iii. A few words may here be said on the applications by which Mill

illustrates his doctrine, in order to point out what confusion results from relying on a demarcation which cannot strictly be made.

It will be noted in the first place that he objects altogether to the attempt to prevent by punishment either immorality or irreligion as such. [1] This objection a sound social theory must uphold. But if we look at Mill’s reason for it, we find it simply to be that such an attempt infringes liberty, by interfering with action which is purely self-regarding. Without entering further upon the endless argument whether this or any action is indeed purely self-regarding, we may observe that by taking such ground, Mill causes the above objection, which is substantially sound, to appear as on all fours with others which are at any rate very much more doubtful. Such is the objection on principle to all restrictions imposed upon trade with a distinct view to protecting the consumer, not from fraud, but from opportunities of consumption injurious to himself. The regulation or prohibition of the traffic in alcoholic liquors is of course the main question here at issue; and it may be admitted that Mill’s discussion, with the many distinctions which he lays down, is full of shrewdness and suggestiveness. But the ultimate ground which he takes, as above stated, is quite different from the genuine reasons which exist {66} against attempting to enforce morality by law and penalty, and introduces confusion into the whole question of State interference by ranking the two objections together. Closely analogous are his objections to the statutes respecting unlawful games, [2] which, whether wise or unwise, are quite a different thing from an attempt to punish personal immorality as such. And lastly, the same principle is illustrated by his whole attitude to the strong feeling and the various legal obligations which determine and support the monogamous family. In maintaining the general indissolubility of marriage, and supporting the parental power, the State is interfering, for him, with the freedom of parties to a contract, and conferring power over individuals, the children, who have a right to be separately considered. Such interference is for him _ipso facto_ of a suspected nature. It is an interference hostile to liberty; and whether it is or is not an external condition of good life, which the State is able effectively to maintain, is a question which he does not discuss. Throughout all these objections to authoritative interference we trace the peculiar prejudice that the criterion of its justifiability lies in the boundary line between self and others, rather than in the nature of what coercive authority is and is not able to do towards the promotion of good life. On many points indeed, when the simple protection of “others” is concerned, Mill’s doctrine leads to sound conclusions. Such, for example, is the problem of legislation after the pattern of the Factory Acts.

[1] Pp. 48 and 50.

[2] P. 59.

But yet a strange nemesis attaches to grounds {67} alleged with insufficient discrimination. Just as, by ranking inner morality and outer action alike under the name of freedom, Mill is led to object to interference which may be perfectly justified and effectual; so by the same confusion he is led to advocate coercive treatment in impossibly stringent forms, and in cases where it runs extreme risk of thwarting a true moral development. We are amazed when he strongly implies, in respect to the education of children and the prospect of supporting a family, that moral obligations [1] ought to be enforced by law. The proposal of universal State-enacted examinations by way of enforcing the parental duty of educating children, to the exclusion of the task of providing education by public authority, in which Mill sees danger to individuality, opens a prospect of a Chinese type of society, from which, happily, the good sense of Englishmen has recoiled. And just the reverse of his proposal has come to pass under the influence of the logic of experience. The State has taken care that the external conditions of an elementary education are provided, and, while doing this, has no doubt exercised compulsion in order that these conditions may be a reality. But the individual inquisition by examination is tending to drop out of the system; and the practical working of the public education is more and more coming to be that the State sees to it that certain conditions are maintained, of which the parents’ interest and public spirit leads them to take advantage. Sheer compulsion is not the way to enforce a moral obligation.

[1] Pp. 62 and 64.

{68} Still more startling is the suggestion that it might be just to interdict marriage to those unable to show the means of supporting a family, on the ground of possible evil both to the children themselves through poverty, and to others through over-population. This is a case in which authoritative interference (except on account of very definite physical or mental defects) must inevitably defeat its object. No foresight of others can gauge the latent powers to meet and deal with a future indefinite responsibility; and the result of scrupulous timidity, in view of such responsibilities, is seen in the tendency to depopulation which affects that very country from which Mill probably drew his argument. To leave the responsibility as fully as possible where it has been assumed is the best that law can do, and appeals to a spring of energy deeper than compulsion can reach.

Thus we have seen that by discriminating the spheres of non-interference and interference, according to a supposed demarcation between the sphere of “self” and of “others,” a hopelessly confused classification has been introduced. Sometimes the maintenance of external conditions of good life, well within the power of the State, is forbidden on the same grounds as the direct promotion of morality, which is impossible to it. In other cases the enforcement of moral obligations is taken to lie within the functions of the State, although not only is the enforcement of moral obligations _per se_ a contradiction in terms, but almost always, as in the cases in question, the attempt to effect it is sure to frustrate itself, by destroying the springs on which moral action depends.

{69} It is worth noticing, in conclusion, that in two examples, [1] the one trivial, the other that of slavery, both theoretically and practically very important, Mill recognises a principle wholly at variance with his own. Here he is aware that it may be right, according to the principle of liberty, to restrain a man, for reasons affecting himself alone, from doing what at the moment he proposes to do. For we are entitled to argue from the essential nature of freedom to what freedom really demands, as opposed to what the man momentarily seems to wish. “It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom,” as it is not freedom to be allowed to walk over a bridge which is certain to break down and cause his death. Here we have in germ the doctrine of the “real” will, and a conception analogous to that of Rousseau when he speaks of a man “being forced to be free.”

[1] Pp. 57 and 61.

4. Before referring to Mill’s explicit utterances on the problem of self-government, which are of the same general character as those of Mr. Herbert Spencer, it will be well to note some instructive points in the views of the latter thinker. The study of Mr. Spencer’s writings, and more especially of those which appear most directly opposed to the popular conceptions of the day, cannot be too strongly urged upon the sociological student. And this for two reasons. In the first place, no other writer has exhibited with equal vividness the fatal possibilities of a collective governmental stupidity. That in practice these possibilities are continually tending to become facts, just as in theory they are {70} represented by recurrent fallacies, [1] is a proof of the extreme arduousness of the demands made by the task of self-government upon the people which undertakes it. And no theorist is fitted to discuss the problem of social unity who has not realised the arduousness of these demands in all its intensity. And, in the second place, the student will observe an instructive meeting of extremes between elements of Mr. Spencer’s ideas and popular social theories of an opposite cast. The revival of doctrines of the natural rights of man on a biological foundation [2] is a case in point. An uncriticised individualism is always in danger of transformation into an uncritical collectivism. The basis of the two is in fact the same.

[1] As, for example, in Rousseau’s attempts to explain the action of a collective mind, in which he constantly falls into the advocacy of a soulless _régime_ of mass-meetings.

[2] _Man v. State_, p. 95.

i. A comparison of the conception of “right” as entertained by Bentham and by Herbert Spencer forms a striking commentary on ideas in which “government” is antagonistic to “self.” Bentham, seeing clearly that the claims of the actual individual, taken as he happens to be, are casual and unregulated, fulminates against the idea of natural right as representing those claims. Right is for him a creation of the State, and there can be no right which is not constituted by law. And the truth of the contention seems obvious. How, in fact, could individual claims or wishes constitute a right, except as in some way ratified by a more general recognition?

But to Mr. Herbert Spencer the contrary proposition is absolutely convincing, and, indeed, on {71} their common premises, with equal reason. [1] It is ridiculous, he points out, to think of a people as creating rights, which it had not before, by the process of creating a government in order to create them. It is absurd to treat an individual as having a share of rights _qua_ member of the people, while in his private capacity he has no rights at all.

[1] _Ib_., p. 88.

We need not labour this point further. It is obvious that Mr. Herbert Spencer is simply preferring the opposite extreme, in the antithesis of “self” and “government,” to that which commended itself to Bentham. If it is a plain fact that “a right” can only be recognised by a society, it is no less plain that it can only be real in an individual. If individual claims, apart from social adjustment, are arbitrary, yet social recognitions, apart from individual qualities and relations, are meaningless. As long as the self and the law are alien and hostile, it is hopeless to do more than choose at random in which of the two we are to locate the essence of right.