“When we say that one animal is higher than another, we mean that it is more able to control its own destiny. Progress is just this: Increase in Freedom.”—Stewart McDowall.

“Ne vous laissez pas tromper par de vaines paroles. Plusieurs chercheront a vous persuader que vous Êtes vraiment libres, parce qu’ils auront Écrit sur une feuille de papier le mot de libertÉ et l’auront affichÉ À tous les carrefours.

La libertÉ n’est pas un placard qu’on lit au coin de la rue. Elle est une puissance vivante qu’on sent en soi et autour de soi, le gÉnie protecteur du foyer domestique, la garantie des droits sociaux, et le premier de ces droits.

La libertÉ luira sur vous quand, a force de courage et de persÉvÉrance, vous vous serez affranchis de toutes ces servitudes.”

I

POLITICAL and religious freedom cannot be complete without the winning of economic freedom. That economic dependence cuts the nerve of all freedom needs no proof; the history of landownership is full of instances—even in recent times—of the coercion of dependants in matters of opinion and religious observance. So long as one man’s subsistence depends upon the will of another, it is foolish to suppose that he can in any real sense be free; and it is to be counted for righteousness to the Trade Unions that by binding the workers together, they have been able to resist encroachments on the part of the vested interests upon liberty of thought and conscience. Nevertheless, while the present acceptances of the industrial order prevail, the worker still lacks that liberty of the person without which the liberty of the mind, the crown and safeguard of all liberty, can never be more than partial. It is true that the serf was tied to the land in a way in which the modern worker is not tied to his job. Yet the difference is more apparent than real; for the worker has obtained this freedom at the cost of that security of subsistence which the serf did undoubtedly to some extent enjoy. The worker may also choose his master as the serf could not; but it is nevertheless the choice of a master, a man who dictates the terms and conditions of employment, except in so far as the principle of collective bargaining has succeeded in entering in and modifying the magisterial power of the employer. Freedom of thought and conscience is a vain thing except a man be able to translate thought into act and to obey the injunctions of his conscience; and so long as a system, industrial or other, imposes restrictions upon a man’s control of his own person, he does not possess that mobility with which his own personal growth and his ultimate social efficiency are organically bound up. To complete our heritage of freedom, it is essential that the worker should receive a guarantee of economic security. His mind and his conscience mud be delivered from the fear of starvation; for to-day it is only at the risk of exposing himself and his children to hunger that he is able to assert his liberty within the industrial region.^[20]

It is further to be noted that industrial conditions circumscribe the mind in another more subtle and probably more dangerous way; for a man may assert—and indeed men have often done so—his liberty of thought, and so save his mind even at the risk of starvation. The evolution of the machine industry has been in a direction which continually decreases the activity of the mind. It requires no more than habituation to a routine process which makes no demand for initiative and independent judgment on the part of the worker. This is apt to lead to a mental inertia which accords well with that bondage of the person which the wage system entails; and this is no doubt the reason (at least in great part) of the general apathy of large masses of the workers in the past to progressive industrial movements. And so long as there is ample and easy opportunity for those parts of the physical and nervous organism which have laid inert through the working day to strike a balance of expenditure with the rest—in the drinking-shop or elsewhere—there seems to be no reason why a large proportion of the workers should not sink into a permanent helot class. We are apt to forget that the progressive elements of the labour movement have not hitherto constituted or represented by a great deal the total mass of the working population; and there has been a real menace to the growth of liberty involved in the possibility that the apathetic elements of the working class might be hardened into a virtual serfdom. For the presence in any society of a permanently unprivileged and disabled element which is condemned in perpetuity to do its menial work is the undoing not only of liberty, but at last of the society itself.

The problem of liberty resolves itself therefore into that of the liberty of the mind. The coming achievement of economic independence is due largely to the circumstance that the Trade Unions have afforded a sanctuary for intellectual freedom against the danger of encroachment upon it by the system of private capital and the conditions of the machine industry.^[21] It must, however, be remembered that the freedom of the mind is dependent on factors other than external; and chiefly upon the capacity to use mind in coherent and purposeful ways. A mind capable of such use will not long remain bound. This aspect of the problem belongs properly to the sphere of education; and it is in that setting only that it can be profitably handled. At this point our concern is with the external conditions of mental freedom.

II

Lord Acton’s definition of liberty, already quoted, as “the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influence of authority, custom and opinion,” suggests that the test of the quality and measure of liberty in a particular community, lies in its attitude to and its treatment of dissent—or to put it in another way, its treatment of minorities. And it is plainly true that the freedom of the mind is a pure fiction except it be freedom to dissent from the common acceptances of the community. Speaking generally, the common tendency is toward the suppression of dissent especially if it be of a radical type, in all kinds of communities, democratic or otherwise. In some cases, the suppression is dictated by the obvious requirements of an authoritarian polity, in which case it is systematic and deliberate; but this is on the whole less dangerous than the informal and unorganised suppression or opposition which springs out of the mental inertia of the multitude, the lethargy which is bred of hatred of change, and especially out of the prejudice which is easily and successfully generated in the minds of the ignorant by those whose interests would be imperilled by change. It is only by a recognition of the social significance and value of dissent, and the important part it has played in historical progress, that we are likely to reach a proper understanding of the true democratic attitude to it. In the history of religion, it is plain that dissent has almost always proved to be the organ of advance, and if not of advance, at least of a saner balance of religious faith and practice; and it may be said with not a little assurance that whether in church or state, the dissent that has gained a reasonable following has been evoked by the need of vindicating some natural right or emphasising some truth or fact of experience which was neglected or obscured in the traditional syntheses. It may still further be stated, that whereas dissent has been denounced by its contemporaries as disruptive and hostile to social solidarity, it has in point of fact been the product of a larger social vision than that current in the existing conventions. Dissent has usually been created by the desire to broaden the basis of human fellowship.

This will be seen by an appeal to the mental outlook of the dissenter. Of course every dissenting movement has been hampered and prejudiced, and its ideals muddied by the adhesion to it of temperamental rebels, and the type of crank which gathers around any standard of revolt, just as the opposition to dissent has been degraded by its readiness to accept the help of “lewd fellows of the baser sort.” But when one penetrates to the core of the movement in the mind of its chief exponents we find ourselves in a peculiarly pure and stimulating air. The great historical rebels have almost invariably been actuated by a social passion.

Some day perhaps a competent student may give us a work upon the psychology of the rebel. That there is something typical about the mentality of the great rebels may be gathered even from a cursory reading of a few obvious biographies. There is usually an abnormal mental sensitiveness combined with great physical restlessness, a keen craving for comradeship, combined with fondness for solitude and lonely meditation, a vivid perception of present evils together with a passion for a future which should restore some ancient simplicity, a tendency—once the first step in revolt has been taken,—to broaden the rebellious front to include other issues, a frequent admixture of integrity of character with a certain irregularity of conduct. Yet this is only the psychological basis; and the real differentia of the true rebel lies in the character of the occasion which crystallises his mental make-up into a definite course of action.

Disraeli used to speak of the “two nations” which inhabited England. These were the privileged people and the disinherited. But that is a phenomenon peculiar neither to England nor to the modern world. It is the great permanent line which divides the human race from top to bottom into two classes. We belong either to the exploiting race or the exploited, are either top dogs or under-dogs. The Greek cities with all their emphasis upon freedom yet thought of it as the prerogative of the few. “There were vague beginnings of a new ideal in Athens, but even in Athens personal liberty such as is now connected with the word ‘democracy’ was confined to a very small percentage of the population.”^[22] The remainder were women and slaves upon whose subordination the entire social order rested. The line of division has not always been political or economic. In our own time the acute sense of disinheritance has been the main-spring of the feminist movement. In religion especially the cleavage has been conspicuous. The Reformation controversy about the layman’s rights to receive the chalice in the Sacrament was at bottom a repudiation of the tradition of a privileged caste; and every considerable reformation of religion has involved a challenge to priestcraft on the part of a disinherited laity.

It is the clear perception of this circumstance—the subordination of that mass which we commonly designate “the people,” the appeal of a disinherited class, of “the army of workers,” as Lord Morley said, “who make the most painful sacrifices for the continuous nutrition of the social organisation,” which constitutes the decisive factor in shaping the rebel’s mind and course of life. It sometimes happens that a combination of circumstances throws the need of the disinherited into sharp relief, and the ensuing ferment creates the leader ad hoc, as it were. The disintegration of the old feudal bonds in England liberated the social discontent which roused John Ball and made him the inspirer of the Peasants’ Revolt. Dr. Lindsay in his History of the Reformation tells us of the existence of an active and wide-spread evangelical piety in Germany long before the Reformation, and it was the sharp contrast between the spiritual hunger of the people and the barren externality and corruption of mediÆval ecclesiasticism, at last brought to a head by Tetzel’s peddling of indulgences, that precipitated Luther’s crisis and with it the Reformation. The crisis in the early development of Kansas undoubtedly marked a stage in John Brown’s development. But whether we may be able or not to trace decisive occasions of this kind in the life of the rebel, the common mark of the rebel mind is a passion for the common people. It has been said of Rousseau that “it was because he had seen the wrongs of the poor not from without but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as one of their own company, that he by and by brought such fire to the attack of the old order and changed the blank practice of the older philosophers into a deadly affair of ball and shell.” Similarly Professor Dowden says of Shelley that “it was the sufferings of the industrious poor that especially claimed his sympathy; and he thought of publishing for them a series of popular songs which should inspire them with heart and hope.”^[23] Tolstoi, according to Romain Rolland, had for the labouring people a “strange affection, absolutely genuine,” which his repeated disillusionments were powerless to shake. Sometimes, as in the case of Glendower, Mazzini and “nationalist” rebels generally, it is not the case of a disinherited class but of an oppressed nation which shapes the rebel’s course. The great rebel in every case is made by the lure of the disinherited.

But it is not only compassion for the disinherited which moves the rebel, but a profound faith in their power to work out their own salvation. The appeal to the people has been of the essence of rebel policy. The Peasants’ Revolt in England was stimulated by John Ball’s doggerel verse, which was specially intended to stir discontent. “Wyclif,” says John Richard Green, “appealed, and the appeal is memorable as the first of such a kind in our history, to England at large. With an amazing industry, he issued tract after tract in the tongue of the people itself.” He wrote “in the rough, clear homely English” of the ploughman and trader of his day. The Tractarians of a later date were only imitating their great Oxford precursor when they went distributing their tracts from door to door. But Wyclif did not confine his popular appeal to tracts. His order of “poor preachers,” “whose coarse sermons and long russet dress moved the laughter of the clergy, formed a priceless organisation for the diffusion of their master’s teaching.” John Brown addressed his propaganda at an early stage to the negro; and it is hardly doubtful that his hopes chiefly centred at last upon a general rising of negroes in support of his campaign. Long before, John Hus had carried his appeal to the Bohemian people, as Arnauld of Port Royal, convicted of Jansenism at the Sorbonne, designed to place his case before the French. Pascal’s Provincial Letters were deliberately composed as an appeal from the ecclesiastics to the public. The great emphasis upon public preaching during the Reformation was derived from this same faith in the efficacy of popular appeal. It is sufficiently well known to need no further remark than the reminder that in this way the rebel has made important contributions to the literary as well as the social and religious history of his people.

The paradox of the rebel, then, is this, that while he has been assailed as a subverter of social order, his own driving force has been a social sense quicker and broader than that of his orthodox contemporaries. He attacked the existing social organisation only to break down walls that hindered fellowship. He heard the call of the disinherited and it became in his heart a call to lead them into that heritage of opportunity of which they were cheated by the cupidity and cunning of the great. He assailed the Bastilles of constituted authority, and battered hoary institutions that people might—at this point or that—come into their own. He sought to fling out wide the frontiers of privilege that the poor and the outcast might come into a world of larger life.

Mr. Wells has recently told us that “from the first dawn of the human story” man has been “pursuing the boundary of his possible community.” But the prime agent of this pursuit has been the dissenter. Dissent has proved itself to be the growing point of society. Yet the dissenter has been stoned and hanged by his contemporaries. Must it ever be so? Is there no conceivable social order in which it shall be unnecessary to treat the moral pioneer as a criminal? As yet we have not achieved it. Our limit hitherto has been a kind of toleration rather grudgingly accorded so long as the dissenter does not disturb us over much. But no society will ever be truly free until it has reached the point not only of frank toleration but of the serious encouragement of dissenting opinion. For dissent is after all only a manifestation of the “elan vitale” of a living society; and it should be greeted with a cheer. A society incapable of dissent or of tolerating it has entered upon its last phase.

III

The problem of dissent, however, goes deeper than the realm of opinion. Dissenting opinion would not trouble Israel so long as it remained pure opinion. The difficulty begins when opinion is translated into action. William James said that a belief always discharges itself in an act; and this supplies us with a convenient working distinction between a belief and an opinion. But this brings us into a region where other forces begin to operate, and particularly that inner constraint to act in obedience to one’s belief which we call conscience. From the days when Plato spoke of his [Greek: daimÔn] to ours, the dissenter has always claimed that he acted because he “could do no other.” He submitted to what he believed to be the instance of a moral order from which he could not appeal. His contemporaries either derided his conscience or charged him with hypocrisy; but it is worth some consideration that the contemporary judgment was reversed in almost every case.

It is essential that we should attempt to work out the problem of the relation of conscience to the achievement of liberty in view of the extreme danger which lurks in the recent contemptuous criticism of the conscientious objector. “The duty of obeying conscience at all hazards” (to quote Newman), is valid only so long as we agree with Newman that conscience is “the aboriginal vicar of Christ,” that is to say, that it is the inner embodiment of an irrevocable and infrangible moral order. This does not, of course, imply that every “conscientious objector” interprets the moral order rightly, but simply that it is, as and in so far as he sees it, the moral order for him. His judgment may be fallacious; but what is in question is not so much the soundness of his judgment as the sincerity of his conviction; and we are rather apt to forget that moral sincerity is a greater asset to society than a logical correctitude. It is difficult to see how any one who takes a “religious” view of the world can escape this conviction. Even Lord Morley, who speaks of “the higher expediencies” where a religious believer might speak of an ultimate moral order, reaches the judgment that this is a region in which no man ought to compromise. It is on this account singular that the most drastic criticism of the conscientious objector, both in England and America, has come from ministers of religion; and it is more singular still that this severity of criticism should have chiefly come from ministers of the non-authoritarian churches which were born out of the struggle for the rights of conscience.

When Gladstone challenged English Catholics to say how they would act in the event of a collision between the commands of the Queen and the Pope, the greatest of modern English Catholics took up the gage and gave answer. “It is my rule,” said Newman, “both to obey the one and to obey the other; but that there is no rule in this world without exceptions; and that if either the Pope or the Queen demanded of me an ‘Absolute Obedience,’ he or she would be transgressing the laws of human nature and human society. I give an absolute obedience to neither. Further, if ever this double allegiance pulled me in contrary ways which in this age of the world I think it never will, then I should decide according to the particular case, which is beyond all rule and must be decided on its own merits. I should look to see what theologians could do for me, what the Bishops and Clergy around me, what my confessor, what my friends whom I revered, and if, after all, I could not take their view of the matter, then I must rule myself by my own judgment and my own conscience.”^[24] He then goes on to insist upon “the duty of obeying our conscience at all hazards” and supports his view by an appeal to weighty Roman authorities. “Certainly,” he concluded, “if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please—still to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”^[25]

Forty years before this English controversy, a great French Catholic found himself in this dilemma. No man had more consistently maintained the duty of submission to the Pope than Lamennais. His hard fight for religious liberty in France was precisely for the right of the Catholic to render the Pope a full and undivided allegiance in all matters relating to the content and practice of faith. But a time came when the Pope came to exact from Lamennais a submission he was unable to make. As he would not allow the state to have jurisdiction in the spiritual sphere, so he denied to the Pope jurisdiction in the civil. The Pope would not consent to this modification of his claim to authority and demanded of Lamennais an unqualified submission. Whereupon Lamennais replied, “Most Holy Father, a word from your Holiness is always enough for me, not only to obey it in all that religion ordains but to comply with it in all that conscience allows.”^[26] “Outside the Church,” he wrote to the Countess de Senfft, “in the strictly temporal order, and more particularly in that which touches the affairs of my country, I do not recognise any authority which has the right to impose an opinion upon me or to dictate my conduct. I say it emphatically, in that sphere which is not that of the spiritual power, I will never renounce my independence as a man; nor will I, for thought or action, ever take counsel but of my conscience and my reason.”^[27] In this course, Lamennais followed the judgment of Cardinal Jacobatus, in what Newman calls his “authoritative work upon councils.” “If it were doubtful whether a precept (of the Pope) be a sin or not, we must determine thus: that if he to whom the precept is addressed has a conscientious sense that it is a sin and injustice; first, it is his duty to put off that sense; but if he cannot nor conform himself to the judgment of the Pope, in that case it is his duty to follow his own private conscience, and patiently to bear it if the Pope punishes him.”^[28]

At first sight there appears to be no real analogy between the case of the conscientious objector to war, as we have recently known him, and that propounded by Newman. Newman postulates a conflict of loyalties to two societies whose requirements are at a given point antagonistic, before invoking the arbitrament of conscience. The conscientious objector is conceived as setting his own private judgment against the will of the only society to which he owes allegiance. That is, at least, how it looks on the surface. But in point of fact, the conscientious objector as a rule bases his action on the ground of loyalty to a certain view of human relationships, that is to say, to a social ideal; and in the case of a man like Stephen Hobhouse whose social idealism has been validated by a unique realism of self-renunciation and sacrifice, it would be idle to deny that the conflict of loyalties was very concrete and authentic. The Socialist conscientious objector who sees in the International, if not the city of God, at least its threshold, and who does not conceive himself absolved from his loyalty to it even though the German socialists betrayed it, is moved by no personal eccentricity, but by a real social emotion. A sympathetic study of the conscientious objector brings him according to his measure into the same category as the historical leaders of dissenting movements. The decisive moral surrenders which quicken and ennoble life are acts of obedience to a social vision; and the only really moral attitude to men who make these surrenders, however variously they may make them, is that of the dedication of a recent volume—“To all who are fighting for conscience’ sake, whether in the trenches or in prison.”^[29] It is well for the community that it should have those within it who are ready to endure obloquy and imprisonment rather than be guilty of what is to them a moral apostasy.

The conscientious objector—whatever the subject matter of his dissent—has always been an exasperating figure to his orthodox contemporaries. This is, of course, largely due to the inertia and the dislike of dissent which settle upon middle-aged communities; but at the present time it is probable that the impatience with the conscientious objector springs from other and more respectable sources. Yet by a curious paradox the two principal sources are logically antithetical.

The first is the circumstance that the mental habit of this generation has been profoundly affected by the supremacy of the machine. Its characteristic intellectual achievement is the pragmatist philosophy; and as much in religion and sociology as in the physical sciences its main pre-occupation is with processes. It requires efficiency for immediate concrete objects rather more than faithfulness to what seems to be remote and imponderable abstractions. Conscientious objection is irritating because it is so palpably futile, and indeed so vexatiously obstructive of the business in hand. Not only does it not work, it actually hinders the work in which the multitude is engaged. It puts the machine out of gear; in a supreme emergency when all hands should be at the pumps, the conscientious objector puts us to the trouble of putting him in irons. That is obviously—and naturally—how the case looks. The gulf between the conscientious objector and common opinion is made by a difference of emphasis upon principle and process. The conscientious objector—being perhaps a sort of reversion to a less sophisticated age—puts the process to the test of principle and finds them incompatible. Common opinion, in the exercise of a presumably more realistic judgment says, “This is the only process available; let us make the best use of it we can, and take the risk of coming to terms with principles afterwards, if that be necessary.” The one hitches his wagon to a star; the other hitches it to anything that is going his way. Upon the merits of this kind of controversy, contemporary judgments are notoriously unsafe; unfortunately, none of us will be living at the time when it will be possible to say with assurance who was in this case the true realist after all. Meantime, the conscientious objector, however despised, may help us to a healthier balance between ultimate principle and immediate process than any of us have had this many a day.

But along with the mechanistic habit of thought, there is a survival of the Hegelian idealism which has been chiefly responsible for the modern apothesis of the national state. It is not the Prussian only who has affirmed the sovereignty and omnicompetency of the state and its right to undivided obedience; but being more mechanically and remorselessly logical than his neighbours, he has carried the doctrine to a more definite point. But it seems to be generally assumed in all popular political thinking that our loyalty to the state should be not only first but absolute over all the other loyalties of life. In our day this view has received, particularly in democratic communities, a subtle and plausible reinforcement from the growing emphasis upon the fact of social solidarity with its implication that the consensus of the community fixes the norm of conduct. A man’s conscience should reflect the collective conscience of the society. Moreover, the egalitarian populates of republican democracy are construed to require a uniformity of conduct no less complete than that demanded by the political theory of autocracy; and the unpardonable sin is to break the ranks. “The true democratic principle,” says Lord Acton, “that every man’s free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing.”^[30] Democracy which has sloughed the archaism of aristocracy has yet to outgrow the Austinian doctrine of sovereignty if it is not to be in danger of ceasing to be the sanctuary and becoming the grave of liberty, and with liberty of much else beside. When it no longer tolerates the nonconformist and the moral pioneer, “its doom is writ;” for once more let it be repeated that historically dissent of this type has always proved to be the growing point of society.

This is not a plea for the conscientious objector but for democracy. Newman said that if the Pope spoke against conscience, “he would commit a suicidal act. He would be cutting the ground from under his feet.” The authority of the Pope is not shaken because he concedes to conscience the liberty of dissent; rather it is confirmed. Even more so do the stability and growth of democracy depend upon its recognition of the inviolability of the individual conscience; for democracy cannot live except its roots be deep struck in the moral nature of man. The ultimate battleground of democracy is in men’s hearts; and its appeal must at last ever be to men’s consciences. But the appeal to conscience has no meaning unless conscience be free; and when democracy constrains men’s consciences it is writing off its own spiritual charter. Even in time of war it is safer for democracy to let a hundred shirkers go scot-free rather than run the risk of penalising an honest conscience. For by its affirmation of the sovereignty of conscience it reinforces the consciences of all its members and wins the deeper loyalty of those who are constrained to dissent from its policy on particular issues.

IV

The growth of the democratic ideal is bound up with the acceptance of the freedom of the mind in all its consequences—even at the risk of some disorder; and the difficulty which political democracy is apt even in normal times to find in conforming to this view is due to the fact that it has not yet perceived the logic of its own first principles. This in its turn is at least to some extent to be accounted for by the survival in democracies of mediÆval conceptions of authority. We do not need to take into account those doctrines of authority which are begotten of the divine right of kings and are now clearly at their last gasp. The divine right of kings is, however, assumed to have fallen upon democratic governments; and though they may not exercise authority for the same ends as an autocrat of the old style, yet they conceive of it as operating in the same way. Theoretically, authority in democracies is exercised in the interests of social justice; but we still suppose that the discipline of social justice must be imposed upon men from without.

Apparently the assumption underlying the authoritarian position is that human nature is incurably anarchic, that it is its instinctive tendency to be wayward and disruptive, and that there is no remedy for this state of things except that of putting it in a cage, of surrounding it with a fine mesh of arrests, checks and restraints. This view may owe something of its modern strength to the theological doctrine of the total depravity of human nature—a dogma no longer held by sane people. We know that if we do hold a doctrine of original sin it must be held together with the no less true doctrine of original goodness. But the authoritarian is theologically orthodox; man to him is a born rebel, a natural anarchist; he holds that he is organically antisocial; and there is therefore nothing to do with him but to treat him like a wild animal and put him behind bars. It is of course possible to subdue anarchy in this way, and to produce some kind of order—for a time. But it should be observed that what happens is that liberty is not so much disciplined as denied; and as it appears to be the inherent, and incurable tendency of authority to feed upon itself and to grow fat, the natural consequence is the progressive destruction of liberty. The historical reaction from the excess of authority is a violent revulsion to wild and bloody anarchy; and over against authority, the only hope of liberty is to divide and to keep it divided.

As a matter of fact in democratic communities, there is a curious discrepancy between theory and practice; and—somewhat unusually—our practice is better than our theory. The mediÆval doctrine of authority still haunts our political and social thinking; but there are few people in a democratic community who behave themselves only when and because there is a policeman about. The whole structure of law (of which the policeman is the symbol) rests upon the proposition that it is possible to define and to enforce those moral obligations which are essential to the cohesion and the order of the community, those things which members of a society must do or abstain from doing if the society is to hold together at all. Law does not do more than state the lowest common terms of social duty. It does not cover “the whole duty of man.” The maximum of legal obligation is the minimum of moral obligation. That is why the law does not touch ordinary folk—except, of course, in formal adjustments of affairs of business or property. In the region of personal conduct, law is for decent folk in normal times a pure irrelevancy. We not only keep the law but we to some degree transcend it, and we do so without thinking about it. The policeman has no terrors for us because we do not approach his frontiers; and he has terrors only for the wilful social misfit whose native anarchy is still untamed. Law, that is, imposes the discipline of social justice only upon the exceptional case, the individual who is contemptuous or negligent of his social duty. Upon the great majority of people it is imposed from within—sometimes indeed by the fear of public opinion, but chiefly by a more or less effective social sense. We are free from the law not because we take care not to break it, but because a higher principle has lifted us outside and beyond its bounds. Our righteousness truly exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees, that is, of the legal mind; and that is because a higher principle of righteousness is at work within us. This higher principle of righteousness is of course no other than our own independent and energised sense of social obligation. The degree to which it is effectual may and does vary in different persons; but it is not to be questioned that democracy exists because of the increasing efficiency of the inward sense of social obligation in its members. Its further development is contingent upon the measure in which this inner constraint supersedes coercive machinery as the organ of social justice.

It is, of course, better for men to live under law than in anarchy. What we have to understand concerning law and its machinery is that it is a stage in the evolution of social order and in our education into true freedom. At the same time it must not be forgotten that the law itself may become a real hindrance to this process. Just because law is a definition of obligation, it tends to be regarded as fixing the outmost limits of social duty; and whatsoever we do beyond these limits ranks as work of supererogation. That is bad enough; but worse may happen. One may suppose that outside these limits, any kind of conduct is admissible; and law, despite its intention, may therefore arrest the growth of the social sense. The social sense, that is, is expected to operate up to frontier line defined by the law; beyond that point, it is not called upon to act. We require to introduce into men’s minds a different conception of law from that popularly current. It is the office of the law to make itself superfluous; and its administration requires not a superstitious veneration of its majesty or a pedantic respect for its letter, but humanity and common sense. The law is overmuch conceived as our gaoler; properly understood, it is, as St. Paul said of the Mosaic Law, our “schoolmaster.” But so long as we talk about “vindicating” the law more than reclaiming the offender—as the legal mind is apt to do—so long will men tend to regard the law not as a stepping-stone to higher things, but as an irksome restraint; and while we indulge in tall talk about the majesty of the law, we make law-abidingness “the law and the prophets,” and jeopardise our chance of effecting that increasing enfranchisement of the social sense in which alone is the hope of the democratic ideal.

The further development of the democratic principle and the achievement of a genuine freedom would appear to be contingent upon the growth of the interior discipline of social justice with a consequent diminution in the influence of exterior legal sanctions. If society is to be regarded as in any sense truly organic, and if consequently its vitality is to be measured by its capacity for variation, it is plain that it must be released from the tendency to uniformity which is entailed in a “reign of law.” Augustine’s definition of liberty is pertinent here—Love God and do as you please, and translated out of the idiom of religion into that of sociology (which is like unto it) the rule runs: Love your neighbour and do as you please. Authoritarianism makes inevitably for regimentation; and while it may in this way repress the waywardness of individualism, it does so at the expense of that precious thing, individuality. The task of democracy is that of destroying individualism and of cultivating individuality. Liberty is the condition in which a man may be true to himself through everything, and may live out the logic of his own distinctive spiritual endowments. But because personality is essentially social, a man cannot be true to himself until he is in a true sense delivered from himself. An effectual social discipline is a necessary condition of a real liberty. It is not a check upon liberty but its indispensable concomitant. Without it, liberty overshoots its bolt and destroys itself.

But this relation is a mutual one. Not only does a social conscience safeguard and discipline liberty; but its own mating with liberty works for its liberation. We have seen how the influence of legalistic preconceptions tends to arrest the growth of the social conscience; how the school of law may become the prison of legalism. The social conscience is something more than a moral critic or invigilator; it has the quality of a creative energy; and once it is “free from the law,” it is for ever trying to outdo itself. It is indeed only an adventurous social conscience of this kind that will avail to overcome those distinctions of class which constitute the immemorial and multiform schism of our race. We have to work not only for the socialisation of liberty but also for the liberation of our social instincts; and this is to be done by an equal mating of liberty and the social conscience. This is, in the main, the office of the teacher and the preacher, but meantime a great deal is to be done by a systematic effort to multiply and develop those social contacts which already exist either actually or potentially.

The final reason for this mating is not merely to make room for dissent in the community. That, indeed, is only an incidental thing which serves to test the quality and extent of the community’s freedom. Freedom is necessary because it is the only condition under which creative self-expression becomes really possible. The human spirit must have independence and initiative if it is to be its whole self. It was not made for regimentation; it was made for a distinctive life of its own. But its very constitution tells us that if it is to attain to a fruitful freedom, it must achieve something besides freedom. The motto of a democracy resolute to live out the full implicates of its first principles must not be freedom alone, but freedom and fellowship.