1859 2026
This is an AI modernization of On Liberty into contemporary English. The original is available from Standard Ebooks. Also available as an epub.
John Stuart Mill was raised as an experiment. His father started him on Greek at three and set him to teaching his younger siblings before he was ten, and at twenty he had a breakdown he later traced straight to the training. He published this book in 1859, the year after his wife died. He had married Harriet Taylor in 1851, after a friendship of twenty years; she died at Avignon in 1858, and the dedication he wrote for this volume calls her the inspirer and in part the author of all that is best in his writings, and says that the parts he most wanted her to revise will now never be revised. That dedication is printed here.
Almost nothing in the book sounds old, which is the difficulty. Three words are doing technical work in ordinary clothes. Utility is not usefulness; it is Bentham's standard, the greatest happiness, and Mill says outright that he claims no advantage from any notion of abstract right and rests everything on utility in the largest sense. Self-regarding is his own coinage and the hinge of the book: conduct whose consequences fall on the person doing it. And when he writes that mankind gain more by letting each other live as seems good to themselves, suffer means allow. A few others have moved the same way — peculiar means specific, vulgarly means commonly, obtain means hold good.
The principle is one sentence. The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. The five chapters are the cost of it. Chapter Two is the case for free speech, and it is not that the censor might be wrong: it is that an opinion nobody is allowed to argue with dies in the people who hold it. Chapter Three is about individuality and is the best writing in the book. Chapters Four and Five work the principle through drink, gambling, marriage, education and compulsory schooling, and Mill does not make it come out tidy.
He also limits the principle himself, in Chapter One: it applies only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties, and not, he says, to backward states of society, where despotism is a legitimate mode of government. That is the most argued-over passage in the book's modern reception, and it is here as he wrote it, with no note attached. So are the attack on Christian morality, the pages on the Mormons, and the last chapter's view that a man who cannot support children should not be permitted to have them.
What he was writing against was not a king. It was opinion — the pressure of a majority that reaches further into the details of a life than any law. He is angrier than his reputation suggests, and the prosecutions for opinion in England in 1857, the Maine liquor law and the Sabbath legislation are where the temper shows. His own footnotes are kept in place. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of 1792 and Mill's own The Subjection of Women, written in 1861 and published in 1869, are both in this collection.
Chapter Two: On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion
Chapter Three: On Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being
Chapter Four: On the Limits of Society's Authority over the Individual
"The great leading principle towards which every argument in these pages directly converges is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity." Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government
To the beloved and mourned memory of her who was the inspirer and in part the author of all that is best in my writings — the friend and wife whose lofty sense of truth and right was my strongest spur, and whose approval was my chief reward — I dedicate this volume. Like everything I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, to a very inadequate degree, the priceless benefit of her revision, since some of the most important parts were held back for a more careful re-examination that they are now never to receive. If I were capable of conveying to the world half the great thoughts and noble feelings that are buried in her grave, I would be the means of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to come from anything I can write without her prompting and without the help of her almost unrivalled wisdom.
The subject of this essay is not what is called freedom of the will, so unfortunately set against the misnamed doctrine of philosophical necessity. It is civil, or social, liberty: the nature and the limits of the power that society may legitimately exercise over the individual. It is a question that is seldom stated and hardly ever discussed in general terms, but its unspoken presence shapes the practical controversies of the age, and it is likely soon to be recognised as the vital question of the future. It is so far from being new that in a certain sense it has divided mankind almost from the remotest ages; but at the stage of progress the more civilised part of the species has now reached, it appears under new conditions and needs a different and more fundamental treatment.
The struggle between liberty and authority is the most conspicuous feature of the history we know earliest, particularly the history of Greece, Rome and England. But in those times the contest was between subjects, or some class of subjects, and the government. By liberty people meant protection against the tyranny of their political rulers. The rulers were understood to stand — except in some of the popular governments of Greece — in a necessarily hostile position to the people they ruled. They were a governing One, or a governing tribe or caste, who held their authority by inheritance or conquest, who at any rate did not hold it at the pleasure of the governed, and whose supremacy men did not dare, and perhaps did not want, to contest, whatever precautions they might take against its being used oppressively. Their power was regarded as necessary, but also as extremely dangerous: a weapon they would try to use against their subjects as readily as against foreign enemies. To keep the weaker members of the community from being preyed on by countless vultures, there had to be a bird of prey stronger than the rest, commissioned to hold the others down. But since the king of the vultures would be no less set on preying on the flock than the lesser predators were, it was essential to stay permanently on guard against his beak and claws. So the aim of patriots was to set limits to the power the ruler was allowed to exercise over the community, and that limitation was what they meant by liberty.
They attempted it in two ways. First, by winning recognition of certain immunities, called political liberties or rights, which the ruler was held to be in breach of his duty if he violated, and which, if he did violate them, justified either specific resistance or general rebellion. A second and generally later device was to establish constitutional checks, by which the consent of the community, or of some body supposed to represent its interests, was made a necessary condition of some of the more important acts of the governing power. To the first kind of limitation the ruling power in most European countries was compelled to submit, more or less. It was not so with the second, and to achieve it — or, where it was already partly in place, to achieve it more completely — became everywhere the chief object of the friends of liberty. As long as mankind was content to fight one enemy with another, and to be ruled by a master on condition of being guaranteed more or less effectively against his tyranny, they carried their hopes no further than this.
In time, however, there came a point in human affairs when men stopped thinking it a law of nature that their governors should be an independent power with interests opposed to their own. It seemed much better that the various officers of the state should be their tenants or delegates, removable at their pleasure. That way alone, it seemed, could they be completely secure that the powers of government would never be used to their disadvantage. By degrees this new demand for elected and temporary rulers became the main object of the popular party's efforts wherever such a party existed, and it largely displaced the earlier effort to limit the ruler's power. As the struggle went on to make the ruling power emanate from the periodic choice of the ruled, some people began to think that too much importance had been attached to limiting the power itself. That (so it might seem) was a safeguard against rulers whose interests were habitually opposed to the people's. What was wanted now was that the rulers should be identified with the people, that their interest and will should be the nation's interest and will. The nation did not need protection against its own will. There was no danger of its tyrannising over itself. Let the rulers be genuinely answerable to it and promptly removable by it, and it could afford to trust them with power whose use it could dictate for itself. Their power was only the nation's own power, concentrated and put in a convenient form for use. This way of thinking, or rather of feeling, was common among the last generation of European liberals, and on the Continent it apparently still prevails. Anyone there who admits any limit at all on what a government may do — except in the case of governments they think ought not to exist — stands out as a brilliant exception among Continental political thinkers. A similar tone of feeling might by now have prevailed in this country too, if the circumstances that encouraged it for a time had continued unchanged.
But in political and philosophical theories, as in people, success exposes faults and weaknesses that failure might have kept out of sight. The idea that the people have no need to limit their power over themselves might seem self-evident while popular government was only dreamed about, or read about as something that had existed in the distant past. Nor was the idea necessarily disturbed by temporary aberrations like those of the French Revolution, the worst of which were the work of a usurping few, and which in any case belonged not to the permanent working of popular institutions but to a sudden convulsive revolt against monarchical and aristocratic despotism. In time, though, a democratic republic came to occupy a large part of the Earth's surface and made itself felt as one of the most powerful members of the community of nations; and elected, accountable government became subject to the observation and criticism that attend any great existing fact. It was now seen that phrases like "self-government" and "the power of the people over themselves" do not describe the true state of affairs. The "people" who exercise the power are not always the same people as those over whom it is exercised, and the "self-government" people talk about is not each man governing himself but each being governed by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, means in practice the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people — the majority, or those who succeed in getting themselves accepted as the majority. The people, in other words, may want to oppress a section of their own number, and precautions are as much needed against that as against any other abuse of power. Limiting the power of government over individuals therefore loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community — that is, to the strongest party in it. This view, which appeals equally to the intelligence of thinkers and to the inclinations of those important classes in European society whose real or supposed interests democracy threatens, has had no trouble establishing itself; and in political thought "the tyranny of the majority" is now generally counted among the evils that society has to guard against.
Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first feared, and is still commonly feared, chiefly as something exercised through the acts of public authorities. But thoughtful people saw that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, over the separate individuals who make it up — its means of tyrannising are not limited to what it can do through its political officials. Society can and does carry out its own orders; and if it issues wrong orders instead of right ones, or any orders at all about things it has no business meddling with, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression. It is not usually backed by such extreme penalties, but it leaves fewer ways out, since it penetrates far more deeply into the details of life and enslaves the soul itself. Protection against the tyranny of the magistrate is therefore not enough. There must also be protection against the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling: against society's tendency to impose its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct, by means other than legal penalties, on those who dissent from them; to hamper the development, and if possible prevent the formation, of any individuality not in tune with its ways, and to compel every character to shape itself on the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence, and to find that limit and defend it against encroachment is as indispensable to a good state of human affairs as protection against political despotism.
But though nobody is likely to dispute that proposition in general terms, the practical question — where to draw the line, how to make the right adjustment between individual independence and social control — is one on which almost everything remains to be done. Everything that makes life worth living to anyone depends on restraints being enforced on other people's actions. Some rules of conduct must therefore be imposed: by law in the first place, and by opinion in the many matters that are not fit subjects for law. What those rules should be is the chief question in human affairs; and yet, apart from a few of the most obvious cases, it is one of the questions on which least progress has been made. No two ages, and hardly any two countries, have settled it the same way, and one age's or country's decision astonishes another. Yet the people of any given age and country suspect no difficulty in it, as though it were a matter on which mankind had always agreed. The rules that hold good among themselves seem to them self-evident and self-justifying.
This nearly universal illusion is one instance of the magical influence of custom, which is not only, as the proverb says, a second nature, but is constantly mistaken for the first. Custom is all the more effective at preventing any misgiving about the rules of conduct people impose on one another because this is a subject on which nobody generally thinks it necessary to give reasons — either to other people or to himself. People are used to believing, and have been encouraged in the belief by some who aspire to be called philosophers, that on subjects of this kind their feelings are better than reasons and make reasons unnecessary. The practical principle that guides them to their opinions about the regulation of human conduct is the feeling in each person's mind that everybody ought to be required to act as he, and those he sympathises with, would like them to act. Nobody, of course, admits to himself that his standard of judgment is simply what he likes; but an opinion on a point of conduct that is not supported by reasons can only count as one person's preference, and if the reasons, when given, are merely an appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people's liking instead of one man's. To an ordinary man, though, his own preference, backed that way, is not only a perfectly satisfactory reason but generally the only one he has for any of his ideas about morality, taste or propriety that are not expressly written in his religious creed — and it is his chief guide even in interpreting that.
People's opinions about what is praiseworthy or blameworthy are accordingly affected by all the many causes that influence their wishes about other people's behaviour, and those causes are as numerous as the ones that determine their wishes on any other subject. Sometimes their reason; at other times their prejudices or superstitions; often their social feelings, and not seldom their antisocial ones — envy or jealousy, arrogance or contempt; but most commonly their hopes or fears for themselves, their legitimate or illegitimate self-interest. Wherever there is a dominant class, a large part of the country's morality comes from its class interests and its feelings of class superiority. The morality between Spartans and Helots, between planters and the people they enslaved, between princes and subjects, between nobles and commoners, between men and women, has for the most part been the creation of these class interests and feelings; and the sentiments so produced react in turn on the moral feelings of the members of the dominant class in their dealings with one another. Where, on the other hand, a formerly dominant class has lost its ascendancy, or where its ascendancy is unpopular, the prevailing moral sentiments often bear the mark of an impatient dislike of superiority.
Another great determining principle of the rules of conduct, in what people must do and what they must refrain from doing, has been mankind's servility towards the supposed likes and dislikes of their earthly masters, or of their gods. This servility, though essentially selfish, is not hypocrisy; it produces perfectly genuine feelings of abhorrence, and it made men burn magicians and heretics. Among so many baser influences the general and obvious interests of society have of course had a share, and a large one, in shaping moral sentiment — though less as a matter of reason and on their own account than as a consequence of the sympathies and antipathies that grew out of them; and sympathies and antipathies that had little or nothing to do with the interests of society have made themselves felt in establishing moralities with quite as much force.
What society likes and dislikes, or what some powerful section of it likes and dislikes, is thus the main thing that has in practice determined the rules laid down for everyone to observe on pain of law or opinion. And in general, those who have been ahead of society in thought and feeling have left this state of things unchallenged in principle, however much they may have collided with it in particular cases. They have busied themselves with asking what things society ought to like or dislike, rather than with questioning whether its likes and dislikes should be law for individuals. They preferred trying to change mankind's feelings on the particular points where they were themselves heretical, rather than making common cause with heretics in general in defence of freedom.
The one case in which the higher ground has been taken on principle and held consistently, by more than an individual here and there, is religious belief — a case instructive in many ways, and not least as a striking example of the fallibility of what is called the moral sense; for odium theologicum, the peculiar hatred a sincere bigot feels for those who believe differently, is one of the least ambiguous cases of moral feeling there is. Those who first broke the yoke of what called itself the Universal Church were in general as unwilling to allow differences of religious opinion as that church itself. But when the heat of the conflict was over without giving any party complete victory, and each church or sect was reduced to hoping it could keep the ground it already held, minorities who saw they had no chance of becoming majorities were obliged to plead with those they could not convert for permission to differ. It is on this battlefield, almost alone, that the rights of the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and society's claim to exercise authority over dissenters openly disputed. The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it has have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an absolute right, and denied outright that a human being is answerable to others for his religious belief. Yet intolerance about whatever we really care about is so natural to mankind that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been realised in practice, except where religious indifference — which dislikes having its peace disturbed by theological quarrels — has added its weight to the scale. In the minds of almost all religious people, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty of toleration is admitted with silent reservations. One person will put up with dissent about church government but not about doctrine; another can tolerate everybody short of a Catholic or a Unitarian; another, everyone who believes in revealed religion; a few extend their tolerance a little further, but stop at belief in God and a future life. Wherever the feeling of the majority is still genuine and intense, it is found to have given up very little of its claim to be obeyed.
In England, because of the peculiar circumstances of our political history, the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier than in most other countries of Europe, but the yoke of law is lighter; and there is considerable suspicion of any direct interference by the legislature or the executive with private conduct. This comes not so much from any proper regard for the independence of the individual as from the still surviving habit of looking on the government as representing an interest opposed to the public's. The majority have not yet learned to feel the government's power as their power, or its opinions as their opinions. When they do, individual liberty will probably be as exposed to invasion from the government as it already is from public opinion. As yet, though, there is a good deal of feeling ready to be roused against any attempt by the law to control individuals in matters where they have not been used to being controlled by it — and roused with very little discrimination as to whether the matter does or does not fall within the legitimate sphere of legal control, so that the feeling, salutary as it is on the whole, is perhaps as often misplaced as well founded in the particular cases where it is applied. There is in fact no recognised principle by which the rightness or wrongness of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see good to be done or an evil to be remedied, would gladly urge the government to take the business on; others would rather put up with almost any amount of social evil than add one more department of human interests to those under government control. And men range themselves on one side or the other in a particular case according to the general direction of their feelings, or according to how much they care about the particular thing the government is being asked to do, or according to whether they believe the government would or would not do it in the way they prefer — but very rarely on account of any consistent opinion about what sorts of things a government is fit to do. And it seems to me that as a result of this absence of any rule or principle, one side is at present as often wrong as the other: government interference is about equally often improperly demanded and improperly condemned.
The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual by way of compulsion and control, whether the means used are physical force in the shape of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion. The principle is this. The only end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or not do something because it will be better for him, because it will make him happier, or because in other people's opinion it would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for arguing with him, reasoning with him, persuading him, pleading with him — but not for compelling him, or for doing him any harm if he does otherwise. To justify that, the conduct he is to be deterred from must be calculated to produce harm to someone else. The only part of anyone's conduct for which he is answerable to society is the part that concerns others. In the part that merely concerns himself, his independence is, by right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
It is hardly necessary, perhaps, to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not talking about children, or about young people below the age the law may fix as adulthood. Those who are still in a state that requires them to be taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against injury from outside. For the same reason we may leave out of account those backward states of society in which the race itself may be regarded as in its infancy. The early obstacles to spontaneous progress are so great that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them, and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in using any expedient that will attain an end otherwise perhaps unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end is their improvement and the means are justified by actually achieving it. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things before the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are lucky enough to find one. But as soon as mankind have become capable of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion — a stage long since reached in all the nations we need concern ourselves with here — compulsion, whether direct or in the form of pains and penalties for non-compliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and is justifiable only for the security of others.
I should state that I forgo any advantage my argument could draw from the idea of abstract right as something independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions — utility, that is, in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of a human being as a progressive creature. Those interests, I maintain, authorise subjecting individual spontaneity to external control only in respect of the actions of each that concern other people's interests. If anyone does something harmful to others, there is a prima facie case for punishing him, by law or, where legal penalties cannot safely be applied, by general disapproval. There are also many positive acts for the benefit of others that he may rightfully be compelled to perform: to give evidence in court; to bear his fair share in the common defence, or in any other joint work necessary to the society whose protection he enjoys; and to perform certain acts of individual kindness, such as saving a fellow creature's life, or stepping in to protect the defenceless against ill-treatment — things which, whenever it is obviously a man's duty to do them, he may rightfully be held answerable to society for not doing. A person may do harm to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury. The second case, it is true, calls for a much more cautious use of compulsion than the first. Holding someone answerable for doing harm to others is the rule; holding him answerable for not preventing harm is, comparatively speaking, the exception. Yet there are plenty of cases clear enough and serious enough to justify the exception. In everything that concerns his external relations, the individual is by right answerable to those whose interests are involved, and if need be to society as their protector. There are often good reasons for not holding him to that responsibility, but they must arise from the special circumstances of the case: either because it is the kind of case in which he is on the whole likely to act better when left to his own discretion than when controlled in any way society has it in its power to control him, or because the attempt to control him would produce other evils greater than the ones it would prevent. Where reasons like these rule out enforcing responsibility, the agent's own conscience should step into the vacant judgment seat and protect the interests of others that have no external protection, judging himself all the more strictly because the case does not allow him to be made accountable to the judgment of his fellow creatures.
But there is a sphere of action in which society, as distinct from the individual, has at most an indirect interest: the whole of that part of a person's life and conduct which affects only himself, or which, if it affects others, does so only with their free, voluntary and undeceived consent and participation. When I say only himself, I mean directly and in the first instance; for whatever affects a man may affect others through him, and the objection that might be based on that possibility will be considered later. This, then, is the proper region of human liberty. It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness: liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense, liberty of thought and feeling, absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral or theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to the part of a person's conduct that concerns other people; but as it is almost as important as liberty of thought itself, and rests largely on the same reasons, it is inseparable from it in practice. Second, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits: of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like and taking the consequences, without being obstructed by our fellow creatures so long as what we do does no harm to them, even if they think our conduct foolish, perverse or wrong. Third, from this liberty of each individual follows, within the same limits, the liberty of individuals to combine: freedom to unite for any purpose that does no harm to others, the people combining being supposed to be adults, and neither forced nor deceived.
No society in which these liberties are not on the whole respected is free, whatever its form of government; and none is completely free in which they do not exist absolute and unqualified. The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not try to deprive others of theirs, or obstruct their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily or mental and spiritual. Mankind gain more by letting each other live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
Though this doctrine is anything but new, and may strike some people as a truism, there is no doctrine that stands more directly opposed to the general tendency of existing opinion and practice. Society has spent quite as much effort in trying (according to its lights) to compel people to conform to its notions of personal excellence as of social excellence. The ancient commonwealths thought themselves entitled to regulate every part of private conduct by public authority, and the ancient philosophers approved, on the ground that the state had a deep interest in the whole bodily and mental discipline of every one of its citizens. That way of thinking may have been defensible in small republics surrounded by powerful enemies, in constant danger of being overthrown by foreign attack or internal upheaval, and to which even a short spell of relaxed energy and self-command might so easily be fatal that they could not afford to wait for the wholesome long-term effects of freedom. In the modern world, the greater size of political communities and above all the separation of spiritual from temporal authority — which put the direction of men's consciences in other hands than those that controlled their worldly affairs — prevented so great an interference by law in the details of private life. But the machinery of moral repression has been driven harder against departures from the reigning opinion in self-regarding matters than even in social ones; religion, the most powerful of the elements that have gone into the making of moral feeling, having almost always been governed either by the ambition of a hierarchy seeking control over every department of human conduct, or by the spirit of Puritanism. And some of the modern reformers who have set themselves most strongly against the religions of the past have been no way behind either churches or sects in asserting the right of spiritual domination — Monsieur Comte in particular, whose social system, as unfolded in his Traité de Politique Positive, aims at establishing (though by moral rather than legal machinery) a despotism of society over the individual surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal of the strictest disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers.
Quite apart from the peculiar doctrines of individual thinkers, there is in the world at large a growing inclination to stretch the powers of society over the individual unduly, both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation. And since the tendency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society and diminish the power of the individual, this encroachment is not one of the evils that tend to disappear of themselves — on the contrary, it grows steadily more formidable. Mankind's disposition, whether as rulers or as fellow citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others is so energetically supported by some of the best and some of the worst feelings human nature is subject to, that it is hardly ever kept in check by anything but lack of power; and as the power is not declining but growing, we must expect, in the present state of the world, to see the mischief increase, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against it.
It will suit the argument if, instead of entering at once on the general thesis, we confine ourselves in the first place to a single branch of it, on which the principle stated here is already recognised by current opinion, if not fully, then up to a point. That branch is liberty of thought — from which it is impossible to separate the related liberty of speaking and writing. Although these liberties do to a considerable extent form part of the political morality of every country that professes religious toleration and free institutions, the grounds they rest on, both philosophical and practical, are perhaps not as familiar to the general mind, nor as thoroughly appreciated even by many leaders of opinion, as one might have expected. Those grounds, when properly understood, apply much more widely than to this one division of the subject, and a thorough consideration of this part of the question will prove the best introduction to the rest. Those to whom nothing I am about to say will be new may therefore excuse me, I hope, if on a subject that has now been discussed so often for three centuries I venture on one discussion more.
The time has gone by, it is to be hoped, when anyone would need to defend "the liberty of the press" as one of the safeguards against corrupt or tyrannical government. No argument, we may suppose, is needed now against letting a legislature or an executive whose interests are not the people's prescribe opinions to them and decide what doctrines or arguments they are to be allowed to hear. Besides, this side of the question has been put so often and so triumphantly by earlier writers that it need not be dwelt on here. English law on the subject of the press is as servile today as it was under the Tudors, but there is little danger of its actually being enforced against political discussion, except during some temporary panic when fear of insurrection drives ministers and judges out of their senses; and generally speaking, in constitutional countries there is no reason to fear that the government, whether fully answerable to the people or not, will often try to control the expression of opinion — except where in doing so it makes itself the mouthpiece of the general intolerance of the public. Let us suppose, then, that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of using coercive power except in agreement with what it takes to be their voice. Even so, I deny that the people have any right to use such coercion, either themselves or through their government. The power is illegitimate in itself. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as harmful, or more harmful, when used in accordance with public opinion as when used against it. If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. If an opinion were a personal possession of no value to anyone but its owner, and being obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted on a few people or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it robs the human race — posterity as much as the present generation, and those who disagree with the opinion still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the chance to exchange error for truth; if it is wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit: the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth that is produced by its collision with error.
Footnote: These words had hardly been written when, as if to give them an emphatic contradiction, the Government Press Prosecutions of 1858 took place. That ill-judged interference with the liberty of public discussion has not, however, led me to alter a single word in the text, nor has it in the least weakened my conviction that, moments of panic aside, the era of pains and penalties for political discussion has passed away in this country. For in the first place the prosecutions were not persisted in, and in the second they were never, properly speaking, political prosecutions. The offence charged was not criticising institutions, or the acts or persons of rulers, but circulating what was held to be an immoral doctrine, the lawfulness of tyrannicide. If the arguments of this chapter have any validity, there ought to be the fullest liberty to profess and discuss, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine at all, however immoral it may be thought. It would therefore be irrelevant and out of place to examine here whether the doctrine of tyrannicide deserves that name. I shall content myself with saying that the subject has at all times been one of the open questions of morals; that the act of a private citizen in striking down a criminal who, by raising himself above the law, has put himself beyond the reach of legal punishment or control, has been accounted by whole nations, and by some of the best and wisest of men, not a crime but an act of exalted virtue; and that, right or wrong, it is not of the nature of assassination but of civil war. As such, I hold that instigating it in a specific case may properly be punished, but only if an overt act has followed, and if at least a probable connection can be established between the act and the instigation. And even then it is not a foreign government but the very government attacked that alone, in the exercise of self-defence, can legitimately punish attacks on its own existence.
We must consider these two hypotheses separately, since each has its own distinct branch of the argument. We can never be sure that the opinion we are trying to stifle is a false one; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
First, then: the opinion someone is trying to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who want to suppress it deny its truth, of course; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to settle the question for all mankind and shut every other person out from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion because they are sure it is false is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, which is none the worse for being common.
Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact that they are fallible carries nothing like the weight in their practical judgment that is always granted to it in theory. Everyone knows perfectly well that he is fallible, but few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or to entertain the idea that some opinion they feel very certain of may be one of the examples of the error they admit they are liable to. Absolute princes, and others who are used to unlimited deference, generally feel this complete confidence in their own opinions on nearly every subject. People more fortunately placed, who sometimes hear their opinions disputed and are not entirely unused to being set right when they are wrong, place the same unbounded reliance only on those of their opinions that are shared by everyone around them, or by the people they habitually defer to; for the less confidence a man has in his own solitary judgment, the more implicitly he usually trusts in the infallibility of "the world" in general. And the world, to each individual, means the part of it he comes into contact with: his party, his sect, his church, his class in society. A man may be called almost liberal and broad-minded by comparison if it means anything so comprehensive as his own country or his own age. Nor is his faith in this collective authority at all shaken by his knowing that other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes and parties have thought, and still think, the exact opposite. He hands over to his own world the responsibility of being right against the dissenting worlds of other people, and it never troubles him that it was mere accident that decided which of these many worlds he relies on — that the same causes which made him a Churchman in London would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Peking. Yet it is as evident in itself as any amount of argument could make it that ages are no more infallible than individuals, since every age has held many opinions that later ages have thought not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions now general will be rejected by future ages as it is that many once general are rejected by the present one.
The objection likely to be made to this argument would probably run something like this. There is no greater assumption of infallibility in forbidding the spread of error than in anything else that is done by public authority on its own judgment and responsibility. Judgment is given to men so that they may use it. Are they to be told they should not use it at all, because it can be used wrongly? To prohibit what they think harmful is not to claim exemption from error but to fulfil the duty that lies on them, fallible as they are, of acting on their conscientious conviction. If we were never to act on our opinions because those opinions might be wrong, we should leave all our interests uncared for and all our duties undone. An objection that applies to all conduct can be no valid objection to any conduct in particular. It is the duty of governments, and of individuals, to form the truest opinions they can, to form them carefully, and never to impose them on others unless they are quite sure of being right. But when they are sure (such reasoners may say), it is not conscientiousness but cowardice to shrink from acting on their opinions, and to let doctrines they honestly think dangerous to the welfare of mankind, in this life or another, be scattered abroad unchecked, merely because other people in less enlightened times persecuted opinions now believed to be true. Let us take care, it may be said, not to make the same mistake — but governments and nations have made mistakes in other things too, which nobody denies are fit subjects for the exercise of authority: they have laid on bad taxes and made unjust wars. Ought we therefore to lay on no taxes, and, under whatever provocation, make no wars? Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance enough for the purposes of human life. We may, and must, assume our opinion to be true as a guide to our own conduct; and we are assuming no more than that when we forbid bad men to corrupt society by spreading opinions we regard as false and harmful.
My answer is that we are assuming very much more. There is all the difference in the world between presuming an opinion to be true because it has not been refuted although every opportunity of contesting it has been open, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting it to be refuted. Complete liberty to contradict and disprove our opinion is the very thing that entitles us to assume its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.
When we look at the history of opinion, or at the ordinary conduct of human life, what is it that keeps both of them from being worse than they are? Certainly not the inherent force of human understanding: on any matter that is not self-evident there are ninety-nine people wholly incapable of judging it for every one who is capable, and the capacity of the hundredth is only comparative, since most of the eminent men of every past generation held many opinions now known to be mistaken, and did or approved numerous things nobody would defend today. Why is it, then, that on the whole rational opinions and rational conduct predominate among mankind? If they really do predominate — and they must, unless human affairs are now, and always have been, in a nearly desperate state — it is owing to one quality of the human mind, the source of everything respectable in man as an intellectual or a moral being: that his errors can be corrected. He is capable of putting his mistakes right by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how the experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually give way to fact and argument; but facts and arguments must be brought before the mind before they can have any effect on it. Very few facts can tell their own story without comment to bring out their meaning. Since the whole strength and value of human judgment rests on the one property that it can be set right when it is wrong, we can rely on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly to hand. Take any person whose judgment really deserves confidence: how has it come to deserve it? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and his conduct. Because it has been his habit to listen to everything that could be said against him, to profit by whatever was just in it, and to set out for himself, and on occasion for others, why what was fallacious was fallacious. Because he has felt that the only way a human being can come near to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by people of every variety of opinion, and studying every way it can be looked at by every cast of mind. No wise man ever got his wisdom in any other way, and it is not in the nature of human intelligence to become wise by any other means. The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by comparing it with other people's, so far from causing doubt and hesitation when he comes to act on it, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it. Knowing everything that can obviously be said against him, and having taken up his position against all comers — knowing that he has looked for objections and difficulties instead of avoiding them, and has shut out no light that could be thrown on the subject from any quarter — he has a right to think his judgment better than that of any person, or any multitude, who has not gone through the same process.
It is not asking too much that what the wisest of mankind, the people best entitled to trust their own judgment, find necessary before they may rely on it, should be submitted to by that mixed collection of a few wise and many foolish individuals called the public. The most intolerant of churches, the Roman Catholic Church, admits and listens patiently to a "devil's advocate" even at the canonisation of a saint. The holiest of men, it seems, cannot be admitted to posthumous honours until everything the devil could say against him has been heard and weighed. If even Newton's philosophy were not open to question, mankind could not feel as completely assured of its truth as they now do. The beliefs we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not taken up, or is taken up and the attempt fails, we are still far from certainty; but we have done the best the present state of human reason allows, and have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us. If the lists are kept open we may hope that if there is a better truth it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and meanwhile we may rely on having come as near the truth as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty a fallible being can attain, and this is the only way of attaining it.
It is strange that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion but object to their being "pushed to an extreme", not seeing that unless the reasons are good in an extreme case, they are not good in any case. It is strange that they should imagine they are not assuming infallibility when they allow that there should be free discussion of every subject that could possibly be doubtful, but hold that some particular principle or doctrine should not be open to question because it is so certain — that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call a proposition certain while there is anyone who would deny its certainty if he were allowed to, but who is not allowed to, is to assume that we and those who agree with us are the judges of certainty, and judges who need not hear the other side.
In the present age — which has been described as "destitute of faith, but terrified at scepticism", in which people feel sure not so much that their opinions are true as that they would not know what to do without them — the claim that an opinion should be protected from public attack rests not so much on its truth as on its importance to society. There are, we are told, certain beliefs so useful, not to say indispensable, to well-being that it is as much the duty of governments to uphold them as to protect any other of the interests of society. In a case of such necessity, and so squarely in the line of their duty, something short of infallibility may (it is argued) warrant governments, and even oblige them, to act on their own opinion when it is confirmed by the general opinion of mankind. It is also often argued, and still more often thought, that none but bad men would want to weaken these wholesome beliefs, and that there can be nothing wrong in restraining bad men and prohibiting what only such men would wish to do. This way of thinking makes the justification of restraints on discussion a question not of the truth of doctrines but of their usefulness, and flatters itself that it thereby escapes the responsibility of claiming to be an infallible judge of opinions. But those who satisfy themselves this way do not see that the assumption of infallibility has merely been shifted from one point to another. The usefulness of an opinion is itself a matter of opinion — as disputable, as open to discussion, and as much in need of discussion as the opinion itself. There is just as much need of an infallible judge of opinions to decide that an opinion is harmful as to decide that it is false, unless the condemned opinion has full opportunity to defend itself. And it will not do to say that the heretic may be allowed to argue for the usefulness or harmlessness of his opinion but forbidden to argue for its truth. The truth of an opinion is part of its usefulness. If we want to know whether it is desirable that a proposition should be believed, is it possible to leave out of account whether or not it is true? In the opinion not of bad men but of the best men, no belief that is contrary to truth can be really useful; and can you stop such men from urging that plea when they are charged with wickedness for denying some doctrine they are told is useful but believe to be false? Those on the side of received opinions never fail to take every possible advantage of this plea. You do not find them handling the question of usefulness as though it could be entirely separated from the question of truth; on the contrary, it is above all because their doctrine is "the truth" that knowing it or believing it is held to be so indispensable. There can be no fair discussion of the question of usefulness when so vital an argument may be used on one side but not on the other. And in point of fact, where law or public feeling does not allow the truth of an opinion to be disputed, it is just as little willing to allow its usefulness to be denied. The most it will allow is some slight qualifying of its absolute necessity, or of the positive guilt of rejecting it.
To bring out more fully the mischief of refusing a hearing to opinions because we have condemned them in our own judgment, it will be as well to fix the discussion on a concrete case; and I choose, by preference, the cases least favourable to me — the ones where the argument against freedom of opinion is thought strongest, both on the score of truth and on that of usefulness. Let the opinions attacked be belief in God and in a future life, or any of the commonly received doctrines of morality. To fight the battle on such ground gives a great advantage to an unfair opponent, since he is sure to say (and many who have no wish to be unfair will say it inwardly): Are these the doctrines you do not think certain enough to be taken under the protection of the law? Is belief in God one of the opinions that you hold it an assumption of infallibility to feel sure of? But I must be allowed to point out that it is not feeling sure of a doctrine, whatever it may be, that I call an assumption of infallibility. It is undertaking to decide the question for others, without letting them hear what can be said on the other side. And I denounce and condemn that claim no less when it is put forward on the side of my own most solemn convictions. However positive anyone's belief may be — not only in the falsity of an opinion but in its pernicious consequences, and not only in its pernicious consequences but (to use expressions I altogether condemn) in its immorality and impiety — if, acting on that private judgment, even backed by the public judgment of his country or his contemporaries, he prevents the opinion from being heard in its own defence, he assumes infallibility. And so far from the assumption being less objectionable or less dangerous because the opinion is called immoral or impious, that is the case of all others in which it is most fatal. These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes that fill posterity with astonishment and horror. It is among such cases that we find the instances memorable in history where the arm of the law has been used to root out the best men and the noblest doctrines — with deplorable success as far as the men were concerned, though some of the doctrines have survived to be invoked, as if in mockery, in defence of the same treatment of those who dissent from them, or from their received interpretation.
Mankind can hardly be reminded too often that there was once a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and public opinion of his time there took place a memorable collision. Born in an age and a country abounding in individual greatness, he was handed down to us by those who knew both him and the age best as the most virtuous man in it; while we know him as the head and prototype of all later teachers of virtue, the source equally of Plato's lofty inspiration and Aristotle's judicious utilitarianism — i maëstri di color che sanno, the masters of those who know, the two headsprings of ethical philosophy as of all other. This acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have lived since, whose fame is still growing after more than two thousand years and all but outweighs the whole remainder of the names that make his native city illustrious, was put to death by his countrymen after a judicial conviction for impiety and immorality. Impiety, in denying the gods the state recognised — indeed his accuser claimed (see the Apologia) that he believed in no gods at all. Immorality, in being by his doctrines and his teaching a "corrupter of youth". Of these charges the tribunal, there is every reason to believe, honestly found him guilty, and condemned the man who of all then born had probably deserved best of mankind to be put to death as a criminal.
To pass from this to the only other instance of judicial iniquity whose mention, after the condemnation of Socrates, would not be an anticlimax: the event that took place on Calvary rather more than eighteen hundred years ago. The man who left on the memory of those who witnessed his life and his conversation such an impression of moral grandeur that eighteen centuries since have worshipped him as the Almighty in person, was ignominiously put to death — as what? As a blasphemer. Men did not merely mistake their benefactor; they mistook him for the exact opposite of what he was, and treated him as that monster of impiety which they themselves are now held to have been for their treatment of him. The feelings with which mankind now regard these lamentable transactions, especially the later of the two, make them extremely unjust in their judgment of the unhappy men who took part in them. To all appearance these were not bad men — not worse than men commonly are, rather the contrary: men who possessed in full measure, or a little more than full measure, the religious, moral and patriotic feelings of their time and their people; exactly the sort of men who in all times, our own included, have every chance of going through life blameless and respected. The high priest who tore his garments when the words were spoken that, by every idea of his country, constituted the blackest guilt, was in all probability quite as sincere in his horror and indignation as most respectable and pious men now are in the religious and moral sentiments they profess; and most of those who now shudder at his conduct would, if they had lived in his time and been born Jews, have acted exactly as he did. Orthodox Christians who are tempted to think that those who stoned the first martyrs to death must have been worse men than they are themselves ought to remember that one of those persecutors was Saint Paul.
Let us add one more example, the most striking of all if the impressiveness of an error is measured by the wisdom and virtue of the man who falls into it. If anyone in possession of power ever had grounds for thinking himself the best and most enlightened of his contemporaries, it was the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Absolute monarch of the whole civilised world, he preserved all his life not only the most unblemished justice but — what was less to be expected from his Stoic upbringing — the tenderest heart. The few failings attributed to him were all on the side of indulgence, while his writings, the highest ethical product of the ancient mind, differ scarcely at all, if they differ, from the most characteristic teachings of Christ. This man, a better Christian in everything but the dogmatic sense of the word than almost any of the ostensibly Christian sovereigns who have reigned since, persecuted Christianity. Placed at the summit of everything humanity had so far achieved, with an open and unfettered intellect, and a character that led him of his own accord to embody the Christian ideal in his moral writings, he still failed to see that Christianity was going to be a good and not an evil to the world whose welfare he felt so deeply. He knew that the society of his day was in a deplorable state. But such as it was, he saw, or thought he saw, that it was held together and kept from getting worse by belief in and reverence for the received gods. As a ruler of mankind he thought it his duty not to let society fall to pieces, and he could not see how, if its existing ties were removed, any others could be formed to knit it together again. The new religion openly aimed at dissolving those ties; so unless it was his duty to adopt that religion, it seemed to be his duty to put it down. And since the theology of Christianity did not appear to him true or of divine origin; since this strange history of a crucified God was not credible to him, and since a system that professed to rest entirely on a foundation so wholly unbelievable to him could not be foreseen by him to be the renewing force that, after every qualification, it has in fact proved — the gentlest and most amiable of philosophers and rulers, under a solemn sense of duty, authorised the persecution of Christianity. To my mind this is one of the most tragic facts in all history. It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under Marcus Aurelius instead of Constantine. But it would be equally unjust to him and false to the truth to deny that no plea which can be urged for punishing anti-Christian teaching was unavailable to Marcus Aurelius for punishing, as he did, the spread of Christianity. No Christian believes more firmly that atheism is false and tends to dissolve society than Marcus Aurelius believed the same things of Christianity — he who of all men then living might have been thought the most capable of appreciating it. Unless someone who approves of punishing the spread of opinions flatters himself that he is a wiser and better man than Marcus Aurelius, more deeply versed in the wisdom of his time and more raised above it in intellect, more earnest in his search for truth or more single-minded in his devotion to it once found, let him abstain from that assumption of the joint infallibility of himself and the multitude which the great Antoninus made with such unfortunate results.
Aware that the use of punishment to restrain irreligious opinions cannot be defended by any argument that would not also justify Marcus Antoninus, the enemies of religious freedom, when hard pressed, occasionally accept the consequence and say, with Dr Johnson, that the persecutors of Christianity were in the right; that persecution is an ordeal truth ought to pass through, and always does pass through successfully, legal penalties being in the end powerless against truth, though sometimes usefully effective against mischievous errors. This form of the argument for religious intolerance is remarkable enough not to be passed over without notice.
A theory that maintains truth may justifiably be persecuted because persecution cannot possibly do it any harm cannot be accused of being deliberately hostile to the reception of new truths; but we cannot praise the generosity of its dealings with the people to whom mankind owes them. To reveal to the world something that deeply concerns it and that it did not know before, to prove to it that it has been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render his fellow creatures; and in certain cases — the early Christians, the Reformers — those who think with Dr Johnson believe it to have been the most precious gift that could be given to mankind. That the authors of such splendid benefits should be repaid with martyrdom, that their reward should be to be treated as the vilest of criminals, is not on this theory a deplorable error and misfortune for humanity to mourn in sackcloth and ashes, but the normal and justifiable state of things. On this doctrine, the man who puts forward a new truth should stand as, in the legislation of the Locrians, the proposer of a new law had to stand: with a rope round his neck, to be tightened on the spot if the public assembly did not adopt his proposal there and then on hearing his reasons. People who defend this way of treating benefactors can hardly be supposed to set much value on the benefit; and I believe this view of the matter is mostly confined to the sort of person who thinks new truths may have been desirable once, but that we have had enough of them now.
But in fact the saying that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods that men repeat after one another until they pass into commonplaces, and that all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If it is not suppressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigensians were put down. The Waldensians were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down. Even after Luther's time, wherever persecution was persisted in it succeeded. In Spain, Italy, Flanders and the Austrian empire, Protestantism was rooted out, and most likely would have been in England too if Queen Mary had lived, or if Queen Elizabeth had died. Persecution has always succeeded, except where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectively persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been wiped out in the Roman Empire. It spread and became dominant because the persecutions were only occasional, lasted a short time, and were separated by long intervals in which it could spread almost undisturbed. It is idle sentimentality to suppose that truth, merely because it is truth, has some inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the spread of either. The real advantage truth has is this: when an opinion is true, it may be put out once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be people to rediscover it, until one of its reappearances falls at a time when favourable circumstances let it escape persecution long enough to gain the strength to survive every later attempt to suppress it.
It will be said that we do not now put to death the introducers of new opinions; that we are not like our fathers who killed the prophets — we even build tombs for them. It is true we no longer put heretics to death, and the amount of punishment modern feeling would probably tolerate, even against the most objectionable opinions, is not enough to stamp them out. But let us not flatter ourselves that we are yet clear of the stain even of legal persecution. Penalties for opinion, or at least for expressing it, still exist in law, and their enforcement is not, even in these times, so unheard-of as to make it at all incredible that they may some day be revived in full force. In 1857, at the summer assizes for the county of Cornwall, an unfortunate man said to be of unexceptionable conduct in every relation of life was sentenced to twenty-one months' imprisonment for saying, and writing on a gate, some offensive words about Christianity. Within a month of the same date, at the Old Bailey, two people were rejected as jurymen on two separate occasions, and one of them was grossly insulted by the judge and by one of the counsel, because they honestly declared that they had no theological belief; and a third, a foreigner, was for the same reason denied justice against a thief. This refusal of redress was made under the legal doctrine that nobody may give evidence in a court of justice who does not profess belief in a God — any god will do — and in a future state. That amounts to declaring such people outlaws, shut out from the protection of the courts: they may not only be robbed or assaulted with impunity if nobody is present but themselves or people of similar opinions, but anyone else may be robbed or assaulted with impunity if proving the fact depends on their evidence. The assumption behind this is that the oath of a person who does not believe in a future state is worthless — a proposition that shows great ignorance of history in those who accept it, since it is historically true that a large proportion of unbelievers in every age have been people of distinguished integrity and honour; and it would be maintained by nobody who had the least idea how many of the people in highest repute with the world, for their virtues as much as for their accomplishments, are well known, at least to their friends, to be unbelievers. The rule is suicidal besides, and cuts away its own foundation. On the pretence that atheists must be liars, it admits the testimony of every atheist willing to lie and rejects only those who face public disgrace by confessing a detested creed rather than swear to a falsehood. A rule so self-convicted of absurdity as far as its professed purpose goes can only be kept in force as a badge of hatred, a relic of persecution — a persecution with the peculiarity that the qualification for undergoing it is being clearly proved not to deserve it. The rule, and the theory behind it, are hardly less insulting to believers than to unbelievers. For if a man who does not believe in a future state necessarily lies, it follows that those who do believe are only kept from lying, if they are kept from it, by the fear of hell. We will not do the authors and supporters of the rule the injury of supposing that the conception they have formed of Christian virtue is drawn from their own experience.
Footnote: Thomas Pooley, Bodmin Assizes, July 31, 1857. In December following he received a free pardon from the Crown.
Footnote: George Jacob Holyoake, August 17, 1857; Edward Truelove, July, 1857.
Footnote: Baron de Gleichen, Marlborough-Street Police Court, August 4, 1857.
These, it is true, are only rags and remnants of persecution, and may be thought not so much a sign of the wish to persecute as an example of that very frequent weakness of English minds which makes them take a preposterous pleasure in asserting a bad principle when they are no longer bad enough to want to put it into practice. But unhappily there is nothing in the state of the public mind to guarantee that the suspension of worse forms of legal persecution, which has now lasted about a generation, will continue. In this age the quiet surface of routine is as often disturbed by attempts to revive old evils as to introduce new benefits. What is boasted of at present as the revival of religion is always, in narrow and uncultivated minds, at least as much a revival of bigotry; and where there is that strong permanent leaven of intolerance in a people's feelings which lives at all times in the middle classes of this country, it takes very little to provoke them into actively persecuting people they have never stopped thinking proper objects of persecution. For it is this — the opinions men hold and the feelings they cherish about those who disown the beliefs they think important — that makes this country not a place of mental freedom. For a long time now the chief mischief of the legal penalties has been that they strengthen the social stigma. It is the stigma that is really effective, and so effective that professing opinions under society's ban is much less common in England than professing opinions that risk judicial punishment is in many other countries. For everyone except those whose money makes them independent of other people's goodwill, opinion on this subject is as effective as law: men might as well be imprisoned as shut out from the means of earning their bread. Those whose bread is already secure, and who want no favours from men in power, or from bodies of men, or from the public, have nothing to fear from openly avowing any opinion but being ill thought of and ill spoken of — and it ought not to take a very heroic character to bear that. There is no room for any appeal ad misericordiam, any plea for pity, on behalf of such people. But though we no longer inflict as much harm on those who think differently from us as we used to, it may be that we do ourselves as much harm as ever by the way we treat them. Socrates was put to death, but Socratic philosophy rose like the sun in the sky and spread its light over the whole intellectual firmament. Christians were thrown to the lions, but the Christian church grew into a stately spreading tree, overtopping the older and less vigorous growths and stifling them in its shade. Our merely social intolerance kills nobody and roots out no opinions, but it induces men to disguise them, or to give up any active effort to spread them. With us, heretical opinions do not perceptibly gain ground, or even lose it, from decade to decade or generation to generation; they never blaze out far and wide, but go on smouldering in the narrow circles of thinking and studious people among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true light or a false one.
And so a state of things is kept up that is very satisfactory to some minds, because without the unpleasant business of fining or imprisoning anybody it keeps every prevailing opinion outwardly undisturbed, while not absolutely forbidding the use of reason by dissenters afflicted with the disease of thought. A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world and keeping everything in it going on very much as it does already. But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind. A state of things in which a large proportion of the most active and inquiring intellects find it advisable to keep the real principles and grounds of their convictions to themselves, and to fit as much of their own conclusions as they can, in what they say publicly, to premises they have inwardly abandoned — such a state cannot produce the open, fearless characters and the logical, consistent intellects that once adorned the thinking world. The sort of men to be looked for under it are either mere conformers to commonplace or timeservers for truth, whose arguments on every great subject are meant for their hearers and are not the arguments that convinced themselves. Those who avoid this alternative do it by narrowing their thoughts and their interests to matters that can be discussed without venturing into the region of principles — that is, to small practical questions, which would come right of themselves if only the minds of mankind were strengthened and enlarged, and which will never be effectively put right until they are; while the very thing that would strengthen and enlarge men's minds, free and daring speculation on the highest subjects, is given up.
Footnote: Ample warning may be drawn from the large infusion of the persecutor's passions which mingled with the general display of the worst parts of our national character on the occasion of the Sepoy insurrection. The ravings of fanatics or charlatans from the pulpit may be unworthy of notice; but the heads of the Evangelical party have announced as their principle, for the government of Hindus and Muslims, that no schools be supported by public money in which the Bible is not taught, and by necessary consequence that no public employment be given to any but real or pretended Christians. An Undersecretary of State, in a speech delivered to his constituents on the 12th of November, 1857, is reported to have said: "Toleration of their faith" (the faith of a hundred millions of British subjects), "the superstition which they called religion, by the British Government, had had the effect of retarding the ascendency of the British name, and preventing the salutary growth of Christianity. … Toleration was the great cornerstone of the religious liberties of this country; but do not let them abuse that precious word toleration. As he understood it, it meant the complete liberty to all, freedom of worship, among Christians, who worshipped upon the same foundation. It meant toleration of all sects and denominations of Christians who believed in the one mediation." I want to draw attention to the fact that a man who has been thought fit to fill a high office in the government of this country, under a liberal Ministry, maintains the doctrine that all who do not believe in the divinity of Christ are beyond the pale of toleration. Who, after this imbecile display, can indulge the illusion that religious persecution has passed away, never to return?
Those who see no evil in this reticence on the part of heretics should consider, first, that because of it there is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical opinions, and that those of them which could not survive such a discussion, though they may be kept from spreading, do not disappear. But it is not the minds of the heretics that suffer most from the ban placed on every inquiry that does not end in orthodox conclusions. The greatest harm is done to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped and their reason cowed by the fear of heresy. Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects joined to timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought for fear it might land them in something that could be considered irreligious or immoral? Among them we may occasionally see a man of deep conscientiousness and subtle, refined understanding who spends his life quibbling with an intellect he cannot silence, and exhausts the resources of ingenuity in trying to reconcile the promptings of his conscience and his reason with orthodoxy — which perhaps in the end he never manages to do. Nobody can be a great thinker who does not recognise that as a thinker his first duty is to follow his intellect wherever it leads. Truth gains more even by the errors of someone who, with proper study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who hold them only because they do not allow themselves to think.
Not that freedom of thought is required solely, or even chiefly, to produce great thinkers. On the contrary, it is as much and even more indispensable to enable average human beings to reach the mental stature they are capable of. There have been, and may be again, great individual thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, and never will be, an intellectually active people in such an atmosphere. Where a people has made a temporary approach to such a character, it has been because the dread of unorthodox speculation was for a time suspended. Where there is a tacit agreement that principles are not to be disputed, where discussion of the greatest questions that can occupy humanity is considered closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high level of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable. Never, when controversy avoided the subjects large and important enough to kindle enthusiasm, was the mind of a people stirred to its foundations and the impulse given that raised even people of the most ordinary intellect to something of the dignity of thinking beings. We have had one example of this in the condition of Europe in the years just after the Reformation; another, confined to the Continent and to a more cultivated class, in the speculative movement of the second half of the eighteenth century; and a third, of still shorter duration, in the intellectual ferment of Germany in the age of Goethe and Fichte. These periods differed widely in the particular opinions they developed, but they were alike in this: in all three the yoke of authority was broken. In each an old mental despotism had been thrown off and no new one had yet taken its place. The impulse given at these three periods has made Europe what it is now. Every single improvement that has taken place in the human mind or in institutions can be traced distinctly to one or another of them. Appearances have for some time suggested that all three impulses are nearly spent, and we can expect no fresh start until we assert our mental freedom again.
Let us now pass to the second division of the argument. Dropping the supposition that any received opinion may be false, let us assume they are all true, and examine the worth of the way they are likely to be held when their truth is not freely and openly canvassed. However unwillingly a person with a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion is false, he ought to be moved by this consideration: that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.
There is a class of people — happily not quite so numerous as they used to be — who think it enough if a person assents without doubting to what they think true, even though he has no knowledge at all of the grounds of the opinion and could not defend it tenably against the most superficial objection. Such people, once they can get their creed taught on authority, naturally think that no good and some harm comes of allowing it to be questioned. Where their influence prevails, they make it nearly impossible for the received opinion to be rejected wisely and thoughtfully, though it may still be rejected rashly and ignorantly; for shutting out discussion entirely is seldom possible, and once it gets in, beliefs not grounded in conviction tend to give way before the slightest semblance of an argument. Setting that possibility aside, though — supposing that the true opinion stays in the mind, but stays as a prejudice, a belief independent of argument and impervious to it — this is not the way truth ought to be held by a rational being. This is not knowing the truth. Truth held this way is only one superstition the more, clinging by accident to the words that state a truth.
If the intellect and judgment of mankind ought to be cultivated — a thing Protestants at least do not deny — on what can these faculties be more suitably exercised than on the matters that concern a person so much that he is thought bound to have opinions about them? If cultivating the understanding consists in one thing more than another, it is surely in learning the grounds of one's own opinions. Whatever people believe on subjects where it is of the first importance to believe rightly, they ought to be able to defend against at least the common objections. But somebody may say: "Then let them be taught the grounds of their opinions. It does not follow that opinions must be merely parroted because they are never heard contradicted. People who learn geometry do not simply commit the theorems to memory; they understand and learn the proofs as well, and it would be absurd to say that they remain ignorant of the grounds of geometrical truths because they never hear anyone deny them and try to disprove them." Undoubtedly; and such teaching is sufficient on a subject like mathematics, where there is nothing at all to be said on the wrong side of the question. The peculiarity of the evidence for mathematical truths is that all the argument is on one side. There are no objections, and no answers to objections. But on every subject where a difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends on a balance struck between two sets of conflicting reasons. Even in natural philosophy there is always some other possible explanation of the same facts — a geocentric theory instead of a heliocentric one, phlogiston instead of oxygen — and it has to be shown why that other theory cannot be the true one; and until this is shown, and until we know how it is shown, we do not understand the grounds of our opinion. But when we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated — to morals, religion, politics, social relations and the business of life — three quarters of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in dispelling the appearances that favour some different opinion. The greatest orator of antiquity but one has left it on record that he always studied his opponent's case with as much intensity as his own, if not more. What Cicero practised as the means of success in court needs to be imitated by everyone who studies any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and nobody may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the other side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment; and unless he is content with that, he is either led by authority or adopts, as most of the world does, the side he feels most inclined to. Nor is it enough that he should hear his opponents' arguments from his own teachers, presented as the teachers state them and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do the arguments justice, or to bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from people who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to meet and dispose of, or he will never really take possession of the portion of truth that meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of the people we call educated are in this condition, even those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but for anything they know it might be false. They have never put themselves in the mental position of those who think differently, and considered what such people might have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine they themselves profess. They do not know the parts of it that explain and justify the rest; the considerations that show how a fact which seems to conflict with another can be reconciled with it, or why, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other should be preferred. The whole part of the truth that tips the scale and settles the judgment of a fully informed mind is unknown to them; and it is never really known except to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides and tried to see the reasons of each in the strongest light. This discipline is so essential to a real understanding of moral and human subjects that if opponents of any important truth do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up.
To weaken the force of these considerations, an enemy of free discussion may be supposed to say that there is no need for mankind in general to know and understand everything philosophers and theologians can say for and against their opinions; that ordinary people need not be able to expose all the misstatements or fallacies of an ingenious opponent; that it is enough if there is always somebody capable of answering them, so that nothing likely to mislead the uninstructed goes unrefuted; that simple minds, having been taught the obvious grounds of the truths impressed on them, may trust to authority for the rest, and, knowing that they have neither the knowledge nor the talent to resolve every difficulty that can be raised, may rest in the assurance that all those which have been raised have been or can be answered by people specially trained for the task.
Grant this view of the subject the utmost that can be claimed for it by those most easily satisfied with the amount of understanding that ought to accompany belief in a truth; even so, the argument for free discussion is not weakened at all. For even this doctrine admits that mankind ought to have a rational assurance that every objection has been satisfactorily answered; and how are objections to be answered if what needs answering is never spoken? Or how can the answer be known to be satisfactory if the objectors have no opportunity of showing that it is not? If not the public, then at least the philosophers and theologians who are to resolve the difficulties must make themselves familiar with those difficulties in their most puzzling form; and that cannot be done unless the difficulties are freely stated and put in the most favourable light they admit of. The Catholic Church has its own way of dealing with this embarrassing problem. It makes a broad separation between those who may be permitted to accept its doctrines on conviction and those who must accept them on trust. Neither group is allowed any choice about what to accept; but the clergy, at least those who can be fully trusted, may permissibly and even meritoriously make themselves acquainted with their opponents' arguments in order to answer them, and may therefore read heretical books. The laity may not, except by special permission, which is hard to get. This discipline recognises that knowing the enemy's case is good for the teachers, but finds a way, consistent with that, of denying it to everybody else — giving the elite more mental cultivation, though not more mental freedom, than it allows the mass. By this device it succeeds in producing the kind of mental superiority its purposes require; for though cultivation without freedom never made a large and liberal mind, it can make a clever nisi prius advocate of a cause — a barrister who can argue whatever brief is handed to him. But in countries professing Protestantism this resource is unavailable, since Protestants hold, in theory at least, that responsibility for the choice of a religion must be borne by each person for himself and cannot be shifted onto teachers. Besides, in the present state of the world it is practically impossible to keep writings read by the instructed away from the uninstructed. If the teachers of mankind are to know everything they ought to know, everything must be free to be written and published without restraint.
If, however, the harm done by the absence of free discussion, where received opinions are true, were confined to leaving men ignorant of the grounds of those opinions, it might be thought that this is an intellectual evil and not a moral one, and does not affect the worth of the opinions considered in their influence on character. The fact, though, is that in the absence of discussion it is not only the grounds of the opinion that are forgotten, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself. The words that convey it stop suggesting ideas, or suggest only a small part of what they were originally used to communicate. Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, all that remains is a few phrases learned by rote — or, if any part of the meaning survives, only the shell and husk of it, the finer essence gone. The great chapter of human history which this fact occupies and fills cannot be too earnestly studied and thought about.
It is illustrated in the experience of almost every ethical doctrine and religious creed. They are all full of meaning and vitality to those who originate them, and to the originators' immediate disciples. Their meaning goes on being felt at undiminished strength, and is perhaps brought out into even fuller consciousness, as long as the struggle lasts to give the doctrine or creed the ascendancy over other creeds. At last it either prevails and becomes the general opinion, or its progress stops: it holds the ground it has gained but spreads no further. Once either result becomes apparent, controversy on the subject flags and gradually dies away. The doctrine has taken its place, if not as a received opinion then as one of the admitted sects or divisions of opinion; those who hold it have generally inherited rather than adopted it; and since conversion from one of these doctrines to another is now exceptional, it occupies little place in the thoughts of those who profess them. Instead of being, as at first, constantly on the alert either to defend themselves against the world or to bring the world round to them, they have subsided into acquiescence, and neither listen if they can help it to arguments against their creed, nor trouble dissenters, if there are any, with arguments for it. From this time can usually be dated the decline in the living power of the doctrine. We often hear the teachers of every creed lamenting how hard it is to keep alive in believers' minds a lively apprehension of the truth they nominally recognise, so that it penetrates their feelings and gains real mastery over their conduct. No such difficulty is complained of while the creed is still fighting for its existence: even the weaker combatants then know and feel what they are fighting for, and how it differs from other doctrines; and in that period of every creed's existence there are quite a few people who have realised its fundamental principles in every form of thought, have weighed and considered them in all their important bearings, and have felt the full effect on character that belief in that creed ought to produce in a mind thoroughly steeped in it. But when it has become a hereditary creed, received passively and not actively — when the mind is no longer compelled, to the same degree as at first, to exercise its vital powers on the questions the belief presents to it — there is a progressive tendency to forget everything about the belief except the formulas, or to give it a dull, torpid assent, as though accepting it on trust dispensed with the need to realise it in consciousness or test it by personal experience; until it almost stops connecting itself with the inner life of the human being at all. Then we see the cases so frequent in this age of the world as to be almost the majority, in which the creed remains as it were outside the mind, encrusting and petrifying it against every other influence addressed to the higher parts of our nature, showing its power by not letting any fresh and living conviction in, but doing nothing itself for the mind or the heart except standing sentinel over them to keep them empty.
How far doctrines intrinsically fitted to make the deepest impression on the mind may remain in it as dead beliefs, never realised in the imagination, the feelings or the understanding, is shown by the way most believers hold the doctrines of Christianity. By Christianity here I mean what all churches and sects count as such: the maxims and precepts contained in the New Testament. These are regarded as sacred and accepted as laws by everyone professing Christianity. Yet it is hardly too much to say that not one Christian in a thousand guides or tests his own conduct by reference to those laws. The standard he does refer it to is the custom of his nation, his class, or his religious denomination. So he has, on the one hand, a collection of ethical maxims which he believes were granted to him by infallible wisdom as rules to govern him by; and on the other, a set of everyday judgments and practices which go a certain distance with some of those maxims, not so far with others, stand in direct opposition to some, and are on the whole a compromise between the Christian creed and the interests and suggestions of worldly life. To the first of these standards he gives his homage; to the second his real allegiance. All Christians believe that the blessed are the poor and humble and those the world ill-treats; that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven; that they should judge not, lest they be judged; that they should swear not at all; that they should love their neighbour as themselves; that if someone takes their cloak they should give him their coat as well; that they should take no thought for the morrow; that if they would be perfect they should sell everything they have and give it to the poor. They are not insincere when they say they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard praised and never heard discussed. But in the sense of a living belief that regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point at which it is customary to act on them. The doctrines in their entirety are useful for pelting opponents with, and it is understood that they are to be put forward, where possible, as the reasons for whatever people do that they think praiseworthy. But anyone who reminded them that the maxims require an infinity of things they never even think of doing would gain nothing but a place among those very unpopular characters who pretend to be better than other people. The doctrines have no hold on ordinary believers; they are not a power in their minds. They have a habitual respect for the sound of them, but no feeling that spreads from the words to the things they signify and forces the mind to take them in and conform itself to the formula. Whenever conduct is concerned, they look round for Mr A and Mr B to direct them how far to go in obeying Christ.
Now we may be quite sure that this was not how it stood with the early Christians — far from it. If it had been, Christianity would never have grown from an obscure sect of the despised Hebrews into the religion of the Roman empire. When their enemies said "See how these Christians love one another" — a remark nobody is likely to make now — they certainly had a much livelier feeling of what their creed meant than they have ever had since. And that is probably the chief reason why Christianity now makes so little progress in extending its territory, and after eighteen centuries is still nearly confined to Europeans and the descendants of Europeans. Even among the strictly religious, who are very much in earnest about their doctrines and attach far more meaning to many of them than people in general, it commonly happens that the part which is comparatively alive in their minds is the part shaped by Calvin, or Knox, or someone else much closer to them in character. The sayings of Christ lie passively beside these in their minds, producing hardly any effect beyond what comes of merely listening to words so gentle and pleasant. There are many reasons, no doubt, why the doctrines that are the badge of a sect keep more of their vitality than those common to every recognised sect, and why teachers take more trouble to keep their meaning alive; but one reason certainly is that the distinctive doctrines are questioned more, and have to be defended more often against open opponents. Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their posts as soon as there is no enemy in the field.
The same thing is generally true of all traditional doctrines — those of prudence and knowledge of life as much as those of morals or religion. Every language and every literature is full of general observations about life, both what it is and how to conduct oneself in it: observations everybody knows, which everybody repeats or hears with agreement, which are accepted as truisms, and yet whose meaning most people first truly learn when experience, usually of a painful kind, has made them real. How often, smarting under some unforeseen misfortune or disappointment, does a person call to mind some proverb or common saying familiar to him all his life, whose meaning, if he had ever felt it before as he feels it now, would have saved him from the calamity. There are indeed reasons for this besides the absence of discussion: there are many truths whose full meaning cannot be realised until personal experience has brought it home. But much more of the meaning even of these would have been understood, and what was understood would have been far more deeply impressed on the mind, if the man had been used to hearing it argued for and against by people who did understand it. Mankind's fatal tendency to stop thinking about something as soon as it is no longer in doubt is the cause of half their errors. A living author has put it well: "the deep slumber of a decided opinion".
But what! (it may be asked) Is the absence of unanimity an indispensable condition of real knowledge? Must some part of mankind persist in error to enable anybody to realise the truth? Does a belief stop being real and vital as soon as it is generally accepted, and is a proposition never thoroughly understood and felt unless some doubt of it remains? As soon as mankind have unanimously accepted a truth, does the truth die inside them? The highest aim and best result of improved intelligence has been thought until now to be uniting mankind more and more in acknowledging all important truths; and does the intelligence only last as long as it has not achieved its object? Do the fruits of conquest perish by the very completeness of the victory?
I claim nothing of the kind. As mankind improve, the number of doctrines no longer disputed or doubted will constantly increase, and the well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths that have reached the point of being uncontested. The ending of serious controversy on one question after another is one of the necessary incidents of the consolidation of opinion — a consolidation as beneficial when the opinions are true as it is dangerous and harmful when they are mistaken. But though this gradual narrowing of the bounds of diversity of opinion is necessary in both senses of the word, being at once inevitable and indispensable, we are not obliged to conclude that all its consequences must be beneficial. Losing so important an aid to the intelligent and living grasp of a truth as the necessity of explaining it to opponents or defending it against them, though not enough to outweigh the benefit of its universal recognition, is no trifling drawback from that benefit. Where this advantage can no longer be had, I confess I should like to see the teachers of mankind trying to provide a substitute for it — some contrivance for making the difficulties of the question as present to the learner's mind as they would be if an opposing champion were pressing them on him, eager for his conversion.
But instead of looking for contrivances of that kind, they have lost the ones they used to have. The Socratic dialectic, so magnificently displayed in Plato's dialogues, was a contrivance of exactly this description. It was essentially a negative discussion of the great questions of philosophy and life, directed with consummate skill towards convincing anyone who had merely adopted the commonplaces of received opinion that he did not understand the subject — that he attached no definite meaning as yet to the doctrines he professed — so that, becoming aware of his ignorance, he might be put in the way of attaining a stable belief resting on a clear grasp both of what the doctrines mean and of the evidence for them. The school disputations of the Middle Ages had a somewhat similar object. They were meant to make sure that the pupil understood his own opinion and, by necessary corollary, the opinion opposed to it, and could set out the grounds of the one and refute those of the other. These later contests had the incurable defect that the premises appealed to were taken from authority and not from reason, and as a discipline for the mind they were in every respect inferior to the powerful dialectic that formed the intellects of the Socratici viri, the men of Socrates' circle. But the modern mind owes far more to both than it is generally willing to admit, and present modes of education contain nothing that in the smallest degree takes the place of either. A person who gets all his instruction from teachers or books, even if he escapes the besetting temptation of contenting himself with cramming, is under no compulsion to hear both sides; and accordingly knowing both sides is far from a frequent accomplishment, even among thinkers. The weakest part of what anybody says in defence of his opinion is what he means as a reply to opponents. It is the fashion of the present time to disparage negative logic — the kind that points out weaknesses in a theory or errors in a practice without establishing positive truths. Such negative criticism would be poor enough as an ultimate result; but as a means of attaining any positive knowledge or conviction worth the name it cannot be valued too highly, and until people are again systematically trained in it there will be few great thinkers, and a low general average of intellect, in any but the mathematical and physical departments of thought. On any other subject nobody's opinions deserve the name of knowledge except so far as he has either had forced on him by others, or gone through by himself, the same mental process that would have been required of him in carrying on an active controversy with opponents. When it is absent it is so indispensable and yet so difficult to create; how much worse than absurd, then, to forgo it when it offers itself spontaneously. If there are people who contest a received opinion, or who would if law or opinion let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and be glad that somebody is doing for us what we otherwise ought — if we care about either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions — to do with much greater labour for ourselves.
There is still one of the principal reasons why diversity of opinion is an advantage left to speak of, and it will go on being an advantage until mankind reach a stage of intellectual advancement that at present seems incalculably distant. So far we have considered only two possibilities: that the received opinion may be false and some other opinion consequently true; or that, the received opinion being true, a conflict with the opposite error is essential to any clear grasp and deep feeling of its truth. But there is a commoner case than either: where the conflicting doctrines, instead of one being true and the other false, share the truth between them, and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of a truth of which the received doctrine embodies only a part. Popular opinions on subjects not open to the senses are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth. They are a part of the truth — sometimes a larger part, sometimes a smaller — but exaggerated, distorted, and cut off from the truths that ought to accompany and limit them. Heretical opinions, on the other hand, are generally some of these suppressed and neglected truths bursting the bonds that held them down, and either seeking reconciliation with the truth contained in the common opinion or confronting it as an enemy, setting themselves up with the same exclusiveness as the whole truth. The second case has been the more frequent so far, since in the human mind one-sidedness has always been the rule and many-sidedness the exception. So even in revolutions of opinion, one part of the truth usually sets while another rises. Even progress, which ought to add, for the most part only substitutes one partial and incomplete truth for another, the improvement consisting chiefly in this: that the new fragment of truth is more wanted, better suited to the needs of the time, than the one it displaces. Prevailing opinions being partial in this way even when they rest on a true foundation, every opinion that embodies any of the portion of truth the common opinion leaves out ought to be considered precious, however much error and confusion may be mixed with that truth. No sober judge of human affairs will feel obliged to be indignant because those who force truths on our notice that we should otherwise have overlooked overlook some of the truths we see. He will think, rather, that as long as popular truth is one-sided it is on the whole desirable that unpopular truth should have one-sided champions too, since they are usually the most energetic and the most likely to compel reluctant attention to the fragment of wisdom they proclaim as if it were the whole.
Thus in the eighteenth century, when nearly all the educated, and all the uneducated who were led by them, were lost in admiration of what is called civilisation and of the marvels of modern science, literature and philosophy, and, greatly overrating how unlike the men of modern times were to the men of antiquity, indulged the belief that the whole difference was in their own favour — with what a salutary shock did the paradoxes of Rousseau explode like bombshells in the middle of it, dislocating the compact mass of one-sided opinion and forcing its elements to recombine in a better form and with new ingredients. Not that the current opinions were on the whole further from the truth than Rousseau's were; on the contrary, they were nearer to it, and contained more positive truth and much less error. Nevertheless there lay in Rousseau's doctrine, and has floated down the stream of opinion along with it, a considerable amount of exactly those truths the popular opinion lacked; and these are the deposit left behind when the flood subsided. The superior worth of simplicity of life, and the enervating and demoralising effect of the shackles and hypocrisies of artificial society, are ideas that have never been entirely absent from cultivated minds since Rousseau wrote, and in time they will produce their due effect — though at present they need asserting as much as ever, and asserting by deeds, since on this subject words have nearly exhausted their power.
In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace that a party of order or stability and a party of progress or reform are both necessary elements of a healthy political life, until one or the other has so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party of order and of progress equally, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be kept from what ought to be swept away. Each of these ways of thinking gets its usefulness from the deficiencies of the other; but it is largely the opposition of the other that keeps each within the bounds of reason and sanity. Unless opinions favourable to democracy and to aristocracy, to property and to equality, to cooperation and to competition, to luxury and to abstinence, to sociability and to individuality, to liberty and to discipline, and all the other standing antagonisms of practical life, are expressed with equal freedom and pressed and defended with equal talent and energy, there is no chance of both elements getting their due; one scale is sure to go up and the other down. Truth in the great practical concerns of life is so much a matter of reconciling and combining opposites that very few minds are capacious and impartial enough to make the adjustment anywhere near correctly, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners. On any of the great open questions just listed, if either of the two opinions has a better claim than the other not merely to be tolerated but to be encouraged and supported, it is the one that happens at that particular time and place to be in a minority. That is the opinion which for the time being represents the neglected interests, the side of human well-being that is in danger of getting less than its share. I am aware that in this country there is no intolerance of differences of opinion on most of these topics. They are brought forward to show, by admitted and multiplied examples, how universal it is that only through diversity of opinion is there, in the present state of human intellect, any chance of fair play for all sides of the truth. Where there are people to be found who form an exception to the apparent unanimity of the world on some subject, it is always probable, even if the world is in the right, that the dissenters have something worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.
It may be objected: "But some received principles, especially on the highest and most vital subjects, are more than half-truths. Christian morality, for instance, is the whole truth on that subject, and if anyone teaches a morality that differs from it, he is wholly in error." As this is the most important case of all in practice, none could be fitter for testing the general rule. But before pronouncing on what Christian morality is or is not, it would be as well to settle what is meant by Christian morality. If it means the morality of the New Testament, I am surprised that anyone who gets his knowledge of that from the book itself can suppose it was announced, or intended, as a complete doctrine of morals. The Gospel always refers back to a pre-existing morality, and confines its precepts to the particulars in which that morality was to be corrected or superseded by a wider and higher one; and it expresses itself, moreover, in the most general terms, often impossible to interpret literally, and with the impressiveness of poetry or eloquence rather than the precision of legislation. It has never been possible to extract a body of ethical doctrine from it without eking it out from the Old Testament — that is, from a system elaborate indeed, but in many respects barbarous, and intended only for a barbarous people. St Paul, a declared enemy of this Judaical way of interpreting his Master's doctrine and filling out his scheme, equally assumes a pre-existing morality, namely that of the Greeks and Romans, and his advice to Christians is largely a system of accommodation to it, even to the extent of giving an apparent sanction to slavery. What is called Christian, but should rather be called theological, morality was not the work of Christ or the Apostles, but is of much later origin, having been gradually built up by the Catholic church of the first five centuries; and though it has not been adopted wholesale by moderns and Protestants, it has been much less modified by them than might have been expected. For the most part, indeed, they have contented themselves with cutting off the additions made to it in the Middle Ages, each sect filling the gap with fresh additions suited to its own character and tendencies. That mankind owe a great debt to this morality and to its early teachers, I should be the last person to deny; but I do not hesitate to say of it that in many important points it is incomplete and one-sided, and that unless ideas and feelings it does not sanction had contributed to the formation of European life and character, human affairs would be in a worse state than they are now. Christian morality, so called, has all the marks of a reaction: it is in great part a protest against paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than active; innocence rather than nobleness; abstinence from evil rather than energetic pursuit of good. In its precepts, as has been well said, "thou shalt not" predominates unduly over "thou shalt". In its horror of sensuality it made an idol of asceticism, which has gradually been compromised away into an idol of legality. It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell as the appointed and appropriate motives for a virtuous life, and in this it falls far below the best of the ancients, and does what it can to give human morality an essentially selfish character by disconnecting each man's sense of duty from the interests of his fellow creatures, except so far as a self-interested inducement is offered him for consulting them. It is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it teaches submission to whatever authorities are found established — who are not indeed to be actively obeyed when they command what religion forbids, but who are not to be resisted, far less rebelled against, for any amount of wrong done to ourselves. And while in the morality of the best pagan nations duty to the state holds even a disproportionate place, encroaching on the just liberty of the individual, in purely Christian ethics that great department of duty is scarcely noticed or acknowledged. It is in the Koran, not the New Testament, that we read the maxim: "A ruler who appoints any man to an office, when there is in his dominions another man better qualified for it, sins against God and against the State." What little recognition the idea of an obligation to the public gets in modern morality comes from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian ones — just as, even in the morality of private life, whatever we have of magnanimity, high-mindedness, personal dignity, even the sense of honour, comes from the purely human and not the religious part of our education, and could never have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth professedly recognised is that of obedience.
I am as far as anyone from pretending that these defects are necessarily inherent in Christian ethics, in every way it can be conceived, or that the many requirements of a complete moral doctrine which it does not contain cannot be reconciled with it. Far less would I suggest this of the doctrines and precepts of Christ himself. I believe that the sayings of Christ are all that I can see any evidence of their having been intended to be; that they are irreconcilable with nothing a comprehensive morality requires; that everything excellent in ethics can be brought within them, with no more violence to their language than has been done to it by everyone who has ever tried to deduce from them any practical system of conduct at all. But it is quite consistent with this to believe that they contain, and were meant to contain, only a part of the truth; that many essential elements of the highest morality are among the things not provided for, and not intended to be provided for, in the recorded utterances of the founder of Christianity, and that they have been thrown aside entirely in the system of ethics erected on the basis of those utterances by the Christian Church. That being so, I think it a great error to persist in trying to find in the Christian doctrine that complete rule for our guidance which its author intended it to sanction and enforce but only partly to supply. I believe, too, that this narrow theory is becoming a grave practical evil, greatly reducing the value of the moral training and instruction that so many well-meaning people are now at last exerting themselves to promote. I much fear that by trying to form the mind and the feelings on an exclusively religious type, and discarding those secular standards (as for want of a better name they may be called) which used to coexist with Christian ethics and supplement it, taking some of its spirit and infusing some of theirs into it, the result will be — and even now is — a low, abject, servile type of character, which, however it may submit to what it takes to be the Supreme Will, is incapable of rising to the conception of Supreme Goodness or of sympathising with it. I believe that other ethics than any that can be developed from exclusively Christian sources must exist side by side with Christian ethics to produce the moral regeneration of mankind, and that the Christian system is no exception to the rule that in an imperfect state of the human mind the interests of truth require a diversity of opinions. It is not necessary that in ceasing to ignore the moral truths not contained in Christianity, men should ignore any of those it does contain. Such prejudice, or oversight, when it happens, is altogether an evil; but it is one we cannot hope to be always free of, and must be regarded as the price paid for an inestimable good. The exclusive claim made by a part of the truth to be the whole must be, and ought to be, protested against; and if a reactionary impulse should make the protesters unjust in their turn, this one-sidedness, like the other, may be lamented but must be tolerated. If Christians want to teach unbelievers to be just to Christianity, they should themselves be just to unbelief. It can do truth no service to shut our eyes to the fact, known to everyone with the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large proportion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work not only of men who did not know the Christian faith, but of men who knew it and rejected it.
I do not pretend that the most unlimited use of the freedom to state every possible opinion would put an end to the evils of religious or philosophical sectarianism. Every truth that men of narrow capacity are in earnest about is sure to be asserted, inculcated, and in many ways even acted on, as though no other truth existed in the world, or at any rate none that could limit or qualify the first. I acknowledge that the tendency of all opinions to become sectarian is not cured by the freest discussion, and is often heightened and exacerbated by it, the truth that ought to have been seen and was not being rejected all the more violently for being proclaimed by people regarded as opponents. But it is not on the impassioned partisan that this collision of opinions works its beneficial effect; it is on the calmer and more disinterested bystander. The formidable evil is not the violent conflict between parts of the truth but the quiet suppression of half of it. There is always hope while people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend to only one that errors harden into prejudices and truth itself stops having the effect of truth by being exaggerated into falsehood. And since few mental attributes are rarer than the judicial faculty that can sit in intelligent judgment between two sides of a question when only one is represented before it by an advocate, truth has no chance except in proportion as every side of it, every opinion that embodies any fraction of it, not only finds advocates but is so advocated as to be listened to.
We have now recognised, on four distinct grounds, the necessity of freedom of opinion and freedom of the expression of opinion to the mental well-being of mankind, on which all their other well-being depends. Let us briefly recapitulate them.
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for all we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Second, though the silenced opinion may be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of opposing opinions that the rest of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Third, even if the received opinion is not only true but the whole truth, unless it is allowed to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, most of those who accept it will hold it in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.
And fourth, not only that, but the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or weakened, and stripped of its vital effect on character and conduct — the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, useless for good, but cluttering the ground and preventing the growth of any real, heartfelt conviction from reason or personal experience.
Before leaving the subject of freedom of opinion, I should take some notice of those who say that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted on condition that the manner is temperate and does not go beyond the bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said about the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds lie; for if the test is offence to those whose opinion is attacked, experience shows, I think, that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that any opponent who presses them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them an intemperate opponent if he shows any strong feeling on the subject. But this, though an important consideration in practice, is absorbed in a more fundamental objection. Undoubtedly the manner of asserting an opinion, even a true one, may be very objectionable and may justly incur severe censure. But the principal offences of the kind are mostly impossible to bring home to conviction, except by accidental self-betrayal. The gravest of them is to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or to misrepresent the opposing opinion. But all this, even in the most aggravated degree, is so continually done in perfect good faith by people who are not considered ignorant or incompetent, and who in many other respects may not deserve to be, that it is rarely possible on adequate grounds to stamp the misrepresentation conscientiously as morally culpable; and still less could the law presume to interfere with controversial misconduct of that kind. As for what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion — invective, sarcasm, personal attack and the like — denouncing these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to forbid them equally to both sides. But it is only ever wanted to restrain their use against the prevailing opinion; against the unprevailing one they may be used not only without general disapproval but with a good chance of earning the user the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief comes of their use is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless, and whatever unfair advantage any opinion can derive from this way of asserting it accrues almost exclusively to received opinions. The worst offence of this kind a controversialist can commit is to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men. To slander of that sort, holders of any unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because they are generally few and without influence, and nobody but themselves cares much whether they get justice. But from the nature of the case this weapon is denied to those who attack a prevailing opinion: they can neither use it with safety to themselves nor, if they could, would it do anything but recoil on their own cause. In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only get a hearing by studied moderation of language and the most careful avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever depart even slightly without losing ground; while unmeasured abuse used on the side of the prevailing opinion really does deter people from professing contrary opinions and from listening to those who do. In the interest of truth and justice, therefore, it is far more important to restrain this use of abusive language than the other; and if a choice had to be made, there would be much more need to discourage offensive attacks on unbelief than on religion. It is obvious, though, that law and authority have no business restraining either, while opinion ought in every instance to reach its verdict on the circumstances of the individual case, condemning everyone, on whichever side of the argument he places himself, in whose way of arguing there appears either a want of candour, or malice, bigotry, or intolerance of feeling — but not inferring these vices from the side a person takes, even if it is the opposite side to our own; and giving deserved honour to everyone, whatever opinion he holds, who has the calmness to see and the honesty to state what his opponents and their opinions really are, exaggerating nothing to their discredit and keeping nothing back that tells, or could be supposed to tell, in their favour. This is the real morality of public discussion; and though it is often violated, I am glad to think that there are many controversialists who observe it to a great extent, and a still greater number who conscientiously try to.
Those, then, are the reasons that make it imperative for human beings to be free to form opinions and to express their opinions without reserve, and those are the ruinous consequences to the intellectual, and through that to the moral, nature of man unless this liberty is either granted or asserted in spite of prohibition. Let us next examine whether the same reasons do not require that men should be free to act on their opinions — to carry them out in their lives without hindrance, physical or moral, from their fellow men, so long as it is at their own risk and peril. This last proviso is of course indispensable. Nobody claims that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed make the expression a positive incitement to some mischievous act. The opinion that corn dealers starve the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to go unmolested when it is simply circulated through the press, but may justly be punished when it is delivered by word of mouth to an excited mob gathered in front of a corn dealer's house, or handed round among the same mob on a placard. Acts of any kind that do harm to others without justifiable cause may be, and in the more important cases absolutely must be, controlled by the disapproval of mankind and, where necessary, by their active interference. The liberty of the individual must be limited that far: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people. But if he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts on his own inclination and judgment in things that concern himself, then the same reasons that show opinion should be free also prove that he should be allowed, without molestation, to put his opinions into practice at his own cost. That mankind are not infallible; that their truths are for the most part only half-truths; that unity of opinion is not desirable unless it results from the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinions, and that diversity is not an evil but a good until mankind are far more capable than at present of recognising all sides of the truth — these principles apply to men's ways of acting no less than to their opinions. Just as it is useful, while mankind are imperfect, that there should be different opinions, so it is useful that there should be different experiments in living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different ways of life should be proved in practice when anyone thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. Where the rule of conduct is not the person's own character but the traditions or customs of other people, one of the principal ingredients of human happiness is missing, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.
In maintaining this principle, the greatest difficulty is not in judging the means towards an acknowledged end, but in the indifference of people in general to the end itself. If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being — that it is not merely one element alongside everything meant by the words civilisation, instruction, education and culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all of them — there would be no danger of liberty being undervalued, and adjusting the boundary between it and social control would present no extraordinary difficulty. But the trouble is that common ways of thinking hardly recognise individual spontaneity as having any intrinsic worth, or deserving any regard on its own account. The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they are now (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot understand why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of most moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with suspicion, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind. Few people outside Germany even understand the meaning of the doctrine that Wilhelm von Humboldt, so eminent both as a scholar and as a politician, made the text of a treatise: that "the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole"; that therefore the object "towards which every human being must ceaselessly direct his efforts, and on which especially those who design to influence their fellow-men must ever keep their eyes, is the individuality of power and development"; that for this there are two requisites, "freedom, and a variety of situations"; and that from the union of these arise "individual vigour and manifold diversity", which combine in "originality".
Footnote: The Sphere and Duties of Government, from the German of Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt, pp. 11–13.
Little accustomed as people are to a doctrine like von Humboldt's, and surprising as they may find it to see so high a value put on individuality, the question can surely only be one of degree. Nobody's idea of excellence in conduct is that people should do absolutely nothing but copy one another. Nobody would assert that people ought to put no stamp whatever of their own judgment, or of their own individual character, on their way of life or on the conduct of their affairs. On the other hand it would be absurd to pretend that people ought to live as if nothing at all had been known in the world before they came into it, as if experience had so far done nothing to show that one mode of existence or conduct is preferable to another. Nobody denies that people should be taught and trained in youth so as to know and benefit by the established results of human experience. But it is the privilege and the proper condition of a human being who has reached maturity to use and interpret experience in his own way. It is for him to find out what part of recorded experience properly applies to his own circumstances and character. The traditions and customs of other people are to some extent evidence of what their experience has taught them — presumptive evidence, and as such entitled to his respect. But in the first place their experience may be too narrow, or they may not have interpreted it rightly. Second, their interpretation of experience may be correct but unsuited to him. Customs are made for customary circumstances and customary characters, and his circumstances or his character may be uncustomary. Third, even if the customs are both good as customs and suitable to him, still, conforming to custom merely as custom does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities that are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discrimination of feeling, mental activity and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. A man who does something because it is the custom makes no choice. He gets no practice either in discerning or in wanting what is best. Mental and moral powers, like muscular ones, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, any more than by believing a thing only because others believe it. If the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the person's own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened by his adopting it, and is likely to be weakened; and if the inducements to an act are not in harmony with his own feelings and character (where affection or the rights of others are not concerned), then so much has been done towards making his feelings and character inert and torpid instead of active and energetic.
A man who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him needs no faculty but the apelike one of imitation. A man who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather the materials for a decision, discrimination to decide, and, when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And he needs and exercises these qualities exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct he settles by his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided along some good path, and kept out of harm's way, without any of these things. But what will his comparative worth as a human being be? It really is of importance not only what men do but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance is surely man himself. Suppose it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, cases tried and even churches erected and prayers said by machinery — by automatons in human shape — it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who are certainly no more than starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built to a model and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which needs to grow and develop itself on every side according to the tendency of the inward forces that make it a living thing.
It will probably be granted that it is desirable for people to exercise their understandings, and that an intelligent following of custom, or even an occasional intelligent departure from custom, is better than a blind and merely mechanical adherence to it. Up to a point it is admitted that our understanding should be our own; but there is not the same willingness to admit that our desires and impulses should be our own too, or that having impulses of our own, of any strength, is anything but a danger and a snare. Yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a complete human being as beliefs and restraints; and strong impulses are dangerous only when they are not properly balanced — when one set of aims and inclinations is developed into strength while others, which ought to coexist with them, remain weak and inactive. It is not because men's desires are strong that they act badly; it is because their consciences are weak. There is no natural connection between strong impulses and a weak conscience. The natural connection is the other way. To say that one person's desires and feelings are stronger and more varied than another's is merely to say that he has more of the raw material of human nature, and is therefore capable perhaps of more evil, but certainly of more good. Strong impulses are only another name for energy. Energy may be turned to bad uses, but more good can always be made of an energetic nature than of an indolent and unfeeling one. Those who have the most natural feeling are always those whose cultivated feelings can be made the strongest. The same strong susceptibilities that make personal impulses vivid and powerful are also the source from which the most passionate love of virtue and the sternest self-control are generated. It is by cultivating these that society both does its duty and protects its interests, not by rejecting the stuff heroes are made of because it does not know how to make heroes. A person whose desires and impulses are his own — the expression of his own nature as it has been developed and modified by his own cultivation — is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own has no character, any more than a steam engine has a character. If, besides being his own, his impulses are strong and under the government of a strong will, he has an energetic character. Anyone who thinks that individuality of desires and impulses should not be encouraged to unfold itself must maintain that society has no need of strong natures, is none the better for containing many people with much character, and that a high general average of energy is undesirable.
In some early states of society these forces might be, and were, too far ahead of society's power to discipline and control them. There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess, and the social principle had a hard struggle with it. The difficulty then was to get men of strong bodies or minds to obey any rules requiring them to control their impulses. To overcome that difficulty, law and discipline, like the Popes struggling against the Emperors, asserted a power over the whole man, claiming to control the whole of his life in order to control his character — which society had found no other sufficient means of binding. But society has now fairly got the better of individuality, and the danger threatening human nature is not the excess but the deficiency of personal impulses and preferences. Things have changed enormously since the passions of those who were strong by rank or by personal endowment were in a state of habitual rebellion against laws and ordinances, and had to be rigorously chained up to let anyone within their reach enjoy the least particle of security. In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as if under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves: what do I prefer? Or, what would suit my character and disposition? Or, what would let the best and highest in me have fair play and grow and thrive? They ask themselves: what suits my position? What is usually done by people of my station and means? Or, worse still, what is usually done by people of a station and means above mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination except for what is customary. So the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like things in crowds; they exercise choice only among the things commonly done. Peculiarity of taste and eccentricity of conduct are shunned as much as crimes — until, by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature left to follow. Their human capacities are withered and starved; they become incapable of any strong wishes or natural pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now, is this or is it not the desirable condition of human nature?
It is, on the Calvinistic theory. According to that, the one great offence of man is Self-will. All the good humanity is capable of is comprised in Obedience. You have no choice; you must do thus and not otherwise: "whatever is not a duty, is a sin." Human nature being radically corrupt, there is no redemption for anybody until human nature is killed inside him. To someone holding this theory of life, crushing out any of the human faculties, capacities and susceptibilities is no evil: man needs no capacity but that of surrendering himself to the will of God, and if he uses any of his faculties for any purpose other than doing that supposed will more effectively, he is better off without them. That is the theory of Calvinism, and it is held in a milder form by many who do not consider themselves Calvinists, the mildness consisting in a less ascetic interpretation of God's alleged will — asserting it to be his will that mankind should gratify some of their inclinations, not of course in the way they themselves prefer, but by way of obedience, that is, in a way prescribed for them by authority, and therefore, by the necessary conditions of the case, the same for everybody.
In some such insidious form there is at present a strong tendency towards this narrow theory of life, and towards the pinched and hidebound type of human character it favours. Many people, no doubt, sincerely think that human beings cramped and dwarfed in this way are as their Maker designed them to be, just as many have thought that trees are a much finer thing when clipped into pollards or cut into the shapes of animals than as nature made them. But if it is any part of religion to believe that man was made by a good being, it is more consistent with that faith to believe that this Being gave men all their faculties so that they might be cultivated and unfolded, not rooted out and consumed, and that he takes delight in every nearer approach his creatures make to the ideal conception embodied in them — every increase in any of their capacities for understanding, for action, or for enjoyment. There is a type of human excellence different from the Calvinistic one: a conception of humanity as having its nature given it for other purposes than merely to be renounced. "Pagan self-assertion" is one of the elements of human worth, as well as "Christian self-denial". There is a Greek ideal of self-development, which the Platonic and Christian ideal of self-government blends with but does not supersede. It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either; and a Pericles, if we had one in these days, would not be without anything good that belonged to John Knox.
Footnote: Sterling's Essays.
It is not by wearing down into uniformity everything individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it out, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and since works take on the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified and animating, supplying more abundant nourishment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie that binds every individual to the race by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to. In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others. There is a greater fullness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass they compose. As much compression as is necessary to prevent the stronger specimens of human nature from encroaching on the rights of others cannot be dispensed with; but for that there is ample compensation, even from the point of view of human development. The means of development the individual loses by being prevented from gratifying his inclinations to the injury of others are chiefly gained at the expense of the development of other people. And even for himself there is a full equivalent in the better development of the social part of his nature, made possible by the restraint put on the selfish part. Being held to strict rules of justice for the sake of others develops the feelings and capacities that have the good of others for their object. But being restrained, in things that do not affect other people's good, by their mere displeasure develops nothing valuable, except whatever strength of character may unfold itself in resisting the restraint. If it is acquiesced in, it dulls and blunts the whole nature. To give any fair play to the nature of each, it is essential that different people should be allowed to lead different lives. Every age has been notable to posterity in proportion as this latitude has been exercised in it. Even despotism does not produce its worst effects so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it is called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
Having said that individuality is the same thing as development, and that only the cultivation of individuality produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings, I might close the argument here. For what better can be said of any condition of human affairs than that it brings human beings themselves nearer to the best thing they can be? Or what worse of any obstruction to good than that it prevents this? No doubt, though, these considerations will not be enough to convince those who most need convincing, and it is necessary to show further that these developed human beings are of some use to the undeveloped — to point out to those who do not want liberty, and would not make use of it, that they may be rewarded in some intelligible way for allowing other people to use it without hindrance.
In the first place, then, I would suggest that they might possibly learn something from them. Nobody will deny that originality is a valuable element in human affairs. There is always need of people not only to discover new truths and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to begin new practices and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and of better taste and sense in human life. This can hardly be denied by anyone who does not believe that the world has already reached perfection in all its ways and practices. It is true that not everybody can confer this benefit alike: there are only a few people, compared with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement on established practice. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things that did not exist before, it is they who keep the life in the things that already existed. If there were nothing new to be done, would human intellect cease to be necessary? Would that be a reason why the people who do the old things should forget why they are done, and do them like cattle instead of like human beings? There is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical; and unless there were a succession of people whose ever-recurring originality keeps the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional, such dead matter would not resist the smallest shock from anything really alive, and there would be no reason why civilisation should not die out, as it did in the Byzantine Empire. People of genius are, it is true, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them it is necessary to preserve the soil they grow in. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom. People of genius are, ex vi termini — by the very force of the word — more individual than anyone else, and consequently less capable of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds society provides to save its members the trouble of forming their own character. If out of timidity they consent to be forced into one of these moulds, and to let all the part of themselves that cannot expand under the pressure stay unexpanded, society will be little the better for their genius. If they have a strong character and break their fetters, they become a mark for the society that has failed to reduce them to commonplace to point at with solemn warning as "wild", "erratic" and the like — much as if someone complained of the Niagara river for not flowing smoothly between its banks like a Dutch canal.
I insist so emphatically on the importance of genius, and on the necessity of letting it unfold freely both in thought and in practice, because although I know nobody will deny the point in theory, I also know that almost everybody is in reality completely indifferent to it. People think genius a fine thing if it enables a man to write an exciting poem or paint a picture. But in its true sense, originality in thought and action, nobody says it is not admirable and yet nearly everybody thinks at heart that they can do very well without it. Unhappily this is too natural to be surprising. Originality is the one thing unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. They cannot see what it is to do for them — how should they? If they could see what it would do for them, it would not be originality. The first service originality has to render them is to open their eyes; and once that is fully done, they would have a chance of becoming original themselves. Meanwhile, remembering that nothing was ever yet done that somebody was not the first to do, and that every good thing in existence is the fruit of originality, let them be modest enough to believe that there is something still left for originality to accomplish, and let them be sure that the less they are conscious of needing it, the more they need it.
In sober truth, whatever homage may be professed, or even paid, to real or supposed mental superiority, the general tendency of things throughout the world is to make mediocrity the ruling power among mankind. In ancient history, in the Middle Ages, and to a diminishing degree through the long transition from feudalism to the present, the individual was a power in himself; and if he had either great talents or a high social position, he was a considerable power. At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the mouthpiece of the tendencies and instincts of masses. This is as true of the moral and social relations of private life as of public affairs. Those whose opinions go by the name of public opinion are not always the same sort of public: in America they are the whole white population, in England chiefly the middle class. But they are always a mass — that is to say, collective mediocrity. And what is an even greater novelty, the mass now take their opinions not from dignitaries in Church or State, from recognised leaders, or from books. Their thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers. I am not complaining of all this. I do not claim that anything better is compatible, as a general rule, with the present low state of the human mind. But that does not stop the government of mediocrity from being mediocre government. No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities and tone of mind it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except so far as the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided — as in their best times they always have been — by the counsel and influence of a more gifted and better instructed One or Few. The beginning of all wise or noble things comes, and must come, from individuals; generally at first from one individual. The honour and glory of the average man is that he is capable of following that lead, that he can respond inwardly to wise and noble things and be led to them with his eyes open. I am not endorsing the sort of "hero worship" that applauds the strong man of genius for forcibly seizing the government of the world and making it do his bidding in spite of itself. All he can claim is the freedom to point out the way. The power of compelling others into it is not only inconsistent with the freedom and development of everybody else, but corrupting to the strong man himself. It does seem, though, that now that the opinions of masses of merely average men have everywhere become or are becoming the dominant power, the counterweight and corrective to that tendency would be a more and more pronounced individuality in those who stand on the higher summits of thought. It is in these circumstances above all that exceptional individuals should be encouraged, rather than deterred, from acting differently from the mass. At other times there was no advantage in their doing so unless they acted not only differently but better. In this age the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded where and when strength of character has abounded, and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
I have said that it is important to give the freest possible scope to uncustomary things, so that in time it may appear which of them are fit to be turned into customs. But independence of action and disregard of custom do not deserve encouragement solely for the chance they give that better ways of acting, and customs more worthy of general adoption, may be struck out; nor is it only people of decided mental superiority who have a just claim to lead their lives in their own way. There is no reason why all human existences should be constructed on one pattern, or on a small number of them. If a person has any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own way of laying out his existence is the best — not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own way. Human beings are not like sheep, and even sheep are not indistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him unless they are either made to his measure or he has a whole warehouse to choose from; and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat? Are human beings more alike in their whole physical and spiritual make-up than in the shape of their feet? If it were only that people have different tastes, that is reason enough for not trying to shape them all to one model. But different people also need different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more live healthily in the same moral atmosphere and climate than the whole variety of plants can in the same physical one. The very things that help one person to cultivate his higher nature are hindrances to another. The same way of life is a healthy stimulus to one, keeping all his faculties of action and enjoyment in their best order, while to another it is a distracting burden that suspends or crushes all inner life. Such are the differences between human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibility to pain, and the effect different physical and moral agencies have on them, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their ways of life, they neither get their fair share of happiness nor grow to the mental, moral and aesthetic stature their nature is capable of. Why, then, should tolerance, as far as public feeling is concerned, extend only to tastes and ways of life that extort acquiescence by the sheer number of their adherents? Nowhere, except in some monastic institutions, is diversity of taste entirely unrecognised: a person may without blame like or dislike rowing, or smoking, or music, or athletic exercise, or chess, or cards, or study, because both those who like each of these things and those who dislike them are too numerous to be put down. But the man, and still more the woman, who can be accused either of doing "what nobody does" or of not doing "what everybody does" is the object of as much disparaging remark as if he or she had committed some grave moral offence. People need a title, or some other badge of rank or of the regard of people of rank, before they can indulge at all in the luxury of doing as they like without damage to their reputation. Indulge at all, I repeat: for anyone who allows himself much of that indulgence runs the risk of something worse than disparaging speeches. He is in danger of a commission de lunatico — an inquiry into his sanity — and of having his property taken from him and given to his relations.
Footnote: There is something both contemptible and frightful in the sort of evidence on which, in recent years, any person can be judicially declared unfit to manage his own affairs, and after his death can have his disposal of his property set aside, if there is enough of it to pay the costs of the litigation — which are charged on the property itself. All the minute details of his daily life are pried into, and whatever is found that looks unlike absolute commonplace when seen through the perceiving and describing faculties of the lowest of the low is laid before the jury as evidence of insanity, and often with success, the jurors being little if at all less coarse and ignorant than the witnesses; while the judges, with that extraordinary ignorance of human nature and human life which continually astonishes us in English lawyers, often help to mislead them. These trials speak volumes about the state of feeling and opinion among the common run of people with regard to human liberty. So far from setting any value on individuality, so far from respecting the right of each individual to act, in matters that harm nobody, as seems good to his own judgment and inclination, judges and juries cannot even conceive that a person in a state of sanity could want such freedom. In former days, when it was proposed to burn atheists, charitable people used to suggest putting them in a madhouse instead. It would be nothing surprising nowadays to see this done, and the doers applauding themselves because instead of persecuting for religion they had adopted so humane and Christian a way of treating these unfortunates — not without a silent satisfaction at their having got their deserts.
There is one feature of the present direction of public opinion peculiarly calculated to make it intolerant of any marked show of individuality. The general run of mankind are not only moderate in intellect but also moderate in their inclinations. They have no tastes or wishes strong enough to incline them to do anything unusual, and consequently they do not understand those who have, and class all such people with the wild and intemperate, whom they are used to looking down on. Now, in addition to this general fact, we have only to suppose that a strong movement has set in for the improvement of morals, and it is obvious what to expect. In our day such a movement has set in; a good deal has actually been achieved in the way of greater regularity of conduct and discouragement of excess; and there is a philanthropic spirit abroad, for which there is no more inviting field than the moral and prudential improvement of our fellow creatures. These tendencies of the times make the public more disposed than in most earlier periods to prescribe general rules of conduct and to try to make everybody conform to the approved standard. And that standard, stated or unstated, is to desire nothing strongly. Its ideal of character is to have no marked character at all: to maim by compression, like a Chinese lady's foot, every part of human nature that stands out prominently and tends to make the person markedly different in outline from commonplace humanity.
As usually happens with ideals that exclude half of what is desirable, the present standard of approval produces only an inferior imitation of the other half. Instead of great energies guided by vigorous reason, and strong feelings strongly controlled by a conscientious will, its result is weak feelings and weak energies, which can therefore be kept in outward conformity to rule without any strength of will or of reason. Energetic characters on any large scale are already becoming merely traditional. There is now hardly any outlet for energy in this country except business. What energy is spent there may still be counted considerable. The little that is left over from that employment is spent on some hobby, which may be a useful, even a philanthropic hobby, but is always some one thing, and generally a thing of small dimensions. The greatness of England is now all collective: individually small, we seem capable of anything great only through our habit of combining — and with this our moral and religious philanthropists are perfectly content. But it was men of another stamp than this who made England what it has been, and men of another stamp will be needed to prevent its decline.
The despotism of Custom is everywhere the standing obstacle to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than the customary which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or of progress, or of improvement. The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement. But the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since under it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals. The progressive principle, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or the love of improvement, is opposed to the sway of Custom, and involves at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two makes up the chief interest of the history of mankind. The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete there. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there in all things the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to Custom; nobody but some tyrant drunk with power thinks of resisting the argument from Custom. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality: they did not spring out of the ground populous, literate and skilled in many of the arts of life. They made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependants of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests while theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom Custom held only a divided rule with liberty and progress. It appears that a people may be progressive for a certain length of time and then stop. When does it stop? When it stops possessing individuality. If a similar change should overtake the nations of Europe, it will not take exactly the same shape. The despotism of Custom that threatens these nations is not precisely a standing still. It outlaws singularity, but it does not rule out change, provided everyone changes together. We have discarded the fixed costumes of our forefathers; everyone must still dress like everyone else, but the fashion may change once or twice a year. So we take care that when there is change it shall be for change's sake and not from any idea of beauty or convenience — for the same idea of beauty or convenience would not strike the whole world at the same moment and be thrown aside by everyone at the same later moment. But we are progressive as well as changeable. We are constantly making new inventions in mechanical things and keeping them until they are superseded by better ones; we are eager for improvement in politics, in education, even in morals, though in the last our idea of improvement consists chiefly in persuading or forcing other people to be as good as ourselves. It is not progress we object to; on the contrary, we flatter ourselves that we are the most progressive people who ever lived. It is individuality that we make war on. We should think we had done wonders if we had made ourselves all alike — forgetting that the unlikeness of one person to another is generally the first thing that draws either of them to notice the imperfection of his own type and the superiority of another, or the possibility of producing something better than either by combining the advantages of both. We have a warning example in China: a nation of much talent and, in some respects, even wisdom, thanks to the rare good fortune of having been provided at an early period with a particularly good set of customs, the work in some measure of men to whom even the most enlightened European must grant, with certain reservations, the title of sages and philosophers. They are remarkable, too, for the excellence of their machinery for impressing the best wisdom they have on every mind in the community as far as possible, and for making sure that those who have absorbed most of it occupy the posts of honour and power. Surely the people who did this have discovered the secret of human progressiveness and must have kept themselves steadily at the head of the movement of the world. On the contrary, they have become stationary, and have stayed so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be further improved, it must be by foreigners. They have succeeded beyond all hope in the very thing English philanthropists are working at so industriously — making a people all alike, all governing their thoughts and conduct by the same maxims and rules; and these are the fruits. The modern regime of public opinion is, in an unorganised form, what the Chinese educational and political systems are in an organised one; and unless individuality can successfully assert itself against this yoke, Europe, in spite of its noble ancestry and its professed Christianity, will tend to become another China.
What is it that has preserved Europe from this fate so far? What has made the European family of nations an improving instead of a stationary portion of mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which, where it exists, exists as the effect and not the cause, but their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes and nations have been extremely unlike one another. They have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable; and although at every period those who travelled by different paths have been intolerant of one another, and each would have thought it an excellent thing if all the rest could have been compelled to travel his road, their attempts to thwart each other's development have rarely had any lasting success, and each has in time put up with receiving the good the others had to offer. Europe is, in my judgment, wholly indebted to this plurality of paths for its progressive and many-sided development. But it is already beginning to possess this benefit in a considerably smaller degree. It is decidedly advancing towards the Chinese ideal of making all people alike. Monsieur de Tocqueville, in his last important work, remarks how much more the Frenchmen of the present day resemble one another than even those of the last generation did. The same remark might be made of Englishmen to a far greater degree. In a passage already quoted from Wilhelm von Humboldt, he points to two things as necessary conditions of human development, because necessary to make people unlike one another: freedom, and variety of situations. The second of these conditions is diminishing in this country every day. The circumstances that surround different classes and individuals and shape their characters are becoming more alike daily. Formerly different ranks, different neighbourhoods, different trades and professions lived in what might be called different worlds; at present, largely in the same one. Comparatively speaking, they now read the same things, listen to the same things, see the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears fixed on the same objects, have the same rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting them. Great as the differences of position that remain may be, they are nothing to those that have ceased. And the assimilation is still going on. All the political changes of the age promote it, since they all tend to raise the low and lower the high. Every extension of education promotes it, because education brings people under common influences and gives them access to the general stock of facts and sentiments. Improvements in the means of communication promote it, by bringing the inhabitants of distant places into personal contact and keeping up a rapid flow of people moving house from one place to another. The increase of commerce and manufactures promotes it, by spreading the advantages of easy circumstances more widely and opening every object of ambition, even the highest, to general competition, so that the desire to rise is no longer the mark of a particular class but of every class. An agency more powerful even than all of these in producing a general similarity among mankind is the complete establishment, in this and other free countries, of the ascendancy of public opinion in the state. As the various social eminences that let those entrenched on them disregard the opinion of the multitude are gradually levelled; as the very idea of resisting the will of the public, when it is positively known that the public has a will, disappears more and more from the minds of practical politicians, there ceases to be any social support for nonconformity — any substantial power in society which, being itself opposed to the ascendancy of numbers, has an interest in taking under its protection opinions and tendencies at odds with the public's.
The combination of all these causes forms so great a mass of influences hostile to individuality that it is not easy to see how it can hold its ground. It will do so with increasing difficulty unless the intelligent part of the public can be made to feel its value — to see that it is good that there should be differences, even when they are not for the better, even when, as it may appear to them, some are for the worse. If the claims of individuality are ever to be asserted, the time is now, while much is still lacking to complete the enforced assimilation. It is only in the earlier stages that any stand can be successfully made against the encroachment. The demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves grows by what it feeds on. If resistance waits until life is reduced nearly to one uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature. Mankind rapidly become unable to conceive diversity once they have been for some time unaccustomed to seeing it.
What, then, is the rightful limit to the individual's sovereignty over himself? Where does the authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?
Each will get its proper share if each has what particularly concerns it. To individuality should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the individual who has an interest; to society, the part which chiefly interests society.
Society is not founded on a contract, and no good purpose is served by inventing one in order to deduce social obligations from it; but everyone who receives the protection of society owes something in return for the benefit, and the mere fact of living in society makes it indispensable that each should be bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest. This conduct consists, first, in not injuring one another's interests — or rather certain interests which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be regarded as rights; and second, in each person's bearing his share, to be fixed on some equitable principle, of the labours and sacrifices incurred in defending the society or its members from injury and molestation. Society is justified in enforcing these conditions at all costs on those who try to withhold them. Nor is this all society may do. An individual's acts may be hurtful to others, or lacking in due consideration for their welfare, without going so far as to violate any of their established rights. The offender may then be justly punished by opinion, though not by law. As soon as any part of a person's conduct affects the interests of others prejudicially, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering becomes open to discussion. But there is no room for raising any such question where a person's conduct affects nobody's interests but his own, or need not affect them unless they choose — everyone concerned being of full age and of the ordinary amount of understanding. In all such cases there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the thing and take the consequences.
It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose it a doctrine of selfish indifference, pretending that human beings have no business with one another's conduct in life and should not concern themselves with anyone else's doing well or being well unless their own interest is involved. Far from any reduction, there is need of a great increase in disinterested effort to promote the good of others. But disinterested benevolence can find instruments for persuading people to their good other than whips and scourges, of either the literal or the metaphorical kind. I am the last person to undervalue the self-regarding virtues; they are only second in importance to the social ones, if even second. It is equally the business of education to cultivate both. But even education works by conviction and persuasion as well as by compulsion, and it is by conviction and persuasion alone that the self-regarding virtues should be taught once the period of education is over. Human beings owe each other help in distinguishing the better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the one and avoid the other. They should be forever stimulating each other to greater exercise of their higher faculties, and to directing their feelings and aims more towards wise objects instead of foolish ones, and elevating instead of degrading ones. But neither one person nor any number of people is warranted in telling another human creature of mature years that he shall not do with his life, for his own benefit, what he chooses to do with it. He is the person most concerned in his own well-being. The interest anyone else can have in it, except in cases of strong personal attachment, is trifling compared with his own; the interest society has in him individually, apart from his conduct towards others, is fractional and altogether indirect; while with respect to his own feelings and circumstances the most ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably beyond anything anyone else can possess. Society's interference to overrule his judgment and his purposes in what concerns only himself must be grounded on general presumptions, which may be entirely wrong, and even if right are as likely as not to be misapplied to individual cases by people no better acquainted with the circumstances of those cases than someone looking at them from outside. In this department of human affairs, then, individuality has its proper field of action. In the conduct of human beings towards one another it is necessary that general rules should for the most part be observed, so that people may know what to expect; but in each person's own concerns, his individual spontaneity is entitled to free exercise. Considerations to help his judgment and exhortations to strengthen his will may be offered to him by others, even pressed on him; but he himself is the final judge. All the errors he is likely to commit against advice and warning are far outweighed by the evil of letting others constrain him to what they think is his good.
I do not mean that the feelings with which others regard a person ought not to be affected in any way by his self-regarding qualities or deficiencies. That is neither possible nor desirable. If he is outstanding in any of the qualities that conduce to his own good, he is so far a proper object of admiration. He is that much nearer the ideal perfection of human nature. If he is grossly deficient in those qualities, a feeling the opposite of admiration will follow. There is a degree of folly, and a degree of what may be called (though the phrase is not unobjectionable) lowness or depravity of taste, which, though it cannot justify doing harm to the person who shows it, necessarily and properly makes him an object of distaste, or in extreme cases even of contempt; a person could not have the opposite qualities in due strength without feeling this. Though he does nobody any wrong, a person may act in such a way as to compel us to judge him, and feel towards him, as a fool or as a being of an inferior order; and since this judgment and this feeling are a fact he would rather avoid, it is doing him a service to warn him of it beforehand, as of any other disagreeable consequence he is exposing himself to. It would be a good thing, indeed, if this good office were much more freely performed than common notions of politeness at present allow, and if one person could honestly tell another that he thinks him at fault without being considered ill-mannered or presumptuous. We also have a right to act in various ways on our unfavourable opinion of someone — not so as to oppress his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for instance, to seek his company; we have a right to avoid it, though not to parade the avoidance, since we have a right to choose the company we find most agreeable. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to warn others against him if we think his example or his conversation likely to have a bad effect on those he associates with. We may give others preference over him in optional good offices, except the ones that tend to his improvement. In these various ways a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others for faults that directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural and, so to speak, spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, and not because they are deliberately inflicted on him for the sake of punishment. A person who shows rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit; who cannot live within moderate means; who cannot restrain himself from harmful indulgences; who pursues animal pleasures at the expense of the pleasures of feeling and intellect, must expect to sink in other people's opinion and to have a smaller share of their goodwill. But he has no right to complain of this, unless he has earned their favour by special excellence in his social relations and so established a claim on their good offices that is not affected by his failings towards himself.
What I contend for is that the inconveniences strictly inseparable from other people's unfavourable judgment are the only ones a person should ever be subjected to for the portion of his conduct and character that concerns his own good but does not affect other people's interests in their dealings with him. Acts injurious to others require entirely different treatment. Encroaching on their rights; inflicting any loss or damage on them not justified by his own rights; falsehood or duplicity in dealing with them; unfair or ungenerous use of advantages over them; even selfishly refraining from defending them against injury — these are fit objects of moral condemnation and, in grave cases, of moral retribution and punishment. And not only these acts but the dispositions that lead to them are properly immoral, and fit subjects for disapproval that may rise to abhorrence. Cruelty of disposition; malice and ill nature; that most antisocial and odious of all passions, envy; dissimulation and insincerity; anger on insufficient cause, and resentment out of proportion to the provocation; the love of domineering over others; the desire to grab more than one's share of advantages, the πλεονεξἱα of the Greeks; the pride that takes gratification from the humiliation of others; the egotism that thinks the self and its concerns more important than everything else and settles every doubtful question in its own favour — these are moral vices and make up a bad and odious moral character. They are unlike the self-regarding faults mentioned before, which are not properly immoralities and, to whatever pitch they are carried, do not amount to wickedness. They may be proof of any amount of folly, or of a want of personal dignity and self-respect; but they are only a subject of moral condemnation when they involve a breach of duty to others, for whose sake the individual is bound to take care of himself. What are called duties to ourselves are not socially obligatory unless circumstances make them at the same time duties to others. The term duty to oneself, when it means anything more than prudence, means self-respect or self-development; and nobody is accountable to his fellow creatures for any of these, because for none of them is it good for mankind that he should be held accountable to them.
The distinction between the loss of regard a person may rightly incur through a lack of prudence or of personal dignity, and the condemnation he deserves for an offence against the rights of others, is not merely a distinction in name. It makes a vast difference both to our feelings and to our conduct towards him whether he displeases us in things we think we have a right to control him in, or in things we know we have not. If he displeases us, we may express our distaste, and we may keep our distance from a person as from a thing that displeases us; but we shall not therefore feel called on to make his life uncomfortable. We shall reflect that he already bears, or will bear, the whole penalty of his error. If he spoils his life by mismanaging it, we shall not for that reason want to spoil it further. Instead of wanting to punish him, we shall rather try to lighten his punishment by showing him how he may avoid or cure the evils his conduct tends to bring on him. He may be to us an object of pity, perhaps of dislike, but not of anger or resentment; we shall not treat him as an enemy of society. The worst we shall think ourselves justified in doing is leaving him to himself, if we do not step in benevolently by showing an interest in him or a concern for him. It is quite otherwise if he has broken the rules necessary for the protection of his fellow creatures, individually or collectively. The evil consequences of his acts then fall not on himself but on others, and society, as the protector of all its members, must retaliate on him — must inflict pain on him for the express purpose of punishment, and must take care that it is severe enough. In the one case he is an offender at our bar, and we are called on not only to sit in judgment on him but, in one shape or another, to carry out our own sentence. In the other it is no part of our business to inflict any suffering on him, except what may incidentally follow from our using the same liberty in managing our own affairs that we allow him in his.
Many people will refuse to admit the distinction drawn here between the part of a person's life that concerns only himself and the part that concerns others. How, it may be asked, can any part of a member of society's conduct be a matter of indifference to the other members? Nobody is an entirely isolated being; it is impossible for a person to do anything seriously or permanently hurtful to himself without the mischief reaching at least his near connections, and often far beyond them. If he damages his property, he does harm to those who derived support from it directly or indirectly, and usually reduces, by a greater or smaller amount, the general resources of the community. If he impairs his bodily or mental faculties, he not only brings evil on everyone who depended on him for any part of their happiness, but disqualifies himself for rendering the services he owes to his fellow creatures generally, and perhaps becomes a burden on their affection or their charity; and if such conduct were very frequent, hardly any offence that gets committed would subtract more from the general sum of good. Finally, even if by his vices or follies a person does no direct harm to others, he is nevertheless (it may be said) harmful by his example, and ought to be compelled to control himself for the sake of those whom the sight or the knowledge of his conduct might corrupt or mislead.
And even (it will be added) if the consequences of misconduct could be confined to the vicious or thoughtless individual, ought society to abandon to their own guidance people who are plainly unfit for it? If protection against themselves is admittedly owed to children and people under age, is society not equally bound to give it to people of mature years who are equally incapable of self-government? If gambling, or drunkenness, or sexual incontinence, or idleness, or dirtiness are as damaging to happiness and as great an obstacle to improvement as many or most of the acts the law prohibits, why (it may be asked) should the law not try to repress these too, so far as practicability and social convenience allow? And as a supplement to the unavoidable imperfections of law, ought opinion at least not to organise a powerful police against these vices, and visit those known to practise them with rigorous social penalties? There is no question here (it may be said) of restricting individuality or hindering the trial of new and original experiments in living. The only things it is sought to prevent are things that have been tried and condemned from the beginning of the world until now — things experience has shown to be neither useful nor suited to anybody's individuality. There must be some length of time and amount of experience after which a moral or prudential truth may be regarded as established; and all that is wanted is to stop generation after generation from falling over the same precipice that proved fatal to their predecessors.
I fully admit that the mischief a person does to himself may seriously affect those closely connected with him, both through their sympathies and through their interests, and to a lesser degree society at large. When conduct of this kind leads a person to violate a distinct and assignable obligation to some other person or persons, the case is taken out of the self-regarding class and becomes liable to moral disapproval in the proper sense of the word. If, for example, a man through intemperance or extravagance becomes unable to pay his debts, or, having taken on the moral responsibility of a family, becomes for the same reason unable to support or educate them, he is deservedly condemned and might be justly punished — but for the breach of duty to his family or his creditors, not for the extravagance. If the resources that ought to have gone to them had been diverted from them for the most prudent investment, the moral guilt would have been the same. George Barnwell murdered his uncle to get money for his mistress; but if he had done it to set himself up in business, he would have been hanged just the same. Again, in the frequent case of a man who causes his family grief by addiction to bad habits, he deserves reproach for his unkindness or ingratitude — but so he may for cultivating habits that are not in themselves vicious, if they are painful to those he lives among, or to those who depend on him by personal ties for their comfort. Anyone who fails in the consideration generally owed to the interests and feelings of others, without being compelled by some more imperative duty or justified by allowable self-preference, is a subject of moral disapproval for that failure — but not for its cause, nor for the errors, merely personal to himself, that may have led remotely to it. In the same way, when a person by purely self-regarding conduct disables himself from performing some definite duty he owes the public, he is guilty of a social offence. Nobody ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty. In short, wherever there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty and placed in that of morality or law.
But as for the merely contingent, or, as it may be called, constructive injury a person does to society by conduct that violates no specific duty to the public and causes no perceptible harm to any assignable individual but himself, the inconvenience is one society can afford to bear for the sake of the greater good of human freedom. If grown people are to be punished for not taking proper care of themselves, I would rather it were for their own sake than on the pretence of preventing them from impairing their capacity to render society benefits that society does not pretend it has a right to demand. But I cannot agree to argue the point as though society had no way of bringing its weaker members up to its ordinary standard of rational conduct except waiting until they do something irrational and then punishing them for it, legally or morally. Society has had absolute power over them throughout the whole early part of their existence: it has had the whole period of childhood and adolescence to try whether it could make them capable of rational conduct in life. The existing generation is master both of the training and of the entire circumstances of the generation to come. It cannot, of course, make them perfectly wise and good, because it is itself so lamentably deficient in goodness and wisdom, and its best efforts are not always the most successful in individual cases; but it is perfectly well able to make the rising generation, as a whole, as good as itself and a little better. If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up mere children, incapable of being influenced by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame for the consequences. Armed not only with all the powers of education, but with the ascendancy the authority of a received opinion always has over the minds least fitted to judge for themselves, and helped by the natural penalties that cannot be kept from falling on those who incur the distaste or the contempt of the people who know them — let society not pretend that on top of all this it needs the power to issue commands and enforce obedience in the personal concerns of individuals, where on every principle of justice and policy the decision ought to rest with those who have to live with the consequences. Nor is there anything that tends more to discredit and frustrate the better means of influencing conduct than resorting to the worse. If there is among those it is attempted to coerce into prudence or temperance any of the material vigorous and independent characters are made of, they will infallibly rebel against the yoke. No such person will ever feel that others have the same right to control him in his own concerns as they have to prevent him from injuring them in theirs; and it easily comes to be thought a mark of spirit and courage to fly in the face of such usurped authority and do the exact opposite of what it enjoins, and do it ostentatiously — as in the fashion for coarseness that followed, in the time of Charles II, on the fanatical moral intolerance of the Puritans. As for what is said about the necessity of protecting society from the bad example the vicious or the self-indulgent set to others: it is true that a bad example may have a pernicious effect, especially the example of doing wrong to others and getting away with it. But we are speaking now of conduct that does no wrong to others while it is supposed to do great harm to the person himself; and I do not see how those who believe this can think anything but that the example must on the whole be more wholesome than harmful, since if it displays the misconduct it also displays the painful or degrading consequences which, if the conduct is justly censured, must be supposed to accompany it in all or most cases.
But the strongest of all the arguments against the public interfering with purely personal conduct is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly and in the wrong place. On questions of social morality, of duty to others, the opinion of the public — that is, of an overruling majority — though often wrong, is likely to be right still oftener, because on such questions they are only required to judge their own interests: how some way of behaving, if it were allowed, would affect them. But the opinion of a similar majority, imposed as a law on the minority in questions of self-regarding conduct, is quite as likely to be wrong as right; for in these cases public opinion means, at best, some people's opinion of what is good or bad for other people, and very often it does not even mean that, the public passing over the pleasure or convenience of those whose conduct they censure with the most perfect indifference, and considering only their own preference. There are many who count any conduct they dislike as an injury to themselves, and resent it as an outrage on their feelings — as a religious bigot, charged with disregarding other people's religious feelings, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings by persisting in their abominable worship or creed. But there is no parity between a person's feeling for his own opinion and the feeling of somebody who is offended that he holds it, any more than between a thief's desire to take a purse and the rightful owner's desire to keep it. And a person's taste is as much his own particular concern as his opinion or his purse. It is easy for anyone to imagine an ideal public that leaves the freedom and choice of individuals undisturbed in all uncertain matters, and only requires them to abstain from ways of behaving that universal experience has condemned. But where has a public ever been seen that set any such limit to its censorship? Or when does the public trouble itself about universal experience? In its interferences with personal conduct it is seldom thinking of anything but the enormity of acting or feeling differently from itself; and this standard of judgment, thinly disguised, is held up to mankind as the dictate of religion and philosophy by nine tenths of all moralists and speculative writers. They teach that things are right because they are right, because we feel them to be so. They tell us to search our own minds and hearts for laws of conduct binding on ourselves and on everyone else. What can the poor public do but apply these instructions and make their own personal feelings of good and evil, if they are tolerably unanimous in them, binding on all the world?
The evil pointed out here is not one that exists only in theory, and it may perhaps be expected that I should name the instances in which the public of this age and country improperly invests its own preferences with the character of moral laws. I am not writing an essay on the aberrations of existing moral feeling. That is too weighty a subject to be discussed in parentheses and by way of illustration. Yet examples are needed to show that the principle I maintain is of serious and practical importance, and that I am not trying to erect a barrier against imaginary evils. And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that extending the bounds of what may be called moral police until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual is one of the most universal of all human propensities.
For a first instance, consider the antipathies men cherish on no better grounds than that people whose religious opinions differ from theirs do not keep their religious observances, and especially their religious abstinences. To take a rather trivial example: nothing in the creed or practice of Christians does more to embitter Muslim hatred of them than the fact that they eat pork. There are few acts that Christians and Europeans regard with more unaffected disgust than Muslims regard this particular way of satisfying hunger. It is in the first place an offence against their religion; but that by no means explains either the degree or the kind of their repugnance, for wine is also forbidden by their religion, and every Muslim counts drinking it wrong, but not disgusting. Their aversion to the flesh of the "unclean beast" is, on the contrary, of that peculiar kind, resembling an instinctive antipathy, which the idea of uncleanness always seems to excite once it has thoroughly sunk into the feelings, even in people whose personal habits are anything but scrupulously clean; and of this the sense of religious impurity, so intense in the Hindus, is a remarkable example. Now suppose that among a people of whom the majority were Muslims, that majority insisted on not permitting pork to be eaten anywhere in the country. This would be nothing new in Muslim countries. Would it be a legitimate exercise of the moral authority of public opinion? And if not, why not? The practice really is revolting to such a public. They also sincerely think it is forbidden and abhorred by God. Nor could the prohibition be condemned as religious persecution. It might be religious in origin, but it would not be persecution for religion, since nobody's religion makes it a duty to eat pork. The only tenable ground of condemnation would be that the public has no business interfering with the personal tastes and self-regarding concerns of individuals.
Footnote: The case of the Bombay Parsees is a curious instance in point. When this industrious and enterprising people, the descendants of the Persian fire-worshippers, arrived in western India in flight from their native country before the Caliphs, they were granted toleration by the Hindu sovereigns on condition of not eating beef. When those regions later fell under the rule of Muslim conquerors, the Parsees obtained a continuance of the indulgence from them on condition of abstaining from pork. What was at first obedience to authority became second nature, and the Parsees to this day abstain from both beef and pork. Though their religion does not require it, the double abstinence has had time to grow into a custom of their people; and custom, in the East, is a religion.
To come rather nearer home: most Spaniards consider it a gross impiety, offensive in the highest degree to the Supreme Being, to worship him in any way but the Roman Catholic one, and no other public worship is lawful on Spanish soil. The people of all southern Europe look on a married clergy as not only irreligious but unchaste, indecent, gross and disgusting. What do Protestants think of these perfectly sincere feelings, and of the attempt to enforce them against non-Catholics? Yet if mankind are justified in interfering with each other's liberty in things that do not concern other people's interests, on what principle is it possible to exclude these cases consistently? Or who can blame people for wanting to suppress what they regard as a scandal in the sight of God and man? No stronger case can be made for prohibiting anything regarded as a personal immorality than is made for suppressing these practices in the eyes of those who regard them as impieties; and unless we are willing to adopt the logic of persecutors and say that we may persecute others because we are right, and that they must not persecute us because they are wrong, we must beware of admitting a principle whose application to ourselves we should resent as a gross injustice.
The preceding instances may be objected to, though unreasonably, as drawn from things that could not happen among us: opinion in this country is not likely to enforce abstinence from particular meats, or to interfere with people for worshipping, or for marrying or not marrying, according to their creed or inclination. The next example, however, shall be taken from an interference with liberty that we are by no means past all danger of. Wherever the Puritans have been powerful enough, as in New England and in Great Britain at the time of the Commonwealth, they have tried, with considerable success, to put down all public and nearly all private amusements — especially music, dancing, public games and other gatherings for the purpose of entertainment, and the theatre. There are still in this country large bodies of people by whose notions of morality and religion these recreations are condemned; and since those people belong chiefly to the middle class, which is the ascendant power in the present social and political condition of the kingdom, it is by no means impossible that people of these sentiments may at some time command a majority in Parliament. How will the rest of the community like having the amusements they are permitted regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable sharpness, ask these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? That is exactly what ought to be said to every government and every public that claims that nobody shall enjoy any pleasure they think wrong. But if the principle of the claim is admitted, nobody can reasonably object to its being acted on according to the views of the majority, or of whatever other power predominates in the country; and everyone must be ready to conform to the idea of a Christian commonwealth as the early settlers in New England understood it, if a religious profession like theirs should ever succeed in regaining its lost ground, as religions supposed to be in decline have so often been known to do.
Let us imagine another possibility, perhaps more likely to be realised than the last. There is admittedly a strong tendency in the modern world towards a democratic constitution of society, whether or not accompanied by popular political institutions. It is said that in the country where this tendency is most completely realised — where both society and the government are most democratic, the United States — the feeling of the majority, who dislike any appearance of a showier or more expensive style of living than they can hope to rival, works as a tolerably effective sumptuary law, and that in many parts of the Union it is really difficult for a person with a very large income to find any way of spending it that will not incur popular disapproval. Such statements are no doubt much exaggerated as a description of the existing facts, but the state of things they describe is not only conceivable and possible but a probable result of democratic feeling combined with the notion that the public has a right to veto the way individuals spend their incomes. We have only to suppose, further, a considerable spread of socialist opinions, and it may become disgraceful in the eyes of the majority to own more than some very small amount of property, or to have any income not earned by manual labour. Opinions similar in principle to these already prevail widely among the artisan class and weigh oppressively on those who are answerable mainly to the opinion of that class, namely its own members. It is well known that the bad workmen who make up the majority of the workforce in many branches of industry are decidedly of the opinion that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good ones, and that nobody should be allowed, through piecework or otherwise, to earn more by superior skill or industry than others can earn without it. And they employ a moral police, which occasionally becomes a physical one, to deter skilful workmen from accepting, and employers from giving, larger pay for more useful service. If the public has any jurisdiction over private concerns, I cannot see that these people are at fault, or that any individual's own particular public can be blamed for asserting the same authority over his individual conduct that the general public asserts over people in general.
But without dwelling on hypothetical cases, there are in our own day gross usurpations of the liberty of private life actually being practised, and greater ones threatened with some prospect of success, and opinions put forward that assert an unlimited right in the public not only to prohibit by law everything it thinks wrong, but, in order to get at what it thinks wrong, to prohibit any number of things it admits to be innocent.
Under the name of preventing intemperance, the people of one English colony and of nearly half the United States have been forbidden by law to make any use whatever of fermented drinks except for medical purposes; for prohibiting their sale is in fact, as it is intended to be, prohibiting their use. And though the impracticability of enforcing the law has caused its repeal in several of the states that adopted it, including the one it takes its name from, an attempt has nevertheless been begun, and is pressed with considerable zeal by many professed philanthropists, to agitate for a similar law in this country. The association, or "Alliance" as it calls itself, formed for this purpose has acquired some notoriety through the publicity given to a correspondence between its Secretary and one of the very few English public men who hold that a politician's opinions ought to be founded on principles. Lord Stanley's share in this correspondence is calculated to strengthen the hopes already built on him by those who know how rare the qualities shown in some of his public appearances unhappily are among those who figure in political life. The spokesman of the Alliance, who would "deeply deplore the recognition of any principle which could be wrested to justify bigotry and persecution", undertakes to point out the "broad and impassable barrier" that divides such principles from those of his association. "All matters relating to thought, opinion, conscience, appear to me," he says, "to be without the sphere of legislation; all pertaining to social act, habit, relation, subject only to a discretionary power vested in the State itself, and not in the individual, to be within it." No mention is made of a third class, different from either of these: acts and habits that are not social but individual — although it is surely to this class that the act of drinking fermented liquors belongs. Selling fermented liquors, however, is trading, and trading is a social act. But the infringement complained of is not on the liberty of the seller but on that of the buyer and consumer, since the state might just as well forbid him to drink wine as deliberately make it impossible for him to get any. The Secretary, however, says: "I claim, as a citizen, a right to legislate whenever my social rights are invaded by the social act of another." And now for the definition of these "social rights". "If anything invades my social rights, certainly the traffic in strong drink does. It destroys my primary right of security, by constantly creating and stimulating social disorder. It invades my right of equality, by deriving a profit from the creation of a misery, I am taxed to support. It impedes my right to free moral and intellectual development, by surrounding my path with dangers, and by weakening and demoralising society, from which I have a right to claim mutual aid and intercourse." Here is a theory of "social rights" the like of which has probably never before found its way into distinct language: nothing less than this, that it is the absolute social right of every individual that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought; that whoever fails in this in the smallest particular violates my social right, and entitles me to demand that the legislature remove the grievance. So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty it would not justify. It acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except perhaps the freedom to hold opinions in secret and never disclose them; for the moment an opinion I consider harmful passes anybody's lips, it invades all the "social rights" the Alliance ascribes to me. The doctrine gives all mankind a vested interest in each other's moral, intellectual and even physical perfection, to be defined by each claimant according to his own standard.
Another important example of illegitimate interference with the rightful liberty of the individual, not merely threatened but long since carried into triumphant effect, is Sabbatarian legislation. Without doubt, abstaining one day a week from one's usual daily occupation, so far as the necessities of life permit, is a highly beneficial custom, though it is in no way religiously binding on anyone but Jews. And since this custom cannot be observed without a general agreement to that effect among the working population, it may be allowable and right, in so far as some people by working can impose the same necessity on others, that the law should guarantee to each the observance of the custom by others, by suspending the greater operations of industry on a particular day. But this justification, grounded on the direct interest others have in each individual's observance of the practice, does not apply to the occupations a person may choose to fill his own leisure with; nor does it hold good in the smallest degree for legal restrictions on amusements. It is true that the amusement of some is the day's work of others; but the pleasure, not to say the useful recreation, of many is worth the labour of a few, provided the occupation is freely chosen and can be freely given up. The workers are perfectly right in thinking that if everybody worked on Sunday, seven days' work would have to be given for six days' wages; but so long as the great mass of employments are suspended, the small number who must still work for the enjoyment of others get a proportional increase in earnings, and they are not obliged to follow those occupations if they prefer leisure to pay. If a further remedy is wanted, it might be found in establishing by custom a holiday on some other day of the week for those particular classes of people. The only ground, then, on which restrictions on Sunday amusements can be defended must be that they are religiously wrong — a motive for legislation that can never be protested against too earnestly. Deorum injuriae Diis curae: wrongs done to the gods are the gods' own business. It remains to be proved that society, or any of its officers, holds a commission from on high to avenge any supposed offence to Omnipotence which is not also a wrong done to our fellow creatures. The notion that it is one man's duty that another should be religious was the foundation of every religious persecution ever perpetrated, and if admitted would fully justify them. Though the feeling that breaks out in the repeated attempts to stop railway travel on Sunday, in the resistance to opening museums and the like, has not the cruelty of the old persecutors, the state of mind it indicates is fundamentally the same. It is a determination not to tolerate others in doing what their religion permits, because the persecutor's religion does not permit it. It is a belief that God not only abominates the act of the misbeliever, but will not hold us guiltless if we leave him alone.
I cannot help adding to these examples of how little account is commonly made of human liberty the language of downright persecution that breaks out from the press of this country whenever it feels called on to notice the remarkable phenomenon of Mormonism. Much might be said about the unexpected and instructive fact that an alleged new revelation, and a religion founded on it, the product of palpable imposture, not even supported by the prestige of extraordinary qualities in its founder, is believed by hundreds of thousands and has been made the foundation of a society in the age of newspapers, railways and the electric telegraph. What concerns us here is that this religion, like other and better religions, has its martyrs; that its prophet and founder was put to death by a mob for his teaching; that others of its adherents lost their lives by the same lawless violence; that they were forcibly expelled in a body from the country where they first grew up; while now that they have been chased into a solitary retreat in the middle of a desert, many in this country openly declare that it would be right — only that it is not convenient — to send an expedition against them and compel them by force to conform to other people's opinions. The article of Mormon doctrine that chiefly provokes the antipathy which thus breaks through the ordinary restraints of religious tolerance is its sanction of polygamy, which, though permitted to Muslims, Hindus and Chinese, seems to excite unquenchable animosity when practised by people who speak English and profess to be a kind of Christians. Nobody disapproves of this Mormon institution more deeply than I do, both for other reasons and because, far from being in any way countenanced by the principle of liberty, it is a direct infraction of that principle, being nothing but a riveting of the chains on one half of the community and a release of the other half from any reciprocal obligation towards them. Still, it must be remembered that this relation is as voluntary on the part of the women concerned in it, who may be considered the sufferers by it, as any other form of the marriage institution is; and however surprising the fact may seem, it has its explanation in the common ideas and customs of the world, which, by teaching women that marriage is the one thing needful, make it intelligible that many a woman should prefer being one of several wives to not being a wife at all. Other countries are not asked to recognise such unions, or to release any of their inhabitants from their own laws on the strength of Mormon opinions. But when the dissenters have conceded to the hostile feelings of others far more than could justly be demanded — when they have left the countries where their doctrines were unacceptable and established themselves in a remote corner of the Earth, which they are the first to make habitable for human beings — it is difficult to see on what principle but tyranny they can be prevented from living there under whatever laws they please, provided they commit no aggression against other nations and allow perfect freedom of departure to anyone dissatisfied with their ways. A recent writer, in some respects of considerable merit, proposes (in his own words) not a crusade but a civilizade against this polygamous community, to put an end to what seems to him a retrograde step in civilisation. It seems so to me too; but I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilised. So long as those who suffer under the bad law do not call for help from other communities, I cannot admit that people entirely unconnected with them ought to step in and demand that a state of things which everyone directly concerned appears satisfied with should be brought to an end because it is a scandal to people some thousands of miles away who have no part or interest in it. Let them send missionaries, if they like, to preach against it; and let them, by any fair means — of which silencing the teachers is not one — oppose the progress of similar doctrines among their own people. If civilisation has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much to profess to be afraid that barbarism, having been fairly subdued, will revive and conquer civilisation. A civilisation that can succumb to its own vanquished enemy must first have become so degenerate that neither its appointed priests and teachers nor anybody else has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand up for it. If that is so, the sooner such a civilisation gets notice to quit, the better. It can only go on from bad to worse, until it is destroyed and regenerated, like the Western Empire, by energetic barbarians.
The principles asserted in these pages will have to be more generally admitted as the basis for discussing details before any consistent application of them to all the various departments of government and morals can be attempted with any prospect of advantage. The few observations I propose to make on questions of detail are meant to illustrate the principles rather than to follow them out to their consequences. I offer not so much applications as specimens of application, which may help to bring out more clearly the meaning and the limits of the two maxims that together make up the whole doctrine of this essay, and to assist the judgment in holding the balance between them in cases where it seems doubtful which of them applies.
The maxims are, first, that the individual is not accountable to society for his actions in so far as they concern the interests of nobody but himself. Advice, instruction, persuasion, and being avoided by other people if they think it necessary for their own good, are the only measures by which society can justifiably express its dislike or disapproval of his conduct. Second, that for actions prejudicial to the interests of others the individual is accountable, and may be subjected to either social or legal punishment if society is of the opinion that one or the other is needed for its protection.
In the first place, it must by no means be supposed that because damage, or the probability of damage, to the interests of others is the only thing that can justify society in interfering, it therefore always does justify such interference. In many cases an individual, in pursuing a legitimate object, necessarily and therefore legitimately causes pain or loss to others, or intercepts some good they had a reasonable hope of getting. Such oppositions of interest between individuals often arise from bad social institutions, but are unavoidable while those institutions last, and some would be unavoidable under any institutions. Whoever succeeds in an overcrowded profession or in a competitive examination, whoever is preferred to another in any contest for something both of them want, reaps a benefit from other people's loss, from their wasted effort and their disappointment. But it is by common admission better for the general interest of mankind that people should pursue their objects undeterred by consequences of this sort. In other words, society admits no right, legal or moral, in the disappointed competitors to be spared this kind of suffering, and feels called on to interfere only when means of success have been used that it is against the general interest to permit — namely fraud, treachery and force.
Again, trade is a social act. Anyone who undertakes to sell goods of any description to the public does something that affects the interests of other people and of society in general, and so his conduct comes in principle within the jurisdiction of society. Accordingly it was once held to be the duty of governments, in every case they thought important, to fix prices and regulate the processes of manufacture. But it is now recognised, though not until after a long struggle, that both the cheapness and the good quality of goods are most effectively secured by leaving producers and sellers perfectly free, with the sole check of an equal freedom in buyers to supply themselves elsewhere. This is the so-called doctrine of Free Trade, which rests on grounds different from, though equally solid as, the principle of individual liberty asserted in this essay. Restrictions on trade, or on production for the purposes of trade, are indeed restraints, and all restraint quâ restraint, simply as restraint, is an evil; but the restraints in question affect only that part of conduct which society is competent to restrain, and they are wrong solely because they do not in fact produce the results they are meant to produce. Just as the principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of Free Trade, so it is not involved in most of the questions that arise about the limits of that doctrine — for example, how much public control is admissible for preventing fraud by adulteration, or how far sanitary precautions, or arrangements to protect workers employed in dangerous occupations, should be enforced on employers. Such questions involve considerations of liberty only in so far as leaving people to themselves is always better, caeteris paribus, all else being equal, than controlling them; but that they may legitimately be controlled for these ends is in principle undeniable. On the other hand, there are questions about interference with trade that are essentially questions of liberty: the Maine Law, already touched on; the prohibition of importing opium into China; the restriction on the sale of poisons — in short, all cases where the object of the interference is to make a particular commodity impossible or difficult to get. These interferences are objectionable not as infringements of the liberty of the producer or seller, but of the buyer's.
One of these examples, the sale of poisons, opens a new question: the proper limits of what may be called the functions of the police, and how far liberty may legitimately be invaded to prevent crime or accident. It is one of the undisputed functions of government to take precautions against crime before it is committed, as well as to detect and punish it afterwards. The preventive function of government, however, is far more liable to be abused to the prejudice of liberty than the punitive function, since there is hardly any part of the legitimate freedom of action of a human being that could not be represented, and fairly represented too, as increasing the facilities for some form of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, if a public authority, or even a private person, sees someone evidently preparing to commit a crime, they are not bound to look on inactive until the crime is committed, but may interfere to prevent it. If poisons were never bought or used for any purpose except murder, it would be right to prohibit their manufacture and sale. But they may be wanted not only for innocent but for useful purposes, and restrictions cannot be imposed in the one case without operating in the other. Again, it is a proper office of public authority to guard against accidents. If a public officer, or anyone else, saw a person about to cross a bridge that had been found to be unsafe, and there were no time to warn him of his danger, they might seize him and turn him back without any real infringement of his liberty; for liberty consists in doing what one wants, and he does not want to fall into the river. Nevertheless, where there is not a certainty but only a danger of mischief, nobody but the person himself can judge whether his motive for running the risk is sufficient. In that case, therefore, unless he is a child, or delirious, or in some state of excitement or absorption incompatible with the full use of his reflective faculty, he ought, I think, only to be warned of the danger, not forcibly prevented from exposing himself to it. Similar considerations, applied to a question like the sale of poisons, may enable us to decide which among the possible modes of regulation are and are not contrary to principle. A precaution such as labelling the drug with some word expressing its dangerous character, for instance, may be enforced without any violation of liberty: the buyer cannot want not to know that the thing he has is poisonous. But to require a doctor's certificate in every case would make it sometimes impossible, and always expensive, to obtain the article for legitimate uses. The only way I can see of putting difficulties in the way of crime committed by this means, without any infringement worth counting on the liberty of those who want the poisonous substance for other purposes, is to provide what in Bentham's apt phrase is called "preappointed evidence". This provision is familiar to everybody in the case of contracts. It is usual and right that when a contract is entered into, the law should require, as a condition of enforcing performance, that certain formalities be observed — signatures, the attestation of witnesses and the like — so that in case of later dispute there may be evidence to prove that the contract really was entered into, and that there was nothing in the circumstances to make it legally invalid. The effect is to throw great obstacles in the way of fictitious contracts, or contracts made in circumstances that would destroy their validity if they were known. Precautions of a similar kind might be enforced in the sale of articles suited to be instruments of crime. The seller, for example, might be required to enter in a register the exact time of the transaction, the name and address of the buyer, and the precise quality and quantity sold; to ask what purpose it was wanted for, and record the answer he was given. Where there was no medical prescription, the presence of some third person might be required, so as to bring the fact home to the purchaser if there should afterwards be reason to think the article had been put to criminal use. Such regulations would in general be no material obstacle to obtaining the article, but a very considerable one to making improper use of it undetected.
Society's inherent right to ward off crimes against itself by precautions taken in advance suggests the obvious limits to the maxim that purely self-regarding misconduct cannot properly be meddled with by way of prevention or punishment. Drunkenness, for example, is in ordinary cases not a fit subject for legislative interference; but I should think it perfectly legitimate that a person who had once been convicted of any act of violence to others while under the influence of drink should be placed under a special legal restriction personal to himself — that if he were afterwards found drunk he should be liable to a penalty, and that if in that state he committed another offence, the punishment he would be liable to for that offence should be increased in severity. Making himself drunk, in a person whom drunkenness excites to do harm to others, is a crime against others. So again idleness, except in a person receiving public support, or except where it constitutes a breach of contract, cannot without tyranny be made a subject of legal punishment; but if from idleness or from any other avoidable cause a man fails to perform his legal duties to others — for instance to support his children — it is no tyranny to force him to fulfil that obligation by compulsory labour, if no other means are available.
Again, there are many acts which, being directly injurious only to the people who do them, ought not to be legally forbidden, but which, if done publicly, are a violation of good manners, and coming thus into the category of offences against others may rightfully be prohibited. Offences against decency are of this kind, and there is no need to dwell on them, the more so as they are only indirectly connected with our subject, the objection to publicity being equally strong in the case of many actions that are not in themselves condemnable, or supposed to be.
There is another question that must be answered consistently with the principles laid down here. In cases of personal conduct that is supposed to be blameable but which respect for liberty forbids society to prevent or punish, because the harm that directly results falls wholly on the person himself: what the person is free to do, ought other people to be equally free to advise or urge? This question is not free of difficulty. The case of a person who solicits another to do an act is not strictly a case of self-regarding conduct. To give advice or offer inducements to anybody is a social act, and may therefore, like actions in general that affect others, be supposed liable to social control. But a little reflection corrects that first impression by showing that even if the case does not strictly fall within the definition of individual liberty, the reasons the principle of individual liberty is grounded on do apply to it. If people must be allowed, in whatever concerns only themselves, to act as seems best to them at their own risk, they must equally be free to consult one another about what would be best to do, to exchange opinions, and to give and receive suggestions. Whatever it is permitted to do, it must be permitted to advise doing. The question is doubtful only where the person urging it derives a personal benefit from his advice — where he makes it his occupation, for a living or for money, to promote what society and the state consider an evil. Then indeed a new element of complication comes in: the existence of classes of people whose interest is opposed to what is considered the public good, and whose way of living is founded on working against it. Ought this to be interfered with, or not? Fornication, for example, must be tolerated, and so must gambling; but should a person be free to be a pimp, or to keep a gambling house? The case is one of those that lie exactly on the boundary line between two principles, and it is not immediately obvious which of the two it belongs to. There are arguments on both sides. On the side of toleration it may be said that following something as an occupation, and living or profiting by the practice of it, cannot make criminal what would otherwise be permissible; that the act should either be consistently permitted or consistently prohibited; that if the principles we have defended so far are true, society has no business, as society, to decide that anything concerning only the individual is wrong; that it cannot go beyond dissuasion, and that one person should be as free to persuade as another is to dissuade. Against this it may be argued that although the public, or the state, are not warranted in deciding authoritatively, for purposes of repression or punishment, that such and such conduct affecting only the individual's own interests is good or bad, they are fully justified in assuming, if they regard it as bad, that whether it is so or not is at least a disputable question; and that on that supposition they cannot be acting wrongly in trying to exclude the influence of solicitations that are not disinterested, of instigators who cannot possibly be impartial, who have a direct personal interest on one side, the side the state believes to be the wrong one, and who admittedly promote it for personal ends alone. Surely, it may be urged, nothing can be lost, and no good sacrificed, by so ordering things that people shall make their choice, wisely or foolishly, on their own initiative, as free as possible from the arts of people who stimulate their inclinations for interested purposes of their own. Thus, it may be said, though the statutes about unlawful games are utterly indefensible — though everyone should be free to gamble in his own house or in each other's, or in any meeting place established by their own subscriptions and open only to members and their guests — yet public gambling houses should not be permitted. It is true that the prohibition is never effective, and that however much tyrannical power is given to the police, gambling houses can always be kept up under other pretences; but they can be forced to conduct their operations with a certain degree of secrecy and mystery, so that nobody knows anything about them but those who seek them out; and society ought not to aim at more than that. There is considerable force in these arguments. I will not venture to decide whether they are enough to justify the moral anomaly of punishing the accessory when the principal is, and must be, allowed to go free — of fining or imprisoning the procurer but not the fornicator, the keeper of the gambling house but not the gambler. Still less should the common operations of buying and selling be interfered with on analogous grounds. Almost every article that is bought and sold may be used to excess, and the sellers have a financial interest in encouraging that excess; but no argument can be founded on this in favour, for instance, of the Maine Law, because the class of dealers in strong drink, though interested in its abuse, are indispensable for the sake of its legitimate use. The interest these dealers have in promoting intemperance is, however, a real evil, and justifies the state in imposing restrictions and requiring guarantees which but for that justification would be infringements of legitimate liberty.
A further question is whether the state, while permitting such conduct, should nevertheless discourage it indirectly when it thinks it contrary to the best interests of the person concerned — whether, for example, it should take measures to make the means of drunkenness more expensive, or add to the difficulty of getting them by limiting the number of places of sale. On this, as on most other practical questions, many distinctions have to be made. To tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them harder to get is a measure differing only in degree from prohibiting them entirely, and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable. Every increase in cost is a prohibition to those whose means do not come up to the increased price, and to those whose means do it is a penalty laid on them for gratifying a particular taste. Their choice of pleasures, and the way they spend their income after satisfying their legal and moral obligations to the state and to individuals, are their own concern and must rest with their own judgment. These considerations may seem at first sight to condemn the singling out of stimulants as special subjects of taxation for revenue. But it must be remembered that taxation for fiscal purposes is absolutely inevitable; that in most countries a considerable part of that taxation has to be indirect; and that the state therefore cannot help imposing penalties, which to some people may be prohibitive, on the use of some articles of consumption. It is therefore the duty of the state to consider, when imposing taxes, which commodities the consumers can best do without, and à fortiori, all the more, to choose in preference those whose use beyond a very moderate quantity it thinks positively injurious. Taxation of stimulants, then, up to the point that produces the largest amount of revenue — supposing the state needs all the revenue it yields — is not only admissible but to be approved of.
The question of making the sale of these commodities a more or less exclusive privilege must be answered differently according to the purposes the restriction is meant to serve. All places of public resort require the restraint of a police, and places of this kind particularly, because offences against society are especially apt to originate there. It is therefore fitting to confine the power of selling these commodities, at least for consumption on the premises, to people of known or vouched-for respectability of conduct; to make such regulations about opening and closing hours as public surveillance requires; and to withdraw the licence if breaches of the peace repeatedly occur through the connivance or the incapacity of the keeper of the house, or if it becomes a meeting place for planning and preparing offences against the law. Any further restriction I do not think justifiable in principle. Limiting the number of beer houses and spirit houses, for instance, for the express purpose of making them harder to get to and reducing the occasions of temptation, not only exposes everybody to an inconvenience because there are some who would abuse the facility, but is suited only to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages and placed under an education of restraint, to fit them for future admission to the privileges of freedom. This is not the principle on which the labouring classes are professedly governed in any free country, and nobody who sets a due value on freedom will consent to their being governed that way, unless after every effort has been exhausted to educate them for freedom and govern them as free men, and it has been definitively proved that they can only be governed as children. The bare statement of the alternative shows the absurdity of supposing that such efforts have been made in any case we need consider here. It is only because the institutions of this country are a mass of inconsistencies that things belonging to a system of despotic, or as it is called paternal, government find their way into our practice, while the general freedom of our institutions rules out exercising the amount of control that would make the restraint of any real use as a moral education.
It was pointed out earlier in this essay that the liberty of the individual in things that concern the individual alone implies a corresponding liberty in any number of individuals to regulate by mutual agreement things that concern them jointly and concern nobody else. This question presents no difficulty as long as the will of everyone involved remains unchanged; but since that will may change, it is often necessary, even in things that concern only themselves, that they should enter into engagements with one another — and when they do, it is fitting as a general rule that those engagements should be kept. Yet in the laws of probably every country this general rule has some exceptions. Not only are people not held to engagements that violate the rights of third parties, but it is sometimes considered sufficient reason for releasing them from an engagement that it is injurious to themselves. In this and most other civilised countries, for example, an engagement by which a person sold himself, or allowed himself to be sold, as a slave would be null and void, enforced neither by law nor by opinion. The ground for thus limiting his power to dispose of his own lot in life voluntarily is obvious, and is very clearly seen in this extreme case. The reason for not interfering with a person's voluntary acts, except for the sake of others, is consideration for his liberty. His voluntary choice is evidence that what he chooses is desirable, or at least endurable, to him, and that his good is on the whole best provided for by letting him take his own means of pursuing it. But by selling himself as a slave he abdicates his liberty; he gives up any future use of it beyond that single act. He therefore defeats, in his own case, the very purpose that justifies allowing him to dispose of himself. He is no longer free, and is from then on in a position that no longer has the presumption in its favour which his voluntarily remaining in it would give. The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom to be allowed to give away one's freedom. These reasons, whose force is so conspicuous in this peculiar case, evidently apply far more widely; yet a limit is set to them everywhere by the necessities of life, which continually require, not indeed that we should resign our freedom, but that we should consent to this or that limitation of it. The principle, however, that demands uncontrolled freedom of action in everything that concerns only the people acting requires that those who have become bound to one another in things concerning no third party should be able to release one another from the engagement; and even without such voluntary release there are perhaps no contracts or engagements, except those relating to money or money's worth, of which one can venture to say that there ought to be no liberty of withdrawal whatever. Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt, in the excellent essay I have already quoted, states his conviction that engagements involving personal relations or services should never be legally binding beyond a limited length of time, and that the most important of these engagements, marriage, having the peculiarity that its objects are frustrated unless the feelings of both parties are in harmony with it, should require nothing more than the declared will of either party to dissolve it. This subject is too important and too complicated to be discussed in a parenthesis, and I touch on it only so far as is necessary for purposes of illustration. If the conciseness and generality of Baron Humboldt's essay had not obliged him in this instance to content himself with stating his conclusion without discussing the premises, he would doubtless have recognised that the question cannot be decided on grounds as simple as the ones he confines himself to. When a person, either by an express promise or by his conduct, has encouraged another to rely on his continuing to act in a certain way — to build expectations and calculations, and to stake any part of his plan of life on that supposition — a new series of moral obligations arises on his part towards that person, which may possibly be overruled, but cannot be ignored. And again, if the relation between two contracting parties has been followed by consequences to others; if it has put third parties in any particular position, or, as in the case of marriage, has even called third parties into existence, obligations arise on the part of both contracting parties towards those third persons, and the fulfilment of them, or at any rate the manner of fulfilling them, must be greatly affected by whether the relation between the original parties to the contract continues or is broken off. It does not follow, and I cannot admit, that these obligations extend to requiring the contract to be fulfilled at all costs to the happiness of the reluctant party; but they are a necessary element in the question. And even if, as von Humboldt maintains, they ought to make no difference to the legal freedom of the parties to release themselves from the engagement — and I too hold that they ought not to make much difference — they necessarily make a great difference to the moral freedom. A person is bound to take all these circumstances into account before resolving on a step that may affect such important interests of others; and if he does not give proper weight to those interests, he is morally responsible for the wrong. I have made these obvious remarks the better to illustrate the general principle of liberty, and not because they are at all needed on the particular question, which on the contrary is usually discussed as if the interest of children were everything and that of grown people nothing.
I have already observed that because there are no recognised general principles, liberty is often granted where it should be withheld as well as withheld where it should be granted; and one of the cases in which the feeling for liberty is strongest in the modern European world is a case where, in my view, it is altogether misplaced. A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns, but he ought not to be free to do as he likes when he is acting for somebody else, under the pretext that the other person's affairs are his own. The state, while it respects the liberty of each in what specially concerns himself, is bound to keep a vigilant control over his exercise of any power it allows him to have over others. This obligation is almost entirely disregarded in the case of family relations — a case which in its direct influence on human happiness is more important than all the others put together. The almost despotic power of husbands over wives need not be dwelt on here, because nothing more is needed to remove the evil completely than that wives should have the same rights and receive the protection of the law in the same way as everyone else; and because on this subject the defenders of established injustice do not resort to the plea of liberty, but stand out openly as the champions of power. It is in the case of children that misapplied notions of liberty are a real obstacle to the state's fulfilling its duties. One would almost think that a man's children were supposed to be literally, and not metaphorically, a part of himself, so jealous is opinion of the smallest interference of the law with his absolute and exclusive control over them — more jealous than of almost any interference with his own freedom of action. So much less do most people value liberty than power.
Consider, for example, the case of education. Is it not almost a self-evident axiom that the state should require and compel the education, up to a certain standard, of every human being born its citizen? Yet who is there who is not afraid to recognise and assert this truth? Hardly anyone will deny that it is one of the most sacred duties of the parents — or, as law and custom now stand, the father — after summoning a human being into the world, to give that being an education fitting him to do his part well in life, towards others and towards himself. But while everyone unanimously declares this to be the father's duty, hardly anybody in this country will bear to hear of obliging him to perform it. Instead of being required to make any effort or sacrifice to secure an education for the child, he is left to choose whether to accept one or not when it is provided free. It is still not recognised that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able not only to provide food for its body but instruction and training for its mind is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and that if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the state ought to see it fulfilled, at the parent's expense as far as possible.
If the duty of enforcing universal education were once admitted, there would be an end of the difficulties about what the state should teach and how it should teach, which now turn the subject into a mere battlefield for sects and parties, and cause the time and labour that should have gone into educating to be wasted in quarrelling about education. If the government would make up its mind to require a good education for every child, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It could leave parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer children and paying the whole school expenses of those who have nobody else to pay for them. The objections urged with reason against state education do not apply to the enforcement of education by the state, but to the state's taking on itself to direct that education, which is an entirely different thing. That the whole, or any large part, of the education of the people should be in the hands of the state, I deplore as much as anyone. Everything that has been said about the importance of individuality of character, and of diversity in opinions and modes of conduct, implies that diversity of education is of the same unspeakable importance. A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and since the mould it casts them in is the one that pleases the predominant power in the government — whether that is a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy or the majority of the existing generation — in proportion as it is efficient and successful it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the state should exist, if it exists at all, only as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the sake of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence. Unless, indeed, society in general is in so backward a state that it could not or would not provide itself with any proper institutions of education unless the government undertook the task; then indeed the government may, as the lesser of two great evils, take the business of schools and universities on itself, as it may take on that of joint-stock companies when private enterprise in a form fit for undertaking great works of industry does not exist in the country. But in general, if the country contains enough people qualified to provide education under government auspices, the same people would be able and willing to give an equally good education on the voluntary principle, assured of payment by a law making education compulsory combined with state aid for those unable to meet the expense.
The instrument for enforcing the law could only be public examinations, extending to all children and beginning at an early age. An age might be fixed at which every child must be examined to find out whether he or she can read. If a child proved unable, the father, unless he had some sufficient excuse, might be subjected to a moderate fine, to be worked out by his labour if necessary, and the child might be put to school at his expense. Once every year the examination should be repeated, with a gradually widening range of subjects, so as to make the universal acquisition — and, what is more, retention — of a certain minimum of general knowledge virtually compulsory. Beyond that minimum there should be voluntary examinations on all subjects, at which anyone reaching a certain standard of proficiency could claim a certificate. To prevent the state from using these arrangements to exert an improper influence over opinion, the knowledge required for passing an examination — beyond the merely instrumental parts of knowledge, such as languages and their use — should be confined, even in the higher class of examinations, exclusively to facts and positive science. Examinations on religion, politics, or other disputed topics should not turn on the truth or falsity of opinions, but on the matter of fact that such and such an opinion is held, on such and such grounds, by particular authors, schools or churches. Under this system the rising generation would be no worse off with regard to all disputed truths than they are at present; they would be brought up as churchmen or as dissenters just as they are now, the state merely taking care that they should be instructed churchmen or instructed dissenters. There would be nothing to stop them from being taught religion, if their parents chose, at the same schools where they were taught everything else. All attempts by the state to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects are evil; but it may very properly offer to ascertain and certify that a person has the knowledge needed to make his conclusions on any given subject worth attending to. A student of philosophy would be the better for being able to stand an examination in both Locke and Kant, whichever of the two he takes up with, or even if he takes up with neither; and there is no reasonable objection to examining an atheist on the evidences of Christianity, provided he is not required to profess belief in them. The examinations in the higher branches of knowledge, however, should in my view be entirely voluntary. It would give governments too dangerous a power if they were allowed to exclude anyone from a profession, even from the profession of teacher, for an alleged deficiency of qualifications; and I think, with Wilhelm von Humboldt, that degrees and other public certificates of scientific or professional attainment should be given to everyone who presents himself for examination and passes the test, but that such certificates should confer no advantage over competitors beyond whatever weight public opinion chooses to attach to their testimony.
It is not only in the matter of education that misplaced notions of liberty prevent moral obligations on the part of parents from being recognised, and legal obligations from being imposed, where there are the strongest grounds for the moral ones always and in many cases for the legal ones too. The very fact of causing a human being to exist is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life. To take on this responsibility — to bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing — unless the being it is bestowed on will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being. And in a country either overpopulated or threatened with being so, to produce children beyond a very small number, with the effect of reducing the reward of labour by their competition, is a serious offence against everyone who lives on the pay for their labour. The laws in many Continental countries that forbid marriage unless the parties can show they have the means of supporting a family do not exceed the legitimate powers of the state; and whether such laws are expedient or not, a question depending mainly on local circumstances and feelings, they are not objectionable as violations of liberty. Such laws are interferences by the state to prohibit a mischievous act — an act injurious to others, which ought to be a subject of condemnation and social stigma even where it is not thought expedient to add legal punishment. Yet the current ideas of liberty, which bend so easily to real infringements of an individual's freedom in things that concern only himself, would repel any attempt to restrain his inclinations when the consequence of indulging them is a life, or lives, of wretchedness and depravity for the offspring, and manifold evils for everyone near enough to be affected in any way by what they do. When we compare mankind's strange respect for liberty with their strange want of respect for it, we might imagine that a man had an indispensable right to do harm to others and no right at all to please himself without giving pain to anyone.
I have reserved for last a large class of questions about the limits of government interference which, though closely connected with the subject of this essay, do not strictly belong to it. These are cases where the reasons against interference do not turn on the principle of liberty at all: the question is not about restraining the actions of individuals but about helping them. It is asked whether the government should do, or have done, something for their benefit, instead of leaving it to be done by themselves, individually or in voluntary combination.
The objections to government interference, when it does not involve any infringement of liberty, may be of three kinds.
The first is where the thing to be done is likely to be done better by individuals than by the government. Generally speaking, nobody is so fit to conduct a business, or to decide how and by whom it shall be conducted, as the people personally interested in it. This principle condemns the interferences, once so common, of the legislature or the officers of government with the ordinary processes of industry. But this part of the subject has been sufficiently dealt with by political economists, and is not particularly related to the principles of this essay.
The second objection is more closely allied to our subject. In many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing as well on average as government officials would, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education — a way of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects they are thus left to deal with. This is a principal, though not the sole, recommendation of trial by jury, in non-political cases; of free and popular local and municipal institutions; and of the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enterprises by voluntary associations. These are not questions of liberty, and are connected with that subject only by remote tendencies; but they are questions of development. It belongs to another occasion than this to dwell on these things as parts of national education — as being in truth the peculiar training of a citizen, the practical part of the political education of a free people, taking them out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness and accustoming them to understanding joint interests and managing joint concerns, getting them into the habit of acting from public or semi-public motives and guiding their conduct by aims that unite them instead of isolating them from one another. Without these habits and powers, a free constitution can neither be worked nor preserved, as is shown by the too often transitory nature of political freedom in countries where it does not rest on a sufficient basis of local liberties. The management of purely local business by the localities, and of the great enterprises of industry by the union of those who voluntarily supply the money, is further recommended by all the advantages this essay has set out as belonging to individuality of development and diversity of modes of action. Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, by contrast, there are varied experiments and endless diversity of experience. What the state can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and an active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimenter to benefit from other people's experiments, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.
The third and most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. Every function added to those the government already exercises spreads its influence over people's hopes and fears more widely, and converts more and more of the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party aiming at becoming the government. If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities and the public charities were all branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with everything now entrusted to them, became departments of the central administration; if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government and looked to the government for every step up in life — then not all the freedom of the press and all the popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free except in name. And the evil would be the greater the more efficiently and scientifically the administrative machinery was constructed, and the more skilful the arrangements for obtaining the best qualified hands and heads to work it. In England it has lately been proposed that all members of the civil service should be selected by competitive examination, so as to get the most intelligent and instructed people available for those posts; and much has been said and written for and against the proposal. One of the arguments most insisted on by its opponents is that the occupation of a permanent official servant of the state does not offer prospects of pay and importance great enough to attract the highest talents, which will always be able to find a more inviting career in the professions, or in the service of companies and other public bodies. One would not have been surprised if this argument had been used by the friends of the proposal, as an answer to its chief difficulty. Coming from the opponents it is strange enough. What is urged as an objection is the safety valve of the proposed system. If all the high talent of the country could indeed be drawn into the service of the government, a proposal tending to bring that about might well cause uneasiness. If every part of the business of society requiring organised concert, or large and comprehensive views, were in the hands of the government, and if government offices were universally filled by the ablest men, then all the enlarged culture and practised intelligence in the country, except the purely speculative, would be concentrated in a numerous bureaucracy, to whom alone the rest of the community would look for everything: the multitude for direction and dictation in all they had to do, and the able and aspiring for personal advancement. Getting admitted into the ranks of this bureaucracy, and, once admitted, rising in it, would be the only objects of ambition. Under such a regime not only is the outside public ill qualified, for want of practical experience, to criticise or check how the bureaucracy operates; but even if the accidents of a despotism, or the natural working of popular institutions, occasionally raise to the top a ruler or rulers with a leaning towards reform, no reform can be carried through that is contrary to the interest of the bureaucracy. Such is the melancholy condition of the Russian empire, as the accounts of those who have had opportunity enough to observe it show. The Czar himself is powerless against the bureaucratic body: he can send any one of them to Siberia, but he cannot govern without them, or against their will. On every decree of his they have a tacit veto, simply by refraining from carrying it out. In countries of more advanced civilisation and a more insurrectionary spirit, the public, accustomed to expect everything to be done for them by the state, or at least to do nothing for themselves without asking the state not only for leave to do it but even for instructions how, naturally hold the state responsible for every evil that befalls them; and when the evil exceeds the amount of patience they have, they rise against the government and make what is called a revolution. Then somebody else, with or without legitimate authority from the nation, vaults into the seat, issues his orders to the bureaucracy, and everything goes on much as before, the bureaucracy being unchanged and nobody else being capable of taking their place.
A very different spectacle is seen among a people used to transacting their own business. In France, where a large part of the people have served in the army and many have held at least the rank of non-commissioned officer, there are in every popular insurrection several people competent to take the lead and improvise some tolerable plan of action. What the French are in military affairs, the Americans are in every kind of civil business. Leave them without a government, and any body of Americans is able to improvise one and to carry on that or any other public business with a sufficient amount of intelligence, order and decision. This is what every free people ought to be, and a people capable of it is certain to be free. It will never let itself be enslaved by any man or body of men merely because they are able to seize and pull the reins of the central administration. No bureaucracy can hope to make such a people do or put up with anything they do not like. But where everything is done through the bureaucracy, nothing the bureaucracy is really opposed to can be done at all. The constitution of such countries is an organisation of the experience and practical ability of the nation into a disciplined body for the purpose of governing the rest; and the more perfect that organisation is in itself, the more successful it is at drawing to itself and educating for itself the people of greatest capacity from every rank of the community, the more complete is the bondage of everybody — the members of the bureaucracy included. For the governors are as much the slaves of their organisation and discipline as the governed are of the governors. A Chinese mandarin is as much the tool and creature of a despotism as the humblest farmer. An individual Jesuit is the slave of his order to the utmost degree of abasement, though the order itself exists for the collective power and importance of its members.
Nor should it be forgotten that absorbing all the principal ability of the country into the governing body is fatal, sooner or later, to the mental activity and progressiveness of that body itself. Banded together as they are, working a system which, like all systems, must proceed largely by fixed rules, the official body are under the constant temptation of sinking into an indolent routine — or, if they now and then leave that treadmill round, of rushing into some half-examined crudity that has taken the fancy of some leading member of the corps. The only check on these closely allied though apparently opposite tendencies, and the only stimulus that can keep the ability of the body itself up to a high standard, is being liable to the watchful criticism of equal ability outside the body. It is indispensable, therefore, that the means should exist, independently of the government, of forming such ability and giving it the opportunities and experience necessary for correct judgment in great practical affairs. If we want to have permanently a skilful and efficient body of officials — above all, a body able to originate improvements and willing to adopt them; if we do not want our bureaucracy to degenerate into a pedantocracy, this body must not monopolise all the occupations that form and cultivate the faculties needed for governing mankind.
To determine the point at which evils so formidable to human freedom and advancement begin — or rather, at which they begin to outweigh the benefits of applying the collective force of society, under its recognised leaders, to removing the obstacles that stand in the way of its well-being; to secure as much of the advantages of centralised power and intelligence as can be had without turning too great a proportion of the general activity into governmental channels — is one of the most difficult and complicated questions in the art of government. It is largely a question of detail, in which many various considerations have to be kept in view and no absolute rule can be laid down. But I believe the practical principle in which safety lies, the ideal to keep in view, the standard by which to test every arrangement intended to overcome the difficulty, can be put in these words: the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency, but the greatest possible centralisation of information and diffusion of it from the centre. Thus in municipal administration there would be, as in the New England states, a very minute division among separate officers, chosen by the localities, of all business that is not better left to the people directly interested; but besides this there would be, in each department of local affairs, a central superintendence forming a branch of the general government. The organ of this superintendence would concentrate, as in a focus, the variety of information and experience derived from the conduct of that branch of public business in every locality, from everything analogous done in foreign countries, and from the general principles of political science. This central organ should have a right to know everything that is done, and its special duty should be to make the knowledge acquired in one place available to others. Emancipated by its elevated position and comprehensive view from the petty prejudices and narrow outlook of a locality, its advice would naturally carry much authority; but its actual power as a permanent institution should, I think, be limited to compelling the local officers to obey the laws laid down for their guidance. In everything not provided for by general rules, those officers should be left to their own judgment, answerable to their constituents. For violating the rules they should be answerable to the law, and the rules themselves should be laid down by the legislature, the central administrative authority only watching over their execution, and if they were not properly carried out, appealing, according to the nature of the case, either to the courts to enforce the law or to the constituencies to dismiss the officials who had not carried it out in its spirit. Such, in its general conception, is the central superintendence the Poor Law Board is meant to exercise over the administrators of the Poor Rate throughout the country. Whatever powers the Board exercises beyond this limit were right and necessary in that peculiar case, to cure rooted habits of maladministration in matters deeply affecting not merely the localities but the whole community, since no locality has a moral right to make itself by mismanagement a nest of pauperism, which necessarily overflows into other localities and impairs the moral and physical condition of the whole labouring community. The powers of administrative coercion and subordinate legislation the Poor Law Board possesses, though they exercise them very sparingly given the state of opinion on the subject, are perfectly justifiable in a case of first-rate national interest but would be wholly out of place in the superintendence of purely local interests. But a central organ of information and instruction for all the localities would be equally valuable in every department of administration. A government cannot have too much of the kind of activity that does not impede but aids and stimulates individual effort and development. The mischief begins when, instead of calling forth the activity and the powers of individuals and bodies, it substitutes its own activity for theirs; when, instead of informing, advising and on occasion denouncing, it makes them work in fetters, or tells them to stand aside and does their work for them. The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a state which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more administrative skill, or to that semblance of it which practice gives in the details of business; a state which dwarfs its men so that they may be more docile instruments in its hands, even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men nothing great can really be accomplished, and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, so that the machine might run more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.