Liberty in History and Institutions

We are blinded by the common use of language to the fact that all social actions are attended by reactions. To take the commonest and often noticed instance, we talk of buyers and sellers as if they were independent of each other; we call those who have money buyers, and those who have goods sellers. We find, however, that no transaction can be correctly understood until we regard it as an exchange, having two parts, an action and a reaction, equal and opposite. In the language of the market, also, we speak of being long or short of the market, but every one who has either money or goods is in the market, and is both long and short of it all the time. He is either long of goods and short of money, or long of money and short of goods. The philosophy of the market cannot be understood unless we study it from this point of view.

The fallacy of a great many doctrines in social science, and the philosophy of a great many errors in social policy, is that they divorce the action from the reaction. If there is not a reaction with equivalence and equilibrium, then there is an expenditure from one side toward the other, a drain of force from one side and an accumulation of it at another, until there come a crisis and a redistribution. When the return and equivalence are suspended, there is a necessary continuance of the movement, in the tendency toward a stable equilibrium of another kind, which would come about when all the force had been transferred. For instance, you give good schools for less than their market value; you must, then, give free schools; then you must give free books and stationery; then “hot breakfasts,” and so on in succession. The fact that one thing has been given is made an argument for more. You are told: You have established free schools; “why should not you” do whatever else the proponent favors? The argument that because you have given a man one thing you ought to give him another is not good in logic, but it is intensely strong in human nature and in history. The saying is attributed to Danton, the revolutionist: “The revolution came, and I and all those like me plunged into it. The ancien régime had given us a good education without opening an outlet for our talents.” The great fallacy of socialistic schemes is that they break off the social reaction. A man is to have something simply because he is a man—that is, simply because he is here. He is not to be called upon to render any return for it, except to stay. On the other hand, the tax-payer, who has provided all there is, is not on that account to be entitled to a recompense of any kind. He has only incurred a new liability, viz., to do the next thing which is demanded of him. The only stable equilibrium under this system would be universal contentment. But bounty does not lead to contentment, and cannot, until the recipient has everything for nothing. The movement, therefore, runs to a crisis, a redistribution, a recommencement, and the further it goes, the nearer it approaches anarchy, impoverishment, and barbarism.

At various times, in primitive society, in ancient Egypt, and in the Roman Empire, when women have possessed the forces which were efficient in the society, they have had dominion over men. They abused the power when they had it, too. At other times the subjection of women has been due to the fact that they needed protection; they did not possess the forces which, at the time, were required for self-defense in the society. But since they accepted protection, they could not be free; when they fell into dependence, they could not be independent. If they could claim protection and at the same time dominion, they would be privileged; and any one who enjoys privilege which some one else has to furnish, is of course superior. Hence, there are three positions only in social relations: servitude with inferiority, privilege with superiority, and a middle state of neither, with equality.

Peasant proprietors turn into colons and serfs through misery. They abandon personal liberty in order to get protection, and they accept servitude to get security, because they find that they have not enough of the force which prevails in the society to defend themselves. Their lords maintain superiority and exact for themselves social privilege. Such was the course of things at the downfall of the Roman Empire. When things began to improve in western Europe, the slave thought that it was comparative freedom when he was bound to the soil, because his family could not be separated, and he could not be removed from his home. A villain, however, would have thought it slavery to be reduced to the status of the serf, with unlimited servitudes to render. The serf, in his turn, thought it immeasurable gain to get his servitudes made definite, although a free man would have thought it slavery to be reduced to villainage. A villain could not go if he wanted to, but he could not be evicted if any one wanted to send him away. A free man can go if he wants to, and may be evicted if the other party chooses. At what point does the servitude of the villain, who must stay and work and pay feudal dues, turn into the blessing of the free tenant, who has fixity of tenure, but works and enjoys subject to taxes? Evidently it is at that point where the rights and benefits of holding and using become equal to the burdens and duties of taking and using—always with reference to the comparative value of other chances which present themselves. If a villain wants to stay, it is a privilege that no one can evict him; if he wants to go, it is a servitude that some one can retain him. If the landlord wants to force tenants to stay and till his land, it is a privilege for him to be able to force them to stay; if the landlord wants to turn his land to other use, it is a servitude for him if he cannot evict his tenants. The modern peasant proprietor is one in whose status all these privileges and servitudes have met, coalesced, and disappeared, so that they are all summed up in the question whether his land is worth holding and tilling, subject to the taxes which must be paid on it.

In all these variations and mutations of social status and of the relations of classes, which we might pursue with any amount of detail through the history of the last fifteen hundred years, where is there any such thing as personal liberty of the sort which means doing as one likes? None have had it but those who were privileged—that is to say, it has lain entirely outside of civil liberty. It has had the form of an artificial social monopoly, and the fact has come out distinctly that liberty to do as you please in this world is only possible as a monopoly, but that it is the most valuable monopoly in the world, provided you can get it as a monopoly. You would realize it when you got into the position of Nero, or Louis XIV, or Catharine II.

We may gather some other cases in point.

A man who expects to go to the alms-house in his old age may regard a law of settlement as his patent of security, because it defines and secures his place of refuge. A man who is in the same status, but who is determined to better his condition by energy and enterprise, and tries to move, finds the law of settlement a curse, which may hold him down and force him to become a pauper.

If you are not able to make your own way in the world, you want to be protected by status; if you have ambition and ability to make a career for yourself, you find that status holds you down. In the former case it holds you up, or keeps you from falling; in the latter it holds you down, or keeps you from rising, on the whole, therefore, it keeps the society stagnant. If numbers do not increase very much, there may not be much suffering; if numbers do increase, there will be mendicancy, pauperism, vagabondage, and brigandage. It is a matter of great surprise that so little investigation has been expended on the vagabondage of the Middle Ages; the students of that period have kept their attention on those who were inside of its institutions, but the test of the mediæval system is to be found in a study of those who were kept out of its institutions.

If it is a mark of a free man, as in early Rome, to do military duty, every one may regard that function as a right or privilege rather than as a burden or duty; it may carry with it privileges of citizenship which make it worth more than it costs. If, however, the privileges of citizenship are lost and the burden of military duty increases, men will, as in the Dark Ages, sacrifice personal liberty as well as civil liberty in order to get rid of military duty. If, as in Russia, at least formerly, the privileges of citizenship are nil, and the burdens of military duty very heavy, to be taken as a soldier is like incurring a capital sentence.

If a man enjoys a position of advantage compared with others, he is anxious to entail it on his children; if he is under shame or disadvantage, he is anxious to break the entail. One who is born of a duke is anxious to maintain hereditariness, but one who is born of the hangman rebels against it. The two are part of one system, and, in the long run, must stand or fall together.

He who is not able to attain to his standards of happiness by his own efforts is one of the “weak;” he does not want to be let alone; he wants some one to come and help him. He who is confident of his own power to accomplish his own purposes, wants to be let alone; he is “strong” and resents interference. In the long run, however, he who may be called upon for aid in the former case will insist on his right to interfere in the latter case, and he who claims freedom in the latter case will find that he must bear his own burdens in the former. Any other course would simply lead to a new system of privilege and servitude, for he who can choose his own ends and make somebody else help him attain them has realized privilege in its old and ever-abiding sense.

Privilege and servitude, therefore, when we classify them with reference to our present study, are the poles between which all forms of social status lie. Rights lie on the side toward privilege; duties lie on the side toward servitude. Rights and duties, however, are not separated by any gulf nor even by a line. They overlap each other. Not only are they parallel and connected by the social reaction, but also to different men or at different times the same thing often presents itself either as a right or a duty, e.g., military duty. Somewhere between, however, lies the middle point or neutral point, where there is neither privilege nor servitude, but where the rights and duties are in equilibrium, and that status is civil liberty in the only sense in which it is thinkable or realizable in laws, institutions, and history.

We have seen cases above in which the same men were under privilege and servitude at the same time, having accepted one as the price of the other. We have also seen cases in which the privilege of some involved the servitude of others. The former class of cases have been those which have had the most unhappy issue, for the privileges have often faded with time and the servitudes have been intensified. It is a bargain which a rational being can rarely afford to make, to incur servitude in the hope of privilege. Herein lies the curse of socialistic schemes when viewed from the side of the supposed beneficiary—they are a bait to defraud him of his liberty. I do not see how the German accident and workman’s insurance can fail to act as a law of settlement, thereby, under a pretense of offering the workman security, robbing him of his best chance of improving his position. Still, the cases where a man incurs his own servitude for the sake of his own privilege are not as bad in some respects as those in which some have privileges for which others bear servitudes.

The modern jural state, at least of the Anglo-American type, by its hostility to privileges and servitudes, if not by direct analytical definition of its purpose, aims to realize the above definition of liberty. It is the one which fills our institutions at their best, and the one which forms the stem of our best civil and social ideals. If all privileges and all servitudes are abolished, the individual finds that there are no prescriptions left either to lift him up or to hold him down. He simply has all his chances left open that he may make out of himself all there is in him. This is individualism and atomism. There is absolutely no escape from it except back into the system of privileges and servitudes. The doctrine of the former is that a man has a right to make the most of himself to attain the ends of his existence; the doctrine of the latter is that a man has a right to whatever he needs to attain the ends of his existence. If the latter is true, then any one who is bound to furnish him what he needs is under servitude to him.

The fact, however, is rapidly making itself felt that this civil liberty of the modern type is a high and costly thing. A generation which has been glorying in it and heralding it to all the world as a boon and a blessing, to be had for the taking and to be enjoyed for nothing, begins to cry out that it is too great for them; that they cannot attain to it nor even bear it; that to be a free man means to come up to the standard and be it; and that it is asking too much of human nature. They want somebody to come and help them to be free. It has always been so. Men have failed of freedom not because kings, nobles, or priests enslaved them, but because liberty was too high and great for them. They would not rise to it; they would submit to any servitude rather; therefore they get servitude.

The strain of liberty is in the demand which it makes on the whole mass of the people for perpetual activity of reason and conscience to re-examine rights and duties, and to readjust their equilibrium. Civil liberty is not a scientific fact. It is not in the order of nature. It is not positive and objective; therefore it is not capable of constant and easy verification. It is historical and institutional. That means, however, that it is in the flux and change of civilization, wherefore the reason and conscience of men are kept in constant activity to re-examine accepted principles, and to reach new and more nearly correct solution of problems. On account of this activity, institutions are modified constantly, and the concrete contents of the public creed, about rights and duties, are undergoing constant change. It does not appear that this can ever be otherwise. There is an assumption that we can attain to social stability by finding out the right “form of government,” or the correct “social system,” but no ground for such a notion can be found in philosophy or history. The equilibrium of rights and duties constitutes the terms on which the struggle for existence is carried on in a given society, after the reason and conscience of the community have pronounced judgment on those terms. The very highest conception of the state is that it is an organization for bringing that judgment to an expression in the constitution and laws. A state, therefore, is good, bad, or indifferent, according to the directness and correctness with which it brings to an expression the best reason and conscience of the people, and embodies their judgment in institutions and laws. The state, therefore, lives by deliberation and discussion, and by tacit or overt expressions of the major opinion.

The fact that laws and institutions must be constantly remolded in the progress of time by the active reason and conscience of the people, is what has probably given rise to the notion, just now so popular, that ethical considerations do, or ought to, regulate legislation and social relations. The doctrine, however, that institutions must in the course of generations slowly change to conform to social conditions and social forces, according to the mature convictions of great masses of men, is a very different thing from the notion that rights and duties should be at the sport of all the crude notions which, from time to time, may gain the assent of even an important group of the population.

Among the most important tides of thought at the present time which are hostile to liberty are socialism which always has to assume a controlling organ to overrule personal liberty and set aside civil liberty, in order to bring about what the socialist authorities have decided shall be done; nationalism, really a cognate of socialism, with opposition to emigration or immigration; state absolutism, which, in its newest form, insists that the individual exists for the state; and altruism, which, when put forward as an absolute dogma, is as anti-social as selfishness. All these are only the latest forms of the devices by which some men live at the expense of others. In their essence and principle they are as old as history, and not even the device of making the victims vote away their own liberty, apparently of their own free will, because they think they ought to do so, has anything new in it.