vices of human nature in
those who had political power is law sustained by impersonal
institutions. If political power be given to the masses who have not
hitherto had it, nothing will stop them from abusing it but laws and
institutions. To say that a popular government cannot be paternal is to
give it a charter that it can do no wrong. The trouble is that a
democratic government is in greater danger than any other of becoming
paternal, for it is sure of itself, and ready to undertake anything,
and its power is excessive and pitiless against dissentients.
What history shows is, that rights are safe only when guaranteed
against all arbitrary power, and all class and personal interest.
Around an autocrat there has grown up an oligarchy of priests and
soldiers. In time a class of nobles has been developed, who have broken
into the oligarchy and made an aristocracy. Later the _demos_, rising
into an independent development, has assumed power and made a
democracy. Then the mob of a capital city has overwhelmed the democracy
in an ochlocracy. Then the "idol of the people," or the military
"savior of society," or both in one, has made himself autocrat, and
the same old vicious round has recommenced. Where in all this is
liberty? There has been no liberty at all, save where a state has known
how to break out, once for all, from this delusive round; to set
barriers to selfishness, cupidity, envy, and lust, in _all_ classes,
from highest to lowest, by laws and institutions; and to create great
organs of civil life which can eliminate, as far as possible, arbitrary
and personal elements from the adjustment of interests and the
definition of rights. Liberty is an affair of laws and institutions
which bring rights and duties into equilibrium. It is not at all an
affair of selecting the proper class to rule.
The notion of a free state is entirely modern. It has been developed
with the development of the middle class, and with the growth of a
commercial and industrial civilization. Horror at human slavery is not
a century old as a common sentiment in a civilized state. The idea of
the "free man," as we understand it, is the product of a revolt against
mediaeval and feudal ideas; and our notion of equality, when it is true
and practical, can be explained only by that revolt. It was in England
that the modern idea found birth. It has been strengthened by the
industrial and commercial development of that country. It has been
inherited by all the English-speaking nations, who have made liberty
real because they have inherited it, not as a notion, but as a body of
institutions. It has been borrowed and imitated by the military and
police state of the European continent so fast as they have felt the
influence of the expanding industrial civilization; but they have
realized it only imperfectly, because they have no body of local
institutions or traditions, and it remains for them as yet too much a
matter of "declarations" and pronunciamentos.
The notion of civil liberty which we have inherited is that of _a
status created for the individual by laws and institutions, the effect
of which is that each man is guaranteed the use of all his own powers
exclusively for his own welfare_. It is not at all a matter of
elections, or universal suffrage, or democracy. All institutions are to
be tested by the degree to which they guarantee liberty. It is not to
be admitted for a moment that liberty is a means to social ends, and
that it may be impaired for major considerations. Any one who so argues
has lost the bearing and relation of all the facts and factors in a
free state. A human being has a life to live, a career to run. He is a
centre of powers to work, and of capacities to suffer. What his powers
may be--whether they can carry him far or not; what his chances may be,
whether wide or restricted; what his fortune may be, whether to suffer
much or little--are questions of his personal destiny which he must
work out and endure as he can; but for all that concerns the bearing
of the society and its institutions upon that man, and upon the sum of
happiness to which he can attain during his life on earth, the product
of all history and all philosophy up to this time is summed up in the
doctrine, that he should be left free to do the most for himself that
he can, and should be guaranteed the exclusive enjoyment of all that he
does. If the society--that is to say, in plain terms, if his
fellow-men, either individually, by groups, or in a mass--impinge upon
him otherwise than to surround him with neutral conditions of security,
they must do so under the strictest responsibility to justify
themselves. Jealousy and prejudice against all such interferences are
high political virtues in a free man. It is not at all the function of
the State to make men happy. They must make themselves happy in their
own way, and at their own risk. The functions of the State lie entirely
in the conditions or chances under which the pursuit of happiness is
carried on, so far as those conditions or chances can be affected by
civil organization. Hence, liberty for labor and security for earnings
are the ends for which civil institutions exist, not means which may be
employed for ulterior ends.
Now, the cardinal doctrine of any sound political system is, that
rights and duties should be in equilibrium. A monarchical or
aristocratic system is not immoral, if the rights and duties of persons
and classes are in equilibrium, although the rights and duties of
different persons and classes are unequal. An immoral political system
is created whenever there are privileged classes--that is, classes who
have arrogated to themselves rights while throwing the duties upon
others. In a democracy all have equal political rights. That is the
fundamental political principle. A democracy, then, becomes immoral, if
all have not equal political duties. This is unquestionably the
doctrine which needs to be reiterated and inculcated beyond all others,
if the democracy is to be made sound and permanent. Our orators and
writers never speak of it, and do not seem often to know anything about
it; but the real danger of democracy is, that the classes which have
the power under it will assume all the rights and reject all the
duties--that is, that they will use the political power to plunder
those-who-have. Democracy, in order to be true to itself, and to
develop into a sound working system, must oppose the same cold
resistance to any claims for favor on the ground of poverty, as on the
ground of birth and rank. It can no more admit to public discussion, as
within the range of possible action, any schemes for coddling and
helping wage-receivers than it could entertain schemes for restricting
political power to wage-payers. It must put down schemes for making
"the rich" pay for whatever "the poor" want, just as it tramples on the
old theories that only the rich are fit to regulate society. One needs
but to watch our periodical literature to see the danger that democracy
will be construed as a system of favoring a new privileged class of the
many and the poor.
Holding in mind, now, the notions of liberty and democracy as we have
defined them, we see that it is not altogether a matter of fanfaronade
when the American citizen calls himself a "sovereign." A member of a
free democracy is, in a sense, a sovereign. He has no superior. He has
reached his sovereignty, however, by a process of reduction and
division of power which leaves him no inferior. It is very grand to
call one's self a sovereign, but it is greatly to the purpose to notice
that the political responsibilities of the free man have been
intensified and aggregated just in proportion as political rights have
been reduced and divided. Many monarchs have been incapable of
sovereignty and unfit for it. Placed in exalted situations, and
inheritors of grand opportunities they have exhibited only their own
imbecility and vice. The reason was, because they thought only of the
gratification of their own vanity, and not at all of their duty. The
free man who steps forward to claim his inheritance and endowment as a
free and equal member of a great civil body must understand that his
duties and responsibilities are measured to him by the same scale as
his rights and his powers. He wants to be subject to no man. He wants
to be equal to his fellows, as all sovereigns are equal. So be it; but
he cannot escape the deduction that he can call no man to his aid. The
other sovereigns will not respect his independence if he becomes
dependent, and they cannot respect his equality if he sues for favors.
The free man in a free democracy, when he cut off all the ties which
might pull him down, severed also all the ties by which he might have
made others pull him up. He must take all the consequences of his new
status. He is, in a certain sense, an isolated man. The family tie does
not bring to him disgrace for the misdeeds of his relatives, as it once
would have done, but neither does it furnish him with the support which
it once would have given. The relations of men are open and free, but
they are also loose. A free man in a free democracy derogates from his
rank if he takes a favor for which he does not render an equivalent.
A free man in a free democracy has no duty whatever toward other men of
the same rank and standing, except respect, courtesy, and good-will. We
cannot say that there are no classes, when we are speaking
politically, and then say that there are classes, when we are telling A
what it is his duty to do for B. In a free state every man is held and
expected to take care of himself and his family, to make no trouble for
his neighbor, and to contribute his full share to public interests and
common necessities. If he fails in this he throws burdens on others. He
does not thereby acquire rights against the others. On the contrary, he
only accumulates obligations toward them; and if he is allowed to make
his deficiencies a ground of new claims, he passes over into the
position of a privileged or petted person-emancipated from duties,
endowed with claims. This is the inevitable result of combining
democratic political theories with humanitarian social theories. It
would be aside from my present purpose to show, but it is worth
noticing in passing, that one result of such inconsistency must surely
be to undermine democracy, to increase the power of wealth in the
democracy, and to hasten the subjection of democracy to plutocracy; for
a man who accepts any share which he has not earned in another man's
capital cannot be an independent citizen.
It is often affirmed that the educated and wealthy have an obligation
to those who have less education and property, just because the latter
have political equality with the former, and oracles and warnings are
uttered about what will happen if the uneducated classes who have the
suffrage are not instructed at the care and expense of the other
classes. In this view of the matter universal suffrage is not a measure
for _strengthening_ the State by bringing to its support the aid and
affection of all classes, but it is a new burden, and, in fact, a
peril. Those who favor it represent it as a peril. This doctrine is
politically immoral and vicious. When a community establishes universal
suffrage, it is as if it said to each new-comer, or to each young man:
"We give you every chance that any one else has. Now come along with
us; take care of yourself, and contribute your share to the burdens
which we all have to bear in order to support social institutions."
Certainly, liberty, and universal suffrage, and democracy are not
pledges of care and protection, but they carry with them the exaction
of individual responsibility. The State gives equal rights and equal
chances just because it does not mean to give anything else. It sets
each man on his feet, and gives him leave to run, just because it does
not mean to carry him. Having obtained his chances, he must take upon
himself the responsibility for his own success or failure. It is a pure
misfortune to the community, and one which will redound to its injury,
if any man has been endowed with political power who is a heavier
burden then than he was before; but it cannot be said that there is
any new _duty_ created for the good citizens toward the bad by the fact
that the bad citizens are a harm to the State.