What Social Classes Owe to Each Other | Page 8

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