Critiques and Addresses | Page 9

magistrate." And the practical corollary which he draws from this proposition is that there ought to be no toleration for either Papists or Atheists.
After Locke's time the negative view of the functions of Government gradually grew in strength, until it obtained systematic and able expression in Wilhelm von Humboldt's "Ideen,"[1] the essence of which is the denial that the State has a right to be anything more than chief policeman. And, of late years, the belief in the efficacy of doing nothing, thus formulated, has acquired considerable popularity for several reasons. In the first place, men's speculative convictions have become less and less real; their tolerance is large because their belief is small; they know that the State had better leave things alone unless it has a clear knowledge about them; and, with reason, they suspect that the knowledge of the governing power may stand no higher than the very low watermark of their own.
[Footnote 1: An English translation has been published under the title of "Essay on the Sphere and Duties of Government."]
In the second place, men have become largely absorbed in the mere accumulation of wealth; and as this is a matter in which the plainest and strongest form of self-interest is intensely concerned, science (in the shape of Political Economy) has readily demonstrated that self-interest may be safely left to find the best way of attaining its ends. Rapidity and certainty of intercourse between different countries, the enormous development of the powers of machinery, and general peace (however interrupted by brief periods of warfare), have changed the face of commerce as completely as modern artillery has changed that of war. The merchant found himself as much burdened by ancient protective measures as the soldier by his armour--and negative legislation has been of as much use to the one as the stripping off of breast-plates, greaves, and buff-coat to the other. But because the soldier is better without his armour it does not exactly follow that it is desirable that our defenders should strip themselves stark naked; and it is not more apparent why _laissez-faire_--great and beneficial as it may be in all that relates to the accumulation of wealth--should be the one great commandment which the State is to obey in all other matters; and especially in those in which the justification of _laissez-faire_, namely, the keen insight given by the strong stimulus of direct personal interest, in matters clearly understood, is entirely absent.
Thirdly, to the indifference generated by the absence of fixed beliefs, and to the confidence in the efficacy of _laissez-faire_, apparently justified by experience of the value of that principle when applied to the pursuit of wealth, there must be added that nobler and better reason for a profound distrust of legislative interference, which animates Von Humboldt and shines forth in the pages of Mr. Mill's famous Essay on Liberty--I mean the just fear lest the end should be sacrificed to the means; lest freedom and variety should be drilled and disciplined out of human life in order that the great mill of the State should grind smoothly.
One of the profoundest of living English philosophers, who is at the same time the most thoroughgoing and consistent of the champions of astynomocracy, has devoted a very able and ingenious essay[1] to the drawing out of a comparison between the process by which men have advanced from the savage state to the highest civilization, and that by which an animal passes from the condition of an almost shapeless and structureless germ, to that in which it exhibits a highly complicated structure and a corresponding diversity of powers. Mr. Spencer says with great justice--
[Footnote 1: "The Social Organism:" Essays. Second Series.]
"That they gradually increase in mass; that they become, little by little, more complex; that, at the same time, their parts grow more mutually dependent; and that they continue to live and grow as wholes, while successive generations of their units appear and disappear,--are broad peculiarities which bodies politic display, in common with all living bodies, and in which they and living bodies differ from everything else."
In a very striking passage of this essay Mr. Spencer shows with what singular closeness a parallel between the development of a nervous system, which is the governing power of the body in the series of animal organisms, and that of government, in the series of social organisms, can be drawn:--
"Strange as the assertion, will be thought," says Mr. Spencer, "our Houses of Parliament discharge in the social economy functions that are, in sundry respects, comparable to those discharged by the cerebral masses in a vertebrate animal.... The cerebrum co-ordinates the countless heterogeneous considerations which affect the present and future welfare of the individual as a whole; and the Legislature co-ordinates the countless heterogeneous considerations which affect the immediate and remote