Introduction

I

John Stu­art Mill was born on 20th May 1806. He was a del­ic­ate child, and the ex­traordin­ary edu­ca­tion de­signed by his father was not cal­cu­lated to de­velop and im­prove his phys­ical powers. “I never was a boy,” he says; “never played cricket.” His ex­er­cise was taken in the form of walks with his father, dur­ing which the elder Mill lec­tured his son and ex­amined him on his work. It is idle to spec­u­late on the pos­sible res­ults of a dif­fer­ent treat­ment. Mill re­mained del­ic­ate through­out his life, but was en­dowed with that in­tense men­tal en­ergy which is so of­ten com­bined with phys­ical weak­ness. His youth was sac­ri­ficed to an idea; he was de­signed by his father to carry on his work; the in­di­vidu­al­ity of the boy was un­im­port­ant. A visit to the south of France at the age of four­teen, in com­pany with the fam­ily of Gen­eral Sir Samuel Bentham, was not without its in­flu­ence. It was a glimpse of an­other at­mo­sphere, though the stu­di­ous habits of his home life were main­tained. Moreover, he de­rived from it his in­terest in for­eign polit­ics, which re­mained one of his char­ac­ter­ist­ics to the end of his life. In 1823 he was ap­poin­ted ju­nior clerk in the Ex­am­iners’ Of­fice at the In­dia House.

Mill’s first es­says were writ­ten in the Trav­el­ler about a year be­fore he entered the In­dia House. From that time for­ward his lit­er­ary work was un­in­ter­rup­ted save by at­tacks of ill­ness. His in­dustry was stu­pendous. He wrote art­icles on an in­fin­ite vari­ety of sub­jects, polit­ical, meta­phys­ical, philo­sophic, re­li­gious, po­et­ical. He dis­covered Tennyson for his gen­er­a­tion, he in­flu­enced the writ­ing of Carlyle’s French Re­volu­tion as well as its suc­cess. And all the while he was en­gaged in study­ing and pre­par­ing for his more am­bi­tious works, while he rose step by step at the In­dia Of­fice. His Es­says on Un­settled Ques­tions in Polit­ical Economy were writ­ten in 1831, al­though they did not ap­pear un­til thir­teen years later. His Sys­tem of Lo­gic, the design of which was even then fash­ion­ing it­self in his brain, took thir­teen years to com­plete, and was ac­tu­ally pub­lished be­fore the Polit­ical Economy. In 1844 ap­peared the art­icle on Michelet, which its au­thor an­ti­cip­ated would cause some dis­cus­sion, but which did not cre­ate the sen­sa­tion he ex­pec­ted. Next year there were the “Claims of La­bour” and “Guizot,” and in 1847 his art­icles on Irish af­fairs in the Morn­ing Chron­icle. These years were very much in­flu­enced by his friend­ship and cor­res­pond­ence with Comte, a curi­ous com­rade­ship between men of such dif­fer­ent tem­pera­ment. In 1848 Mill pub­lished his Polit­ical Economy, to which he had given his ser­i­ous study since the com­ple­tion of his Lo­gic. His art­icles and re­views, though they in­volved a good deal of work—as, for in­stance, the re-per­usal of the Iliad and the Odys­sey in the ori­ginal be­fore re­view­ing Grote’s Greece—were re­cre­ation to the stu­dent. The year 1856 saw him head of the Ex­am­iners’ Of­fice in the In­dia House, and an­other two years brought the end of his of­fi­cial work, ow­ing to the trans­fer of In­dia to the Crown. In the same year his wife died. Liberty was pub­lished shortly after, as well as the Thoughts on Parlia­ment­ary Re­form, and no year passed without Mill mak­ing im­port­ant con­tri­bu­tions on the polit­ical, philo­soph­ical, and eth­ical ques­tions of the day.

Seven years after the death of his wife, Mill was in­vited to con­test West­min­ster. His feel­ing on the con­duct of elec­tions made him re­fuse to take any per­sonal ac­tion in the mat­ter, and he gave the frankest ex­pres­sion to his polit­ical views, but nev­er­the­less he was elec­ted by a large ma­jor­ity. He was not a con­ven­tional suc­cess in the House; as a speaker he lacked mag­net­ism. But his in­flu­ence was widely felt. “For the sake of the House of Com­mons at large,” said Mr. Glad­stone, “I re­joiced in his ad­vent and de­plored his dis­ap­pear­ance. He did us all good.” After only three years in Parlia­ment, he was de­feated at the next Gen­eral Elec­tion by Mr. W. H. Smith. He re­tired to Avignon, to the pleas­ant little house where the hap­pi­est years of his life had been spent in the com­pan­ion­ship of his wife, and con­tin­ued his dis­in­ter­ested la­bours. He com­pleted his edi­tion of his father’s Ana­lysis of the Mind, and also pro­duced, in ad­di­tion to less im­port­ant work, The Sub­jec­tion of Wo­men, in which he had the act­ive co­oper­a­tion of his step­daugh­ter. A book on So­cial­ism was un­der con­sid­er­a­tion, but, like an earlier study of So­ci­ology, it never was writ­ten. He died in 1873, his last years be­ing spent peace­fully in the pleas­ant so­ci­ety of his step­daugh­ter, from whose tender care and earn­est in­tel­lec­tual sym­pathy he caught maybe a far-off re­flec­tion of the light which had ir­ra­di­ated his spir­itual life.

II

The cir­cum­stances un­der which John Stu­art Mill wrote his Liberty are largely con­nec­ted with the in­flu­ence which Mrs. Taylor wiel­ded over his ca­reer. The ded­ic­a­tion is well known. It con­tains the most ex­traordin­ary pan­egyric on a wo­man that any philo­sopher has ever penned. “Were I but cap­able of in­ter­pret­ing to the world one-half the great thoughts and noble feel­ings which are bur­ied in her grave, I should be the me­dium of a greater be­ne­fit to it than is ever likely to arise from any­thing that I can write, un­promp­ted and un­as­sisted by her all but un­ri­valled wis­dom.” It is easy for the or­din­ary worldly cyn­icism to curl a scep­tical lip over sen­tences like these. There may be ex­ag­ger­a­tion of sen­ti­ment, the ne­ces­sary and in­ev­it­able re­ac­tion of a man who was trained ac­cord­ing to the “dry light” of so un­im­pres­sion­able a man as James Mill, the father; but the pas­sage quoted is not the only one in which John Stu­art Mill pro­claims his un­hes­it­at­ing be­lief in the in­tel­lec­tual in­flu­ence of his wife. The treat­ise on Liberty was writ­ten es­pe­cially un­der her au­thor­ity and en­cour­age­ment, but there are many earlier ref­er­ences to the power which she ex­er­cised over his mind. Mill was in­tro­duced to her as early as 1831, at a din­ner-party at Mr. Taylor’s house, where were present, amongst oth­ers, Roebuck, W. J. Fox, and Miss Har­riet Martineau. The ac­quaint­ance rap­idly ripened into in­tim­acy and the in­tim­acy into friend­ship, and Mill was never weary of ex­pa­ti­at­ing on all the ad­vant­ages of so sin­gu­lar a re­la­tion­ship. In some of the present­a­tion cop­ies of his work on Polit­ical Economy, he wrote the fol­low­ing ded­ic­a­tion:—“To Mrs. John Taylor, who, of all per­sons known to the au­thor, is the most highly qual­i­fied either to ori­gin­ate or to ap­pre­ci­ate spec­u­la­tion on so­cial ad­vance­ment, this work is with the highest re­spect and es­teem ded­ic­ated.” An art­icle on the en­fran­chise­ment of wo­men was made the oc­ca­sion for an­other en­co­mium. We shall hardly be wrong in at­trib­ut­ing a much later book, The Sub­jec­tion of Wo­men, pub­lished in 1869, to the in­flu­ence wiel­ded by Mrs. Taylor. Fin­ally, the pages of the Auto­bi­o­graphy ring with the di­thy­rambic praise of his “al­most in­fal­lible coun­sel­lor.”

The facts of this re­mark­able in­tim­acy can eas­ily be stated. The de­duc­tions are more dif­fi­cult. There is no ques­tion that Mill’s in­fatu­ation was the cause of con­sid­er­able trouble to his ac­quaint­ances and friends. His father openly taxed him with be­ing in love with an­other man’s wife. Roebuck, Mrs. Grote, Mrs. Austin, Miss Har­riet Martineau were amongst those who suffered be­cause they made some al­lu­sion to a for­bid­den sub­ject. Mrs. Taylor lived with her daugh­ter in a lodging in the coun­try; but in 1851 her hus­band died, and then Mill made her his wife. Opin­ions were widely di­ver­gent as to her mer­its; but every­one agreed that up to the time of her death, in 1858, Mill was wholly lost to his friends. Ge­orge Mill, one of Mill’s younger broth­ers, gave it as his opin­ion that she was a clever and re­mark­able wo­man, but “noth­ing like what John took her to be.” Carlyle, in his re­min­is­cences, de­scribed her with am­bigu­ous epi­thets. She was “vivid,” “iri­des­cent,” “pale and pas­sion­ate and sad-look­ing, a liv­ing-ro­mance heroine of the roy­al­ist vo­li­tion and ques­tion­able des­tiny.” It is not pos­sible to make much of a judg­ment like this, but we get on more cer­tain ground when we dis­cover that Mrs. Carlyle said on one oc­ca­sion that “she is thought to be dan­ger­ous,” and that Carlyle ad­ded that she was worse than dan­ger­ous, she was pat­ron­ising. The oc­ca­sion when Mill and his wife were brought into close con­tact with the Carlyles is well known. The ma­nu­script of the first volume of the French Re­volu­tion had been lent to Mill, and was ac­ci­dent­ally burnt by Mrs. Mill’s ser­vant. Mill and his wife drove up to Carlyle’s door, the wife speech­less, the hus­band so full of con­ver­sa­tion that he de­tained Carlyle with des­per­ate at­tempts at lo­qua­city for two hours. But Dr. Gar­nett tells us, in his Life of Carlyle, that Mill made a sub­stan­tial re­par­a­tion for the calam­ity for which he was re­spons­ible by in­du­cing the ag­grieved au­thor to ac­cept half of the £200 which he offered. Mrs. Mill, as I have said, died in 1858, after seven years of happy com­pan­ion­ship with her hus­band, and was bur­ied at Avignon. The in­scrip­tion which Mill wrote for her grave is too char­ac­ter­istic to be omit­ted:—“Her great and lov­ing heart, her noble soul, her clear, power­ful, ori­ginal, and com­pre­hens­ive in­tel­lect, made her the guide and sup­port, the in­structor in wis­dom and the ex­ample in good­ness, as she was the sole earthly de­light of those who had the hap­pi­ness to be­long to her. As earn­est for all pub­lic good as she was gen­er­ous and de­voted to all who sur­roun­ded her, her in­flu­ence has been felt in many of the greatest im­prove­ments of the age, and will be in those still to come. Were there even a few hearts and in­tel­lects like hers, this Earth would already be­come the hoped-for Heaven.” These lines prove the in­tens­ity of Mill’s feel­ing, which is not afraid of abund­ant ver­biage; but they also prove that he could not ima­gine what the ef­fect would be on oth­ers, and, as Grote said, only Mill’s repu­ta­tion could sur­vive these and sim­ilar dis­plays.

Every­one will judge for him­self of this ro­mantic epis­ode in Mill’s ca­reer, ac­cord­ing to such ex­per­i­ence as he may pos­sess of the philo­sophic mind and of the value of these curi­ous but not in­fre­quent re­la­tion­ships. It may have been a piece of in­fatu­ation, or, if we prefer to say so, it may have been the most gra­cious and the most hu­man page in Mill’s ca­reer. Mrs. Mill may have flattered her hus­band’s van­ity by echo­ing his opin­ions, or she may have in­deed been an Egeria, full of in­spir­a­tion and in­tel­lec­tual help­ful­ness. What usu­ally hap­pens in these cases—al­though the philo­sopher him­self, through his be­lief in the equal­ity of the sexes, was de­barred from think­ing so—is the ex­tremely valu­able ac­tion and re­ac­tion of two dif­fer­ent classes and or­ders of mind. To any­one whose thoughts have been oc­cu­pied with the sphere of ab­stract spec­u­la­tion, the lively and vivid pre­sent­ment of con­crete fact comes as a de­light­ful and agree­able shock. The in­stinct of the wo­man of­ten en­ables her not only to ap­pre­hend but to il­lus­trate a truth for which she would be totally un­able to give the ad­equate philo­sophic reas­on­ing. On the other hand, the man, with the more care­ful lo­gical meth­ods and the slow pro­cesses of formal reas­on­ing, is apt to sup­pose that the happy in­tu­ition which leaps to the con­clu­sion is really based on the in­tel­lec­tual pro­cesses of which he is con­scious in his own case. Thus both parties to the happy con­tract are equally pleased. The ab­stract truth gets the con­crete il­lus­tra­tion; the con­crete il­lus­tra­tion finds its proper found­a­tion in a series of ab­stract in­quir­ies. Per­haps Carlyle’s epi­thets of “iri­des­cent” and “vivid” refer in­cid­ent­ally to Mrs. Mill’s quick per­cept­ive­ness, and thus throw a use­ful light on the mu­tual ad­vant­ages of the com­mon work of hus­band and wife. But it sa­vours al­most of im­per­tin­ence even to at­tempt to lift the veil on a mys­tery like this. It is enough to say, per­haps, that how­ever much we may de­plore the ex­ag­ger­a­tion of Mill’s ref­er­ences to his wife, we re­cog­nise that, for whatever reason, the pair lived an ideally happy life.

It still, how­ever, re­mains to es­tim­ate the ex­tent to which Mrs. Taylor, both be­fore and after her mar­riage with Mill, made ac­tual con­tri­bu­tions to his thoughts and his pub­lic work. Here I may be per­haps per­mit­ted to avail my­self of what I have already writ­ten in a pre­vi­ous work.1 Mill gives us abund­ant help in this mat­ter in the Auto­bi­o­graphy. When first he knew her, his thoughts were turn­ing to the sub­ject of Lo­gic. But his pub­lished work on the sub­ject owed noth­ing to her, he tells us, in its doc­trines. It was Mill’s cus­tom to write the whole of a book so as to get his gen­eral scheme com­plete, and then la­bor­i­ously to re­write it in or­der to per­fect the phrases and the com­pos­i­tion. Doubt­less Mrs. Taylor was of con­sid­er­able help to him as a critic of style. But to be a critic of doc­trine she was hardly qual­i­fied. Mill has made some clear ad­mis­sions on this point. “The only ac­tual re­volu­tion which has ever taken place in my modes of think­ing was already com­plete,”2 he says, be­fore her in­flu­ence be­came para­mount. There is a curi­ously humble es­tim­ate of his own powers (to which Dr. Bain has called at­ten­tion), which reads at first sight as if it con­tra­dicted this. “Dur­ing the greater part of my lit­er­ary life I have per­formed the of­fice in re­la­tion to her, which, from a rather early period, I had con­sidered as the most use­ful part that I was qual­i­fied to take in the do­main of thought, that of an in­ter­preter of ori­ginal thinkers, and me­di­ator between them and the pub­lic.” So far it would seem that Mill had sat at the feet of his or­acle; but ob­serve the highly re­mark­able ex­cep­tion which is made in the fol­low­ing sen­tence:—“For I had al­ways a humble opin­ion of my own powers as an ori­ginal thinker, ex­cept in ab­stract sci­ence (lo­gic, meta­phys­ics, and the the­or­etic prin­ciples of polit­ical eco­nomy and polit­ics).”3 If Mill then was an ori­ginal thinker in lo­gic, meta­phys­ics, and the sci­ence of eco­nomy and polit­ics, it is clear that he had not learnt these from her lips. And to most men lo­gic and meta­phys­ics may be safely taken as form­ing a do­main in which ori­gin­al­ity of thought, if it can be hon­estly pro­fessed, is a suf­fi­cient title of dis­tinc­tion.

Mrs. Taylor’s as­sist­ance in the Polit­ical Economy is con­fined to cer­tain def­in­ite points. The purely sci­entific part was, we are as­sured, not learnt from her. “But it was chiefly her in­flu­ence which gave to the book that gen­eral tone by which it is dis­tin­guished from all pre­vi­ous ex­pos­i­tions of polit­ical eco­nomy that had any pre­ten­sions to be sci­entific, and which has made it so use­ful in con­cili­at­ing minds which those pre­vi­ous ex­pos­i­tions had re­pelled. This tone con­sisted chiefly in mak­ing the proper dis­tinc­tion between the laws of the pro­duc­tion of wealth, which are real laws of Nature, de­pend­ent on the prop­er­ties of ob­jects, and the modes of its dis­tri­bu­tion, which, sub­ject to cer­tain con­di­tions, de­pend on hu­man will. … I had in­deed par­tially learnt this view of things from the thoughts awakened in me by the spec­u­la­tions of St. Si­mo­ni­ans; but it was made a liv­ing prin­ciple, per­vad­ing and an­im­at­ing the book, by my wife’s prompt­ings.”4 The part which is it­alicised is no­tice­able. Here, as else­where, Mill thinks out the mat­ter by him­self; the con­crete form of the thoughts is sug­ges­ted or promp­ted by the wife. Apart from this “gen­eral tone,” Mill tells us that there was a spe­cific con­tri­bu­tion. “The chapter which has had a greater in­flu­ence on opin­ion than all the rest, that on the ‘Prob­able Fu­ture of the La­bour­ing Classes,’ is en­tirely due to her. In the first draft of the book that chapter did not ex­ist. She poin­ted out the need of such a chapter, and the ex­treme im­per­fec­tion of the book without it; she was the cause of my writ­ing it.” From this it would ap­pear that she gave Mill that tend­ency to So­cial­ism which, while it lends a pro­gress­ive spirit to his spec­u­la­tions on polit­ics, at the same time does not mani­festly ac­cord with his earlier ad­vocacy of peas­ant pro­pri­et­or­ships. Nor, again, is it, on the face of it, con­sist­ent with those doc­trines of in­di­vidual liberty which, aided by the in­tel­lec­tual com­pan­ion­ship of his wife, he pro­pounded in a later work. The ideal of in­di­vidual free­dom is not the ideal of So­cial­ism, just as that in­voc­a­tion of gov­ern­mental aid to which the So­cial­ist re­sorts is not con­sist­ent with the the­ory of lais­sez-faire. Yet Liberty was planned by Mill and his wife in con­cert. Per­haps a slight vis­ion­ar­i­ness of spec­u­la­tion was no less the at­trib­ute of Mrs. Mill than an ab­sence of ri­gid lo­gical prin­ciples. Be this as it may, she un­doubtedly checked the half-re­cog­nised lean­ings of her hus­band in the dir­ec­tion of Col­eridge and Carlyle. Whether this was an in­stance of her steady­ing in­flu­ence,5 or whether it ad­ded one more un­as­sim­il­ated ele­ment to Mill’s di­verse in­tel­lec­tual susten­ance, may be wisely left an open ques­tion. We can­not, how­ever, be wrong in at­trib­ut­ing to her the par­ent­age of one book of Mill, The Sub­jec­tion of Wo­men. It is true that Mill had be­fore learnt that men and wo­men ought to be equal in legal, polit­ical, so­cial, and do­mestic re­la­tions. This was a point on which he had already fallen foul of his father’s es­say on Govern­ment. But Mrs. Taylor had ac­tu­ally writ­ten on this very point, and the warmth and fer­vour of Mill’s de­nun­ci­ations of wo­men’s ser­vitude were un­mis­tak­ably caught from his wife’s view of the prac­tical dis­ab­il­it­ies en­tailed by the fem­in­ine po­s­i­tion.

III

Liberty was pub­lished in 1859, when the nine­teenth cen­tury was half over, but in its gen­eral spirit and in some of its spe­cial tend­en­cies the little tract be­longs rather to the stand­point of the eight­eenth cen­tury than to that which saw its birth. In many of his spec­u­la­tions John Stu­art Mill forms a sort of con­nect­ing link between the doc­trines of the earlier Eng­lish em­pir­ical school and those which we as­so­ci­ate with the name of Mr. Her­bert Spen­cer. In his Lo­gic, for in­stance, he rep­res­ents an ad­vance on the the­or­ies of Hume, and yet does not see how pro­foundly the vic­tor­ies of Science modify the con­clu­sions of the earlier thinker. Sim­il­arly, in his Polit­ical Economy, he de­sires to im­prove and to en­large upon Ri­cardo, and yet does not ad­vance so far as the modi­fic­a­tions of polit­ical eco­nomy by So­ci­ology, in­dic­ated by some later—and es­pe­cially Ger­man—spec­u­la­tions on the sub­ject. In the tract on Liberty, Mill is ad­voc­at­ing the rights of the in­di­vidual as against So­ci­ety at the very open­ing of an era that was rap­idly com­ing to the con­clu­sion that the in­di­vidual had no ab­so­lute rights against So­ci­ety. The eight­eenth cen­tury view is that in­di­vidu­als ex­is­ted first, each with their own spe­cial claims and re­spons­ib­il­it­ies; that they de­lib­er­ately formed a So­cial State, either by a con­tract or oth­er­wise; and that then fi­nally they lim­ited their own ac­tion out of re­gard for the in­terests of the so­cial or­gan­ism thus ar­bit­rar­ily pro­duced. This is hardly the view of the nine­teenth cen­tury. It is pos­sible that lo­gic­ally the in­di­vidual is prior to the State; his­tor­ic­ally and in the or­der of Nature, the State is prior to the in­di­vidual. In other words, such rights as every single per­son­al­ity pos­sesses in a mod­ern world do not be­long to him by an ori­ginal or­din­ance of Nature, but are slowly ac­quired in the growth and de­vel­op­ment of the So­cial State. It is not the truth that in­di­vidual liber­ties were for­feited by some de­lib­er­ate act when men made them­selves into a Com­mon­wealth. It is more true to say, as Aris­totle said long ago, that man is nat­ur­ally a polit­ical an­imal, that he lived un­der strict so­cial laws as a mere item, al­most a non­entity, as com­pared with the Order, So­ci­ety, or Com­munity to which he be­longed, and that such priv­ileges as he sub­sequently ac­quired have been ob­tained in vir­tue of his grow­ing im­port­ance as a mem­ber of a grow­ing or­gan­isa­tion. But if this is even ap­prox­im­ately true, it ser­i­ously re­stricts that liberty of the in­di­vidual for which Mill pleads. The in­di­vidual has no chance, be­cause he has no rights, against the so­cial or­gan­ism. So­ci­ety can pun­ish him for acts or even opin­ions which are an­ti­so­cial in char­ac­ter. His vir­tue lies in re­cog­nising the in­tim­ate com­mu­nion with his fel­lows. His sphere of activ­ity is bounded by the com­mon in­terest. Just as it is an ab­surd and ex­ploded the­ory that all men are ori­gin­ally equal, so it is an an­cient and false doc­trine to protest that a man has an in­di­vidual liberty to live and think as he chooses in any spirit of ant­ag­on­ism to that lar­ger body of which he forms an in­sig­ni­fic­ant part.

Nowadays this view of So­ci­ety and of its de­vel­op­ment, which we largely owe to the Philo­sophie Pos­it­ive of M. Auguste Comte, is so fa­mil­iar and pos­sibly so dam­aging to the in­di­vidual ini­ti­at­ive, that it be­comes ne­ces­sary to ad­vance and pro­claim the truth which resides in an op­pos­ite the­ory. All pro­gress, as we are aware, de­pends on the joint pro­cess of in­teg­ra­tion and dif­fer­en­ti­ation; syn­thesis, ana­lysis, and then a lar­ger syn­thesis seem to form the law of de­vel­op­ment. If it ever comes to pass that So­ci­ety is tyr­an­nical in its re­stric­tions of the in­di­vidual, if, as for in­stance in some forms of So­cial­ism, based on de­cept­ive ana­lo­gies of Nature’s deal­ings, the type is everything and the in­di­vidual noth­ing, it must be con­fid­ently urged in an­swer that the fuller life of the fu­ture de­pends on the man­i­fold activ­it­ies, even though they may be ant­ag­on­istic, of the in­di­vidual. In Eng­land, at all events, we know that gov­ern­ment in all its dif­fer­ent forms, whether as King, or as a caste of nobles, or as an ol­ig­arch­ical plu­to­cracy, or even as trades uni­ons, is so dwarf­ing in its ac­tion that, for the sake of the fu­ture, the in­di­vidual must re­volt. Just as our former point of view lim­ited the value of Mill’s treat­ise on Liberty, so these con­sid­er­a­tions tend to show its eternal im­port­ance. The om­ni­po­tence of So­ci­ety means a dead level of uni­form­ity. The claim of the in­di­vidual to be heard, to say what he likes, to do what he likes, to live as he likes, is ab­so­lutely ne­ces­sary, not only for the vari­ety of ele­ments without which life is poor, but also for the hope of a fu­ture age. So long as in­di­vidual ini­ti­at­ive and ef­fort are re­cog­nised as a vi­tal ele­ment in Eng­lish his­tory, so long will Mill’s Liberty, which he con­fesses was based on a sug­ges­tion de­rived from Von Hum­boldt, re­main as an in­dis­pens­able con­tri­bu­tion to the spec­u­la­tions, and also to the health and san­ity, of the world.

What his wife really was to Mill, we shall, per­haps, never know. But that she was an ac­tual and vivid force, which roused the lat­ent en­thu­si­asm of his nature, we have abund­ant evid­ence. And when she died at Avignon, though his friends may have re­gained an al­most es­tranged com­pan­ion­ship, Mill was, per­son­ally, the poorer. Into the sor­row of that be­reave­ment we can­not enter: we have no right or power to draw the veil. It is enough to quote the simple words, so elo­quent of an un­spoken grief—“I can say noth­ing which could de­scribe, even in the faintest man­ner, what that loss was and is. But be­cause I know that she would have wished it, I en­deav­our to make the best of what life I have left, and to work for her pur­poses with such di­min­ished strength as can be de­rived from thoughts of her, and com­mu­nion with her memory.”

W. L. Court­ney

Lon­don, July 5th, 1901

To the be­loved and de­plored 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 ex­al­ted sense of truth and right was my strongest in­cite­ment, and whose ap­prob­a­tion was my chief re­ward—I ded­ic­ate this volume. Like all that I have writ­ten for many years, it be­longs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a very in­suf­fi­cient de­gree, the in­es­tim­able ad­vant­age of her re­vi­sion; some of the most im­port­ant por­tions hav­ing been re­served for a more care­ful reex­am­in­a­tion, which they are now never destined to re­ceive. Were I but cap­able of in­ter­pret­ing to the world one-half the great thoughts and noble feel­ings which are bur­ied in her grave, I should be the me­dium of a greater be­ne­fit to it than is ever likely to arise from any­thing that I can write, un­promp­ted and un­as­sisted by her all but un­ri­valled wis­dom.

“The grand, lead­ing prin­ciple, to­wards which every ar­gu­ment un­fol­ded in these pages dir­ectly con­verges, is the ab­so­lute and es­sen­tial im­port­ance of hu­man de­vel­op­ment in its richest di­versity.”

—Wil­helm Von Hum­boldt, Sphere and Du­ties of Govern­ment

On Liberty

I Introductory

The sub­ject of this Es­say is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so un­for­tu­nately op­posed to the mis­named doc­trine of Philo­soph­ical Ne­ces­sity; but Civil, or So­cial Liberty: the nature and lim­its of the power which can be le­git­im­ately ex­er­cised by so­ci­ety over the in­di­vidual. A ques­tion sel­dom stated, and hardly ever dis­cussed, in gen­eral terms, but which pro­foundly in­flu­ences the prac­tical con­tro­ver­sies of the age by its lat­ent pres­ence, and is likely soon to make it­self 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 in the stage of pro­gress into which the more civ­il­ised por­tions of the spe­cies have now entered, it presents it­self un­der new con­di­tions, and re­quires a dif­fer­ent and more fun­da­mental treat­ment.

The struggle between Liberty and Author­ity is the most con­spicu­ous fea­ture in the por­tions of his­tory with which we are earli­est fa­mil­iar, par­tic­u­larly in that of Greece, Rome, and Eng­land. But in old times this con­test was between sub­jects, or some classes of sub­jects, and the gov­ern­ment. By liberty, was meant pro­tec­tion against the tyranny of the polit­ical rulers. The rulers were con­ceived (ex­cept in some of the pop­u­lar gov­ern­ments of Greece) as in a ne­ces­sar­ily ant­ag­on­istic po­s­i­tion to the people whom they ruled. They con­sisted of a gov­ern­ing One, or a gov­ern­ing tribe or caste, who de­rived their au­thor­ity from in­her­it­ance or con­quest, who, at all events, did not hold it at the pleas­ure of the gov­erned, and whose su­prem­acy men did not ven­ture, per­haps did not de­sire, to con­test, whatever pre­cau­tions might be taken against its op­press­ive ex­er­cise. Their power was re­garded as ne­ces­sary, but also as highly dan­ger­ous; as a weapon which they would at­tempt to use against their sub­jects, no less than against ex­ternal en­emies. To pre­vent the weaker mem­bers of the com­munity from be­ing preyed upon by in­nu­mer­able vul­tures, it was need­ful that there should be an an­imal of prey stronger than the rest, com­mis­sioned to keep them down. But as the king of the vul­tures would be no less bent upon prey­ing on the flock than any of the minor harpies, it was in­dis­pens­able to be in a per­petual at­ti­tude of de­fence against his beak and claws. The aim, there­fore, of pat­ri­ots, was to set lim­its to the power which the ruler should be suffered to ex­er­cise over the com­munity; and this lim­it­a­tion was what they meant by liberty. It was at­temp­ted in two ways. First, by ob­tain­ing a re­cog­ni­tion of cer­tain im­munit­ies, called polit­ical liber­ties or rights, which it was to be re­garded as a breach of duty in the ruler to in­fringe, and which if he did in­fringe, spe­cific res­ist­ance, or gen­eral re­bel­lion, was held to be jus­ti­fi­able. A second, and gen­er­ally a later ex­pedi­ent, was the es­tab­lish­ment of con­sti­tu­tional checks; by which the con­sent of the com­munity, or of a body of some sort, sup­posed to rep­res­ent its in­terests, was made a ne­ces­sary con­di­tion to some of the more im­port­ant acts of the gov­ern­ing power. To the first of these modes of lim­it­a­tion, the rul­ing power, in most European coun­tries, was com­pelled, more or less, to sub­mit. It was not so with the second; and to at­tain this, or when already in some de­gree pos­sessed, to at­tain it more com­pletely, be­came every­where the prin­cipal ob­ject of the lov­ers of liberty. And so long as man­kind were con­tent to com­bat one en­emy by an­other, and to be ruled by a mas­ter, on con­di­tion of be­ing guar­an­teed more or less ef­fic­a­ciously against his tyranny, they did not carry their as­pir­a­tions bey­ond this point.

A time, how­ever, came, in the pro­gress of hu­man af­fairs, when men ceased to think it a ne­ces­sity of nature that their gov­ernors should be an in­de­pend­ent power, op­posed in in­terest to them­selves. It ap­peared to them much bet­ter that the vari­ous ma­gis­trates of the State should be their ten­ants or del­eg­ates, re­voc­able at their pleas­ure. In that way alone, it seemed, could they have com­plete se­cur­ity that the powers of gov­ern­ment would never be ab­used to their dis­ad­vant­age. By de­grees, this new de­mand for elect­ive and tem­por­ary rulers be­came the prom­in­ent ob­ject of the ex­er­tions of the pop­u­lar party, wherever any such party ex­is­ted; and su­per­seded, to a con­sid­er­able ex­tent, the pre­vi­ous ef­forts to limit the power of rulers. As the struggle pro­ceeded for mak­ing the rul­ing power em­an­ate from the peri­od­ical choice of the ruled, some per­sons began to think that too much im­port­ance had been at­tached to the lim­it­a­tion of the power it­self. That (it might seem) was a re­source against rulers whose in­terests were ha­bitu­ally op­posed to those of the people. What was now wanted was, that the rulers should be iden­ti­fied with the people; that their in­terest and will should be the in­terest and will of the na­tion. The na­tion did not need to be pro­tec­ted against its own will. There was no fear of its tyr­an­nising over it­self. Let the rulers be ef­fec­tu­ally re­spons­ible to it, promptly re­mov­able by it, and it could af­ford to trust them with power of which it could it­self dic­tate the use to be made. Their power was but the na­tion’s own power, con­cen­trated, and in a form con­veni­ent for ex­er­cise. This mode of thought, or rather per­haps of feel­ing, was com­mon among the last gen­er­a­tion of European lib­er­al­ism, in the Contin­ental sec­tion of which it still ap­par­ently pre­dom­in­ates. Those who ad­mit any limit to what a gov­ern­ment may do, ex­cept in the case of such gov­ern­ments as they think ought not to ex­ist, stand out as bril­liant ex­cep­tions among the polit­ical thinkers of the Contin­ent. A sim­ilar tone of sen­ti­ment might by this time have been pre­val­ent in our own coun­try, if the cir­cum­stances which for a time en­cour­aged it, had con­tin­ued un­altered.

But, in polit­ical and philo­soph­ical the­or­ies, as well as in per­sons, suc­cess dis­closes faults and in­firm­it­ies which fail­ure might have con­cealed from ob­ser­va­tion. The no­tion, that the people have no need to limit their power over them­selves, might seem ax­io­matic, when pop­u­lar gov­ern­ment was a thing only dreamed about, or read of as hav­ing ex­is­ted at some dis­tant period of the past. Neither was that no­tion ne­ces­sar­ily dis­turbed by such tem­por­ary ab­er­ra­tions as 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 and con­vuls­ive out­break against mon­arch­ical and ar­is­to­cratic des­pot­ism. In time, how­ever, a demo­cratic re­pub­lic came to oc­cupy a large por­tion of the Earth’s sur­face, and made it­self felt as one of the most power­ful mem­bers of the com­munity of na­tions; and elect­ive and re­spons­ible gov­ern­ment be­came sub­ject to the ob­ser­va­tions and cri­ti­cisms which wait upon a great ex­ist­ing fact. It was now per­ceived that such phrases as “self-gov­ern­ment,” and “the power of the people over them­selves,” do not ex­press the true state of the case. The “people” who ex­er­cise the power are not al­ways the same people with those over whom it is ex­er­cised; and the “self-gov­ern­ment” spoken of is not the gov­ern­ment of each by him­self, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, prac­tic­ally means, the will of the most nu­mer­ous or the most act­ive part of the people; the ma­jor­ity, or those who suc­ceed in mak­ing them­selves ac­cep­ted as the ma­jor­ity: the people, con­sequently, may de­sire to op­press a part of their num­ber; and pre­cau­tions are as much needed against this, as against any other ab­use of power. The lim­it­a­tion, there­fore, of the power of gov­ern­ment over in­di­vidu­als, loses none of its im­port­ance when the hold­ers of power are reg­u­larly ac­count­able to the com­munity, that is, to the strongest party therein. This view of things, re­com­mend­ing it­self equally to the in­tel­li­gence of thinkers and to the in­clin­a­tion of those im­port­ant classes in European so­ci­ety to whose real or sup­posed in­terests demo­cracy is ad­verse, has had no dif­fi­culty in es­tab­lish­ing it­self; and in polit­ical spec­u­la­tions “the tyranny of the ma­jor­ity” is now gen­er­ally in­cluded among the evils against which so­ci­ety re­quires to be on its guard.

Like other tyr­an­nies, the tyranny of the ma­jor­ity was at first, and is still vul­garly, held in dread, chiefly as op­er­at­ing through the acts of the pub­lic au­thor­it­ies. But re­flect­ing per­sons per­ceived that when so­ci­ety is it­self the tyr­ant—so­ci­ety col­lect­ively, over the sep­ar­ate in­di­vidu­als who com­pose it—its means of tyr­an­nising are not re­stric­ted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its polit­ical func­tion­ar­ies. So­ci­ety can and does ex­ecute its own man­dates: and if it is­sues wrong man­dates in­stead of right, or any man­dates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it prac­tises a so­cial tyranny more for­mid­able than many kinds of polit­ical op­pres­sion, since, though not usu­ally up­held by such ex­treme pen­al­ties, it leaves fewer means of es­cape, pen­et­rat­ing much more deeply into the de­tails of life, and en­slav­ing the soul it­self. Pro­tec­tion, there­fore, against the tyranny of the ma­gis­trate is not enough: there needs pro­tec­tion also against the tyranny of the pre­vail­ing opin­ion and feel­ing; against the tend­ency of so­ci­ety to im­pose, by other means than civil pen­al­ties, its own ideas and prac­tices as rules of con­duct on those who dis­sent from them; to fet­ter the de­vel­op­ment, and, if pos­sible, pre­vent the form­a­tion, of any in­di­vidu­al­ity not in har­mony with its ways, and com­pel all char­ac­ters to fash­ion them­selves upon 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 main­tain it against en­croach­ment, is as in­dis­pens­able to a good con­di­tion of hu­man af­fairs, as pro­tec­tion against polit­ical des­pot­ism.

But though this pro­pos­i­tion is not likely to be con­tested in gen­eral terms, the prac­tical ques­tion, where to place the limit—how to make the fit­ting ad­just­ment between in­di­vidual in­de­pend­ence and so­cial con­trol—is a sub­ject on which nearly everything re­mains to be done. All that makes ex­ist­ence valu­able to any­one, de­pends on the en­force­ment of re­straints upon the ac­tions of other people. Some rules of con­duct, there­fore, must be im­posed, by law in the first place, and by opin­ion on many things which are not fit sub­jects for the op­er­a­tion of law. What these rules should be, is the prin­cipal ques­tion in hu­man af­fairs; but if we ex­cept a few of the most ob­vi­ous cases, it is one of those which least pro­gress has been made in resolv­ing. No two ages, and scarcely any two coun­tries, have de­cided it alike; and the de­cision of one age or coun­try is a won­der to an­other. Yet the people of any given age and coun­try no more sus­pect any dif­fi­culty in it, than if it were a sub­ject on which man­kind had al­ways been agreed. The rules which ob­tain among them­selves ap­pear to them self-evid­ent and self-jus­ti­fy­ing. This all but uni­ver­sal il­lu­sion is one of the ex­amples of the ma­gical in­flu­ence of cus­tom, which is not only, as the pro­verb says, a second nature, but is con­tinu­ally mis­taken for the first. The ef­fect of cus­tom, in pre­vent­ing any mis­giv­ing re­spect­ing the rules of con­duct which man­kind im­pose on one an­other, is all the more com­plete be­cause the sub­ject is one on which it is not gen­er­ally con­sidered ne­ces­sary that reas­ons should be given, either by one per­son to oth­ers, or by each to him­self. People are ac­cus­tomed to be­lieve, and have been en­cour­aged in the be­lief by some who as­pire to the char­ac­ter of philo­soph­ers, that their feel­ings, on sub­jects of this nature, are bet­ter than reas­ons, and render reas­ons un­ne­ces­sary. The prac­tical prin­ciple which guides them to their opin­ions on the reg­u­la­tion of hu­man con­duct, is the feel­ing in each per­son’s mind that every­body should be re­quired to act as he, and those with whom he sym­path­ises, would like them to act. No one, in­deed, ac­know­ledges to him­self that his stand­ard of judg­ment is his own lik­ing; but an opin­ion on a point of con­duct, not sup­por­ted by reas­ons, can only count as one per­son’s pref­er­ence; and if the reas­ons, when given, are a mere ap­peal to a sim­ilar pref­er­ence felt by other people, it is still only many people’s lik­ing in­stead of one. To an or­din­ary man, how­ever, his own pref­er­ence, thus sup­por­ted, is not only a per­fectly sat­is­fact­ory reason, but the only one he gen­er­ally has for any of his no­tions of mor­al­ity, taste, or pro­pri­ety, which are not ex­pressly writ­ten in his re­li­gious creed; and his chief guide in the in­ter­pret­a­tion even of that. Men’s opin­ions, ac­cord­ingly, on what is laud­able or blam­able, are af­fected by all the mul­ti­far­i­ous causes which in­flu­ence their wishes in re­gard to the con­duct of oth­ers, and which are as nu­mer­ous as those which de­term­ine their wishes on any other sub­ject. So­me­times their reason—at other times their pre­ju­dices or su­per­sti­tions: of­ten their so­cial af­fec­tions, not sel­dom their an­ti­so­cial ones, their envy or jeal­ousy, their ar­rog­ance or con­temp­tu­ous­ness: but most com­monly, their de­sires or fears for them­selves—their le­git­im­ate or il­le­git­im­ate self-in­terest. Wherever there is an as­cend­ant class, a large por­tion of the mor­al­ity of the coun­try em­an­ates from its class in­terests, and its feel­ings of class su­peri­or­ity. The mor­al­ity between Spartans and Helots, between plant­ers and negroes, between princes and sub­jects, between nobles and ro­tur­iers, between men and wo­men, has been for the most part the cre­ation of these class in­terests and feel­ings: and the sen­ti­ments thus gen­er­ated, re­act in turn upon the moral feel­ings of the mem­bers of the as­cend­ant class, in their re­la­tions among them­selves. Where, on the other hand, a class, formerly as­cend­ant, has lost its as­cend­ancy, or where its as­cend­ancy is un­pop­u­lar, the pre­vail­ing moral sen­ti­ments fre­quently bear the im­press of an im­pa­tient dis­like of su­peri­or­ity. Another grand de­term­in­ing prin­ciple of the rules of con­duct, both in act and for­bear­ance, which have been en­forced by law or opin­ion, has been the servil­ity of man­kind to­wards the sup­posed pref­er­ences or aver­sions of their tem­poral mas­ters, or of their gods. This servil­ity, though es­sen­tially selfish, is not hy­po­crisy; it gives rise to per­fectly genu­ine sen­ti­ments of ab­hor­rence; 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 the dir­ec­tion of the moral sen­ti­ments: less, how­ever, as a mat­ter of reason, and on their own ac­count, than as a con­sequence of the sym­path­ies and an­ti­path­ies which grew out of them: and sym­path­ies and an­ti­path­ies which had little or noth­ing to do with the in­terests of so­ci­ety, have made them­selves felt in the es­tab­lish­ment of mor­al­it­ies with quite as great force.

The lik­ings and dis­lik­ings of so­ci­ety, or of some power­ful por­tion of it, are thus the main thing which has prac­tic­ally de­term­ined the rules laid down for gen­eral ob­serv­ance, un­der the pen­al­ties of law or opin­ion. And in gen­eral, those who have been in ad­vance of so­ci­ety in thought and feel­ing have left this con­di­tion of things un­as­sailed in prin­ciple, how­ever they may have come into con­flict with it in some of its de­tails. They have oc­cu­pied them­selves rather in in­quir­ing what things so­ci­ety ought to like or dis­like, than in ques­tion­ing whether its lik­ings or dis­lik­ings should be a law to in­di­vidu­als. They pre­ferred en­deav­our­ing to al­ter the feel­ings of man­kind on the par­tic­u­lar points on which they were them­selves heretical, rather than make com­mon cause in de­fence of free­dom, with heretics gen­er­ally. The only case in which the higher ground has been taken on prin­ciple and main­tained with con­sist­ency, by any but an in­di­vidual here and there, is that of re­li­gious be­lief: a case in­struct­ive in many ways, and not least so as form­ing a most strik­ing in­stance of the fal­lib­il­ity of what is called the moral sense: for the odium theo­lo­gicum, in a sin­cere bigot, is one of the most un­equi­vocal cases of moral feel­ing. Those who first broke the yoke of what called it­self the Univer­sal Church, were in gen­eral as little will­ing to per­mit dif­fer­ence of re­li­gious opin­ion as that church it­self. But when the heat of the con­flict was over, without giv­ing a com­plete vic­tory to any party, and each church or sect was re­duced to limit its hopes to re­tain­ing pos­ses­sion of the ground it already oc­cu­pied; minor­it­ies, see­ing that they had no chance of be­com­ing ma­jor­it­ies, were un­der the ne­ces­sity of plead­ing to those whom they could not con­vert, for per­mis­sion to dif­fer. It is ac­cord­ingly on this bat­tle­field, al­most solely, that the rights of the in­di­vidual against so­ci­ety have been as­ser­ted on broad grounds of prin­ciple, and the claim of so­ci­ety to ex­er­cise au­thor­ity over dis­sen­tients, openly con­tro­ver­ted. The great writers to whom the world owes what re­li­gious liberty it pos­sesses, have mostly as­ser­ted free­dom of con­science as an in­de­feas­ible right, and denied ab­so­lutely that a hu­man be­ing is ac­count­able to oth­ers for his re­li­gious be­lief. Yet so nat­ural to man­kind is in­tol­er­ance in whatever they really care about, that re­li­gious free­dom has hardly any­where been prac­tic­ally real­ised, ex­cept where re­li­gious in­dif­fer­ence, which dis­likes to have its peace dis­turbed by theo­lo­gical quar­rels, has ad­ded its weight to the scale. In the minds of al­most all re­li­gious per­sons, even in the most tol­er­ant coun­tries, the duty of tol­er­a­tion is ad­mit­ted with ta­cit re­serves. One per­son will bear with dis­sent in mat­ters of church gov­ern­ment, but not of dogma; an­other can tol­er­ate every­body, short of a Pap­ist or a Un­it­arian; an­other, every­one who be­lieves in re­vealed re­li­gion; a few ex­tend their char­ity a little fur­ther, but stop at the be­lief in a God and in a fu­ture state. Wherever the sen­ti­ment of the ma­jor­ity is still genu­ine and in­tense, it is found to have abated little of its claim to be obeyed.

In Eng­land, from the pe­cu­liar cir­cum­stances of our polit­ical his­tory, though the yoke of opin­ion is per­haps heav­ier, that of law is lighter, than in most other coun­tries of Europe; and there is con­sid­er­able jeal­ousy of dir­ect in­ter­fer­ence, by the le­gis­lat­ive or the ex­ec­ut­ive power, with private con­duct; not so much from any just re­gard for the in­de­pend­ence of the in­di­vidual, as from the still sub­sist­ing habit of look­ing on the gov­ern­ment as rep­res­ent­ing an op­pos­ite in­terest to the pub­lic. The ma­jor­ity have not yet learnt to feel the power of the gov­ern­ment their power, or its opin­ions their opin­ions. When they do so, in­di­vidual liberty will prob­ably be as much ex­posed to in­va­sion from the gov­ern­ment, as it already is from pub­lic opin­ion. But, as yet, there is a con­sid­er­able amount of feel­ing ready to be called forth against any at­tempt of the law to con­trol in­di­vidu­als in things in which they have not hitherto been ac­cus­tomed to be con­trolled by it; and this with very little dis­crim­in­a­tion as to whether the mat­ter is, or is not, within the le­git­im­ate sphere of legal con­trol; in­somuch that the feel­ing, highly salut­ary on the whole, is per­haps quite as of­ten mis­placed as well groun­ded in the par­tic­u­lar in­stances of its ap­plic­a­tion. There is, in fact, no re­cog­nised prin­ciple by which the pro­pri­ety or im­pro­pri­ety of gov­ern­ment in­ter­fer­ence is cus­tom­ar­ily tested. People de­cide ac­cord­ing to their per­sonal pref­er­ences. Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, would will­ingly in­stig­ate the gov­ern­ment to un­der­take the busi­ness; while oth­ers prefer to bear al­most any amount of so­cial evil, rather than add one to the de­part­ments of hu­man in­terests amen­able to gov­ern­mental con­trol. And men range them­selves on one or the other side in any par­tic­u­lar case, ac­cord­ing to this gen­eral dir­ec­tion of their sen­ti­ments; or ac­cord­ing to the de­gree of in­terest which they feel in the par­tic­u­lar thing which it is pro­posed that the gov­ern­ment should do, or ac­cord­ing to the be­lief they en­ter­tain that the gov­ern­ment would, or would not, do it in the man­ner they prefer; but very rarely on ac­count of any opin­ion to which they con­sist­ently ad­here, as to what things are fit to be done by a gov­ern­ment. And it seems to me that in con­sequence of this ab­sence of rule or prin­ciple, one side is at present as of­ten wrong as the other; the in­ter­fer­ence of gov­ern­ment is, with about equal fre­quency, im­prop­erly in­voked and im­prop­erly con­demned.

The ob­ject of this Es­say is to as­sert one very simple prin­ciple, as en­titled to gov­ern ab­so­lutely the deal­ings of so­ci­ety with the in­di­vidual in the way of com­pul­sion and con­trol, whether the means used be phys­ical force in the form of legal pen­al­ties, or the moral co­er­cion of pub­lic opin­ion. That prin­ciple is, that the sole end for which man­kind are war­ran­ted, in­di­vidu­ally or col­lect­ively, in in­ter­fer­ing with the liberty of ac­tion of any of their num­ber, is self-pro­tec­tion. That the only pur­pose for which power can be right­fully ex­er­cised over any mem­ber of a civ­il­ised com­munity, against his will, is to pre­vent harm to oth­ers. His own good, either phys­ical or moral, is not a suf­fi­cient war­rant. He can­not right­fully be com­pelled to do or for­bear be­cause it will be bet­ter for him to do so, be­cause it will make him hap­pier, be­cause, in the opin­ions of oth­ers, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reas­ons for re­mon­strat­ing with him, or reas­on­ing with him, or per­suad­ing him, or en­treat­ing him, but not for com­pel­ling him, or vis­it­ing him with any evil in case he do oth­er­wise. To jus­tify that, the con­duct from which it is de­sired to de­ter him must be cal­cu­lated to pro­duce evil to someone else. The only part of the con­duct of any­one, for which he is amen­able to so­ci­ety, is that which con­cerns oth­ers. In the part which merely con­cerns him­self, his in­de­pend­ence is, of right, ab­so­lute. Over him­self, over his own body and mind, the in­di­vidual is sov­er­eign.

It is, per­haps, hardly ne­ces­sary to say that this doc­trine is meant to ap­ply only to hu­man be­ings in the ma­tur­ity of their fac­ulties. We are not speak­ing of chil­dren, or of young per­sons be­low the age which the law may fix as that of man­hood or wo­man­hood. Those who are still in a state to re­quire be­ing taken care of by oth­ers, must be pro­tec­ted against their own ac­tions as well as against ex­ternal in­jury. For the same reason, we may leave out of con­sid­er­a­tion those back­ward states of so­ci­ety in which the race it­self may be con­sidered as in its non­age. The early dif­fi­culties in the way of 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 the use of any ex­pedi­ents that will at­tain an end, per­haps oth­er­wise un­at­tain­able. Des­pot­ism is a le­git­im­ate mode of gov­ern­ment in deal­ing with bar­bar­i­ans, provided the end be their im­prove­ment, and the means jus­ti­fied by ac­tu­ally ef­fect­ing that end. Liberty, as a prin­ciple, has no ap­plic­a­tion to any state of things an­terior to 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 so for­tu­nate as to find one. But as soon as man­kind have at­tained the ca­pa­city of be­ing guided to their own im­prove­ment by con­vic­tion or per­sua­sion (a period long since reached in all na­tions with whom we need here con­cern ourselves), com­pul­sion, either in the dir­ect form or in that of pains and pen­al­ties for non­com­pli­ance, is no longer ad­miss­ible as a means to their own good, and jus­ti­fi­able only for the se­cur­ity of oth­ers.

It is proper to state that I forego any ad­vant­age which could be de­rived to my ar­gu­ment from the idea of ab­stract right, as a thing in­de­pend­ent of util­ity. I re­gard util­ity as the ul­ti­mate ap­peal on all eth­ical ques­tions; but it must be util­ity in the largest sense, groun­ded on the per­man­ent in­terests of man as a pro­gress­ive be­ing. Those in­terests, I con­tend, au­thor­ise the sub­jec­tion of in­di­vidual spon­taneity to ex­ternal con­trol, only in re­spect to those ac­tions of each, which con­cern the in­terest of other people. If any­one does an act hurt­ful to oth­ers, there is a prima facie case for pun­ish­ing him, by law, or, where legal pen­al­ties are not safely ap­plic­able, by gen­eral dis­ap­prob­a­tion. There are also many pos­it­ive acts for the be­ne­fit of oth­ers, which he may right­fully be com­pelled to per­form; such as, to give evid­ence in a court of justice; to bear his fair share in the com­mon de­fence, or in any other joint work ne­ces­sary to the in­terest of the so­ci­ety of which he en­joys the pro­tec­tion; and to per­form cer­tain acts of in­di­vidual be­ne­fi­cence, such as sav­ing a fel­low-creature’s life, or in­ter­pos­ing to pro­tect the de­fence­less against ill-us­age, things which whenever it is ob­vi­ously a man’s duty to do, he may right­fully be made re­spons­ible to so­ci­ety for not do­ing. A per­son may cause evil 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 lat­ter case, it is true, re­quires a much more cau­tious ex­er­cise of com­pul­sion than the former. To make any­one an­swer­able for do­ing evil to oth­ers, is the rule; to make him an­swer­able for not pre­vent­ing evil, is, com­par­at­ively speak­ing, the ex­cep­tion. Yet there are many cases clear enough and grave enough to jus­tify that ex­cep­tion. In all things which re­gard the ex­ternal re­la­tions of the in­di­vidual, he is de jure amen­able to those whose in­terests are con­cerned, and if need be, to so­ci­ety as their pro­tector. There are of­ten good reas­ons for not hold­ing him to the re­spons­ib­il­ity; but these reas­ons must arise from the spe­cial ex­pedi­en­cies of the case: either be­cause it is a 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 in which so­ci­ety have it in their power to con­trol him; or be­cause the at­tempt to ex­er­cise con­trol would pro­duce other evils, greater than those which it would pre­vent. When such reas­ons as these pre­clude the en­force­ment of re­spons­ib­il­ity, the con­science of the agent him­self should step into the va­cant judg­ment seat, and pro­tect those in­terests of oth­ers which have no ex­ternal pro­tec­tion; judging him­self all the more ri­gidly, be­cause the case does not ad­mit of his be­ing made ac­count­able to the judg­ment of his fel­low-creatures.

But there is a sphere of ac­tion in which so­ci­ety, as dis­tin­guished from the in­di­vidual, has, if any, only an in­dir­ect in­terest; com­pre­hend­ing all that por­tion of a per­son’s life and con­duct which af­fects only him­self, or if it also af­fects oth­ers, 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 him­self, may af­fect oth­ers through him­self; and the ob­jec­tion which may be groun­ded on this con­tin­gency, will re­ceive con­sid­er­a­tion in the se­quel. This, then, is the ap­pro­pri­ate re­gion of hu­man liberty. It com­prises, first, the in­ward do­main of con­scious­ness; de­mand­ing 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 that part of the con­duct of an in­di­vidual which con­cerns other people; but, be­ing al­most of as much im­port­ance as the liberty of thought it­self, and rest­ing in great part on the same reas­ons, is prac­tic­ally in­sep­ar­able from it. Se­condly, 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, sub­ject to such con­sequences as may fol­low: without im­ped­i­ment from our fel­low-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our con­duct fool­ish, per­verse, or wrong. Thirdly, from this liberty of each in­di­vidual, fol­lows the liberty, within the same lim­its, of com­bin­a­tion among in­di­vidu­als; free­dom to unite, for any pur­pose not in­volving harm to oth­ers: the per­sons com­bin­ing be­ing sup­posed to be of full age, and not forced or de­ceived.

No so­ci­ety in which these liber­ties are not, on the whole, re­spec­ted, is free, whatever may be 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 at­tempt to de­prive oth­ers of theirs, or im­pede their ef­forts to ob­tain it. Each is the proper guard­ian of his own health, whether bod­ily, or men­tal and spir­itual. Man­kind are greater gain­ers by suf­fer­ing each other to 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, to some per­sons, may have the air of a tru­ism, there is no doc­trine which stands more dir­ectly op­posed to the gen­eral tend­ency of ex­ist­ing opin­ion and prac­tice. So­ci­ety has ex­pen­ded fully as much ef­fort in the at­tempt (ac­cord­ing to its lights) to com­pel people to con­form to its no­tions of per­sonal, as of so­cial ex­cel­lence. The an­cient com­mon­wealths thought them­selves en­titled to prac­tise, and the an­cient philo­soph­ers coun­ten­anced, the reg­u­la­tion of every part of private con­duct by pub­lic au­thor­ity, on the ground that the State had a deep in­terest in the whole bod­ily and men­tal dis­cip­line of every one of its cit­izens; a mode of think­ing which may have been ad­miss­ible in small re­pub­lics sur­roun­ded by power­ful en­emies, in con­stant peril of be­ing sub­ver­ted by for­eign at­tack or in­ternal com­mo­tion, and to which even a short in­ter­val of re­laxed en­ergy and self-com­mand might so eas­ily be fatal, that they could not af­ford to wait for the salut­ary per­man­ent ef­fects of free­dom. In the mod­ern world, the greater size of polit­ical com­munit­ies, and above all, the sep­ar­a­tion between spir­itual and tem­poral au­thor­ity (which placed the dir­ec­tion of men’s con­sciences in other hands than those which con­trolled their worldly af­fairs), pre­ven­ted so great an in­ter­fer­ence by law in the de­tails of private life; but the en­gines of moral re­pres­sion have been wiel­ded more strenu­ously against di­ver­gence from the reign­ing opin­ion in self-re­gard­ing, than even in so­cial mat­ters; re­li­gion, the most power­ful of the ele­ments which have entered into the form­a­tion 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 those mod­ern re­formers who have placed them­selves in strongest op­pos­i­tion to the re­li­gions of the past, have been no­way be­hind either churches or sects in their as­ser­tion of the right of spir­itual dom­in­a­tion: M. Comte, in par­tic­u­lar, whose so­cial sys­tem, as un­fol­ded in his Traité de Poli­tique Pos­it­ive, aims at es­tab­lish­ing (though by moral more than by legal ap­pli­ances) a des­pot­ism of so­ci­ety over the in­di­vidual, sur­pass­ing any­thing con­tem­plated in the polit­ical ideal of the most ri­gid dis­cip­lin­arian among the an­cient philo­soph­ers.

Apart from the pe­cu­liar ten­ets of in­di­vidual thinkers, there is also in the world at large an in­creas­ing in­clin­a­tion to stretch un­duly the powers of so­ci­ety over the in­di­vidual, both by the force of opin­ion and even by that of le­gis­la­tion: and as 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 which tend spon­tan­eously to dis­ap­pear, but, on the con­trary, to grow more and more for­mid­able. The dis­pos­i­tion of man­kind, 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 by some of the worst feel­ings in­cid­ent to hu­man nature, that it is hardly ever kept un­der re­straint by any­thing but want of power; and as the power is not de­clin­ing, but grow­ing, un­less a strong bar­rier of moral con­vic­tion can be raised against the mis­chief, we must ex­pect, in the present cir­cum­stances of the world, to see it in­crease.

It will be con­veni­ent for the ar­gu­ment, if, in­stead of at once en­ter­ing upon the gen­eral thesis, we con­fine ourselves in the first in­stance to a single branch of it, on which the prin­ciple here stated is, if not fully, yet to a cer­tain point, re­cog­nised by the cur­rent opin­ions. This one branch is the Liberty of Thought: from which it is im­possible to sep­ar­ate the cog­nate liberty of speak­ing and of writ­ing. Al­though these liber­ties, to some con­sid­er­able amount, form part of the polit­ical mor­al­ity of all coun­tries which pro­fess re­li­gious tol­er­a­tion and free in­sti­tu­tions, the grounds, both philo­soph­ical and prac­tical, on which they rest, are per­haps not so fa­mil­iar to the gen­eral mind, nor so thor­oughly ap­pre­ci­ated by many even of the lead­ers of opin­ion, as might have been ex­pec­ted. Those grounds, when rightly un­der­stood, are of much wider ap­plic­a­tion than to only one di­vi­sion of the sub­ject, and a thor­ough con­sid­er­a­tion of this part of the ques­tion will be found the best in­tro­duc­tion to the re­mainder. Those to whom noth­ing which I am about to say will be new, may there­fore, I hope, ex­cuse me, if on a sub­ject which for now three cen­tur­ies has been so of­ten dis­cussed, I ven­ture on one dis­cus­sion more.

II Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion

The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any de­fence would be ne­ces­sary of the “liberty of the press” as one of the se­cur­it­ies against cor­rupt or tyr­an­nical gov­ern­ment. No ar­gu­ment, we may sup­pose, can now be needed, against per­mit­ting a le­gis­lature or an ex­ec­ut­ive, not iden­ti­fied in in­terest with the people, to pre­scribe opin­ions to them, and de­term­ine what doc­trines or what ar­gu­ments they shall be al­lowed to hear. This as­pect of the ques­tion, be­sides, has been so of­ten and so tri­umphantly en­forced by pre­ced­ing writers, that it need not be spe­cially in­sisted on in this place. Though the law of Eng­land, on the sub­ject of the press, is as servile to this day as it was in the time of the Tu­dors, there is little danger of its be­ing ac­tu­ally put in force against polit­ical dis­cus­sion, ex­cept dur­ing some tem­por­ary panic, when fear of in­sur­rec­tion drives min­is­ters and judges from their pro­pri­ety;6 and, speak­ing gen­er­ally, it is not, in con­sti­tu­tional coun­tries, to be ap­pre­hen­ded that the gov­ern­ment, whether com­pletely re­spons­ible to the people or not, will of­ten at­tempt to con­trol the ex­pres­sion of opin­ion, ex­cept when in do­ing so it makes it­self the or­gan of the gen­eral in­tol­er­ance of the pub­lic. Let us sup­pose, there­fore, that the gov­ern­ment is en­tirely at one with the people, and never thinks of ex­ert­ing any power of co­er­cion un­less in agree­ment with what it con­ceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to ex­er­cise such co­er­cion, either by them­selves or by their gov­ern­ment. The power it­self is il­le­git­im­ate. The best gov­ern­ment has no more title to it than the worst. It is as nox­ious, or more nox­ious, when ex­er­ted in ac­cord­ance with pub­lic opin­ion, than when in or op­pos­i­tion to 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. Were an opin­ion a per­sonal pos­ses­sion of no value ex­cept to the owner; if to be ob­struc­ted in the en­joy­ment of it were simply a private in­jury, it would make some dif­fer­ence whether the in­jury was in­flic­ted only on a few per­sons or on many. But the pe­cu­liar evil of si­len­cing the ex­pres­sion of an opin­ion is, that it is rob­bing the hu­man race; pos­ter­ity as well as the ex­ist­ing gen­er­a­tion; those who dis­sent from the opin­ion, still more than those who hold it. If the opin­ion is right, they are de­prived of the op­por­tun­ity of ex­chan­ging er­ror for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is al­most as great a be­ne­fit, the clearer per­cep­tion and live­lier im­pres­sion of truth, pro­duced by its col­li­sion with er­ror.

It is ne­ces­sary to con­sider sep­ar­ately these two hy­po­theses, each of which has a dis­tinct branch of the ar­gu­ment cor­res­pond­ing to it. We can never be sure that the opin­ion we are en­deav­our­ing to stifle is a false opin­ion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

First: the opin­ion which it is at­temp­ted to sup­press by au­thor­ity may pos­sibly be true. Those who de­sire to sup­press it, of course deny its truth; but they are not in­fal­lible. They have no au­thor­ity to de­cide the ques­tion for all man­kind, and ex­clude every other per­son from the means of judging. To re­fuse a hear­ing to an opin­ion, be­cause they are sure that 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, not the worse for be­ing com­mon.

Un­for­tu­nately for the good sense of man­kind, the fact of their fal­lib­il­ity is far from car­ry­ing the weight in their prac­tical judg­ment, which is al­ways al­lowed to it in the­ory; for while every­one well knows him­self to be fal­lible, few think it ne­ces­sary to take any pre­cau­tions against their own fal­lib­il­ity, or ad­mit the sup­pos­i­tion that any opin­ion, of which they feel very cer­tain, may be one of the ex­amples of the er­ror to which they ac­know­ledge them­selves to be li­able. Ab­so­lute princes, or oth­ers who are ac­cus­tomed to un­lim­ited de­fer­ence, usu­ally feel this com­plete con­fid­ence in their own opin­ions on nearly all sub­jects. People more hap­pily situ­ated, who some­times hear their opin­ions dis­puted, and are not wholly un­used to be set right when they are wrong, place the same un­boun­ded re­li­ance only on such of their opin­ions as are shared by all who sur­round them, or to whom they ha­bitu­ally de­fer: for in pro­por­tion to a man’s want of con­fid­ence in his own sol­it­ary judg­ment, does he usu­ally re­pose, with im­pli­cit trust, on the in­fal­lib­il­ity of “the world” in gen­eral. And the world, to each in­di­vidual, means the part of it with which he comes in con­tact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of so­ci­ety: the man may be called, by com­par­ison, al­most lib­eral and large-minded to whom 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 be­ing aware that other ages, coun­tries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have thought, and even now think, the ex­act re­verse. He de­volves upon his own world the re­spons­ib­il­ity of be­ing in the right against the dis­sen­tient worlds of other people; and it never troubles him that mere ac­ci­dent has de­cided which of these nu­mer­ous worlds is the ob­ject of his re­li­ance, and that the same causes which make him a Church­man in Lon­don, would have made him a Buddhist or a Con­fucian in Pekin. Yet it is as evid­ent in it­self as any amount of ar­gu­ment can make it, that ages are no more in­fal­lible than in­di­vidu­als; every age hav­ing held many opin­ions which sub­sequent ages have deemed 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.

The ob­jec­tion likely to be made to this ar­gu­ment, would prob­ably take some such form as the fol­low­ing. There is no greater as­sump­tion of in­fal­lib­il­ity in for­bid­ding the propaga­tion of er­ror, than in any other thing which is done by pub­lic au­thor­ity on its own judg­ment and re­spons­ib­il­ity. Judg­ment is given to men that they may use it. Be­cause it may be used er­ro­neously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it at all? To pro­hibit what they think per­ni­cious, is not claim­ing ex­emp­tion from er­ror, but ful­filling the duty in­cum­bent on them, al­though fal­lible, of act­ing on their con­scien­tious con­vic­tion. If we were never to act on our opin­ions, be­cause those opin­ions may be wrong, we should leave all our in­terests un­cared for, and all our du­ties un­per­formed. An ob­jec­tion which 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 im­pose them upon 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 al­low doc­trines which they hon­estly think dan­ger­ous to the wel­fare of man­kind, either in this life or in an­other, to be scattered abroad without re­straint, be­cause other people, in less en­lightened times, have 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, which are not denied to be fit sub­jects for the ex­er­cise of au­thor­ity: they have laid on bad taxes, 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 suf­fi­cient for the pur­poses of hu­man life. We may, and must, as­sume our opin­ion to be true for the guid­ance of our own con­duct: and it is as­sum­ing no more when we for­bid bad men to per­vert so­ci­ety by the propaga­tion of opin­ions which we re­gard as false and per­ni­cious.

I an­swer that it is as­sum­ing very much more. There is the greatest dif­fer­ence between pre­sum­ing an opin­ion to be true, be­cause, with every op­por­tun­ity for con­test­ing it, it has not been re­futed, and as­sum­ing its truth for the pur­pose of not per­mit­ting its re­fut­a­tion. Com­plete liberty of con­tra­dict­ing and dis­prov­ing our opin­ion, is the very con­di­tion which jus­ti­fies us in as­sum­ing 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 con­sider either the his­tory of opin­ion, or the or­din­ary con­duct of hu­man life, to what is it to be ascribed that the one and the other are no worse than they are? Not cer­tainly to the in­her­ent force of the hu­man un­der­stand­ing; for, on any mat­ter not self-evid­ent, there are ninety-nine per­sons totally in­cap­able of judging of it, for one who is cap­able; and the ca­pa­city of the hun­dredth per­son is only com­par­at­ive; for the ma­jor­ity of the em­in­ent men of every past gen­er­a­tion held many opin­ions now known to be er­ro­neous, and did or ap­proved nu­mer­ous things which no one will now jus­tify. Why is it, then, that there is on the whole a pre­pon­der­ance among man­kind of ra­tional opin­ions and ra­tional con­duct? If there really is this pre­pon­der­ance—which there must be, un­less hu­man af­fairs are, and have al­ways been, in an al­most des­per­ate state—it is ow­ing to a qual­ity of the hu­man mind, the source of everything re­spect­able in man either as an in­tel­lec­tual or as a moral be­ing, namely, that his er­rors are cor­ri­gible. He is cap­able of rec­ti­fy­ing his mis­takes, by dis­cus­sion and ex­per­i­ence. Not by ex­per­i­ence alone. There must be dis­cus­sion, to show how ex­per­i­ence is to be in­ter­preted. Wrong opin­ions and prac­tices gradu­ally yield to fact and ar­gu­ment: but facts and ar­gu­ments, to pro­duce any ef­fect on the mind, must be brought be­fore it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without com­ments to bring out their mean­ing. The whole strength and value, then, of hu­man judg­ment, de­pend­ing on the one prop­erty, that it can be set right when it is wrong, re­li­ance can be placed on it only when the means of set­ting it right are kept con­stantly at hand. In the case of any per­son whose judg­ment is really de­serving of con­fid­ence, how has it be­come so? Be­cause he has kept his mind open to cri­ti­cism of his opin­ions and con­duct. Be­cause it has been his prac­tice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and ex­pound to him­self, and upon oc­ca­sion to oth­ers, the fal­lacy of what was fal­la­cious. Be­cause he has felt, that the only way in which a hu­man be­ing can make some ap­proach to know­ing the whole of a sub­ject, is by hear­ing what can be said about it by per­sons of every vari­ety of opin­ion, and study­ing all modes in which it can be looked at by every char­ac­ter of mind. No wise man ever ac­quired his wis­dom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of hu­man in­tel­lect to be­come wise in any other man­ner. The steady habit of cor­rect­ing and com­plet­ing his own opin­ion by col­lat­ing it with those of oth­ers, so far from caus­ing doubt and hes­it­a­tion in car­ry­ing it into prac­tice, is the only stable found­a­tion for a just re­li­ance on it: for, be­ing cog­nis­ant of all that can, at least ob­vi­ously, be said against him, and hav­ing taken up his po­s­i­tion against all gain­say­ers—know­ing that he has sought for ob­jec­tions and dif­fi­culties, in­stead of avoid­ing them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the sub­ject from any quarter—he has a right to think his judg­ment bet­ter than that of any per­son, or any mul­ti­tude, who have not gone through a sim­ilar pro­cess.

It is not too much to re­quire that what the wisest of man­kind, those who are best en­titled to trust their own judg­ment, find ne­ces­sary to war­rant their re­ly­ing on it, should be sub­mit­ted to by that mis­cel­laneous col­lec­tion of a few wise and many fool­ish in­di­vidu­als, called the pub­lic. The most in­tol­er­ant of churches, the Ro­man Cath­olic Church, even at the can­on­isa­tion of a saint, ad­mits, and listens pa­tiently to, a “devil’s ad­voc­ate.” The holi­est of men, it ap­pears, can­not be ad­mit­ted to posthum­ous hon­ours, un­til all that the devil could say against him is known and weighed. If even the New­to­nian philo­sophy were not per­mit­ted to be ques­tioned, man­kind could not feel as com­plete as­sur­ance of its truth as they now do. The be­liefs which 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 ac­cep­ted, or is ac­cep­ted and the at­tempt fails, we are far enough from cer­tainty still; but we have done the best that the ex­ist­ing state of hu­man reason ad­mits of; we 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 be a bet­ter truth, it will be found when the hu­man mind is cap­able of re­ceiv­ing it; and in the mean­time we may rely on hav­ing at­tained such ap­proach to truth, as is pos­sible in our own day. This is the amount of cer­tainty at­tain­able by a fal­lible be­ing, and this the sole way of at­tain­ing it.

Strange it is, 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 for an ex­treme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should ima­gine that they are not as­sum­ing in­fal­lib­il­ity, when they ac­know­ledge that there should be free dis­cus­sion on all sub­jects which can pos­sibly be doubt­ful, but think that some par­tic­u­lar prin­ciple or doc­trine should be for­bid­den to be ques­tioned be­cause it is so cer­tain, that is, be­cause they are cer­tain that it is cer­tain. To call any pro­pos­i­tion cer­tain, while there is any­one who would deny its cer­tainty if per­mit­ted, but who is not per­mit­ted, is to as­sume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of cer­tainty, and judges without hear­ing 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 should not know what to do without them—the claims of an opin­ion to be pro­tec­ted from pub­lic at­tack are res­ted not so much on its truth, as on its im­port­ance to so­ci­ety. There are, it is al­leged, cer­tain be­liefs, so use­ful, not to say in­dis­pens­able to well-be­ing, that it is as much the duty of gov­ern­ments to up­hold those be­liefs, as to pro­tect any other of the in­terests of so­ci­ety. In a case of such ne­ces­sity, and so dir­ectly in the line of their duty, some­thing less than in­fal­lib­il­ity may, it is main­tained, war­rant, and even bind, gov­ern­ments, to act on their own opin­ion, con­firmed by the gen­eral opin­ion of man­kind. It is also of­ten ar­gued, and still of­tener thought, that none but bad men would de­sire to weaken these salut­ary be­liefs; and there can be noth­ing wrong, it is thought, in re­strain­ing bad men, and pro­hib­it­ing what only such men would wish to prac­tise. This mode of think­ing makes the jus­ti­fic­a­tion of re­straints on dis­cus­sion not a ques­tion of the truth of doc­trines, but of their use­ful­ness; and flat­ters it­self by that means to es­cape the re­spons­ib­il­ity of claim­ing to be an in­fal­lible judge of opin­ions. But those who thus sat­isfy them­selves, do not per­ceive that the as­sump­tion of in­fal­lib­il­ity is merely shif­ted from one point to an­other. The use­ful­ness of an opin­ion is it­self mat­ter of opin­ion: as dis­put­able, as open to dis­cus­sion, and re­quir­ing dis­cus­sion as much, as the opin­ion it­self. There is the same need of an in­fal­lible judge of opin­ions to de­cide an opin­ion to be nox­ious, as to de­cide it to be false, un­less the opin­ion con­demned has full op­por­tun­ity of de­fend­ing it­self. And it will not do to say that the heretic may be al­lowed to main­tain the util­ity or harm­less­ness of his opin­ion, though for­bid­den to main­tain its truth. The truth of an opin­ion is part of its util­ity. If we would know whether or not it is de­sir­able that a pro­pos­i­tion should be be­lieved, is it pos­sible to ex­clude the con­sid­er­a­tion of whether or not it is true? In the opin­ion, not of bad men, but of the best men, no be­lief which is con­trary to truth can be really use­ful: and can you pre­vent such men from ur­ging that plea, when they are charged with culp­ab­il­ity for deny­ing some doc­trine which they are told is use­ful, but which they be­lieve to be false? Those who are on the side of re­ceived opin­ions, never fail to take all pos­sible ad­vant­age of this plea; you do not find them hand­ling the ques­tion of util­ity as if it could be com­pletely ab­strac­ted from that of truth: on the con­trary, it is, above all, be­cause their doc­trine is “the truth,” that the know­ledge or the be­lief of it is held to be so in­dis­pens­able. There can be no fair dis­cus­sion of the ques­tion of use­ful­ness, when an ar­gu­ment so vi­tal may be em­ployed on one side, but not on the other. And in point of fact, when law or pub­lic feel­ing do not per­mit the truth of an opin­ion to be dis­puted, they are just as little tol­er­ant of a denial of its use­ful­ness. The ut­most they al­low is an ex­ten­u­ation of its ab­so­lute ne­ces­sity, or of the pos­it­ive guilt of re­ject­ing it.

In or­der more fully to il­lus­trate the mis­chief of deny­ing a hear­ing to opin­ions be­cause we, in our own judg­ment, have con­demned them, it will be de­sir­able to fix down the dis­cus­sion to a con­crete case; and I choose, by pref­er­ence, the cases which are least fa­vour­able to me—in which the ar­gu­ment against free­dom of opin­ion, both on the score of truth and on that of util­ity, is con­sidered the strongest. Let the opin­ions im­pugned be the be­lief in a God and in a fu­ture state, or any of the com­monly re­ceived doc­trines of mor­al­ity. To fight the battle on such ground, gives a great ad­vant­age to an un­fair ant­ag­on­ist; since he will be sure to say (and many who have no de­sire to be un­fair will say it in­tern­ally), Are these the doc­trines which you do not deem suf­fi­ciently cer­tain to be taken un­der the pro­tec­tion of law? Is the be­lief in a God one of the opin­ions, to feel sure of which, you hold to be as­sum­ing in­fal­lib­il­ity? But I must be per­mit­ted to ob­serve, that it is not the feel­ing sure of a doc­trine (be it what it may) which I call an as­sump­tion of in­fal­lib­il­ity. It is the un­der­tak­ing to de­cide that ques­tion for oth­ers, without al­low­ing them to hear what can be said on the con­trary side. And I de­nounce and rep­rob­ate this pre­ten­sion not the less, if put forth on the side of my most sol­emn con­vic­tions. However pos­it­ive any­one’s per­sua­sion may be, not only of the fals­ity, but of the per­ni­cious con­sequences—not only of the per­ni­cious con­sequences, but (to ad­opt ex­pres­sions which I al­to­gether con­demn) the im­mor­al­ity and im­pi­ety of an opin­ion; yet if, in pur­su­ance of that private judg­ment, though backed by the pub­lic judg­ment of his coun­try or his con­tem­por­ar­ies, he pre­vents the opin­ion from be­ing heard in its de­fence, he as­sumes in­fal­lib­il­ity. And so far from the as­sump­tion be­ing less ob­jec­tion­able or less dan­ger­ous be­cause the opin­ion is called im­moral or im­pi­ous, this 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, which ex­cite the as­ton­ish­ment and hor­ror of pos­ter­ity. It is among such that we find the in­stances mem­or­able in his­tory, when the arm of the law has been em­ployed to root out the best men and the noblest doc­trines; with de­plor­able suc­cess as to the men, though some of the doc­trines have sur­vived to be (as if in mock­ery) in­voked, in de­fence of sim­ilar con­duct to­wards those who dis­sent from them, or from their re­ceived in­ter­pret­a­tion.

Man­kind can hardly be too of­ten re­minded 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 coun­try abound­ing in in­di­vidual great­ness, this man has been handed down to us by those who best knew both him and the age, as the most vir­tu­ous man in it; while we know him as the head and pro­to­type of all sub­sequent teach­ers of vir­tue, the source equally of the lofty in­spir­a­tion of Plato and the ju­di­cious util­it­ari­an­ism of Aris­totle, “i maëstri di color che sanno,” the two head­springs of eth­ical as of all other philo­sophy. This ac­know­ledged mas­ter of all the em­in­ent thinkers who have since lived—whose fame, still grow­ing after more than two thou­sand years, all but out­weighs the whole re­mainder of the names which 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 re­cog­nised by the State; in­deed his ac­cuser as­ser­ted (see the Apo­lo­gia) that he be­lieved in no gods at all. Im­mor­al­ity, in be­ing, by his doc­trines and in­struc­tions, a “cor­ruptor of youth.” Of these charges the tribunal, there is every ground for be­liev­ing, hon­estly found him guilty, and con­demned the man who prob­ably of all then born had de­served best of man­kind, to be put to death as a crim­inal.

To pass from this to the only other in­stance of ju­di­cial iniquity, the men­tion of which, after the con­dem­na­tion of So­crates, would not be an an­ti­cli­max: the event which 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 con­ver­sa­tion, such an im­pres­sion of his moral grandeur, that eight­een sub­sequent cen­tur­ies have done homage to 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 con­trary of what he was, and treated him as that prodigy of im­pi­ety, which they them­selves are now held to be, for their treat­ment of him. The feel­ings with which man­kind now re­gard these lam­ent­able trans­ac­tions, es­pe­cially the later of the two, render them ex­tremely un­just in their judg­ment of the un­happy act­ors. These were, to all ap­pear­ance, not bad men—not worse than men com­monly are, but rather the con­trary; men who pos­sessed in a full, or some­what more than a full meas­ure, the re­li­gious, moral, and pat­ri­otic feel­ings of their time and people: the very kind of men who, in all times, our own in­cluded, have every chance of passing through life blame­less and re­spec­ted. The high-priest who rent his gar­ments when the words were pro­nounced, which, ac­cord­ing to all the ideas of his coun­try, con­sti­tuted the black­est guilt, was in all prob­ab­il­ity quite as sin­cere in his hor­ror and in­dig­na­tion, as the gen­er­al­ity of re­spect­able and pi­ous men now are in the re­li­gious and moral sen­ti­ments they pro­fess; and most of those who now shud­der at his con­duct, if they had lived in his time, and been born Jews, would have ac­ted pre­cisely as he did. Ortho­dox Chris­ti­ans who are temp­ted to think that those who stoned to death the first mar­tyrs must have been worse men than they them­selves are, 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 him who falls into it. If ever any­one, pos­sessed of power, had grounds for think­ing him­self the best and most en­lightened among his cotem­por­ar­ies, it was the Em­peror Mar­cus Aurelius. Ab­so­lute mon­arch of the whole civ­il­ised world, he pre­served through life not only the most un­blem­ished justice, but what was less to be ex­pec­ted from his Stoical breed­ing, the tenderest heart. The few fail­ings which are at­trib­uted to him, were all on the side of in­dul­gence: while his writ­ings, the highest eth­ical product of the an­cient mind, dif­fer scarcely per­cept­ibly, if they dif­fer at all, from the most char­ac­ter­istic teach­ings of Christ. This man, a bet­ter Chris­tian in all but the dog­matic sense of the word, than al­most any of the os­tens­ibly Chris­tian sov­er­eigns who have since reigned, per­se­cuted Chris­tian­ity. Placed at the sum­mit of all the pre­vi­ous at­tain­ments of hu­man­ity, with an open, un­fettered in­tel­lect, and a char­ac­ter which led him of him­self to em­body in his moral writ­ings the Chris­tian ideal, he yet failed to see that Chris­tian­ity was to be a good and not an evil to the world, with his du­ties to which he was so deeply pen­et­rated. Ex­ist­ing so­ci­ety he knew to be in a de­plor­able state. But such as it was, he saw, or thought he saw, that it was held to­gether, and pre­ven­ted from be­ing worse, by be­lief and rev­er­ence of the re­ceived di­vin­it­ies. As a ruler of man­kind, he deemed it his duty not to suf­fer so­ci­ety to fall in pieces; and saw not how, if its ex­ist­ing ties were re­moved, any oth­ers could be formed which could again knit it to­gether. The new re­li­gion openly aimed at dis­solv­ing these ties: un­less, there­fore, it was his duty to ad­opt that re­li­gion, it seemed to be his duty to put it down. Inas­much then as the theo­logy of Chris­tian­ity did not ap­pear to him true or of di­vine ori­gin; inas­much as this strange his­tory of a cru­ci­fied God was not cred­ible to him, and a sys­tem which pur­por­ted to rest en­tirely upon a found­a­tion to him so wholly un­be­liev­able, could not be fore­seen by him to be that renov­at­ing agency which, after all abate­ments, it has in fact proved to be; 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 tra­gical 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 the aus­pices of Mar­cus Aurelius in­stead of those of Con­stantine. But it would be equally un­just to him and false to truth, to deny, that no one plea which can be urged for pun­ish­ing anti-Chris­tian teach­ing, was want­ing to Mar­cus Aurelius for pun­ish­ing, as he did, the propaga­tion of Chris­tian­ity. No Chris­tian more firmly be­lieves that Athe­ism is false, and tends to the dis­sol­u­tion of 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 any­one who ap­proves of pun­ish­ment for the pro­mul­ga­tion of opin­ions, flat­ters him­self that he is a wiser and bet­ter man than Mar­cus Aurelius—more deeply versed in the wis­dom of his time, more el­ev­ated in his in­tel­lect above it—more earn­est in his search for truth, or more single-minded in his de­vo­tion to it when found;—let him ab­stain from that as­sump­tion of the joint in­fal­lib­il­ity of him­self and the mul­ti­tude, which the great An­toninus made with so un­for­tu­nate a res­ult.

Aware of the im­possib­il­ity of de­fend­ing the use of pun­ish­ment for re­strain­ing ir­re­li­gious opin­ions, by any ar­gu­ment which will not jus­tify Mar­cus An­toninus, the en­emies of re­li­gious free­dom, when hard pressed, oc­ca­sion­ally ac­cept this con­sequence, and say, with Dr. John­son, that the per­se­cutors of Chris­tian­ity were in the right; that per­se­cu­tion is an or­deal through which truth ought to pass, and al­ways passes suc­cess­fully, legal pen­al­ties be­ing, in the end, power­less against truth, though some­times be­ne­fi­cially ef­fect­ive against mis­chiev­ous er­rors. This is a form of the ar­gu­ment for re­li­gious in­tol­er­ance, suf­fi­ciently re­mark­able not to be passed without no­tice.

A the­ory which main­tains that truth may jus­ti­fi­ably be per­se­cuted be­cause per­se­cu­tion can­not pos­sibly do it any harm, can­not be charged with be­ing in­ten­tion­ally hos­tile to the re­cep­tion of new truths; but we can­not com­mend the gen­er­os­ity of its deal­ing with the per­sons to whom man­kind are in­debted for them. To dis­cover to the world some­thing which deeply con­cerns it, and of which it was pre­vi­ously ig­nor­ant; to prove to it that it had been mis­taken on some vi­tal point of tem­poral or spir­itual in­terest, is as im­port­ant a ser­vice as a hu­man be­ing can render to his fel­low-creatures, and in cer­tain cases, as in those of the early Chris­ti­ans and of the Re­formers, those who think with Dr. John­son be­lieve it to have been the most pre­cious gift which could be be­stowed on man­kind. That the au­thors of such splen­did be­ne­fits should be re­quited by mar­tyr­dom; that their re­ward should be to be dealt with as the vilest of crim­in­als, is not, upon this the­ory, a de­plor­able er­ror and mis­for­tune, for which hu­man­ity should mourn in sack­cloth and ashes, but the nor­mal and jus­ti­fi­able state of things. The pro­pounder of a new truth, ac­cord­ing to this doc­trine, should stand, as stood, in the le­gis­la­tion of the Lo­cri­ans, the pro­poser of a new law, with a hal­ter round his neck, to be in­stantly tightened if the pub­lic as­sembly did not, on hear­ing his reas­ons, then and there ad­opt his pro­pos­i­tion. People who de­fend this mode of treat­ing be­ne­fact­ors, can­not be sup­posed to set much value on the be­ne­fit; and I be­lieve this view of the sub­ject is mostly con­fined to the sort of per­sons who think that new truths may have been de­sir­able once, but that we have had enough of them now.

But, in­deed, the dictum that truth al­ways tri­umphs over per­se­cu­tion, is one of those pleas­ant false­hoods which men re­peat after one an­other till they pass into com­mon­places, but which all ex­per­i­ence re­futes. His­tory teems with in­stances of truth put down by per­se­cu­tion. If not sup­pressed forever, 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 Al­bi­geois were put down. The Vau­dois were put down. The Lol­lards were put down. The Hus­sites were put down. Even after the era of Luther, wherever per­se­cu­tion was per­sisted in, it was suc­cess­ful. In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Aus­trian em­pire, Prot­est­ant­ism was rooted out; and, most likely, would have been so in Eng­land, had Queen Mary lived, or Queen El­iza­beth died. Per­secu­tion has al­ways suc­ceeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be ef­fec­tu­ally per­se­cuted. No reas­on­able per­son can doubt that Chris­tian­ity might have been ex­tirp­ated in the Ro­man Em­pire. It spread, and be­came pre­dom­in­ant, be­cause the per­se­cu­tions were only oc­ca­sional, last­ing but a short time, and sep­ar­ated by long in­ter­vals of al­most un­dis­turbed pro­pa­gand­ism. It is a piece of idle sen­ti­ment­al­ity that truth, merely as truth, has any 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 of so­cial pen­al­ties will gen­er­ally suc­ceed in stop­ping the propaga­tion of either. The real ad­vant­age which truth has, con­sists in this, that when an opin­ion is true, it may be ex­tin­guished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will gen­er­ally be found per­sons to re­dis­cover it, un­til some one of its re­appear­ances falls on a time when from fa­vour­able cir­cum­stances it es­capes per­se­cu­tion un­til it has made such head as to with­stand all sub­sequent at­tempts to sup­press it.

It will be said, that we do not now put to death the in­tro­du­cers of new opin­ions: we are not like our fath­ers who slew the proph­ets, we even build sep­ulchres to them. It is true we no longer put heretics to death; and the amount of penal in­flic­tion which mod­ern feel­ing would prob­ably tol­er­ate, even against the most ob­nox­ious opin­ions, is not suf­fi­cient to ex­tirp­ate them. But let us not flat­ter ourselves that we are yet free from the stain even of legal per­se­cu­tion. Pen­al­ties for opin­ion, or at least for its ex­pres­sion, still ex­ist by law; and their en­force­ment is not, even in these times, so un­exampled as to make it at all in­cred­ible that they may some day be re­vived in full force. In the year 1857, at the sum­mer as­sizes of the county of Corn­wall, an un­for­tu­nate man,7 said to be of un­ex­cep­tion­able con­duct in all re­la­tions of life, was sen­tenced to twenty-one months’ im­pris­on­ment, for ut­ter­ing, and writ­ing on a gate, some of­fens­ive words con­cern­ing Chris­tian­ity. Within a month of the same time, at the Old Bailey, two per­sons, on two sep­ar­ate oc­ca­sions,8 were re­jec­ted as jury­men, and one of them 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,9 for the same reason, was denied justice against a thief. This re­fusal of re­dress took place in vir­tue of the legal doc­trine, that no per­son can be al­lowed to give evid­ence in a court of justice, who does not pro­fess be­lief in a God (any god is suf­fi­cient) and in a fu­ture state; which is equi­val­ent to de­clar­ing such per­sons to be out­laws, ex­cluded from the pro­tec­tion of the tribunals; who may not only be robbed or as­saul­ted with im­pun­ity, if no one but them­selves, or per­sons of sim­ilar opin­ions, be present, but any­one else may be robbed or as­saul­ted with im­pun­ity, if the proof of the fact de­pends on their evid­ence. The as­sump­tion on which this is groun­ded, is that the oath is worth­less, of a per­son who does not be­lieve in a fu­ture state; a pro­pos­i­tion which be­tokens much ig­nor­ance of his­tory in those who as­sent to it (since it is his­tor­ic­ally true that a large pro­por­tion of in­fi­dels in all ages have been per­sons of dis­tin­guished in­teg­rity and hon­our); and would be main­tained by no one who had the smal­lest con­cep­tion how many of the per­sons in greatest re­pute with the world, both for vir­tues and for at­tain­ments, are well known, at least to their in­tim­ates, to be un­be­liev­ers. The rule, be­sides, is sui­cidal, and cuts away its own found­a­tion. Under pre­tence that athe­ists must be li­ars, it ad­mits the testi­mony of all athe­ists who are will­ing to lie, and re­jects only those who brave the ob­lo­quy of pub­licly con­fess­ing a de­tested creed rather than af­firm a false­hood. A rule thus self-con­victed of ab­surdity so far as re­gards its pro­fessed pur­pose, can be kept in force only as a badge of hatred, a relic of per­se­cu­tion; a per­se­cu­tion, too, hav­ing the pe­cu­li­ar­ity, that the qual­i­fic­a­tion for un­der­go­ing it, is the be­ing clearly proved not to de­serve it. The rule, and the the­ory it im­plies, are hardly less in­sult­ing to be­liev­ers than to in­fi­dels. For if he who does not be­lieve in a fu­ture state, ne­ces­sar­ily lies, it fol­lows that they who do be­lieve are only pre­ven­ted from ly­ing, if pre­ven­ted they are, by the fear of hell. We will not do the au­thors and abet­tors of the rule the in­jury of sup­pos­ing, that the con­cep­tion which they have formed of Chris­tian vir­tue is drawn from their own con­scious­ness.

These, in­deed, are but rags and rem­nants of per­se­cu­tion, and may be thought to be not so much an in­dic­a­tion of the wish to per­se­cute, as an ex­ample of that very fre­quent in­firm­ity of Eng­lish minds, which makes them take a pre­pos­ter­ous pleas­ure in the as­ser­tion of a bad prin­ciple, when they are no longer bad enough to de­sire to carry it really into prac­tice. But un­hap­pily there is no se­cur­ity in the state of the pub­lic mind, that the sus­pen­sion of worse forms of legal per­se­cu­tion, which has las­ted for about the space of a gen­er­a­tion, will con­tinue. In this age the quiet sur­face of routine is as of­ten ruffled by at­tempts to re­sus­cit­ate past evils, as to in­tro­duce new be­ne­fits. What is boas­ted of at the present time as the re­vival of re­li­gion, is al­ways, in nar­row and un­cul­tiv­ated minds, at least as much the re­vival of bigotry; and where there is the strong per­man­ent leaven of in­tol­er­ance in the feel­ings of a people, which at all times abides in the middle classes of this coun­try, it needs but little to pro­voke them into act­ively per­se­cut­ing those whom they have never ceased to think proper ob­jects of per­se­cu­tion.10 For it is this—it is the opin­ions men en­ter­tain, and the feel­ings they cher­ish, re­spect­ing those who dis­own the be­liefs they deem im­port­ant, which makes this coun­try not a place of men­tal free­dom. For a long time past, the chief mis­chief of the legal pen­al­ties is that they strengthen the so­cial stigma. It is that stigma which is really ef­fect­ive, and so ef­fect­ive is it that the pro­fes­sion of opin­ions which are un­der the ban of so­ci­ety is much less com­mon in Eng­land, than is, in many other coun­tries, the avowal of those which in­cur risk of ju­di­cial pun­ish­ment. In re­spect to all per­sons but those whose pe­cu­ni­ary cir­cum­stances make them in­de­pend­ent of the good will of other people, opin­ion, on this sub­ject, is as ef­fic­a­cious as law; men might as well be im­prisoned, as ex­cluded from the means of earn­ing their bread. Those whose bread is already se­cured, and who de­sire no fa­vours from men in power, or from bod­ies of men, or from the pub­lic, have noth­ing to fear from the open avowal of any opin­ions, but to be ill-thought of and ill-spoken of, and this it ought not to re­quire a very heroic mould to en­able them to bear. There is no room for any ap­peal ad miseri­cor­diam in be­half of such per­sons. But though we do not now in­flict so much evil on those who think dif­fer­ently from us, as it was formerly our cus­tom to do, it may be that we do ourselves as much evil as ever by our treat­ment of them. So­crates was put to death, but the So­cratic philo­sophy rose like the sun in heaven, and spread its il­lu­min­a­tion over the whole in­tel­lec­tual firm­a­ment. Chris­ti­ans were cast to the lions, but the Chris­tian church grew up a stately and spread­ing tree, over­top­ping the older and less vig­or­ous growths, and stifling them by its shade. Our merely so­cial in­tol­er­ance kills no one, roots out no opin­ions, but in­duces men to dis­guise them, or to ab­stain from any act­ive ef­fort for their dif­fu­sion. With us, heretical opin­ions do not per­cept­ibly gain, or even lose, ground in each dec­ade or gen­er­a­tion; they never blaze out far and wide, but con­tinue to smoulder in the nar­row circles of think­ing and stu­di­ous per­sons among whom they ori­gin­ate, without ever light­ing up the gen­eral af­fairs of man­kind with either a true or a de­cept­ive light. And thus is kept up a state of things very sat­is­fact­ory to some minds, be­cause, without the un­pleas­ant pro­cess of fin­ing or im­pris­on­ing any­body, it main­tains all pre­vail­ing opin­ions out­wardly un­dis­turbed, while it does not ab­so­lutely in­ter­dict the ex­er­cise of reason by dis­sen­tients af­flic­ted with the mal­ady of thought. A con­veni­ent plan for hav­ing peace in the in­tel­lec­tual world, and keep­ing all things go­ing on therein very much as they do 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 por­tion of the most act­ive and in­quir­ing in­tel­lects find it ad­vis­able to keep the genu­ine prin­ciples and grounds of their con­vic­tions within their own breasts, and at­tempt, in what they ad­dress to the pub­lic, to fit as much as they can of their own con­clu­sions to premises which they have in­tern­ally re­nounced, can­not send forth the open, fear­less char­ac­ters, and lo­gical, con­sist­ent in­tel­lects who once ad­orned the think­ing world. The sort of men who can be looked for un­der it, are either mere con­form­ers to com­mon­place, or timeserv­ers for truth, whose ar­gu­ments on all great sub­jects are meant for their hear­ers, and are not those which have con­vinced them­selves. Those who avoid this al­tern­at­ive, do so by nar­row­ing their thoughts and in­terest to things which can be spoken of without ven­tur­ing within the re­gion of prin­ciples, that is, to small prac­tical mat­ters, which would come right of them­selves, if but the minds of man­kind were strengthened and en­larged, and which will never be made ef­fec­tu­ally right un­til then: while that which would strengthen and en­large men’s minds, free and dar­ing spec­u­la­tion on the highest sub­jects, is aban­doned.

Those in whose eyes this reti­cence on the part of heretics is no evil, should con­sider in the first place, that in con­sequence of it there is never any fair and thor­ough dis­cus­sion of heretical opin­ions; and that such of them as could not stand such a dis­cus­sion, though they may be pre­ven­ted from spread­ing, do not dis­ap­pear. But it is not the minds of heretics that are de­teri­or­ated most, by the ban placed on all in­quiry which does not end in the or­tho­dox con­clu­sions. The greatest harm done is 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 com­bined with timid char­ac­ters, who dare not fol­low out any bold, vig­or­ous, in­de­pend­ent train of thought, lest it should land them in some­thing which would ad­mit of be­ing con­sidered ir­re­li­gious or im­moral? Among them we may oc­ca­sion­ally see some man of deep con­scien­tious­ness, and subtle and re­fined un­der­stand­ing, who spends a life in soph­ist­ic­at­ing with an in­tel­lect which he can­not si­lence, and ex­hausts the re­sources of in­genu­ity in at­tempt­ing to re­con­cile the prompt­ings of his con­science and reason with or­tho­doxy, which yet he does not, per­haps, to the end suc­ceed in do­ing. No one can be a great thinker who does not re­cog­nise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to fol­low his in­tel­lect to whatever con­clu­sions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the er­rors of one who, with due study and pre­par­a­tion, thinks for him­self, than by the true opin­ions of those who only hold them be­cause they do not suf­fer them­selves to think. Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers, that free­dom of think­ing is re­quired. On the con­trary, it is as much, and even more in­dis­pens­able, to en­able av­er­age hu­man be­ings to at­tain the men­tal stature which they are cap­able of. There have been, and may again be, great in­di­vidual thinkers, in a gen­eral at­mo­sphere of men­tal slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that at­mo­sphere, an in­tel­lec­tu­ally act­ive people. Where any people has made a tem­por­ary ap­proach to such a char­ac­ter, it has been be­cause the dread of het­ero­dox spec­u­la­tion was for a time sus­pen­ded. Where there is a ta­cit con­ven­tion that prin­ciples are not to be dis­puted; where the dis­cus­sion of the greatest ques­tions which can oc­cupy hu­man­ity is con­sidered to be closed, we can­not hope to find that gen­er­ally high scale of men­tal activ­ity which has made some peri­ods of his­tory so re­mark­able. Never when con­tro­versy avoided the sub­jects which are large and im­port­ant enough to kindle en­thu­si­asm, was the mind of a people stirred up from its found­a­tions, and the im­pulse given which raised even per­sons of the most or­din­ary in­tel­lect to some­thing of the dig­nity of think­ing be­ings. Of such we have had an ex­ample in the con­di­tion of Europe dur­ing the times im­me­di­ately fol­low­ing the Re­form­a­tion; an­other, though lim­ited to the Contin­ent and to a more cul­tiv­ated class, in the spec­u­lat­ive move­ment of the lat­ter half of the eight­eenth cen­tury; and a third, of still briefer dur­a­tion, in the in­tel­lec­tual fer­ment­a­tion of Ger­many dur­ing the Go­ethian and Fichtean period. These peri­ods differed widely in the par­tic­u­lar opin­ions which they de­veloped; but were alike in this, that dur­ing 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 now is. Every single im­prove­ment which has taken place either in the hu­man mind or in in­sti­tu­tions, may be traced dis­tinctly to one or other of them. Ap­pear­ances have for some time in­dic­ated that all three im­pulses are well-nigh spent; and we can ex­pect no fresh start, un­til we again as­sert our men­tal free­dom.

Let us now pass to the second di­vi­sion of the ar­gu­ment, and dis­miss­ing the sup­pos­i­tion that any of the re­ceived opin­ions may be false, let us as­sume them to be true, and ex­am­ine into the worth of the man­ner in which they are likely to be held, when their truth is not freely and openly can­vassed. However un­will­ingly a per­son who has a strong opin­ion may ad­mit the pos­sib­il­ity that his opin­ion may be false, he ought to be moved by the 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 per­sons (hap­pily not quite so nu­mer­ous as formerly) who think it enough if a per­son as­sents un­doubt­ingly to what they think true, though he has no know­ledge whatever of the grounds of the opin­ion, and could not make a ten­able de­fence of it against the most su­per­fi­cial ob­jec­tions. Such per­sons, if they can once get their creed taught from au­thor­ity, nat­ur­ally think that no good, and some harm, comes of its be­ing al­lowed to be ques­tioned. Where their in­flu­ence pre­vails, they make it nearly im­possible for the re­ceived opin­ion to be re­jec­ted wisely and con­sid­er­ately, though it may still be re­jec­ted rashly and ig­nor­antly; for to shut out dis­cus­sion en­tirely is sel­dom pos­sible, and when it once gets in, be­liefs not groun­ded on con­vic­tion are apt to give way be­fore the slight­est semb­lance of an ar­gu­ment. Waiv­ing, how­ever, this pos­sib­il­ity—as­sum­ing that the true opin­ion abides in the mind, but abides as a pre­ju­dice, a be­lief in­de­pend­ent of, and proof against, ar­gu­ment—this is not the way in which truth ought to be held by a ra­tional be­ing. This is not know­ing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one su­per­sti­tion the more, ac­ci­dent­ally cling­ing to the words which enun­ci­ate a truth.

If the in­tel­lect and judg­ment of man­kind ought to be cul­tiv­ated, a thing which Prot­est­ants at least do not deny, on what can these fac­ulties be more ap­pro­pri­ately ex­er­cised by any­one, than on the things which con­cern him so much that it is con­sidered ne­ces­sary for him to hold opin­ions on them? If the cul­tiv­a­tion of the un­der­stand­ing con­sists in one thing more than in an­other, it is surely in learn­ing the grounds of one’s own opin­ions. Whatever people be­lieve, on sub­jects on which it is of the first im­port­ance to be­lieve rightly, they ought to be able to de­fend against at least the com­mon ob­jec­tions. But, someone may say, “Let them be taught the grounds of their opin­ions. It does not fol­low that opin­ions must be merely par­roted be­cause they are never heard con­tro­ver­ted. Per­sons who learn geo­metry do not simply com­mit the the­or­ems to memory, but un­der­stand and learn like­wise the demon­stra­tions; and it would be ab­surd to say that they re­main ig­nor­ant of the grounds of geo­met­rical truths, be­cause they never hear any­one deny, and at­tempt to dis­prove them.” Undoubtedly: and such teach­ing suf­fices 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 of math­em­at­ical truths is, that all the ar­gu­ment is on one side. There are no ob­jec­tions, and no an­swers to ob­jec­tions. But on every sub­ject on which dif­fer­ence of opin­ion is pos­sible, the truth de­pends on a bal­ance to be struck between two sets of con­flict­ing reas­ons. Even in nat­ural philo­sophy, there is al­ways some other ex­plan­a­tion pos­sible of the same facts; some geo­centric the­ory in­stead of he­lio­centric, some 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-fourths of the ar­gu­ments for every dis­puted opin­ion con­sist in dis­pelling the ap­pear­ances which fa­vour some opin­ion dif­fer­ent from it. The greatest orator, save one, of an­tiquity, has left it on re­cord that he al­ways stud­ied his ad­versary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, in­tens­ity than even his own. What Cicero prac­tised as the means of forensic suc­cess, re­quires to be im­it­ated by all who study 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 no one may have been able to re­fute them. But if he is equally un­able to re­fute the reas­ons on the op­pos­ite 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 con­tents him­self with that, he is either led by au­thor­ity, or ad­opts, like the gen­er­al­ity of the world, the side to which he feels most in­clin­a­tion. Nor is it enough that he should hear the ar­gu­ments of ad­versar­ies from his own teach­ers, presen­ted as they state them, and ac­com­pan­ied by what they of­fer as re­fut­a­tions. That is not the way to do justice to the ar­gu­ments, or bring them into real con­tact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from per­sons 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 en­counter and dis­pose of; else he will never really pos­sess him­self of the por­tion of truth which meets and re­moves that dif­fi­culty. Ninety-nine in a hun­dred of what are called edu­cated men are in this con­di­tion; even of those who can ar­gue flu­ently for their opin­ions. Their con­clu­sion may be true, but it might be false for any­thing they know: they have never thrown them­selves into the men­tal po­s­i­tion of those who think dif­fer­ently from them, and con­sidered what such per­sons may have to say; and con­sequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doc­trine which they them­selves pro­fess. They do not know those parts of it which ex­plain and jus­tify the re­mainder; the con­sid­er­a­tions which show that a fact which seem­ingly con­flicts with an­other is re­con­cil­able with it, or that, of two ap­par­ently strong reas­ons, one and not the other ought to be pre­ferred. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and de­cides the judg­ment of a com­pletely in­formed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have at­ten­ded equally and im­par­tially to both sides, and en­deav­oured to see the reas­ons of both in the strongest light. So es­sen­tial is this dis­cip­line to a real un­der­stand­ing of moral and hu­man sub­jects, that if op­pon­ents of all im­port­ant truths do not ex­ist, it is in­dis­pens­able to ima­gine them, and sup­ply them with the strongest ar­gu­ments which the most skil­ful devil’s ad­voc­ate can con­jure up.

To abate the force of these con­sid­er­a­tions, an en­emy of free dis­cus­sion may be sup­posed to say, that there is no ne­ces­sity for man­kind in gen­eral to know and un­der­stand all that can be said against or for their opin­ions by philo­soph­ers and theo­lo­gians. That it is not need­ful for com­mon men to 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 un­in­struc­ted per­sons re­mains un­re­futed. That simple minds, hav­ing been taught the ob­vi­ous grounds of the truths in­cul­cated on them, may trust to au­thor­ity for the rest, and be­ing aware that they have neither know­ledge nor tal­ent to re­solve every dif­fi­culty which can be raised, may re­pose in the as­sur­ance that all those which have been raised have been or can be answered, by those who are spe­cially trained to the task.

Con­ced­ing to this view of the sub­ject the ut­most that can be claimed for it by those most eas­ily sat­is­fied with the amount of un­der­stand­ing of truth which ought to ac­com­pany the be­lief of it; even so, the ar­gu­ment for free dis­cus­sion is no way weakened. For even this doc­trine ac­know­ledges that man­kind ought to have a ra­tional as­sur­ance that all ob­jec­tions have been sat­is­fact­or­ily answered; and how are they to be answered if that which re­quires to be answered is not spoken? or how can the an­swer be known to be sat­is­fact­ory, if the ob­ject­ors have no op­por­tun­ity of show­ing that it is un­sat­is­fact­ory? If not the pub­lic, 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 this can­not be ac­com­plished un­less they are freely stated, and placed in the most ad­vant­age­ous light which they ad­mit of. The Cath­olic Church has its own way of deal­ing with this em­bar­rass­ing prob­lem. It makes a broad sep­ar­a­tion between those who can be per­mit­ted to re­ceive its doc­trines on con­vic­tion, and those who must ac­cept them on trust. Neither, in­deed, are al­lowed any choice as to what they will ac­cept; but the clergy, such at least as can be fully con­fided in, may ad­miss­ibly and mer­it­ori­ously make them­selves ac­quain­ted with the ar­gu­ments of op­pon­ents, in or­der to an­swer them, and may, there­fore, read heretical books; the laity, not un­less by spe­cial per­mis­sion, hard to be ob­tained. This dis­cip­line re­cog­nises a know­ledge of the en­emy’s case as be­ne­fi­cial to the teach­ers, but finds means, con­sist­ent with this, of deny­ing it to the rest of the world: thus giv­ing to the elite more men­tal cul­ture, though not more men­tal free­dom, than it al­lows to the mass. By this device it suc­ceeds in ob­tain­ing the kind of men­tal su­peri­or­ity which its pur­poses re­quire; for though cul­ture without free­dom never made a large and lib­eral mind, it can make a clever nisi prius ad­voc­ate of a cause. But in coun­tries pro­fess­ing Prot­est­ant­ism, this re­source is denied; since Prot­est­ants hold, at least in the­ory, that the re­spons­ib­il­ity for the choice of a re­li­gion must be borne by each for him­self, and can­not be thrown off upon teach­ers. Besides, in the present state of the world, it is prac­tic­ally im­possible that writ­ings which are read by the in­struc­ted can be kept from the un­in­struc­ted. If the teach­ers of man­kind are to be cog­nis­ant of all that they ought to know, everything must be free to be writ­ten and pub­lished without re­straint.

If, how­ever, the mis­chiev­ous op­er­a­tion of the ab­sence of free dis­cus­sion, when the re­ceived opin­ions are true, were con­fined to leav­ing men ig­nor­ant of the grounds of those opin­ions, it might be thought that this, if an in­tel­lec­tual, is no moral evil, and does not af­fect the worth of the opin­ions, re­garded in their in­flu­ence on the char­ac­ter. The fact, how­ever, is, that not only the grounds of the opin­ion are for­got­ten in the ab­sence of dis­cus­sion, but too of­ten the mean­ing of the opin­ion it­self. The words which con­vey it, cease to sug­gest ideas, or sug­gest only a small por­tion of those they were ori­gin­ally em­ployed to com­mu­nic­ate. In­stead of a vivid con­cep­tion and a liv­ing be­lief, there re­main only a few phrases re­tained by rote; or, if any part, the shell and husk only of the mean­ing is re­tained, the finer es­sence be­ing lost. The great chapter in hu­man his­tory which this fact oc­cu­pies and fills, can­not be too earn­estly stud­ied and med­it­ated on.

It is il­lus­trated in the ex­per­i­ence of al­most all eth­ical doc­trines and re­li­gious creeds. They are all full of mean­ing and vi­tal­ity to those who ori­gin­ate them, and to the dir­ect dis­ciples of the ori­gin­at­ors. Their mean­ing con­tin­ues to be felt in un­di­min­ished strength, and is per­haps brought out into even fuller con­scious­ness, so long as the struggle lasts to give the doc­trine or creed an as­cend­ency over other creeds. At last it either pre­vails, and be­comes the gen­eral opin­ion, or its pro­gress stops; it keeps pos­ses­sion of the ground it has gained, but ceases to spread fur­ther. When either of these res­ults has be­come ap­par­ent, con­tro­versy on the sub­ject flags, and gradu­ally dies away. The doc­trine has taken its place, if not as a re­ceived opin­ion, as one of the ad­mit­ted sects or di­vi­sions of opin­ion: those who hold it have gen­er­ally in­her­ited, not ad­op­ted it; and con­ver­sion from one of these doc­trines to an­other, be­ing now an ex­cep­tional fact, oc­cu­pies little place in the thoughts of their pro­fess­ors. In­stead of be­ing, as at first, con­stantly on the alert either to de­fend them­selves against the world, or to bring the world over to them, they have sub­sided into ac­qui­es­cence, and neither listen, when they can help it, to ar­gu­ments against their creed, nor trouble dis­sen­tients (if there be such) with ar­gu­ments in its fa­vour. From this time may usu­ally be dated the de­cline in the liv­ing power of the doc­trine. We of­ten hear the teach­ers of all creeds lament­ing the dif­fi­culty of keep­ing up in the minds of be­liev­ers a lively ap­pre­hen­sion of the truth which they nom­in­ally re­cog­nise, so that it may pen­et­rate the feel­ings, and ac­quire a real mas­tery over the 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 the dif­fer­ence between it and other doc­trines; and in that period of every creed’s ex­ist­ence, not a few per­sons may be found, who have real­ised its fun­da­mental prin­ciples in all the forms of thought, have weighed and con­sidered them in all their im­port­ant bear­ings, and have ex­per­i­enced the full ef­fect on the char­ac­ter, which be­lief in that creed ought to pro­duce in a mind thor­oughly im­bued with it. But when it has come to be a hered­it­ary creed, and to be re­ceived pass­ively, not act­ively—when the mind is no longer com­pelled, in the same de­gree as at first, to ex­er­cise its vi­tal powers on the ques­tions which its be­lief presents to it, there is a pro­gress­ive tend­ency to for­get all of the be­lief ex­cept the for­mu­lar­ies, or to give it a dull and tor­pid as­sent, as if ac­cept­ing it on trust dis­pensed with the ne­ces­sity of real­ising it in con­scious­ness, or test­ing it by per­sonal ex­per­i­ence; un­til it al­most ceases to con­nect it­self at all with the in­ner life of the hu­man be­ing. Then are seen the cases, so fre­quent in this age of the world as al­most to form the ma­jor­ity, in which the creed re­mains as it were out­side the mind, en­crust­ing and pet­ri­fy­ing it against all other in­flu­ences ad­dressed to the higher parts of our nature; mani­fest­ing its power by not suf­fer­ing any fresh and liv­ing con­vic­tion to get in, but it­self do­ing noth­ing for the mind or heart, ex­cept stand­ing sen­tinel over them to keep them va­cant.

To what an ex­tent doc­trines in­trins­ic­ally fit­ted to make the deep­est im­pres­sion upon the mind may re­main in it as dead be­liefs, without be­ing ever real­ised in the ima­gin­a­tion, the feel­ings, or the un­der­stand­ing, is ex­em­pli­fied by the man­ner in which the ma­jor­ity of be­liev­ers hold the doc­trines of Chris­tian­ity. By Chris­tian­ity I here mean what is ac­coun­ted such by all churches and sects—the max­ims and pre­cepts con­tained in the New Testa­ment. These are con­sidered sac­red, and ac­cep­ted as laws, by all pro­fess­ing Chris­ti­ans. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that not one Chris­tian in a thou­sand guides or tests his in­di­vidual con­duct by ref­er­ence to those laws. The stand­ard to which he does refer it, is the cus­tom of his na­tion, his class, or his re­li­gious pro­fes­sion. He has thus, on the one hand, a col­lec­tion of eth­ical max­ims, which he be­lieves to have been vouch­safed to him by in­fal­lible wis­dom as rules for his gov­ern­ment; and on the other, a set of every­day judg­ments and prac­tices, which go a cer­tain length with some of those max­ims, not so great a length 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 other his real al­le­gi­ance. All Chris­ti­ans be­lieve that the blessed are the poor and humble, and those who are ill-used by the world; 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 one take their cloak, they should give him their coat also; that they should take no thought for the mor­row; that if they would be per­fect, they should sell all that they have and give it to the poor. They are not in­sin­cere when they say that they be­lieve these things. They do be­lieve them, as people be­lieve what they have al­ways heard lauded and never dis­cussed. But in the sense of that liv­ing be­lief which reg­u­lates con­duct, they be­lieve these doc­trines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them. The doc­trines in their in­teg­rity are ser­vice­able to pelt ad­versar­ies with; and it is un­der­stood that they are to be put for­ward (when pos­sible) as the reas­ons for whatever people do that they think laud­able. But any­one who re­minded them that the max­ims re­quire an in­fin­ity of things which they never even think of do­ing, would gain noth­ing but to be classed among those very un­pop­u­lar char­ac­ters who af­fect to be bet­ter than other people. The doc­trines have no hold on or­din­ary be­liev­ers—are not a power in their minds. They have a ha­bitual re­spect for the sound of them, but no feel­ing which spreads from the words to the things sig­ni­fied, and forces the mind to take them in, and make them con­form to the for­mula. Whenever con­duct is con­cerned, they look round for Mr. A and B to dir­ect them how far to go in obey­ing Christ.

Now we may be well as­sured that the case was not thus, but far oth­er­wise, with the early Chris­ti­ans. Had it been thus, Chris­tian­ity never would have ex­pan­ded 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 not likely to be made by any­body now), they as­suredly had a much live­lier feel­ing of the mean­ing of their creed than they have ever had since. And to this cause, prob­ably, it is chiefly ow­ing that Chris­tian­ity now makes so little pro­gress in ex­tend­ing its do­main, and after eight­een cen­tur­ies, is still nearly con­fined to Europeans and the des­cend­ants of Europeans. Even with the strictly re­li­gious, who are much in earn­est about their doc­trines, and at­tach a greater amount of mean­ing to many of them than people in gen­eral, it com­monly hap­pens that the part which is thus com­par­at­ively act­ive in their minds is that which was made by Calvin, or Knox, or some such per­son much nearer in char­ac­ter to them­selves. The say­ings of Christ co­ex­ist pass­ively in their minds, pro­du­cing hardly any ef­fect bey­ond what is caused by mere listen­ing to words so ami­able and bland. There are many reas­ons, doubt­less, why doc­trines which are the badge of a sect re­tain more of their vi­tal­ity than those com­mon to all re­cog­nised sects, and why more pains are taken by teach­ers to keep their mean­ing alive; but one reason cer­tainly is, that the pe­cu­liar doc­trines are more ques­tioned, and have to be of­tener de­fen­ded against open gain­say­ers. Both teach­ers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no en­emy in the field.

The same thing holds true, gen­er­ally speak­ing, of all tra­di­tional doc­trines—those of prudence and know­ledge of life, as well as of mor­als or re­li­gion. All lan­guages and lit­er­at­ures are full of gen­eral ob­ser­va­tions on life, both as to what it is, and how to con­duct one­self in it; ob­ser­va­tions which every­body knows, which every­body re­peats, or hears with ac­qui­es­cence, which are re­ceived as tru­isms, yet of which most people first truly learn the mean­ing, when ex­per­i­ence, gen­er­ally of a pain­ful kind, has made it a real­ity to them. How of­ten, when smart­ing un­der some un­fore­seen mis­for­tune or dis­ap­point­ment, does a per­son call to mind some pro­verb or com­mon say­ing, fa­mil­iar to him all his life, the mean­ing of which, if he had ever be­fore felt it as he does now, would have saved him from the calam­ity. There are in­deed reas­ons for this, other than the ab­sence of dis­cus­sion: there are many truths of which the 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 ac­cus­tomed to hear it ar­gued pro and con by people who did un­der­stand it. The fatal tend­ency of man­kind to leave off think­ing about a thing when it is no longer doubt­ful, is the cause of half their er­rors. A con­tem­por­ary au­thor has well spoken of “the deep slum­ber of a de­cided opin­ion.”

But what! (it may be asked) Is the ab­sence of un­an­im­ity an in­dis­pens­able con­di­tion of true know­ledge? Is it ne­ces­sary that some part of man­kind should per­sist in er­ror, to en­able any to real­ise the truth? Does a be­lief cease to be real and vi­tal as soon as it is gen­er­ally re­ceived—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 per­ish within them? The highest aim and best res­ult of im­proved in­tel­li­gence, it has hitherto been thought, is to unite man­kind more and more in the ac­know­ledg­ment of 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 af­firm no such thing. As man­kind im­prove, the num­ber of doc­trines which are no longer dis­puted or doubted will be con­stantly on the in­crease: and the well-be­ing of man­kind may al­most be meas­ured by the num­ber and grav­ity of the truths which have reached the point of be­ing un­con­tested. The ces­sa­tion, on one ques­tion after an­other, of ser­i­ous con­tro­versy, is one of the ne­ces­sary in­cid­ents of the con­sol­id­a­tion of opin­ion; a con­sol­id­a­tion as salut­ary in the case of true opin­ions, as it is dan­ger­ous and nox­ious when the opin­ions are er­ro­neous. But though this gradual nar­row­ing of the bounds of di­versity of opin­ion is ne­ces­sary in both senses of the term, be­ing at once in­ev­it­able and in­dis­pens­able, we are not there­fore ob­liged to con­clude that all its con­sequences must be be­ne­fi­cial. The loss of so im­port­ant an aid to the in­tel­li­gent and liv­ing ap­pre­hen­sion of a truth, as is af­forded by the ne­ces­sity of ex­plain­ing it to, or de­fend­ing it against, op­pon­ents, though not suf­fi­cient to out­weigh, is no tri­fling draw­back from, the be­ne­fit of its uni­ver­sal re­cog­ni­tion. Where this ad­vant­age can no longer be had, I con­fess I should like to see the teach­ers of man­kind en­deav­our­ing to provide a sub­sti­tute for it; some con­triv­ance for mak­ing the dif­fi­culties of the ques­tion as present to the learner’s con­scious­ness, as if they were pressed upon him by a dis­sen­tient cham­pion, eager for his con­ver­sion.

But in­stead of seek­ing con­triv­ances for this pur­pose, they have lost those they formerly had. The So­cratic dia­lectics, so mag­ni­fi­cently ex­em­pli­fied in the dia­logues of Plato, were a con­triv­ance of this de­scrip­tion. They were es­sen­tially a neg­at­ive dis­cus­sion of the great ques­tions of philo­sophy and life, dir­ec­ted with con­sum­mate skill to the pur­pose of con­vin­cing any­one who had merely ad­op­ted the com­mon­places of re­ceived opin­ion, that he did not un­der­stand the sub­ject—that he as yet at­tached no def­in­ite mean­ing to the doc­trines he pro­fessed; in or­der that, be­com­ing aware of his ig­nor­ance, he might be put in the way to at­tain a stable be­lief, rest­ing on a clear ap­pre­hen­sion both of the mean­ing of doc­trines and of their evid­ence. The school dis­pu­ta­tions of the middle ages had a some­what sim­ilar ob­ject. They were in­ten­ded to make sure that the pu­pil un­der­stood his own opin­ion, and (by ne­ces­sary cor­rel­a­tion) the opin­ion op­posed to it, and could en­force the grounds of the one and con­fute those of the other. These last-men­tioned con­tests had in­deed the in­cur­able de­fect, that the premises ap­pealed to were taken from au­thor­ity, not from reason; and, as a dis­cip­line to the mind, they were in every re­spect in­ferior to the power­ful dia­lectics which formed the in­tel­lects of the “So­cratici viri”: but the mod­ern mind owes far more to both than it is gen­er­ally will­ing to ad­mit, and the present modes of edu­ca­tion con­tain noth­ing which in the smal­lest de­gree sup­plies the place either of the one or of the other. A per­son who de­rives all his in­struc­tion from teach­ers or books, even if he es­cape the be­set­ting tempta­tion of con­tent­ing him­self with cram, is un­der no com­pul­sion to hear both sides; ac­cord­ingly it is far from a fre­quent ac­com­plish­ment, even among thinkers, to know both sides; and the weak­est part of what every­body says in de­fence of his opin­ion, is what he in­tends as a reply to ant­ag­on­ists. It is the fash­ion of the present time to dis­par­age neg­at­ive lo­gic—that which points out weak­nesses in the­ory or er­rors in prac­tice, without es­tab­lish­ing pos­it­ive truths. Such neg­at­ive cri­ti­cism would in­deed be poor enough as an ul­ti­mate res­ult; but as a means to at­tain­ing any pos­it­ive know­ledge or con­vic­tion worthy the name, it can­not be val­ued too highly; and un­til people are again sys­tem­at­ic­ally trained to it, there will be few great thinkers, and a low gen­eral av­er­age of in­tel­lect, in any but the math­em­at­ical and phys­ical de­part­ments of spec­u­la­tion. On any other sub­ject no one’s opin­ions de­serve the name of know­ledge, ex­cept so far as he has either had forced upon him by oth­ers, or gone through of him­self, the same men­tal pro­cess which would have been re­quired of him in car­ry­ing on an act­ive con­tro­versy with op­pon­ents. That, there­fore, which when ab­sent, it is so in­dis­pens­able, but so dif­fi­cult, to cre­ate, how worse than ab­surd is it to forego, when spon­tan­eously of­fer­ing it­self! If there are any per­sons who con­test a re­ceived opin­ion, or who will do so if law or opin­ion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and re­joice that there is someone to do for us what we oth­er­wise ought, if we have any re­gard for either the cer­tainty or the vi­tal­ity of our con­vic­tions, to do with much greater la­bour for ourselves.

It still re­mains to speak of one of the prin­cipal causes which make di­versity of opin­ion ad­vant­age­ous, and will con­tinue to do so un­til man­kind shall have entered a stage of in­tel­lec­tual ad­vance­ment which at present seems at an in­cal­cul­able dis­tance. We have hitherto 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 a clear ap­pre­hen­sion and deep feel­ing of its truth. But there is a com­moner case than either of these; when the con­flict­ing doc­trines, in­stead of be­ing one true and the other false, share the truth between them; and the non­con­form­ing opin­ion is needed to sup­ply the re­mainder of the truth, of which the re­ceived doc­trine em­bod­ies only a part. Pop­u­lar opin­ions, on sub­jects not palp­able to sense, are of­ten true, but sel­dom or never the whole truth. They are a part of the truth; some­times a greater, some­times a smal­ler part, but ex­ag­ger­ated, dis­tor­ted, and dis­joined from the truths by which they ought to be ac­com­pan­ied and lim­ited. Heretical opin­ions, on the other hand, are gen­er­ally some of these sup­pressed and neg­lected truths, burst­ing the bonds which kept them down, and either seek­ing re­con­cili­ation with the truth con­tained in the com­mon opin­ion, or front­ing it as en­emies, and set­ting them­selves up, with sim­ilar ex­clus­ive­ness, as the whole truth. The lat­ter case is hitherto the most fre­quent, as, in the hu­man mind, one-sided­ness has al­ways been the rule, and many-sided­ness the ex­cep­tion. Hence, even in re­volu­tions of opin­ion, one part of the truth usu­ally sets while an­other rises. Even pro­gress, which ought to su­per­add, for the most part only sub­sti­tutes one par­tial and in­com­plete truth for an­other; im­prove­ment con­sist­ing chiefly in this, that the new frag­ment of truth is more wanted, more ad­ap­ted to the needs of the time, than that which it dis­places. Such be­ing the par­tial char­ac­ter of pre­vail­ing opin­ions, even when rest­ing on a true found­a­tion; every opin­ion which em­bod­ies some­what of the por­tion of truth which the com­mon opin­ion omits, ought to be con­sidered pre­cious, with whatever amount of er­ror and con­fu­sion that truth may be blen­ded. No sober judge of hu­man af­fairs will feel bound to be in­dig­nant be­cause those who force on our no­tice truths which we should oth­er­wise have over­looked, over­look some of those which we see. Rather, he will think that so long as pop­u­lar truth is one-sided, it is more de­sir­able than oth­er­wise that un­pop­u­lar truth should have one-sided as­sert­ers too; such be­ing usu­ally the most en­er­getic, and the most likely to com­pel re­luct­ant at­ten­tion to the frag­ment of wis­dom which they pro­claim as if it were the whole.

Thus, in the eight­eenth cen­tury, when nearly all the in­struc­ted, and all those of the un­in­struc­ted 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 while greatly over­rat­ing the amount of un­like­ness between the men of mod­ern and those of an­cient times, in­dulged the be­lief that the whole of the dif­fer­ence was in their own fa­vour; with what a salut­ary shock did the para­doxes of Rousseau ex­plode like bomb­shells in the midst, dis­lo­cat­ing the com­pact mass of one-sided opin­ion, and for­cing its ele­ments to re­com­bine in a bet­ter form and with ad­di­tional in­gredi­ents. Not that the cur­rent opin­ions were on the whole farther from the truth than Rousseau’s were; on the con­trary, they were nearer to it; they con­tained more of pos­it­ive truth, and very much less of 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 which the pop­u­lar opin­ion wanted; and these are the de­posit which was left be­hind when the flood sub­sided. The su­per­ior worth of sim­pli­city of life, the en­er­vat­ing and de­mor­al­ising ef­fect of the tram­mels and hy­po­cris­ies of ar­ti­fi­cial so­ci­ety, are ideas which have never been en­tirely ab­sent from cul­tiv­ated minds since Rousseau wrote; and they will in time pro­duce their due ef­fect, though at present need­ing to be as­ser­ted as much as ever, and to be as­ser­ted by deeds, for words, on this sub­ject, 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 state of polit­ical life; un­til the one or the other shall have so en­larged its men­tal grasp as to be a party equally of or­der and of pro­gress, know­ing and dis­tin­guish­ing what is fit to be pre­served from what ought to be swept away. Each of these modes of think­ing de­rives its util­ity from the de­fi­cien­cies of the other; but it is in a great meas­ure the op­pos­i­tion of the other that keeps each within the lim­its 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 so­cial­ity and in­di­vidu­al­ity, to liberty and dis­cip­line, and all the other stand­ing ant­ag­on­isms of prac­tical life, are ex­pressed with equal free­dom, and en­forced and de­fen­ded with equal tal­ent and en­ergy, there is no chance of both ele­ments ob­tain­ing 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 ques­tion of the re­con­cil­ing and com­bin­ing of op­pos­ites, that very few have minds suf­fi­ciently ca­pa­cious and im­par­tial to make the ad­just­ment with an ap­proach to cor­rect­ness, 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 enu­mer­ated, if either of the two opin­ions has a bet­ter claim than the other, not merely to be tol­er­ated, but to be en­cour­aged and coun­ten­anced, it is the one which hap­pens at the 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 which is in danger of ob­tain­ing less than its share. I am aware that there is not, in this coun­try, any in­tol­er­ance of dif­fer­ences of opin­ion on most of these top­ics. They are ad­duced to show, by ad­mit­ted and mul­ti­plied ex­amples, the uni­ver­sal­ity of the fact, that only through di­versity of opin­ion is there, in the ex­ist­ing state of hu­man in­tel­lect, a chance of fair-play to all sides of the truth. When there are per­sons to be found, who form an ex­cep­tion to the ap­par­ent un­an­im­ity of the world on any sub­ject, even if the world is in the right, it is al­ways prob­able that dis­sen­tients 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. The Chris­tian mor­al­ity, for in­stance, is the whole truth on that sub­ject, and if any­one teaches a mor­al­ity which var­ies from it, he is wholly in er­ror.” As this is of all cases the most im­port­ant in prac­tice, none can be fit­ter to test the gen­eral maxim. But be­fore pro­noun­cing what Chris­tian mor­al­ity is or is not, it would be de­sir­able to de­cide what is meant by Chris­tian mor­al­ity. If it means the mor­al­ity of the New Testa­ment, I won­der that any­one who de­rives his know­ledge of this from the book it­self, can sup­pose that it was an­nounced, or in­ten­ded, as a com­plete doc­trine of mor­als. The Gospel al­ways refers to a preex­ist­ing mor­al­ity, and con­fines its pre­cepts to the par­tic­u­lars in which that mor­al­ity was to be cor­rec­ted, or su­per­seded by a wider and higher; ex­press­ing it­self, moreover, in terms most gen­eral, of­ten im­possible to be in­ter­preted lit­er­ally, and pos­sess­ing rather the im­press­ive­ness of po­etry or elo­quence than the pre­ci­sion of le­gis­la­tion. To ex­tract from it a body of eth­ical doc­trine, has ever been pos­sible 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 to this Juda­ical mode of in­ter­pret­ing the doc­trine and filling up the scheme of his Master, equally as­sumes a preex­ist­ing mor­al­ity, namely, that of the Greeks and Ro­mans; and his ad­vice to Chris­ti­ans is in a great meas­ure a sys­tem of ac­com­mod­a­tion to that; even to the ex­tent of giv­ing an ap­par­ent sanc­tion to slavery. What is called Chris­tian, but should rather be termed 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 not im­pli­citly ad­op­ted by mod­erns and Prot­est­ants, 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 which had been made to it in the middle ages, each sect sup­ply­ing the place by fresh ad­di­tions, ad­ap­ted 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 scruple to say of it, that it is, in many im­port­ant points, in­com­plete and one-sided, and that un­less ideas and feel­ings, not sanc­tioned by it, had con­trib­uted to the form­a­tion of European life and char­ac­ter, hu­man af­fairs would have been in a worse con­di­tion than they now are. Chris­tian mor­al­ity (so called) has all the char­ac­ters 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 been gradu­ally com­prom­ised away into one of leg­al­ity. It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the ap­poin­ted and ap­pro­pri­ate motives to a vir­tu­ous life: in this fall­ing far be­low the best of the an­cients, and do­ing what lies in it to give to hu­man mor­al­ity an es­sen­tially selfish char­ac­ter, by dis­con­nect­ing each man’s feel­ings of duty from the in­terests of his fel­low-creatures, ex­cept so far as a self-in­ter­ested in­duce­ment is offered to him for con­sult­ing them. It is es­sen­tially a doc­trine of pass­ive obed­i­ence; it in­cul­cates sub­mis­sion to all au­thor­it­ies found es­tab­lished; who in­deed are not 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 to ourselves. And while, in the mor­al­ity of the best Pagan na­tions, duty to the State holds even a dis­pro­por­tion­ate place, in­fringing on the just liberty of the in­di­vidual; in purely Chris­tian eth­ics, that grand 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 ob­lig­a­tion to the pub­lic ob­tains in mod­ern mor­al­ity, is de­rived from Greek and Ro­man sources, not from Chris­tian; as, even in the mor­al­ity of private life, whatever ex­ists of mag­nan­im­ity, high-minded­ness, per­sonal dig­nity, even the sense of hon­our, is de­rived from the purely hu­man, not the re­li­gious part of our edu­ca­tion, and never could 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 the Chris­tian eth­ics, in every man­ner in which it can be con­ceived, or that the many re­quis­ites of a com­plete moral doc­trine which it does not con­tain, do not ad­mit of be­ing re­con­ciled with it. Far less would I in­sinu­ate 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 which a com­pre­hens­ive mor­al­ity re­quires; that everything which is ex­cel­lent in eth­ics may be brought within them, with no greater vi­ol­ence to their lan­guage than has been done to it by all who have at­temp­ted to de­duce from them any prac­tical sys­tem of con­duct whatever. 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 which are not provided for, nor in­ten­ded to be provided for, in the re­cor­ded de­liv­er­ances of the Founder of Chris­tian­ity, and which have been en­tirely thrown aside in the sys­tem of eth­ics erec­ted on the basis of those de­liv­er­ances by the Chris­tian Church. And this be­ing so, I think it a great er­ror to per­sist in at­tempt­ing to find in the Chris­tian doc­trine that com­plete rule for our guid­ance, which its au­thor in­ten­ded it to sanc­tion and en­force, but only par­tially to provide. I be­lieve, too, that this nar­row the­ory is be­com­ing a grave prac­tical evil, de­tract­ing greatly from the value of the moral train­ing and in­struc­tion, which so many well-mean­ing per­sons are now at length ex­ert­ing them­selves to pro­mote. I much fear that by at­tempt­ing to form the mind and feel­ings on an ex­clus­ively re­li­gious type, and dis­card­ing those sec­u­lar stand­ards (as for want of a bet­ter name they may be called) which here­to­fore co­ex­is­ted with and sup­ple­men­ted the Chris­tian eth­ics, re­ceiv­ing some of its spirit, and in­fus­ing into it some of theirs, there will res­ult, and is even now res­ult­ing, a low, ab­ject, servile type of char­ac­ter, which, sub­mit it­self as it may to what it deems the Su­preme Will, is in­cap­able of rising to or sym­path­ising in the con­cep­tion of Su­preme Good­ness. I be­lieve that other eth­ics than any which can be evolved 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 which it does con­tain. Such pre­ju­dice, or over­sight, when it oc­curs, is al­to­gether an evil; but it is one from which we can­not hope to be al­ways ex­empt, and must be re­garded as the price paid for an in­es­tim­able good. The ex­clus­ive pre­ten­sion made by a part of the truth to be the whole, must and ought to be pro­tested against, and if a re­ac­tion­ary im­pulse should make the protest­ors un­just in their turn, this one-sided­ness, like the other, may be lamen­ted, but must be tol­er­ated. If Chris­ti­ans would teach in­fi­dels to be just to Chris­tian­ity, they should them­selves be just to in­fi­del­ity. It can do truth no ser­vice to blink the fact, known to all who have the most or­din­ary ac­quaint­ance with lit­er­ary his­tory, that a large por­tion of the noblest and most valu­able moral teach­ing has been the work, not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and re­jec­ted, the Chris­tian faith.

I do not pre­tend that the most un­lim­ited use of the free­dom of enun­ci­at­ing all pos­sible opin­ions would put an end to the evils of re­li­gious or philo­soph­ical sec­tari­an­ism. Every truth which men of nar­row ca­pa­city are in earn­est about, is sure to be as­ser­ted, in­cul­cated, and in many ways even ac­ted on, as if no other truth ex­is­ted in the world, or at all events 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, but is of­ten heightened and ex­acer­bated thereby; the truth which ought to have been, but was not, seen, be­ing re­jec­ted all the more vi­ol­ently be­cause pro­claimed by per­sons re­garded as op­pon­ents. But it is not on the im­pas­sioned par­tisan, it is on the calmer and more dis­in­ter­ested bystander, that this col­li­sion of opin­ions works its salut­ary ef­fect. Not the vi­ol­ent con­flict between parts of the truth, but the quiet sup­pres­sion of half of it, is the for­mid­able evil: there is al­ways hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they at­tend only to one that er­rors harden into pre­ju­dices, and truth it­self ceases to have the ef­fect of truth, by be­ing ex­ag­ger­ated into false­hood. And since there are few men­tal at­trib­utes more rare than that ju­di­cial fac­ulty which can sit in in­tel­li­gent judg­ment between two sides of a ques­tion, of which only one is rep­res­en­ted by an ad­voc­ate be­fore it, truth has no chance but in pro­por­tion as every side of it, every opin­ion which em­bod­ies any frac­tion of the truth, not only finds ad­voc­ates, but is so ad­voc­ated as to be listened to.

We have now re­cog­nised the ne­ces­sity to the men­tal well-be­ing of man­kind (on which all their other well-be­ing de­pends) of free­dom of opin­ion, and free­dom of the ex­pres­sion of opin­ion, on four dis­tinct grounds; which we will now briefly re­capit­u­late.

First, if any opin­ion is com­pelled to si­lence, that opin­ion may, for aught we can cer­tainly know, be true. To deny this is to as­sume our own in­fal­lib­il­ity.

Se­condly, though the si­lenced opin­ion 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 ad­verse opin­ions, that the re­mainder of the truth has any chance of be­ing sup­plied.

Thirdly, even if the re­ceived opin­ion be not only true, but the whole truth; un­less it is suffered to be, and ac­tu­ally is, vig­or­ously and earn­estly con­tested, it will, by most of those who re­ceive it, be held in the man­ner of a pre­ju­dice, with little com­pre­hen­sion or feel­ing of its ra­tional grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the mean­ing of the doc­trine it­self will be in danger of be­ing lost, or en­feebled, and de­prived of its vi­tal ef­fect on the char­ac­ter and con­duct: the dogma be­com­ing a mere formal pro­fes­sion, in­ef­fic­a­cious for good, but cum­ber­ing the ground, and pre­vent­ing the growth of any real and heart­felt con­vic­tion, from reason or per­sonal ex­per­i­ence.

Be­fore quit­ting the sub­ject of free­dom of opin­ion, it is fit to take some no­tice of those who say, that the free ex­pres­sion of all opin­ions should be per­mit­ted, on con­di­tion that the man­ner be tem­per­ate, and do not pass the bounds of fair dis­cus­sion. Much might be said on the im­possib­il­ity of fix­ing where these sup­posed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be of­fence to those whose opin­ion is at­tacked, I think ex­per­i­ence test­i­fies that this of­fence is given whenever the at­tack is telling and power­ful, and that every op­pon­ent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it dif­fi­cult to an­swer, ap­pears to them, if he shows any strong feel­ing on the sub­ject, an in­tem­per­ate op­pon­ent. But this, though an im­port­ant con­sid­er­a­tion in a prac­tical point of view, merges in a more fun­da­mental ob­jec­tion. Undoubtedly the man­ner of as­sert­ing an opin­ion, even though it be a true one, may be very ob­jec­tion­able, and may justly in­cur severe cen­sure. But the prin­cipal of­fences of the kind are such as it is mostly im­possible, un­less by ac­ci­dental self-be­trayal, to bring home to con­vic­tion. The gravest of them is, to ar­gue soph­ist­ic­ally, to sup­press facts or ar­gu­ments, to mis­state the ele­ments of the case, or mis­rep­res­ent the op­pos­ite opin­ion. But all this, even to the most ag­grav­ated de­gree, is so con­tinu­ally done in per­fect good faith, by per­sons who are not con­sidered, and in many other re­spects may not de­serve to be con­sidered, ig­nor­ant or in­com­pet­ent, that it is rarely pos­sible on ad­equate grounds con­scien­tiously to stamp the mis­rep­res­ent­a­tion as mor­ally culp­able; and still less could law pre­sume to in­ter­fere with this kind of con­tro­ver­sial mis­con­duct. With re­gard to what is com­monly meant by in­tem­per­ate dis­cus­sion, namely in­vect­ive, sar­casm, per­son­al­ity, and the like, the de­nun­ci­ation of these weapons would de­serve more sym­pathy if it were ever pro­posed to in­ter­dict them equally to both sides; but it is only de­sired to re­strain the em­ploy­ment of them against the pre­vail­ing opin­ion: against the un­pre­vail­ing they may not only be used without gen­eral dis­ap­proval, but will be likely to ob­tain for him who uses them the praise of hon­est zeal and right­eous in­dig­na­tion. Yet whatever mis­chief arises from their use, is greatest when they are em­ployed against the com­par­at­ively de­fence­less; and whatever un­fair ad­vant­age can be de­rived by any opin­ion from this mode of as­sert­ing it, ac­crues al­most ex­clus­ively to re­ceived opin­ions. The worst of­fence of this kind which can be com­mit­ted by a po­lemic, is to stig­mat­ise those who hold the con­trary opin­ion as bad and im­moral men. To calumny of this sort, those who hold any un­pop­u­lar opin­ion are pe­cu­li­arly ex­posed, be­cause they are in gen­eral few and un­in­flu­en­tial, and nobody but them­selves feel much in­terest in see­ing justice done them; but this weapon is, from the nature of the case, 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 ob­tain a hear­ing by stud­ied mod­er­a­tion of lan­guage, and the most cau­tious avoid­ance of un­ne­ces­sary of­fence, from which they hardly ever de­vi­ate even in a slight de­gree without los­ing ground: while un­meas­ured vi­tu­per­a­tion em­ployed on the side of the pre­vail­ing opin­ion, really does de­ter people from pro­fess­ing con­trary opin­ions, and from listen­ing to those who pro­fess them. For the in­terest, there­fore, of truth and justice, it is far more im­port­ant to re­strain this em­ploy­ment of vi­tu­per­at­ive lan­guage than the other; and, for ex­ample, if it were ne­ces­sary to choose, there would be much more need to dis­cour­age of­fens­ive at­tacks on in­fi­del­ity, than on re­li­gion. It is, how­ever, ob­vi­ous that law and au­thor­ity have no busi­ness with re­strain­ing either, while opin­ion ought, in every in­stance, to de­term­ine its ver­dict by the cir­cum­stances of the in­di­vidual case; con­demning every­one, on whichever side of the ar­gu­ment he places him­self, in whose mode of ad­vocacy either want of cand­our, or ma­lig­nity, bigotry, or in­tol­er­ance of feel­ing mani­fest them­selves; but not in­fer­ring these vices from the side which a per­son takes, though it be the con­trary side of the ques­tion to our own: and giv­ing mer­ited hon­our to every­one, whatever opin­ion he may hold, who has calmness to see and hon­esty to state what his op­pon­ents and their opin­ions really are, ex­ag­ger­at­ing noth­ing to their dis­credit, keep­ing noth­ing back which tells, or can be sup­posed to tell, in their fa­vour. This is the real mor­al­ity of pub­lic dis­cus­sion; and if of­ten vi­ol­ated, I am happy to think that there are many con­tro­ver­sial­ists who to a great ex­tent ob­serve it, and a still greater num­ber who con­scien­tiously strive to­wards it.

III Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being

Such be­ing the reas­ons which make it im­per­at­ive that hu­man be­ings should be free to form opin­ions, and to ex­press their opin­ions without re­serve; and such the bane­ful con­sequences to the in­tel­lec­tual, and through that to the moral nature of man, un­less this liberty is either con­ceded, or as­ser­ted in spite of pro­hib­i­tion; let us next ex­am­ine whether the same reas­ons do not re­quire that men should be free to act upon their opin­ions—to carry these out in their lives, without hindrance, either 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. No one pre­tends that ac­tions should be as free as opin­ions. On the con­trary, even opin­ions lose their im­munity, when the cir­cum­stances in which they are ex­pressed are such as to con­sti­tute their ex­pres­sion a pos­it­ive in­stig­a­tion to some mis­chiev­ous act. An opin­ion that corn-deal­ers are starv­ers of the poor, or that private prop­erty is rob­bery, ought to be un­mo­les­ted when simply cir­cu­lated through the press, but may justly in­cur pun­ish­ment when de­livered or­ally to an ex­cited mob as­sembled be­fore the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a plac­ard. Acts, of whatever kind, which, without jus­ti­fi­able cause, do harm to oth­ers, may be, and in the more im­port­ant cases ab­so­lutely re­quire to be, con­trolled by the un­fa­vour­able sen­ti­ments, and, when need­ful, by the act­ive in­ter­fer­ence of man­kind. The liberty of the in­di­vidual must be thus far lim­ited; he must not make him­self a nuis­ance to other people. But if he re­frains from mo­lest­ing oth­ers in what con­cerns them, and merely acts ac­cord­ing to his own in­clin­a­tion and judg­ment in things which con­cern him­self, the same reas­ons which show that opin­ion should be free, prove also that he should be al­lowed, without mo­lesta­tion, to carry his opin­ions into prac­tice at his own cost. That man­kind are not in­fal­lible; that their truths, for the most part, are only half-truths; that unity of opin­ion, un­less res­ult­ing from the fullest and freest com­par­ison of op­pos­ite opin­ions, is not de­sir­able, and di­versity not an evil, but a good, un­til man­kind are much more cap­able than at present of re­cog­nising all sides of the truth, are prin­ciples ap­plic­able to men’s modes of ac­tion, not less than to their opin­ions. As it is use­ful that while man­kind are im­per­fect there should be dif­fer­ent opin­ions, so is it that there should be dif­fer­ent ex­per­i­ments of liv­ing; that free scope should be given to vari­et­ies of char­ac­ter, short of in­jury to oth­ers; and that the worth of dif­fer­ent modes of life should be proved prac­tic­ally, 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, not the per­son’s own char­ac­ter, but the tra­di­tions or cus­toms of other people are the rule of con­duct, there is want­ing one of the prin­cipal in­gredi­ents of hu­man hap­pi­ness, and quite the chief in­gredi­ent of in­di­vidual and so­cial pro­gress.

In main­tain­ing this prin­ciple, the greatest dif­fi­culty to be en­countered does not lie in the ap­pre­ci­ation of means to­wards an ac­know­ledged end, but in the in­dif­fer­ence of per­sons 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 only a co­ordin­ate ele­ment with all that is des­ig­nated by the terms civil­isa­tion, in­struc­tion, edu­ca­tion, cul­ture, but is it­self a ne­ces­sary part and con­di­tion of all those things; there would be no danger that liberty should be un­der­val­ued, and the ad­just­ment of the bound­ar­ies between it and so­cial con­trol would present no ex­traordin­ary dif­fi­culty. But the evil is, that in­di­vidual spon­taneity is hardly re­cog­nised by the com­mon modes of think­ing, as hav­ing any in­trinsic worth, or de­serving any re­gard on its own ac­count. The ma­jor­ity, be­ing sat­is­fied with the ways of man­kind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), can­not com­pre­hend why those ways should not be good enough for every­body; and what is more, spon­taneity forms no part of the ideal of the ma­jor­ity of moral and so­cial re­formers, but is rather looked on with jeal­ousy, 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 per­sons, out of Ger­many, even com­pre­hend the mean­ing of the doc­trine which Wil­helm von Hum­boldt, so em­in­ent both as a sav­ant 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 them­selves in “ori­gin­al­ity.”11

Little, how­ever, as people are ac­cus­tomed to a doc­trine like that of Von Hum­boldt, and sur­pris­ing as it may be to them to find so high a value at­tached to in­di­vidu­al­ity, the ques­tion, one must nev­er­the­less think, can only be one of de­gree. No one’s idea of ex­cel­lence in con­duct is that people should do ab­so­lutely noth­ing but copy one an­other. No one would as­sert that people ought not to put into their mode of life, and into the con­duct of their con­cerns, any im­press whatever of their own judg­ment, or of their own in­di­vidual char­ac­ter. On the other hand, it would be ab­surd to pre­tend that people ought to live as if noth­ing whatever had been known in the world be­fore they came into it; as if ex­per­i­ence had as yet done noth­ing to­wards show­ing that one mode of ex­ist­ence, or of con­duct, is prefer­able to an­other. Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth, as to know and be­ne­fit by the as­cer­tained res­ults of hu­man ex­per­i­ence. But it is the priv­ilege and proper con­di­tion of a hu­man be­ing, ar­rived at the ma­tur­ity of his fac­ulties, to use and in­ter­pret ex­per­i­ence in his own way. It is for him to find out what part of re­cor­ded ex­per­i­ence is prop­erly ap­plic­able to his own cir­cum­stances and char­ac­ter. The tra­di­tions and cus­toms of other people are, to a cer­tain ex­tent, evid­ence of what their ex­per­i­ence has taught them; pre­sumptive evid­ence, and as such, have a claim to his de­fer­ence: but, in the first place, their ex­per­i­ence may be too nar­row; or they may not have in­ter­preted it rightly. Se­condly, their in­ter­pret­a­tion of ex­per­i­ence may be cor­rect, but un­suit­able to him. Cus­toms are made for cus­tom­ary cir­cum­stances, and cus­tom­ary char­ac­ters: and his cir­cum­stances or his char­ac­ter may be un­customary. Thirdly, though the cus­toms be both good as cus­toms, and suit­able to him, yet to con­form to cus­tom, merely as cus­tom, does not edu­cate or de­velop in him any of the qual­it­ies which are the dis­tinct­ive en­dow­ment of a hu­man be­ing. The hu­man fac­ulties of per­cep­tion, judg­ment, dis­crim­in­at­ive feel­ing, men­tal activ­ity, and even moral pref­er­ence, are ex­er­cised only in mak­ing a choice. He who does any­thing be­cause it is the cus­tom, makes no choice. He gains no prac­tice either in dis­cern­ing or in de­sir­ing what is best. The men­tal and moral, like the mus­cu­lar powers, are im­proved only by be­ing used. The fac­ulties are called into no ex­er­cise by do­ing a thing merely be­cause oth­ers do it, no 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, but is likely to be weakened by his ad­opt­ing it: and if the in­duce­ments to an act are not such as are con­sentan­eous to his own feel­ings and char­ac­ter (where af­fec­tion, or the rights of oth­ers, are not con­cerned), it is so much done to­wards ren­der­ing his feel­ings and char­ac­ter in­ert and tor­pid, in­stead of act­ive and en­er­getic.

He who lets the world, or his own por­tion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other fac­ulty than the ape­like one of im­it­a­tion. He who chooses his plan for him­self, em­ploys all his fac­ulties. He must use ob­ser­va­tion to see, reas­on­ing and judg­ment to fore­see, activ­ity to gather ma­ter­i­als for de­cision, dis­crim­in­a­tion to de­cide, and when he has de­cided, firm­ness and self-con­trol to hold to his de­lib­er­ate de­cision. And these qual­it­ies he re­quires and ex­er­cises ex­actly in pro­por­tion as the part of his con­duct which he de­term­ines ac­cord­ing to his own judg­ment and feel­ings is a large one. It is pos­sible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his com­par­at­ive worth as a hu­man be­ing? 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 surely is man him­self. Sup­pos­ing it were pos­sible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erec­ted and pray­ers said, by ma­chinery—by auto­matons in hu­man form—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 as­suredly are but starved spe­ci­mens of what nature can and will pro­duce. Hu­man nature is not a ma­chine to be built after a model, and set to do ex­actly the work pre­scribed for it, but a tree, which re­quires to grow and de­velop it­self on all sides, ac­cord­ing to the tend­ency of the in­ward forces which make it a liv­ing thing.

It will prob­ably be con­ceded that it is de­sir­able people should ex­er­cise their un­der­stand­ings, and that an in­tel­li­gent fol­low­ing of cus­tom, or even oc­ca­sion­ally an in­tel­li­gent de­vi­ation from cus­tom, is bet­ter than a blind and simply mech­an­ical ad­he­sion to it. To a cer­tain ex­tent 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 like­wise; or that to pos­sess im­pulses of our own, and of any strength, is any­thing but a peril and a snare. Yet de­sires and im­pulses are as much a part of a per­fect hu­man be­ing, as be­liefs and re­straints: and strong im­pulses are only per­il­ous when 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 ill; 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 vari­ous than those of an­other, 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 but an­other name for en­ergy. En­ergy may be turned to bad uses; but more good may al­ways be made of an en­er­getic nature, than of an in­dol­ent and im­pass­ive one. Those who have most nat­ural feel­ing, are al­ways those whose cul­tiv­ated feel­ings may be made the strongest. The same strong sus­cept­ib­il­it­ies which make the per­sonal im­pulses vivid and power­ful, are also the source from whence are gen­er­ated the most pas­sion­ate love of vir­tue, and the stern­est self-con­trol. It is through the cul­tiv­a­tion of these, that so­ci­ety both does its duty and pro­tects its in­terests: not by re­ject­ing the stuff of which her­oes are made, be­cause it knows not how to make them. A per­son whose de­sires and im­pulses are his own—are the ex­pres­sion of his own nature, as it has been de­veloped and mod­i­fied by his own cul­ture—is said to have a char­ac­ter. One whose de­sires and im­pulses are not his own, has no char­ac­ter, no more than a steam-en­gine has a char­ac­ter. If, in ad­di­tion to be­ing his own, his im­pulses are strong, and are un­der the gov­ern­ment of a strong will, he has an en­er­getic char­ac­ter. Who­ever 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 not the bet­ter for con­tain­ing many per­sons who have much char­ac­ter—and that a high gen­eral av­er­age of en­ergy is not de­sir­able.

In some early states of so­ci­ety, these forces might be, and were, too much ahead of the power which so­ci­ety then pos­sessed of dis­cip­lin­ing and con­trolling 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 in­duce men of strong bod­ies or minds to pay obed­i­ence to any rules which re­quired them to con­trol their im­pulses. To over­come this dif­fi­culty, law and dis­cip­line, like the Popes strug­gling against the Em­per­ors, as­ser­ted a power over the whole man, claim­ing to con­trol all his life in or­der to con­trol his char­ac­ter—which so­ci­ety had not found any other suf­fi­cient means of bind­ing. But so­ci­ety has now fairly got the bet­ter of in­di­vidu­al­ity; and the danger which threatens hu­man nature is not the ex­cess, but the de­fi­ciency, of per­sonal im­pulses and pref­er­ences. Th­ings are vastly changed, since the pas­sions of those who were strong by sta­tion or by per­sonal en­dow­ment were in a state of ha­bitual re­bel­lion against laws and or­din­ances, and re­quired to be rig­or­ously chained up to en­able the per­sons within their reach to en­joy any particle of se­cur­ity. In our times, from the highest class of so­ci­ety down to the low­est, every­one lives as 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 al­low the best and highest in me to have fair-play, and en­able it to grow and thrive? They ask them­selves, what is suit­able to my po­s­i­tion? what is usu­ally done by per­sons of my sta­tion and pe­cu­ni­ary cir­cum­stances? or (worse still) what is usu­ally done by per­sons of a sta­tion and cir­cum­stances su­per­ior to 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. Thus the mind it­self is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleas­ure, con­form­ity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they ex­er­cise choice only among things com­monly done: pe­cu­li­ar­ity of taste, ec­cent­ri­city of con­duct, are shunned equally with crimes: un­til by dint of not fol­low­ing their own nature, they have no nature to fol­low: their hu­man ca­pa­cit­ies are withered and starved: they be­come in­cap­able of any strong wishes or nat­ive 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 so, on the Calvin­istic the­ory. Ac­cord­ing to that, the one great of­fence of man is Self-will. All the good of which hu­man­ity is cap­able, is com­prised in Obedi­ence. You have no choice; thus you must do, and no oth­er­wise: “whatever is not a duty, is a sin.” Hu­man nature be­ing rad­ic­ally cor­rupt, there is no re­demp­tion for any­one un­til hu­man nature is killed within him. To one 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 other pur­pose but to do that sup­posed will more ef­fec­tu­ally, he is bet­ter without them. That is the the­ory of Calvin­ism; and it is held, in a mit­ig­ated form, by many who do not con­sider them­selves Calvin­ists; the mit­ig­a­tion con­sist­ing in giv­ing a less as­cetic in­ter­pret­a­tion to the al­leged will of God; as­sert­ing it to be his will that man­kind should grat­ify some of their in­clin­a­tions; of course not in the man­ner they them­selves prefer, but in the way of obed­i­ence, that is, in a way pre­scribed to them by au­thor­ity; and, there­fore, by the ne­ces­sary con­di­tions of the case, the same for all.

In some such in­si­di­ous form there is at present a strong tend­ency to this nar­row the­ory of life, and to the pinched and hide­bound type of hu­man char­ac­ter which it pat­ron­ises. Many per­sons, no doubt, sin­cerely think that hu­man be­ings thus cramped and dwarfed, 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 out into fig­ures of an­im­als, than as nature made them. But if it be 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 all hu­man fac­ulties that they might be cul­tiv­ated and un­fol­ded, not rooted out and con­sumed, and that he takes de­light in every nearer ap­proach made by his creatures to the ideal con­cep­tion em­bod­ied in them, every in­crease in any of their cap­ab­il­it­ies of com­pre­hen­sion, of ac­tion, or of en­joy­ment. There is a dif­fer­ent type of hu­man ex­cel­lence from the Calvin­istic; a con­cep­tion of hu­man­ity as hav­ing its nature be­stowed on it for other pur­poses than merely to be ab­neg­ated. “Pagan self-as­ser­tion” is one of the ele­ments of hu­man worth, as well as “Chris­tian self-denial.”12 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; nor would a Pericles, if we had one in these days, be without any­thing good which be­longed to John Knox.

It is not by wear­ing down into uni­form­ity all that is in­di­vidual in them­selves, but by cul­tiv­at­ing it and call­ing it forth, within the lim­its im­posed by the rights and in­terests of oth­ers, that hu­man be­ings be­come a noble and beau­ti­ful ob­ject of con­tem­pla­tion; and as the works par­take the char­ac­ter of those who do them, by the same pro­cess hu­man life also be­comes rich, di­ver­si­fied, and an­im­at­ing, fur­nish­ing more abund­ant al­i­ment to high thoughts and el­ev­at­ing feel­ings, and strength­en­ing the tie which 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 ful­ness of life about his own ex­ist­ence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is com­posed of them. 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 this there is ample com­pens­a­tion even in the point of view of hu­man de­vel­op­ment. The means of de­vel­op­ment which the in­di­vidual loses by be­ing pre­ven­ted from grat­i­fy­ing his in­clin­a­tions to the in­jury of oth­ers, are chiefly ob­tained at the ex­pense of the de­vel­op­ment of other people. And even to him­self there is a full equi­val­ent in the bet­ter de­vel­op­ment of the so­cial part of his nature, rendered pos­sible by the re­straint put upon the selfish part. To be held to ri­gid rules of justice for the sake of oth­ers, de­vel­ops the feel­ings and ca­pa­cit­ies which have the good of oth­ers for their ob­ject. But to be re­strained in things not af­fect­ing their good, by their mere dis­pleas­ure, de­vel­ops noth­ing valu­able, ex­cept such force of char­ac­ter as may un­fold it­self in res­ist­ing the re­straint. If ac­qui­esced in, it dulls and blunts the whole nature. To give any fair-play to the nature of each, it is es­sen­tial that dif­fer­ent per­sons should be al­lowed to lead dif­fer­ent lives. In pro­por­tion as this lat­it­ude has been ex­er­cised in any age, has that age been note­worthy to pos­ter­ity. 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 may be 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 with de­vel­op­ment, and that it is only the cul­tiv­a­tion of in­di­vidu­al­ity which pro­duces, or can pro­duce, well-de­veloped hu­man be­ings, I might here close the ar­gu­ment: for what more or 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 can be said of any ob­struc­tion to good, than that it pre­vents this? Doubt­less, how­ever, these con­sid­er­a­tions will not suf­fice to con­vince those who most need con­vin­cing; and it is ne­ces­sary fur­ther to show, that these de­veloped hu­man be­ings are of some use to the un­developed—to point out to those who do not de­sire liberty, and would not avail them­selves of it, that they may be in some in­tel­li­gible man­ner re­war­ded for al­low­ing other people to make use of it without hindrance.

In the first place, then, I would sug­gest that they might pos­sibly learn some­thing from them. It will not be denied by any­body, that ori­gin­al­ity is a valu­able ele­ment in hu­man af­fairs. There is al­ways need of per­sons not only to dis­cover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to com­mence new prac­tices, and set the ex­ample of more en­lightened con­duct, and bet­ter taste and sense in hu­man life. This can­not well be gain­said by any­body who does not be­lieve that the world has already at­tained per­fec­tion in all its ways and prac­tices. It is true that this be­ne­fit is not cap­able of be­ing rendered by every­body alike: there are but few per­sons, in com­par­ison 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 which did not be­fore ex­ist; it is they who keep the life in those which already ex­is­ted. If there were noth­ing new to be done, would hu­man in­tel­lect cease to be ne­ces­sary? Would it be a reason why those who do the old things should for­get why they are done, and do them like cattle, not 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 per­sons whose ever-re­cur­ring ori­gin­al­ity pre­vents 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 in the Byz­antine Em­pire. Per­sons of genius, it is true, are, and are al­ways likely to be, a small minor­ity; but in or­der to have them, it is ne­ces­sary to pre­serve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an at­mo­sphere of free­dom. Per­sons of genius are, ex vi ter­mini, more in­di­vidual than any other people—less cap­able, con­sequently, of fit­ting them­selves, without hurt­ful com­pres­sion, into any of the small num­ber of moulds which so­ci­ety provides in or­der to save its mem­bers the trouble of form­ing their own char­ac­ter. If from timid­ity they con­sent to be forced into one of these moulds, and to let all that part of them­selves which can­not ex­pand un­der the pres­sure re­main un­ex­pan­ded, so­ci­ety will be little the bet­ter for their genius. If they are of a strong char­ac­ter, and break their fet­ters, they be­come a mark for the so­ci­ety which has not suc­ceeded in re­du­cing them to com­mon­place, to point at with sol­emn warn­ing as “wild,” “er­ratic,” and the like; much as if one should com­plain of the Niagara river for not flow­ing smoothly between its banks like a Dutch canal.

I in­sist thus em­phat­ic­ally on the im­port­ance of genius, and the ne­ces­sity of al­low­ing it to un­fold it­self freely both in thought and in prac­tice, be­ing well aware that no one will deny the po­s­i­tion in the­ory, but know­ing also that al­most every­one, in real­ity, is totally 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, that of ori­gin­al­ity in thought and ac­tion, though no one says that it is not a thing to be ad­mired, nearly all, at heart, think that they can do very well without it. Un­hap­pily this is too nat­ural to be wondered at. Ori­gin­al­ity is the one thing which 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 which ori­gin­al­ity has to render them, is that of open­ing their eyes: which be­ing once fully done, they would have a chance of be­ing them­selves ori­ginal. Mean­while, re­col­lect­ing that noth­ing was ever yet done which someone was not the first to do, and that all good things which ex­ist are the fruits of ori­gin­al­ity, let them be mod­est enough to be­lieve that there is some­thing still left for it to ac­com­plish, and as­sure them­selves that they are more in need of ori­gin­al­ity, the less they are con­scious of the want.

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 render me­diocrity the as­cend­ant power among man­kind. In an­cient his­tory, in the middle ages, and in a di­min­ish­ing de­gree through the long trans­ition from feud­al­ity to the present time, 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 or­gan of the tend­en­cies and in­stincts of masses. This is as true in the moral and so­cial re­la­tions of private life as in pub­lic trans­ac­tions. 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 a still greater nov­elty, the mass do not now take their opin­ions from dig­nit­ar­ies in Church or State, from os­tens­ible 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 as­sert that any­thing bet­ter is com­pat­ible, as a gen­eral rule, with the present low state of the hu­man mind. But that does not hinder 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 which it fosters, ever did or could rise above me­diocrity, ex­cept in so far as the sov­er­eign Many have let them­selves be guided (which in their best times they al­ways have done) by the coun­sels and in­flu­ence of a more highly gif­ted and in­struc­ted One or Few. The ini­ti­ation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from in­di­vidu­als; gen­er­ally at first from some one in­di­vidual. The hon­our and glory of the av­er­age man is that he is cap­able of fol­low­ing that ini­ti­at­ive; that he can re­spond in­tern­ally to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open. I am not coun­ten­an­cing the sort of “hero-wor­ship” which ap­plauds the strong man of genius for for­cibly seiz­ing on the gov­ern­ment of the world and mak­ing it do his bid­ding in spite of it­self. All he can claim is, free­dom to point out the way. The power of com­pel­ling oth­ers into it, is not only in­con­sist­ent with the free­dom and de­vel­op­ment of all the rest, but cor­rupt­ing to the strong man him­self. It does seem, how­ever, that when the opin­ions of masses of merely av­er­age men are every­where be­come or be­com­ing the dom­in­ant power, the coun­ter­poise and cor­rect­ive to that tend­ency would be, the more and more pro­nounced in­di­vidu­al­ity of those who stand on the higher em­in­ences of thought. It is in these cir­cum­stances most es­pe­cially, that ex­cep­tional in­di­vidu­als, in­stead of be­ing de­terred, should be en­cour­aged in act­ing dif­fer­ently from the mass. In 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 when and where 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 which 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 scope pos­sible to un­customary things, in or­der that it may in time ap­pear which of these are fit to be con­ver­ted into cus­toms. But in­de­pend­ence of ac­tion, and dis­reg­ard of cus­tom are not solely de­serving of en­cour­age­ment for the chance they af­ford that bet­ter modes of ac­tion, and cus­toms more worthy of gen­eral ad­op­tion, may be struck out; nor is it only per­sons of de­cided men­tal su­peri­or­ity who have a just claim to carry on their lives in their own way. There is no reason that all hu­man ex­ist­ences should be con­struc­ted on some one, or some small num­ber of pat­terns. If a per­son pos­sesses any tol­er­able amount of com­mon­sense and ex­per­i­ence, his own mode of lay­ing out his ex­ist­ence is the best, not be­cause it is the best in it­self, but be­cause it is his own mode. Hu­man be­ings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not un­dis­tin­guish­ably 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 ware­house­ful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are hu­man be­ings more like one an­other in their whole phys­ical and spir­itual con­form­a­tion than in the shape of their feet? If it were only that people have di­versit­ies of taste, that is reason enough for not at­tempt­ing to shape them all after one model. But dif­fer­ent per­sons also re­quire dif­fer­ent con­di­tions for their spir­itual de­vel­op­ment; and can no more ex­ist health­ily in the same moral, than all the vari­ety of plants can in the same phys­ical, at­mo­sphere and cli­mate. The same things which are helps to one per­son to­wards the cul­tiv­a­tion of his higher nature, are hindrances to an­other. The same mode of life is a healthy ex­cite­ment to one, keep­ing all his fac­ulties of ac­tion and en­joy­ment in their best or­der, while to an­other it is a dis­tract­ing bur­den, which sus­pends or crushes all in­ternal life. Such are the dif­fer­ences among hu­man be­ings in their sources of pleas­ure, their sus­cept­ib­il­it­ies of pain, and the op­er­a­tion on them of dif­fer­ent phys­ical and moral agen­cies, that un­less there is a cor­res­pond­ing di­versity in their modes of life, they neither ob­tain their fair share of hap­pi­ness, nor grow up to the men­tal, moral, and aes­thetic stature of which their nature is cap­able. Why then should tol­er­ance, as far as the pub­lic sen­ti­ment is con­cerned, ex­tend only to tastes and modes of life which ex­tort ac­qui­es­cence by the mul­ti­tude of their ad­her­ents? Nowhere (ex­cept in some mon­astic in­sti­tu­tions) is di­versity of taste en­tirely un­re­cog­nised; a per­son may, without blame, either like or dis­like row­ing, or smoking, or mu­sic, or ath­letic ex­er­cises, 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 sub­ject of as much de­pre­ci­at­ory re­mark as if he or she had com­mit­ted some grave moral de­lin­quency. Per­sons re­quire to pos­sess a title, or some other badge of rank, or of the con­sid­er­a­tion of people of rank, to be able to in­dulge some­what in the lux­ury of do­ing as they like without det­ri­ment to their es­tim­a­tion. To in­dulge some­what, I re­peat: for who­ever al­low them­selves much of that in­dul­gence, in­cur the risk of some­thing worse than dis­par­aging speeches—they are in peril of a com­mis­sion de lun­at­ico, and of hav­ing their prop­erty taken from them and given to their re­la­tions.13

There is one char­ac­ter­istic of the present dir­ec­tion of pub­lic opin­ion, pe­cu­li­arly cal­cu­lated to make it in­tol­er­ant of any marked demon­stra­tion of in­di­vidu­al­ity. The gen­eral av­er­age of man­kind are not only mod­er­ate in in­tel­lect, but also mod­er­ate in in­clin­a­tions: they have no tastes or wishes strong enough to in­cline them to do any­thing un­usual, and they con­sequently do not un­der­stand those who have, and class all such with the wild and in­tem­per­ate whom they are ac­cus­tomed to look down upon. Now, in ad­di­tion to this fact which is gen­eral, we have only to sup­pose that a strong move­ment has set in to­wards the im­prove­ment of mor­als, and it is evid­ent what we have to ex­pect. In these days such a move­ment has set in; much has ac­tu­ally been ef­fected in the way of in­creased reg­u­lar­ity of con­duct, and dis­cour­age­ment of ex­cesses; and there is a phil­an­thropic spirit abroad, for the ex­er­cise of which there is no more in­vit­ing field than the moral and pruden­tial im­prove­ment of our fel­low-creatures. These tend­en­cies of the times cause the pub­lic to be more dis­posed than at most former peri­ods to pre­scribe gen­eral rules of con­duct, and en­deav­our to make every­one con­form to the ap­proved stand­ard. And that stand­ard, ex­press or ta­cit, is to de­sire noth­ing strongly. Its ideal of char­ac­ter is to be without any marked char­ac­ter; to maim by com­pres­sion, like a Chinese lady’s foot, every part of hu­man nature which stands out prom­in­ently, and tends to make the per­son markedly dis­sim­ilar in out­line to com­mon­place hu­man­ity.

As is usu­ally the case with ideals which ex­clude one-half of what is de­sir­able, the present stand­ard of ap­prob­a­tion 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 there­fore can be kept in out­ward con­form­ity to rule without any strength either of will or of reason. Already en­er­getic char­ac­ters on any large scale are be­com­ing merely tra­di­tional. There is now scarcely any out­let for en­ergy in this coun­try ex­cept busi­ness. The en­ergy ex­pen­ded in that may still be re­garded as con­sid­er­able. What little is left from that em­ploy­ment, is ex­pen­ded 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 only ap­pear cap­able of any­thing great by our habit of com­bin­ing; and with this our moral and re­li­gious phil­an­throp­ists are per­fectly con­ten­ted. But it was men of an­other stamp than this that 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 hindrance to hu­man ad­vance­ment, be­ing in un­ceas­ing ant­ag­on­ism to that dis­pos­i­tion to aim at some­thing bet­ter than cus­tom­ary, which is called, ac­cord­ing to cir­cum­stances, the spirit of liberty, or that of pro­gress or 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, in 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 by it there are as many pos­sible in­de­pend­ent centres of im­prove­ment as there are in­di­vidu­als. The pro­gress­ive prin­ciple, how­ever, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of im­prove­ment, is ant­ag­on­istic to the sway of Cus­tom, in­volving at least eman­cip­a­tion from that yoke; and the con­test between the two con­sti­tutes 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. This is the case over the whole East. Cus­tom is there, in all things, the fi­nal ap­peal; justice and right mean con­form­ity to Cus­tom; the ar­gu­ment of Cus­tom no one, un­less some tyr­ant in­tox­ic­ated with power, thinks of res­ist­ing. And we see the res­ult. Those na­tions must once have had ori­gin­al­ity; they did not start out of the ground pop­u­lous, lettered, and versed 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 when theirs had mag­ni­fi­cent palaces and gor­geous temples, but over whom Cus­tom ex­er­cised only a di­vided rule with liberty and pro­gress. A people, it ap­pears, may be pro­gress­ive for a cer­tain length of time, and then stop: when does it stop? When it ceases to pos­sess in­di­vidu­al­ity. If a sim­ilar change should be­fall the na­tions of Europe, it will not be in ex­actly the same shape: the des­pot­ism of Cus­tom with which these na­tions are threatened is not pre­cisely sta­tion­ar­i­ness. It pro­scribes sin­gu­lar­ity, but it does not pre­clude change, provided all change to­gether. We have dis­carded the fixed cos­tumes of our fore­fath­ers; every­one must still dress like other people, but the fash­ion may change once or twice a year. We thus 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 all the world at the same mo­ment, and be sim­ul­tan­eously thrown aside by all at an­other mo­ment. But we are pro­gress­ive as well as change­able: we con­tinu­ally make new in­ven­tions in mech­an­ical things, and keep them un­til they are again su­per­seded by bet­ter; we are eager for im­prove­ment in polit­ics, in edu­ca­tion, even in mor­als, though in this last our idea of im­prove­ment chiefly con­sists in per­suad­ing or for­cing other people to be as good as ourselves. It is not pro­gress that we ob­ject to; on the con­trary, we flat­ter ourselves that we are the most pro­gress­ive people who ever lived. It is in­di­vidu­al­ity that we war against: 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 which draws the at­ten­tion of either to the im­per­fec­tion of his own type, and the su­peri­or­ity of an­other, or the pos­sib­il­ity, by com­bin­ing the ad­vant­ages of both, of pro­du­cing some­thing bet­ter than either. We have a warn­ing ex­ample in Ch­ina—a na­tion of much tal­ent, and, in some re­spects, even wis­dom, ow­ing 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 ac­cord, un­der cer­tain lim­it­a­tions, the title of sages and philo­soph­ers. They are re­mark­able, too, in the ex­cel­lence of their ap­par­atus for im­press­ing, as far as pos­sible, the best wis­dom they pos­sess upon every mind in the com­munity, and se­cur­ing that those who have ap­pro­pri­ated most of it shall 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—have re­mained so for thou­sands of years; and if they are ever to be farther im­proved, it must be by for­eign­ers. They have suc­ceeded bey­ond all hope in what Eng­lish phil­an­throp­ists are so in­dus­tri­ously work­ing at—in 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; and un­less in­di­vidu­al­ity shall be able suc­cess­fully to as­sert it­self against this yoke, Europe, not­with­stand­ing its noble ante­cedents and its pro­fessed Chris­tian­ity, will tend to be­come an­other Ch­ina.

What is it that has hitherto pre­served Europe from this lot? What has made the European fam­ily of na­tions an im­prov­ing, in­stead of a sta­tion­ary por­tion of man­kind? Not any su­per­ior ex­cel­lence in them, which, when it ex­ists, ex­ists as the ef­fect, not as the cause; but their re­mark­able di­versity of char­ac­ter and cul­ture. In­di­vidu­als, classes, 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 in 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 per­man­ent suc­cess, and each has in time en­dured to re­ceive the good which the oth­ers have offered. Europe is, in my judg­ment, wholly in­debted to this plur­al­ity of paths for its pro­gress­ive and many-sided de­vel­op­ment. But it already be­gins to pos­sess this be­ne­fit in a con­sid­er­ably less de­gree. It is de­cidedly ad­van­cing to­wards the Chinese ideal of mak­ing all people alike. M. de Toc­queville, in his last im­port­ant work, re­marks how much more the French­men of the present day re­semble one an­other, than did those even of the last gen­er­a­tion. The same re­mark might be made of Eng­lish­men in a far greater de­gree. In a pas­sage already quoted from Wil­helm von Hum­boldt, he points out two things as ne­ces­sary con­di­tions of hu­man de­vel­op­ment, be­cause ne­ces­sary to render people un­like one an­other; namely, free­dom, and vari­ety of situ­ations. The second of these two con­di­tions is in this coun­try every day di­min­ish­ing. The cir­cum­stances which sur­round dif­fer­ent classes and in­di­vidu­als, and shape their char­ac­ters, are daily be­com­ing more as­sim­il­ated. Formerly, dif­fer­ent ranks, dif­fer­ent neigh­bour­hoods, dif­fer­ent trades and pro­fes­sions, lived in what might be called dif­fer­ent worlds; at present, to a great de­gree in the same. 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 dir­ec­ted to the same ob­jects, have the same rights and liber­ties, and the same means of as­sert­ing them. Great as are the dif­fer­ences of po­s­i­tion which re­main, they are noth­ing to those which have ceased. And the as­sim­il­a­tion is still pro­ceed­ing. All the polit­ical changes of the age pro­mote it, since they all tend to raise the low and to 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 changes of res­id­ence between one place and an­other. The in­crease of com­merce and man­u­fac­tures pro­motes it, by dif­fus­ing more widely the ad­vant­ages of easy cir­cum­stances, and open­ing all ob­jects of am­bi­tion, even the highest, to gen­eral com­pet­i­tion, whereby the de­sire of rising be­comes no longer the char­ac­ter of a par­tic­u­lar class, but of all classes. A more power­ful agency than even all these, in bring­ing about a gen­eral sim­il­ar­ity among man­kind, is the com­plete es­tab­lish­ment, in this and other free coun­tries, of the as­cend­ency of pub­lic opin­ion in the State. As the vari­ous so­cial em­in­ences which en­abled per­sons en­trenched on them to dis­reg­ard the opin­ion of the mul­ti­tude, gradu­ally be­come lev­elled; as the very idea of res­ist­ing the will of the pub­lic, when it is pos­it­ively known that they have a will, dis­ap­pears more and more from the minds of prac­tical politi­cians; there ceases to be any so­cial sup­port for non­con­form­ity—any sub­stant­ive power in so­ci­ety, which, it­self op­posed to the as­cend­ency of num­bers, is in­ter­ested in tak­ing un­der its pro­tec­tion opin­ions and tend­en­cies at vari­ance with those of the pub­lic.

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 stand 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 there should be dif­fer­ences, even though not for the bet­ter, even though, as it may ap­pear to them, some should be for the worse. If the claims of In­di­vidu­al­ity are ever to be as­ser­ted, the time is now, while much is still want­ing 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 till 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 speedily be­come un­able to con­ceive di­versity, when they have been for some time un­ac­cus­tomed to see it.

IV Of the Limits to the Authority of Society Over the Individual

What, then, is the right­ful limit to the sov­er­eignty of the in­di­vidual 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 re­ceive its proper share, if each has that which more par­tic­u­larly con­cerns it. To in­di­vidu­al­ity should be­long the part of life in which it is chiefly the in­di­vidual that is in­ter­ested; to so­ci­ety, the part which chiefly in­terests so­ci­ety.

Though so­ci­ety is not foun­ded on a con­tract, and though no good pur­pose is answered by in­vent­ing a con­tract in or­der to de­duce so­cial ob­lig­a­tions from it, every­one who re­ceives the pro­tec­tion of so­ci­ety owes a re­turn for the be­ne­fit, and the fact of liv­ing in so­ci­ety renders it in­dis­pens­able that each should be bound to ob­serve a cer­tain line of con­duct to­wards the rest. This con­duct con­sists, first, in not in­jur­ing the in­terests of one an­other; or rather cer­tain in­terests which, either by ex­press legal pro­vi­sion or by ta­cit un­der­stand­ing, ought to be con­sidered as rights; and secondly, in each per­son’s bear­ing his share (to be fixed on some equit­able prin­ciple) of the la­bours and sac­ri­fices in­curred for de­fend­ing the so­ci­ety or its mem­bers from in­jury and mo­lesta­tion. These con­di­tions so­ci­ety is jus­ti­fied in en­for­cing, at all costs to those who en­deav­our to with­hold ful­fil­ment. Nor is this all that so­ci­ety may do. The acts of an in­di­vidual may be hurt­ful to oth­ers, or want­ing in due con­sid­er­a­tion for their wel­fare, without go­ing the length of vi­ol­at­ing any of their con­sti­tuted 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 pre­ju­di­cially the in­terests of oth­ers, so­ci­ety has jur­is­dic­tion over it, and the ques­tion whether the gen­eral wel­fare will or will not be pro­moted by in­ter­fer­ing with it, be­comes open to dis­cus­sion. But there is no room for en­ter­tain­ing any such ques­tion when a per­son’s con­duct af­fects the in­terests of no per­sons be­sides him­self, or needs not af­fect them un­less they like (all the per­sons con­cerned be­ing of full age, and the or­din­ary amount of un­der­stand­ing). In all such cases there should be per­fect free­dom, legal and so­cial, to do the ac­tion and stand the con­sequences.

It would be a great mis­un­der­stand­ing of this doc­trine, to sup­pose that it is one of selfish in­dif­fer­ence, which pre­tends that hu­man be­ings have no busi­ness with each other’s con­duct in life, and that they should not con­cern them­selves about the well-do­ing or well-be­ing of one an­other, un­less their own in­terest is in­volved. In­stead of any di­minu­tion, there is need of a great in­crease of dis­in­ter­ested ex­er­tion to pro­mote the good of oth­ers. But dis­in­ter­ested be­ne­vol­ence can find other in­stru­ments to per­suade people to their good, than whips and scourges, either of the lit­eral or the meta­phor­ical sort. I am the last per­son to un­der­value the self-re­gard­ing vir­tues; they are only second in im­port­ance, if even second, to the so­cial. 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 the former only that, when the period of edu­ca­tion is past, the self-re­gard­ing vir­tues should be in­cul­cated. Hu­man be­ings owe to each other help to dis­tin­guish the bet­ter from the worse, and en­cour­age­ment to choose the former and avoid the lat­ter. They should be forever stim­u­lat­ing each other to in­creased ex­er­cise of their higher fac­ulties, and in­creased dir­ec­tion of their feel­ings and aims to­wards wise in­stead of fool­ish, el­ev­at­ing in­stead of de­grad­ing, ob­jects and con­tem­pla­tions. But neither one per­son, nor any num­ber of per­sons, is war­ran­ted in say­ing to an­other hu­man creature of ripe 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 in­ter­ested in his own well-be­ing: the in­terest which any other per­son, ex­cept in cases of strong per­sonal at­tach­ment, can have in it, is tri­fling, com­pared with that which he him­self has; the in­terest which so­ci­ety has in him in­di­vidu­ally (ex­cept as to his con­duct to 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 sur­pass­ing those that can be pos­sessed by any­one else. The in­ter­fer­ence of so­ci­ety to over­rule his judg­ment and pur­poses in what only re­gards him­self, must be groun­ded on gen­eral pre­sump­tions; which may be al­to­gether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be mis­ap­plied to in­di­vidual cases, by per­sons no bet­ter ac­quain­ted with the cir­cum­stances of such cases than those are who look at them merely from without. In this de­part­ment, there­fore, of hu­man af­fairs, 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, in or­der that people may know what they have to ex­pect; but in each per­son’s own con­cerns, his in­di­vidual spon­taneity is en­titled to free ex­er­cise. Con­sid­er­a­tions to aid his judg­ment, ex­horta­tions to strengthen his will, may be offered to him, even ob­truded on him, by oth­ers; but he him­self is the fi­nal judge. All er­rors which he is likely to com­mit against ad­vice and warn­ing, are far out­weighed by the evil of al­low­ing oth­ers to con­strain him to what they deem his good.

I do not mean that the feel­ings with which a per­son is re­garded by oth­ers, ought not to be in any way af­fected by his self-re­gard­ing qual­it­ies or de­fi­cien­cies. This is neither pos­sible nor de­sir­able. If he is em­in­ent in any of the qual­it­ies which con­duce to his own good, he is, so far, a proper ob­ject of ad­mir­a­tion. He is so much the nearer to the ideal per­fec­tion of hu­man nature. If he is grossly de­fi­cient in those qual­it­ies, a sen­ti­ment 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 de­prava­tion of taste, which, though it can­not jus­tify do­ing harm to the per­son who mani­fests it, renders him ne­ces­sar­ily and prop­erly a sub­ject of dis­taste, or, in ex­treme cases, even of con­tempt: a per­son could not have the op­pos­ite qual­it­ies in due strength without en­ter­tain­ing these feel­ings. Though do­ing no wrong to any­one, a per­son may so act as to com­pel us to judge him, and feel to him, as a fool, or as a be­ing of an in­ferior or­der: and since this judg­ment and feel­ing are a fact which he would prefer to avoid, it is do­ing him a ser­vice to warn him of it be­fore­hand, as of any other dis­agree­able con­sequence to which he ex­poses him­self. It would be well, in­deed, if this good of­fice were much more freely rendered than the com­mon no­tions of po­lite­ness at present per­mit, and if one per­son could hon­estly point out to an­other that he thinks him in fault, without be­ing con­sidered un­man­nerly or pre­sum­ing. We have a right, also, in vari­ous ways, to act upon our un­fa­vour­able opin­ion of any­one, not to the op­pres­sion of his in­di­vidu­al­ity, but in the ex­er­cise of ours. We are not bound, for ex­ample, to seek his so­ci­ety; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoid­ance), for we have a right to choose the so­ci­ety most ac­cept­able to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to cau­tion oth­ers against him, if we think his ex­ample or con­ver­sa­tion likely to have a per­ni­cious ef­fect on those with whom he as­so­ci­ates. We may give oth­ers a pref­er­ence over him in op­tional good of­fices, ex­cept those which tend to his im­prove­ment. In these vari­ous modes a per­son may suf­fer very severe pen­al­ties at the hands of oth­ers, for faults which dir­ectly con­cern only him­self; but he suf­fers these pen­al­ties only in so far as they are the nat­ural, and, as it were, the spon­tan­eous con­sequences of the faults them­selves, not be­cause they are pur­posely 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 hurt­ful in­dul­gences—who pur­sues an­imal pleas­ures at the ex­pense of those of feel­ing and in­tel­lect—must ex­pect to be lowered in the opin­ion of oth­ers, and to have a less share of their fa­vour­able sen­ti­ments; but of this he has no right to com­plain, un­less he has mer­ited their fa­vour by spe­cial ex­cel­lence in his so­cial re­la­tions, and has thus es­tab­lished a title to their good of­fices, which is not af­fected by his de­mer­its to­wards him­self.

What I con­tend for is, that the in­con­veni­ences which are strictly in­sep­ar­able from the un­fa­vour­able judg­ment of oth­ers, are the only ones to which a per­son should ever be sub­jec­ted for that por­tion of his con­duct and char­ac­ter which con­cerns his own good, but which does not af­fect the in­terests of oth­ers in their re­la­tions with him. Acts in­jur­i­ous to oth­ers re­quire a totally dif­fer­ent treat­ment. En­croach­ment on their rights; in­flic­tion on them of any loss or dam­age not jus­ti­fied by his own rights; false­hood or du­pli­city in deal­ing with them; un­fair or un­gen­er­ous use of ad­vant­ages over them; even selfish ab­stin­ence from de­fend­ing them against in­jury—these are fit ob­jects of moral rep­rob­a­tion, and, in grave cases, of moral re­tri­bu­tion and pun­ish­ment. And not only these acts, but the dis­pos­i­tions which lead to them, are prop­erly im­moral, and fit sub­jects of dis­ap­prob­a­tion which may rise to ab­hor­rence. Cruelty of dis­pos­i­tion; malice and ill-nature; that most an­ti­so­cial and odi­ous of all pas­sions, envy; dis­sim­u­la­tion and in­sin­cer­ity; iras­cib­il­ity on in­suf­fi­cient cause, and re­sent­ment dis­pro­por­tioned to the pro­voca­tion; the love of dom­in­eer­ing over oth­ers; the de­sire to en­gross more than one’s share of ad­vant­ages (the πλεονεξἱα of the Greeks); the pride which de­rives grat­i­fic­a­tion from the abase­ment of oth­ers; the egot­ism which thinks self and its con­cerns more im­port­ant than everything else, and de­cides all doubt­ful ques­tions in its own fa­vour;—these are moral vices, and con­sti­tute a bad and odi­ous moral char­ac­ter: un­like the self-re­gard­ing faults pre­vi­ously men­tioned, which are not prop­erly im­mor­al­it­ies, and to whatever pitch they may be car­ried, do not con­sti­tute wicked­ness. They may be proofs of any amount of folly, or want of per­sonal dig­nity and self-re­spect; but they are only a sub­ject of moral rep­rob­a­tion when they in­volve a breach of duty to oth­ers, for whose sake the in­di­vidual is bound to have care for him­self. What are called du­ties to ourselves are not so­cially ob­lig­at­ory, un­less cir­cum­stances render 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 for none of these is any­one ac­count­able to his fel­low-creatures, be­cause for none of them is it for the good of man­kind that he be held ac­count­able to them.

The dis­tinc­tion between the loss of con­sid­er­a­tion which a per­son may rightly in­cur by de­fect of prudence or of per­sonal dig­nity, and the rep­rob­a­tion which is due to him for an of­fence against the rights of oth­ers, is not a merely nom­inal dis­tinc­tion. It makes a vast dif­fer­ence both in our feel­ings and in our con­duct to­wards him, whether he dis­pleases us in things in which we think we have a right to con­trol him, or in things in which we know that we have not. If he dis­pleases us, we may ex­press our dis­taste, and we may stand aloof from a per­son as well 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 mis­man­age­ment, we shall not, for that reason, de­sire to spoil it still fur­ther: in­stead of wish­ing to pun­ish him, we shall rather en­deav­our to al­le­vi­ate his pun­ish­ment, by show­ing him how he may avoid or cure the evils his con­duct tends to bring upon him. He may be to us an ob­ject of pity, per­haps of dis­like, but not of an­ger or re­sent­ment; we shall not treat him like an en­emy of so­ci­ety: the worst we shall think ourselves jus­ti­fied in do­ing is leav­ing him to him­self, if we do not in­ter­fere be­ne­vol­ently by show­ing in­terest or con­cern for him. It is far oth­er­wise if he has in­fringed the rules ne­ces­sary for the pro­tec­tion of his fel­low-creatures, in­di­vidu­ally or col­lect­ively. The evil con­sequences of his acts do not then fall 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 be suf­fi­ciently severe. 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 ex­ecute our own sen­tence: in the other case, it is not our part to in­flict any suf­fer­ing on him, ex­cept what may in­cid­ent­ally fol­low from our us­ing the same liberty in the reg­u­la­tion of our own af­fairs, which we al­low to him in his.

The dis­tinc­tion here poin­ted out between the part of a per­son’s life which con­cerns only him­self, and that which con­cerns oth­ers, many per­sons will re­fuse to ad­mit. How (it may be asked) can any part of the con­duct of a mem­ber of so­ci­ety be a mat­ter of in­dif­fer­ence to the other mem­bers? No per­son is an en­tirely isol­ated be­ing; it is im­possible for a per­son to do any­thing ser­i­ously or per­man­ently hurt­ful to him­self, without mis­chief reach­ing at least to his near con­nec­tions, and of­ten far bey­ond them. If he in­jures his prop­erty, he does harm to those who dir­ectly or in­dir­ectly de­rived sup­port from it, and usu­ally di­min­ishes, by a greater or less amount, the gen­eral re­sources of the com­munity. If he de­teri­or­ates his bod­ily or men­tal fac­ulties, he not only brings evil upon all who de­pended on him for any por­tion of their hap­pi­ness, but dis­qual­i­fies him­self for ren­der­ing the ser­vices which he owes to his fel­low-creatures gen­er­ally; per­haps be­comes a bur­den on their af­fec­tion or be­ne­vol­ence; and if such con­duct were very fre­quent, hardly any of­fence that is com­mit­ted would de­tract more from the gen­eral sum of good. Fin­ally, if by his vices or fol­lies a per­son does no dir­ect harm to oth­ers, he is nev­er­the­less (it may be said) in­jur­i­ous by his ex­ample; and ought to be com­pelled to con­trol him­self, for the sake of those whom the sight or 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 those who are mani­festly un­fit for it? If pro­tec­tion against them­selves is con­fessedly due to chil­dren and per­sons un­der age, is not so­ci­ety equally bound to af­ford it to per­sons of ma­ture years who are equally in­cap­able of self-gov­ern­ment? If gambling, or drunk­en­ness, or in­con­tin­ence, or idle­ness, or un­clean­li­ness, are as in­jur­i­ous to hap­pi­ness, and as great a hindrance to im­prove­ment, as many or most of the acts pro­hib­ited by law, why (it may be asked) should not law, so far as is con­sist­ent with prac­tic­ab­il­ity and so­cial con­veni­ence, en­deav­our to repress these also? And as a sup­ple­ment to the un­avoid­able im­per­fec­tions of law, ought not opin­ion at least to or­gan­ise a power­ful po­lice against these vices, and visit ri­gidly with so­cial pen­al­ties those who are known to prac­tise them? There is no ques­tion here (it may be said) about re­strict­ing in­di­vidu­al­ity, or im­ped­ing the trial of new and ori­ginal ex­per­i­ments in liv­ing. The only things it is sought to pre­vent are things which have been tried and con­demned from the be­gin­ning of the world un­til now; things which ex­per­i­ence has shown not to be use­ful or suit­able to any per­son’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 it is merely de­sired to pre­vent gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion from fall­ing over the same pre­cip­ice which has been fatal to their pre­de­cessors.

I fully ad­mit that the mis­chief which a per­son does to him­self, may ser­i­ously af­fect, both through their sym­path­ies and their in­terests, those nearly con­nec­ted with him, and in a minor de­gree, so­ci­ety at large. When, by con­duct of this sort, a per­son is led to vi­ol­ate a dis­tinct and as­signable ob­lig­a­tion to any other per­son or per­sons, the case is taken out of the self-re­gard­ing class, and be­comes amen­able to moral dis­ap­prob­a­tion in the proper sense of the term. If, for ex­ample, a man, through in­tem­per­ance or ex­tra­vag­ance, be­comes un­able to pay his debts, or, hav­ing un­der­taken the moral re­spons­ib­il­ity of a fam­ily, be­comes from the same cause in­cap­able of sup­port­ing or edu­cat­ing them, he is de­servedly rep­rob­ated, and might be justly pun­ished; but it is for the breach of duty to his fam­ily or cred­it­ors, not for the ex­tra­vag­ance. If the re­sources which ought to have been de­voted to them, had been di­ver­ted from them for the most prudent in­vest­ment, the moral culp­ab­il­ity 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 equally have been hanged. Again, in the fre­quent case of a man who causes grief to his fam­ily by ad­dic­tion to bad habits, he de­serves re­proach for his un­kind­ness or in­grat­it­ude; but so he may for cul­tiv­at­ing habits not in them­selves vi­cious, if they are pain­ful to those with whom he passes his life, or who from per­sonal ties are de­pend­ent on him for their com­fort. Who­ever fails in the con­sid­er­a­tion gen­er­ally due to the in­terests and feel­ings of oth­ers, not be­ing com­pelled by some more im­per­at­ive duty, or jus­ti­fied by al­low­able self-pref­er­ence, is a sub­ject of moral dis­ap­prob­a­tion for that fail­ure, but not for the cause of it, nor for the er­rors, merely per­sonal to him­self, which may have re­motely led to it. In like man­ner, when a per­son dis­ables him­self, by con­duct purely self-re­gard­ing, from the per­form­ance of some def­in­ite duty in­cum­bent on him to the pub­lic, he is guilty of a so­cial of­fence. No per­son ought to be pun­ished simply for be­ing drunk; but a sol­dier or a po­lice­man should be pun­ished for be­ing drunk on duty. Whenever, in short, 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 with re­gard to the merely con­tin­gent, or, as it may be called, con­struct­ive in­jury which a per­son causes to so­ci­ety, by con­duct which neither vi­ol­ates any spe­cific duty to the pub­lic, nor oc­ca­sions per­cept­ible hurt to any as­signable in­di­vidual ex­cept him­self; the in­con­veni­ence is one which so­ci­ety can af­ford to bear, for the sake of the greater good of hu­man free­dom. If grown per­sons are to be pun­ished for not tak­ing proper care of them­selves, I would rather it were for their own sake, than un­der pre­tence of pre­vent­ing them from im­pair­ing their ca­pa­city of ren­der­ing to so­ci­ety be­ne­fits which so­ci­ety does not pre­tend it has a right to ex­act. But I can­not con­sent to ar­gue the point as if so­ci­ety had no means of bring­ing its weaker mem­bers up to its or­din­ary stand­ard of ra­tional con­duct, ex­cept wait­ing till they do some­thing ir­ra­tional, and then pun­ish­ing them, leg­ally or mor­ally, for it. So­ci­ety has had ab­so­lute power over them dur­ing all the early por­tion of their ex­ist­ence: it has had the whole period of child­hood and non­age in which to try whether it could make them cap­able of ra­tional con­duct in life. The ex­ist­ing gen­er­a­tion is mas­ter both of the train­ing and the en­tire cir­cum­stances of the gen­er­a­tion to come; it can­not in­deed make them per­fectly wise and good, be­cause it is it­self so lam­ent­ably de­fi­cient in good­ness and wis­dom; and its best ef­forts are not al­ways, in in­di­vidual cases, its most suc­cess­ful ones; but it is per­fectly well able to make the rising gen­er­a­tion, as a whole, as good as, and a little bet­ter than, it­self. If so­ci­ety lets any con­sid­er­able num­ber of its mem­bers grow up mere chil­dren, in­cap­able of be­ing ac­ted on 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 as­cend­ency which the au­thor­ity of a re­ceived opin­ion al­ways ex­er­cises over the minds who are least fit­ted to judge for them­selves; and aided by the nat­ural pen­al­ties which can­not be pre­ven­ted from fall­ing on those who in­cur the dis­taste or the con­tempt of those who know them; let not so­ci­ety pre­tend that it needs, be­sides all this, the power to is­sue com­mands and en­force obed­i­ence in the per­sonal con­cerns of in­di­vidu­als, in which, on all prin­ciples of justice and policy, the de­cision ought to rest with those who are to abide the con­sequences. Nor is there any­thing which tends more to dis­credit and frus­trate the bet­ter means of in­flu­en­cing con­duct, than a re­sort to the worse. If there be among those whom it is at­temp­ted to co­erce into prudence or tem­per­ance, any of the ma­ter­ial of which vig­or­ous and in­de­pend­ent char­ac­ters are made, they will in­fal­libly rebel against the yoke. No such per­son will ever feel that oth­ers have a right to con­trol him in his con­cerns, such as they have to pre­vent him from in­jur­ing them in theirs; and it eas­ily comes to be con­sidered a mark of spirit and cour­age to fly in the face of such usurped au­thor­ity, and do with os­ten­ta­tion the ex­act op­pos­ite of what it en­joins; as in the fash­ion of gross­ness which suc­ceeded, in the time of Charles II, to the fan­at­ical moral in­tol­er­ance of the Pur­it­ans. With re­spect to what is said of the ne­ces­sity of pro­tect­ing so­ci­ety from the bad ex­ample set to oth­ers by the vi­cious or the self-in­dul­gent; it is true that bad ex­ample may have a per­ni­cious ef­fect, es­pe­cially the ex­ample of do­ing wrong to oth­ers with im­pun­ity to the wrong­doer. But we are now speak­ing of con­duct which, while it does no wrong to oth­ers, is sup­posed to do great harm to the agent him­self: and I do not see how those who be­lieve this, can think oth­er­wise than that the ex­ample, on the whole, must be more salut­ary than hurt­ful, since, if it dis­plays the mis­con­duct, it dis­plays also the pain­ful or de­grad­ing con­sequences which, if the con­duct is justly cen­sured, must be sup­posed to be in all or most cases at­tend­ant on it.

But the strongest of all the ar­gu­ments against the in­ter­fer­ence of the pub­lic 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 still of­tener right; be­cause on such ques­tions they are only re­quired to judge of their own in­terests; of the man­ner in which some mode of con­duct, if al­lowed to be prac­tised, would af­fect them­selves. But the opin­ion of a sim­ilar ma­jor­ity, im­posed as a law on the minor­ity, on ques­tions of self-re­gard­ing con­duct, is quite as likely to be wrong as right; for in these cases pub­lic opin­ion means, at the best, some people’s opin­ion of what is good or bad for other people; while very of­ten it does not even mean that; the pub­lic, with the most per­fect in­dif­fer­ence, passing over the pleas­ure or con­veni­ence of those whose con­duct they cen­sure, and con­sid­er­ing only their own pref­er­ence. There are many who con­sider as an in­jury to them­selves any con­duct which they have a dis­taste for, and re­sent it as an out­rage to their feel­ings; as a re­li­gious bigot, when charged with dis­reg­ard­ing the re­li­gious feel­ings of oth­ers, has been known to re­tort that they dis­reg­ard his feel­ings, by per­sist­ing in their ab­om­in­able wor­ship or creed. But there is no par­ity between the feel­ing of a per­son for his own opin­ion, and the feel­ing of an­other who is of­fen­ded at his hold­ing it; no more than between the de­sire of a thief to take a purse, and the de­sire of the right owner to keep it. And a per­son’s taste is as much his own pe­cu­liar con­cern as his opin­ion or his purse. It is easy for any­one to ima­gine an ideal pub­lic, which leaves the free­dom and choice of in­di­vidu­als in all un­cer­tain mat­ters un­dis­turbed, and only re­quires them to ab­stain from modes of con­duct which uni­ver­sal ex­per­i­ence has con­demned. But where has there been seen a pub­lic which 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. These teach that things are right be­cause they are right; be­cause we feel them to be so. They tell us to search in our own minds and hearts for laws of con­duct bind­ing on ourselves and on all oth­ers. 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, ob­lig­at­ory on all the world?

The evil here poin­ted out is not one which ex­ists only in the­ory; and it may per­haps be ex­pec­ted that I should spe­cify 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 par­en­thet­ic­ally, and by way of il­lus­tra­tion. Yet ex­amples are ne­ces­sary, to show that the prin­ciple I main­tain is of ser­i­ous and prac­tical mo­ment, and that I am not en­deav­our­ing to erect a bar­rier against ima­gin­ary evils. And it is not dif­fi­cult to show, by abund­ant in­stances, that to ex­tend 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.

As a first in­stance, con­sider the an­ti­path­ies which men cher­ish on no bet­ter grounds than that per­sons whose re­li­gious opin­ions are dif­fer­ent from theirs, do not prac­tise their re­li­gious ob­serv­ances, es­pe­cially their re­li­gious ab­stin­ences. To cite a rather trivial ex­ample, noth­ing in the creed or prac­tice of Chris­ti­ans does more to en­venom the hatred of Mahome­dans against them, than the fact of their eat­ing pork. There are few acts which Chris­ti­ans and Europeans re­gard with more un­af­fected dis­gust, than Mus­sul­mans re­gard this par­tic­u­lar mode of sat­is­fy­ing hun­ger. It is, in the first place, an of­fence against their re­li­gion; but this cir­cum­stance by no means ex­plains either the de­gree or the kind of their re­pug­nance; for wine also is for­bid­den by their re­li­gion, and to par­take of it is by all Mus­sul­mans ac­coun­ted wrong, but not dis­gust­ing. Their aver­sion to the flesh of the “un­clean beast” is, on the con­trary, of that pe­cu­liar char­ac­ter, re­sem­bling an in­stinct­ive an­ti­pathy, which the idea of un­clean­ness, when once it thor­oughly sinks into the feel­ings, seems al­ways to ex­cite even in those whose per­sonal habits are any­thing but scru­pu­lously cleanly, and of which the sen­ti­ment of re­li­gious im­pur­ity, so in­tense in the Hin­dus, is a re­mark­able ex­ample. Sup­pose now that in a people, of whom the ma­jor­ity were Mus­sul­mans, that ma­jor­ity should in­sist upon not per­mit­ting pork to be eaten within the lim­its of the coun­try. This would be noth­ing new in Mahomedan coun­tries.14 Would it be a le­git­im­ate ex­er­cise of the moral au­thor­ity of pub­lic opin­ion? and if not, why not? The prac­tice is really re­volt­ing to such a pub­lic. They also sin­cerely think that it is for­bid­den and ab­horred by the Deity. Neither could the pro­hib­i­tion be cen­sured as re­li­gious per­se­cu­tion. It might be re­li­gious in its 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 with the per­sonal tastes and self-re­gard­ing con­cerns of in­di­vidu­als the pub­lic has no busi­ness to in­ter­fere.

To come some­what nearer home: the ma­jor­ity of Span­iards con­sider it a gross im­pi­ety, of­fens­ive in the highest de­gree to the Su­preme Be­ing, to wor­ship him in any other man­ner than the Ro­man Cath­olic; and no other pub­lic wor­ship is law­ful on Span­ish soil. The people of all South­ern Europe look upon a mar­ried clergy as not only ir­re­li­gious, but un­chaste, in­de­cent, gross, 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 which do not con­cern the in­terests of oth­ers, on what prin­ciple is it pos­sible con­sist­ently to ex­clude these cases? or who can blame people for de­sir­ing to sup­press what they re­gard as a scan­dal in the sight of God and man? No stronger case can be shown for pro­hib­it­ing any­thing which is re­garded as a per­sonal im­mor­al­ity, than is made out 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 to 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 of which we should re­sent as a gross in­justice the ap­plic­a­tion to ourselves.

The pre­ced­ing in­stances may be ob­jec­ted to, al­though un­reas­on­ably, as drawn from con­tin­gen­cies im­possible among us: opin­ion, in this coun­try, not be­ing likely to en­force ab­stin­ence from meats, or to in­ter­fere with people for wor­ship­ping, and for either mar­ry­ing or not mar­ry­ing, ac­cord­ing to their creed or in­clin­a­tion. The next ex­ample, how­ever, shall be taken from an in­ter­fer­ence with liberty which we have by no means passed all danger of. Wherever the Pur­it­ans have been suf­fi­ciently power­ful, as in New Eng­land, and in Great Bri­tain at the time of the Com­mon­wealth, they have en­deav­oured, with con­sid­er­able suc­cess, to put down all pub­lic, and nearly all private, amuse­ments: es­pe­cially mu­sic, dan­cing, pub­lic games, or other as­semblages for pur­poses of di­ver­sion, and the theatre. There are still in this coun­try large bod­ies of per­sons by whose no­tions of mor­al­ity and re­li­gion these re­cre­ations are con­demned; and those per­sons be­long­ing chiefly to the middle class, who are the as­cend­ant power in the present so­cial and polit­ical con­di­tion of the king­dom, it is by no means im­possible that per­sons of these sen­ti­ments may at some time or other com­mand a ma­jor­ity in Parlia­ment. How will the re­main­ing por­tion of the com­munity like to have the amuse­ments that shall be per­mit­ted to them reg­u­lated by the re­li­gious and moral sen­ti­ments of the stricter Calvin­ists and Meth­od­ists? Would they not, with con­sid­er­able per­emp­tor­i­ness, de­sire these in­trus­ively pi­ous mem­bers of so­ci­ety to mind their own busi­ness? This is pre­cisely what should be said to every gov­ern­ment and every pub­lic, who have the pre­ten­sion that no per­son shall en­joy any pleas­ure which they think wrong. But if the prin­ciple of the pre­ten­sion be ad­mit­ted, no one can reas­on­ably ob­ject to its be­ing ac­ted on in the sense of the ma­jor­ity, or other pre­pon­der­at­ing power in the coun­try; and all per­sons must be ready to con­form to the idea of a Chris­tian com­mon­wealth, as un­der­stood by the early set­tlers in New Eng­land, if a re­li­gious pro­fes­sion sim­ilar to theirs should ever suc­ceed in re­gain­ing its lost ground, as re­li­gions sup­posed to be de­clin­ing have so of­ten been known to do.

To ima­gine an­other con­tin­gency, per­haps more likely to be real­ised than the one last men­tioned. There is con­fessedly a strong tend­ency in the mod­ern world to­wards a demo­cratic con­sti­tu­tion of so­ci­ety, ac­com­pan­ied or not by pop­u­lar polit­ical in­sti­tu­tions. It is af­firmed 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, to whom any ap­pear­ance of a more showy or costly style of liv­ing than they can hope to rival is dis­agree­able, op­er­ates as a tol­er­ably ef­fec­tual sump­tu­ary law, and that in many parts of the Union it is really dif­fi­cult for a per­son pos­sess­ing a very large in­come, to find any mode of spend­ing it, which will not in­cur pop­u­lar dis­ap­prob­a­tion. Though such state­ments as these are doubt­less much ex­ag­ger­ated as a rep­res­ent­a­tion of ex­ist­ing facts, the state of things they de­scribe is not only a con­ceiv­able and pos­sible, but a prob­able res­ult of demo­cratic feel­ing, com­bined with the no­tion that the pub­lic has a right to a veto on the man­ner in which in­di­vidu­als shall spend their in­comes. We have only fur­ther to sup­pose a con­sid­er­able dif­fu­sion of So­cial­ist opin­ions, and it may be­come in­fam­ous in the eyes of the ma­jor­ity to pos­sess more prop­erty than some very small amount, or 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 amen­able to the opin­ion chiefly of that class, namely, its own mem­bers. It is known that the bad work­men who form the ma­jor­ity of the op­er­at­ives in many branches of in­dustry, are de­cidedly of opin­ion that bad work­men ought to re­ceive the same wages as good, and that no one ought to be al­lowed, through piece­work or oth­er­wise, to earn by su­per­ior skill or in­dustry more than oth­ers can without it. And they em­ploy a moral po­lice, which oc­ca­sion­ally be­comes a phys­ical one, to de­ter skil­ful work­men from re­ceiv­ing, and em­ploy­ers from giv­ing, a lar­ger re­mu­ner­a­tion for a more use­ful ser­vice. If the pub­lic have any jur­is­dic­tion over private con­cerns, I can­not see that these people are in fault, or that any in­di­vidual’s par­tic­u­lar pub­lic can be blamed for as­sert­ing the same au­thor­ity over his in­di­vidual con­duct, which the gen­eral pub­lic as­serts over people in gen­eral.

But, without dwell­ing upon sup­posi­ti­tious cases, there are, in our own day, gross usurp­a­tions upon the liberty of private life ac­tu­ally prac­tised, and still greater ones threatened with some ex­pect­a­tion of suc­cess, and opin­ions pro­posed which as­sert an un­lim­ited right in the pub­lic not only to pro­hibit by law everything which it thinks wrong, but in or­der to get at what it thinks wrong, to pro­hibit any num­ber of things which 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 in­ter­dicted by law from mak­ing any use whatever of fer­men­ted drinks, ex­cept for med­ical pur­poses: for pro­hib­i­tion of their sale is in fact, as it is in­ten­ded to be, pro­hib­i­tion of their use. And though the im­prac­tic­ab­il­ity of ex­ecut­ing the law has caused its re­peal in sev­eral of the States which had ad­op­ted it, in­clud­ing the one from which it de­rives its name, an at­tempt has not­with­stand­ing been com­menced, and is pro­sec­uted with con­sid­er­able zeal by many of the pro­fessed phil­an­throp­ists, to agit­ate for a sim­ilar law in this coun­try. The as­so­ci­ation, or “Al­liance” as it terms it­self, which has been 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 such qual­it­ies as are mani­fes­ted in some of his pub­lic ap­pear­ances, un­hap­pily are among those who fig­ure in polit­ical life. The or­gan 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” which di­vides such prin­ciples from those of the 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, viz. acts and habits which are not so­cial, but in­di­vidual; al­though it is to this class, surely, 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 pur­posely make it im­possible for him to ob­tain it. 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.” A the­ory of “so­cial rights,” the like of which prob­ably never be­fore found its way into dis­tinct lan­guage—be­ing noth­ing short of 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 who­so­ever fails thereof in the smal­lest par­tic­u­lar, vi­ol­ates my so­cial right, and en­titles me to de­mand from the le­gis­lature the re­moval of the griev­ance. So mon­strous a prin­ciple is far more dan­ger­ous than any single in­ter­fer­ence with liberty; there is no vi­ol­a­tion of liberty which it would not jus­tify; it ac­know­ledges no right to any free­dom whatever, ex­cept per­haps to that of hold­ing opin­ions in secret, without ever dis­clos­ing them: for the mo­ment an opin­ion which I con­sider nox­ious, passes any­one’s lips, it in­vades all the “so­cial rights” at­trib­uted to me by the Al­liance. The doc­trine ascribes to 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 simply threatened, but long since car­ried into tri­umphant ef­fect, is Sabbatarian le­gis­la­tion. Without doubt, ab­stin­ence on one day in the week, so far as the ex­i­gen­cies of life per­mit, from the usual daily oc­cu­pa­tion, though in no re­spect re­li­giously bind­ing on any ex­cept Jews, is a highly be­ne­fi­cial cus­tom. And inas­much as this cus­tom can­not be ob­served without a gen­eral con­sent to that ef­fect among the in­dus­tri­ous classes, there­fore, in so far as some per­sons by work­ing may im­pose the same ne­ces­sity on oth­ers, it may be al­low­able and right that the law should guar­an­tee to each, the ob­serv­ance by oth­ers of the cus­tom, by sus­pend­ing the greater op­er­a­tions of in­dustry on a par­tic­u­lar day. But this jus­ti­fic­a­tion, groun­ded on the dir­ect in­terest which oth­ers have in each in­di­vidual’s ob­serv­ance of the prac­tice, does not ap­ply to the self-chosen oc­cu­pa­tions in which a per­son may think fit to em­ploy his leis­ure; 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 resigned. The op­er­at­ives are per­fectly right in think­ing that if all 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 for the en­joy­ment of oth­ers must still work, ob­tain a pro­por­tional in­crease of earn­ings; and they are not ob­liged to fol­low those oc­cu­pa­tions, if they prefer leis­ure to emolu­ment. If a fur­ther rem­edy is sought, it might be found in the es­tab­lish­ment by cus­tom of a hol­i­day on some other day of the week for those par­tic­u­lar classes of per­sons. The only ground, there­fore, on which re­stric­tions on Sunday amuse­ments can be de­fen­ded, must be that they are re­li­giously wrong; a motive of le­gis­la­tion which never can be too earn­estly pro­tested against. “Deorum in­juriæ Diis curæ.” 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 to our fel­low-creatures. The no­tion that it is one man’s duty that an­other should be re­li­gious, was the found­a­tion of all the re­li­gious per­se­cu­tions ever per­pet­rated, and if ad­mit­ted, would fully jus­tify them. Though the feel­ing which breaks out in the re­peated at­tempts to stop rail­way trav­el­ling on Sunday, in the res­ist­ance to the open­ing of mu­seums, and the like, has not the cruelty of the old per­se­cutors, the state of mind in­dic­ated by it is fun­da­ment­ally the same. It is a de­term­in­a­tion not to tol­er­ate oth­ers in do­ing what is per­mit­ted by their re­li­gion, be­cause it is not per­mit­ted by the per­se­cutor’s re­li­gion. It is a be­lief that God not only ab­om­in­ates the act of the mis­be­liever, but will not hold us guilt­less if we leave him un­mo­les­ted.

I can­not re­frain from adding to these ex­amples of the little ac­count com­monly made of hu­man liberty, the lan­guage of down­right per­se­cu­tion which breaks out from the press of this coun­try, whenever it feels called on to no­tice the re­mark­able phe­nomenon of Mor­mon­ism. Much might be said on 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 here con­cerns us is, that this re­li­gion, like other and bet­ter re­li­gions, has its mar­tyrs; that its prophet and founder was, for his teach­ing, put to death by a mob; that oth­ers of its ad­her­ents lost their lives by the same law­less vi­ol­ence; that they were for­cibly ex­pelled, in a body, from the coun­try in which they first grew up; while, now that they have been chased into a sol­it­ary re­cess in the midst 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 the opin­ions of other people. The art­icle of the Mor­mon­ite doc­trine which is the chief pro­voc­at­ive to the an­ti­pathy which thus breaks through the or­din­ary re­straints of re­li­gious tol­er­ance, is its sanc­tion of poly­gamy; which, though per­mit­ted to Mahome­dans, and Hin­dus, and Chinese, seems to ex­cite un­quench­able an­im­os­ity when prac­tised by per­sons who speak Eng­lish, and pro­fess to be a kind of Chris­ti­ans. No one has a deeper dis­ap­prob­a­tion than I have of this Mor­mon in­sti­tu­tion; 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 a mere riv­et­ing of the chains of one half of the com­munity, and an eman­cip­a­tion of the other from re­ci­pro­city of ob­lig­a­tion to­wards them. Still, it must be re­membered that this re­la­tion is as much vol­un­tary on the part of the wo­men con­cerned in it, and who may be deemed the suf­fer­ers by it, as is the case with any other form of the mar­riage in­sti­tu­tion; and how­ever sur­pris­ing this fact may ap­pear, it has its ex­plan­a­tion in the com­mon ideas and cus­toms of the world, which teach­ing wo­men to think mar­riage 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 re­lease any por­tion of their in­hab­it­ants from their own laws on the score of Mor­mon­ite opin­ions. But when the dis­sen­tients have con­ceded to the hos­tile sen­ti­ments of oth­ers, far more than could justly be de­man­ded; when they have left the coun­tries to which their doc­trines were un­ac­cept­able, and es­tab­lished them­selves in a re­mote corner of the Earth, which they have been the first to render hab­it­able to hu­man be­ings; it is dif­fi­cult to see on what prin­ciples but those of tyranny they can be pre­ven­ted from liv­ing there un­der what laws they please, provided they com­mit no ag­gres­sion on other na­tions, and al­low per­fect free­dom of de­par­ture to those who are dis­sat­is­fied with their ways. A re­cent writer, in some re­spects of con­sid­er­able merit, pro­poses (to use 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 also ap­pears so to me, but I am not aware that any com­munity has a right to force an­other to be civ­il­ised. So long as the suf­fer­ers by the bad law do not in­voke as­sist­ance from other com­munit­ies, I can­not ad­mit that per­sons en­tirely un­con­nec­ted with them ought to step in and re­quire that a con­di­tion of things with which all who are dir­ectly in­ter­ested ap­pear to be sat­is­fied, should be put an end to be­cause it is a scan­dal to per­sons some thou­sands of miles dis­tant, who have no part or con­cern in it. Let them send mis­sion­ar­ies, if they please, 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 lest bar­bar­ism, after hav­ing been fairly got un­der, should re­vive and con­quer civil­isa­tion. A civil­isa­tion that can thus suc­cumb to its 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 this be so, the sooner such a civil­isa­tion re­ceives no­tice to quit, the bet­ter. It can only go on from bad to worse, un­til des­troyed and re­gen­er­ated (like the Western Em­pire) by en­er­getic bar­bar­i­ans.

V Applications

The prin­ciples as­ser­ted in these pages must be more gen­er­ally ad­mit­ted as the basis for dis­cus­sion of de­tails, be­fore a 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 de­signed 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 serve to bring into greater clear­ness the mean­ing and lim­its of the two max­ims which to­gether form the en­tire doc­trine of this Es­say, and to as­sist the judg­ment in hold­ing the bal­ance between them, in the cases where it ap­pears doubt­ful which of them is ap­plic­able to the case.

The max­ims are, first, that the in­di­vidual is not ac­count­able to so­ci­ety for his ac­tions, in so far as these con­cern the in­terests of no per­son but him­self. Ad­vice, in­struc­tion, per­sua­sion, and avoid­ance by other people if thought ne­ces­sary by them for their own good, are the only meas­ures by which so­ci­ety can jus­ti­fi­ably ex­press its dis­like or dis­ap­prob­a­tion of his con­duct. Se­condly, that for such ac­tions as are pre­ju­di­cial to the in­terests of oth­ers, the in­di­vidual is ac­count­able and may be sub­jec­ted either to so­cial or to legal pun­ish­ments, if so­ci­ety is of opin­ion that the one or the other is re­quis­ite for its pro­tec­tion.

In the first place, it must by no means be sup­posed, be­cause dam­age, or prob­ab­il­ity of dam­age, to the in­terests of oth­ers, can alone jus­tify the in­ter­fer­ence of so­ci­ety, that there­fore it 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 a good which they had a reas­on­able hope of ob­tain­ing. 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 an ob­ject which both de­sire, reaps be­ne­fit from the loss of oth­ers, from their wasted ex­er­tion and their dis­ap­point­ment. But it is, by com­mon ad­mis­sion, bet­ter for the gen­eral in­terest of man­kind, that per­sons should pur­sue their ob­jects un­deterred by this sort of con­sequences. In other words, so­ci­ety ad­mits no rights, either legal or moral, in the dis­ap­poin­ted com­pet­it­ors, to im­munity from this kind of suf­fer­ing; and feels called on to in­ter­fere, only when means of suc­cess have been em­ployed which it is con­trary to the gen­eral in­terest to per­mit—namely, fraud or treach­ery, and force.

Again, trade is a so­cial act. Who­ever un­der­takes to sell any de­scrip­tion of goods to the pub­lic, does what af­fects the in­terest of other per­sons, and of so­ci­ety in gen­eral; and thus his con­duct, in prin­ciple, comes within the jur­is­dic­tion of so­ci­ety: ac­cord­ingly, it was once held to be the duty of gov­ern­ments, in all cases which were con­sidered of im­port­ance, to fix prices, and reg­u­late the pro­cesses of man­u­fac­ture. But it is now re­cog­nised, though not till after a long struggle, that both the cheapness and the good qual­ity of com­mod­it­ies are most ef­fec­tu­ally provided for by leav­ing the pro­du­cers and sellers per­fectly free, un­der the sole check of equal free­dom to the buy­ers for sup­ply­ing them­selves else­where. This is the so-called doc­trine of Free Trade, which rests on grounds dif­fer­ent from, though equally solid with, the prin­ciple of in­di­vidual liberty as­ser­ted in this Es­say. Restric­tions on trade, or on pro­duc­tion for pur­poses of trade, are in­deed re­straints; and all re­straint, quâ re­straint, is an evil: but the re­straints in ques­tion af­fect only that part of con­duct which so­ci­ety is com­pet­ent to re­strain, and are wrong solely be­cause they do not really pro­duce the res­ults which it is de­sired to pro­duce by them. As the prin­ciple of in­di­vidual liberty is not in­volved in the doc­trine of Free Trade, so neither is it in most of the ques­tions which arise re­spect­ing the lim­its of that doc­trine: as for ex­ample, what amount of pub­lic con­trol is ad­miss­ible for the pre­ven­tion of fraud by adul­ter­a­tion; how far san­it­ary pre­cau­tions, or ar­range­ments to pro­tect work-people 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, cæ­teris paribus, than con­trolling them: but that they may be le­git­im­ately con­trolled for these ends, is in prin­ciple un­deni­able. On the other hand, there are ques­tions re­lat­ing to in­ter­fer­ence with trade, which are es­sen­tially ques­tions of liberty; such as the Maine Law, already touched upon; the pro­hib­i­tion of the im­port­a­tion of opium into Ch­ina; the re­stric­tion of the sale of pois­ons; all cases, in short, where the ob­ject of the in­ter­fer­ence is to make it im­possible or dif­fi­cult to ob­tain a par­tic­u­lar com­mod­ity. These in­ter­fer­ences are ob­jec­tion­able, not as in­fringe­ments on the liberty of the pro­du­cer or seller, but on that of the buyer.

One of these ex­amples, that of the sale of pois­ons, opens a new ques­tion; the proper lim­its of what may be called the func­tions of po­lice; how far liberty may le­git­im­ately be in­vaded for the pre­ven­tion of crime, or of ac­ci­dent. It is one of the un­dis­puted func­tions of gov­ern­ment to take pre­cau­tions against crime be­fore it has been 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 pun­it­ory func­tion; for there is hardly any part of the le­git­im­ate free­dom of ac­tion of a hu­man be­ing which would not ad­mit of be­ing rep­res­en­ted, and fairly too, as in­creas­ing the fa­cil­it­ies for some form or other of de­lin­quency. Never­the­less, if a pub­lic au­thor­ity, or even a private per­son, sees any­one 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 the com­mis­sion of murder, it would be right to pro­hibit their man­u­fac­ture and sale. They may, how­ever, 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 either a pub­lic of­ficer or any­one else saw a per­son at­tempt­ing to cross a bridge which had been as­cer­tained 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 de­sires, and he does not de­sire to fall into the river. Never­the­less, when there is not a cer­tainty, but only a danger of mis­chief, no one but the per­son him­self can judge of the suf­fi­ciency of the motive which may prompt him to in­cur the risk: in this case, there­fore (un­less he is a child, or de­li­ri­ous, or in some state of ex­cite­ment or ab­sorp­tion in­com­pat­ible with the full use of the re­flect­ing fac­ulty), he ought, I con­ceive, to be only warned of the danger; not for­cibly pre­ven­ted from ex­pos­ing him­self to it. Sim­ilar con­sid­er­a­tions, ap­plied to such a ques­tion as the sale of pois­ons, may en­able us to de­cide which among the pos­sible modes of reg­u­la­tion are or are not con­trary to prin­ciple. Such a pre­cau­tion, for ex­ample, as that of la­belling the drug with some word ex­press­ive of its dan­ger­ous char­ac­ter, may be en­forced without vi­ol­a­tion of liberty: the buyer can­not wish not to know that the thing he pos­sesses has pois­on­ous qual­it­ies. But to re­quire in all cases the cer­ti­fic­ate of a med­ical prac­ti­tioner, would make it some­times im­possible, al­ways ex­pens­ive, to ob­tain the art­icle for le­git­im­ate uses. The only mode ap­par­ent to me, in which dif­fi­culties may be thrown in the way of crime com­mit­ted through this means, without any in­fringe­ment, worth tak­ing into ac­count, upon the liberty of those who de­sire the pois­on­ous sub­stance for other pur­poses, con­sists in provid­ing what, in the apt lan­guage of Bentham, is called “pre­appoin­ted evid­ence.” This pro­vi­sion is fa­mil­iar to every­one in the case of con­tracts. It is usual and right that the law, when a con­tract is entered into, should re­quire as the con­di­tion of its en­for­cing per­form­ance, that cer­tain form­al­it­ies should be ob­served, such as sig­na­tures, at­test­a­tion of wit­nesses, and the like, in or­der that in case of sub­sequent dis­pute, there may be evid­ence to prove that the con­tract was really entered into, and that there was noth­ing in the cir­cum­stances to render it leg­ally in­valid: the ef­fect be­ing, to throw great obstacles in the way of fic­ti­tious con­tracts, or con­tracts made in cir­cum­stances which, if known, would des­troy their valid­ity. Pre­cau­tions of a sim­ilar nature might be en­forced in the sale of art­icles ad­ap­ted to be in­stru­ments of crime. The seller, for ex­ample, might be re­quired to enter into a re­gister the ex­act time of the trans­ac­tion, the name and ad­dress of the buyer, the pre­cise qual­ity and quant­ity sold; to ask the pur­pose for which it was wanted, and re­cord the an­swer he re­ceived. When there was no med­ical pre­scrip­tion, the pres­ence of some third per­son might be re­quired, to bring home the fact to the pur­chaser, in case there should af­ter­wards be reason to be­lieve that the art­icle had been ap­plied to crim­inal pur­poses. Such reg­u­la­tions would in gen­eral be no ma­ter­ial im­ped­i­ment to ob­tain­ing the art­icle, but a very con­sid­er­able one to mak­ing an im­proper use of it without de­tec­tion.

The right in­her­ent in so­ci­ety, to ward off crimes against it­self by ante­cedent pre­cau­tions, sug­gests the ob­vi­ous lim­it­a­tions to the maxim, that purely self-re­gard­ing mis­con­duct can­not prop­erly be meddled with in the way of pre­ven­tion or pun­ish­ment. Drunken­ness, for ex­ample, in or­din­ary cases, is not a fit sub­ject for le­gis­lat­ive in­ter­fer­ence; but I should deem it per­fectly le­git­im­ate that a per­son, who had once been con­victed of any act of vi­ol­ence to oth­ers 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 when in that state he com­mit­ted an­other of­fence, the pun­ish­ment to which he would be li­able for that other of­fence should be in­creased in sever­ity. The 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 sup­port from the pub­lic, or ex­cept when it con­sti­tutes a breach of con­tract, can­not without tyranny be made a sub­ject of legal pun­ish­ment; but if either from idle­ness or from any other avoid­able cause, a man fails to per­form his legal du­ties to oth­ers, as 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 agents them­selves, ought not to be leg­ally in­ter­dicted, but which, if done pub­licly, are a vi­ol­a­tion of good man­ners and com­ing thus within the cat­egory of of­fences against oth­ers may right­fully be pro­hib­ited. Of this kind are of­fences against de­cency; on which it is un­ne­ces­sary to dwell, the rather as they are only con­nec­ted in­dir­ectly with our sub­ject, the ob­jec­tion to pub­li­city be­ing equally strong in the case of many ac­tions not in them­selves con­dem­nable, nor sup­posed to be so.

There is an­other ques­tion to which an an­swer must be found, con­sist­ent with the prin­ciples which have been laid down. In cases of per­sonal con­duct sup­posed to be blam­able, but which re­spect for liberty pre­cludes so­ci­ety from pre­vent­ing or pun­ish­ing, be­cause the evil dir­ectly res­ult­ing falls wholly on the agent; what the agent is free to do, ought other per­sons to be equally free to coun­sel or in­stig­ate? This ques­tion is not free from 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 any­one, is a so­cial act, and may there­fore, like ac­tions in gen­eral which af­fect oth­ers, be sup­posed amen­able to so­cial con­trol. But a little re­flec­tion cor­rects the first im­pres­sion, by show­ing that if the case is not strictly within the defin­i­tion of in­di­vidual liberty, yet the reas­ons on which the prin­ciple of in­di­vidual liberty is groun­ded, are ap­plic­able to it. If people must be al­lowed, in whatever con­cerns only them­selves, to act as seems best to them­selves at their own peril, they must equally be free to con­sult with one an­other about what is fit to be so done; to ex­change opin­ions, and give and re­ceive sug­ges­tions. Whatever it is per­mit­ted to do, it must be per­mit­ted to ad­vise to do. The ques­tion is doubt­ful, only when the in­stig­ator de­rives a per­sonal be­ne­fit from his ad­vice; when he makes it his oc­cu­pa­tion, for sub­sist­ence or pe­cu­ni­ary gain, to pro­mote what so­ci­ety and the state con­sider to be an evil. Then, in­deed, a new ele­ment of com­plic­a­tion is in­tro­duced; namely, the ex­ist­ence of classes of per­sons with an in­terest op­posed to what is con­sidered as the pub­lic weal, and whose mode of liv­ing is groun­ded on the coun­ter­ac­tion of 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 which lie on the ex­act bound­ary line between two prin­ciples, and it is not at once ap­par­ent to which of the two it prop­erly be­longs. There are ar­gu­ments on both sides. On the side of tol­er­a­tion it may be said, that the fact of fol­low­ing any­thing as an oc­cu­pa­tion, and liv­ing or profit­ing by the prac­tice of it, can­not make that crim­inal which would oth­er­wise be ad­miss­ible; that the act should either be con­sist­ently per­mit­ted or con­sist­ently pro­hib­ited; that if the prin­ciples which we have hitherto de­fen­ded are true, so­ci­ety has no busi­ness, as so­ci­ety, to de­cide any­thing to be wrong which con­cerns only the in­di­vidual; that it can­not go bey­ond dis­sua­sion, and that one per­son should be as free to per­suade, as an­other to dis­suade. In op­pos­i­tion to this it may be con­ten­ded, that al­though the pub­lic, or the State, are not war­ran­ted in au­thor­it­at­ively de­cid­ing, for pur­poses of re­pres­sion or pun­ish­ment, that such or such con­duct af­fect­ing only the in­terests of the in­di­vidual is good or bad, they are fully jus­ti­fied in as­sum­ing, if they re­gard it as bad, that its be­ing so or not is at least a dis­put­able ques­tion: That, this be­ing sup­posed, they can­not be act­ing wrongly in en­deav­our­ing to ex­clude the in­flu­ence of so­li­cit­a­tions which are not dis­in­ter­ested, of in­stig­at­ors who can­not pos­sibly be im­par­tial—who have a dir­ect per­sonal in­terest on one side, and that side the one which the State be­lieves to be wrong, and who con­fessedly pro­mote it for per­sonal ob­jects only. There can surely, it may be urged, be noth­ing lost, no sac­ri­fice of good, by so or­der­ing mat­ters that per­sons shall make their elec­tion, either wisely or fool­ishly, on their own prompt­ing, as free as pos­sible from the arts of per­sons who stim­u­late their in­clin­a­tions for in­ter­ested pur­poses of their own. Thus (it may be said) though the stat­utes re­spect­ing un­law­ful games are ut­terly in­defens­ible—though all per­sons should be free to gamble in their own or each other’s houses, or in any place of meet­ing es­tab­lished by their own sub­scrip­tions, and open only to the mem­bers and their vis­it­ors—yet pub­lic gambling-houses should not be per­mit­ted. It is true that the pro­hib­i­tion is never ef­fec­tual, and that whatever amount of tyr­an­nical power is given to the po­lice, gambling-houses can al­ways be main­tained un­der other pre­tences; but they may be com­pelled to con­duct their op­er­a­tions with a cer­tain de­gree of secrecy and mys­tery, so that nobody knows any­thing about them but those who seek them; and more than this, so­ci­ety ought not to aim at. There is con­sid­er­able force in these ar­gu­ments; I will not ven­ture to de­cide whether they are suf­fi­cient to jus­tify the moral an­om­aly of pun­ish­ing the ac­cessary, when the prin­cipal is (and must be) al­lowed to go free; or fin­ing or im­pris­on­ing the pro­curer, but not the for­nic­ator, the gambling-house keeper, but not the gam­bler. Still less ought the com­mon op­er­a­tions of buy­ing and selling to be in­terfered with on ana­log­ous grounds. Al­most every art­icle which is bought and sold may be used in ex­cess, and the sellers have a pe­cu­ni­ary 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 drinks, though in­ter­ested in their ab­use, are in­dis­pens­ably re­quired for the sake of their le­git­im­ate use. The in­terest, how­ever, of these deal­ers in pro­mot­ing in­tem­per­ance is 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 it per­mits, should nev­er­the­less in­dir­ectly dis­cour­age con­duct which it deems con­trary to the best in­terests of the agent; whether, for ex­ample, it should take meas­ures to render the means of drunk­en­ness more costly, or add to the dif­fi­culty of pro­cur­ing them, by lim­it­ing the num­ber of the places of sale. On this as on most other prac­tical ques­tions, many dis­tinc­tions re­quire to be made. To tax stim­u­lants for the sole pur­pose of mak­ing them more dif­fi­cult to be ob­tained, is a meas­ure dif­fer­ing only in de­gree from their en­tire pro­hib­i­tion; and would be jus­ti­fi­able only if that were jus­ti­fi­able. Every in­crease of cost is a pro­hib­i­tion, to those whose means do not come up to the aug­men­ted price; and to those who do, it is a pen­alty laid on them for grat­i­fy­ing a par­tic­u­lar taste. Their choice of pleas­ures, and their mode of ex­pend­ing 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 se­lec­tion of stim­u­lants as spe­cial sub­jects of tax­a­tion for pur­poses of rev­enue. But it must be re­membered that tax­a­tion for fiscal pur­poses is ab­so­lutely in­ev­it­able; that in most coun­tries it is ne­ces­sary that a con­sid­er­able part of that tax­a­tion should be in­dir­ect; that the State, there­fore, can­not help im­pos­ing pen­al­ties, which to some per­sons may be pro­hib­it­ory, on the use of some art­icles of con­sump­tion. It is hence the duty of the State to con­sider, in the im­pos­i­tion of taxes, what com­mod­it­ies the con­sumers can best spare; and à for­tiori, to se­lect in pref­er­ence those of which it deems the use, bey­ond a very mod­er­ate quant­ity, to be pos­it­ively in­jur­i­ous. Tax­a­tion, there­fore, of stim­u­lants, up to the point which pro­duces the largest amount of rev­enue (sup­pos­ing that the State needs all the rev­enue which 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 to which the re­stric­tion is in­ten­ded to be sub­ser­vi­ent. All places of pub­lic re­sort re­quire the re­straint of a po­lice, and places of this kind pe­cu­li­arly, be­cause of­fences against so­ci­ety are es­pe­cially apt to ori­gin­ate there. It is, there­fore, fit to con­fine the power of selling these com­mod­it­ies (at least for con­sump­tion on the spot) to per­sons of known or vouched-for re­spect­ab­il­ity of con­duct; to make such reg­u­la­tions re­spect­ing hours of open­ing and clos­ing as may be re­quis­ite for pub­lic sur­veil­lance, and to with­draw the li­cence if breaches of the peace re­peatedly take place through the con­niv­ance or in­ca­pa­city of the keeper of the house, or if it be­comes a ren­dez­vous for con­coct­ing and pre­par­ing of­fences against the law. Any fur­ther re­stric­tion I do not con­ceive to be, in prin­ciple, jus­ti­fi­able. The lim­it­a­tion in num­ber, for in­stance, of beer and spirit-houses, for the ex­press pur­pose of ren­der­ing them more dif­fi­cult of ac­cess, and di­min­ish­ing the oc­ca­sions of tempta­tion, not only ex­poses all to an in­con­veni­ence be­cause there are some by whom the fa­cil­ity would be ab­used, 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 no per­son who sets due value on free­dom will give his ad­he­sion to their be­ing so gov­erned, un­less after all ef­forts have been ex­hausted to edu­cate them for free­dom and gov­ern them as free­men, 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 which needs be con­sidered here. It is only be­cause the in­sti­tu­tions of this coun­try are a mass of in­con­sist­en­cies, that things find ad­mit­tance into our prac­tice which be­long to the sys­tem of des­potic, or what is called pa­ternal, gov­ern­ment, while the gen­eral free­dom of our in­sti­tu­tions pre­cludes the ex­er­cise of the amount of con­trol ne­ces­sary to render the re­straint of any real ef­fic­acy as a moral edu­ca­tion.

It was poin­ted out in an early part of this Es­say, that the liberty of the in­di­vidual, in things wherein the in­di­vidual is alone con­cerned, im­plies a cor­res­pond­ing liberty in any num­ber of in­di­vidu­als to reg­u­late by mu­tual agree­ment such things as re­gard them jointly, and re­gard no per­sons but them­selves. This ques­tion presents no dif­fi­culty, so long as the will of all the per­sons im­plic­ated re­mains un­altered; but since that will may change, it is of­ten ne­ces­sary, even in things in which they alone are con­cerned, that they should enter into en­gage­ments with one an­other; and when they do, it is fit, as a gen­eral rule, that those en­gage­ments should be kept. Yet in the laws, prob­ably, of every coun­try, this gen­eral rule has some ex­cep­tions. Not only per­sons are not held to en­gage­ments which vi­ol­ate the rights of third parties, but it is some­times con­sidered a 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 should sell him­self, or al­low him­self to be sold, as a slave, would be null and void; neither en­forced by law nor by opin­ion. The ground for thus lim­it­ing his power of vol­un­tar­ily dis­pos­ing of his own lot in life, is ap­par­ent, and is very clearly seen in this ex­treme case. The reason for not in­ter­fer­ing, un­less for the sake of oth­ers, with a per­son’s vol­un­tary acts, is con­sid­er­a­tion for his liberty. His vol­un­tary choice is evid­ence that what he so chooses is de­sir­able, or at the least en­dur­able, to him, and his good is on the whole best provided for by al­low­ing him to take his own means of pur­su­ing it. But by selling him­self for a slave, he ab­dic­ates his liberty; he fore­goes any fu­ture use of it, bey­ond that single act. He there­fore de­feats, in his own case, the very pur­pose which is the jus­ti­fic­a­tion of al­low­ing him to dis­pose of him­self. He is no longer free; but is thence­forth in a po­s­i­tion which has no longer the pre­sump­tion in its fa­vour, that would be af­forded by his vol­un­tar­ily re­main­ing in it. The prin­ciple of free­dom can­not re­quire that he should be free not to be free. It is not free­dom, to be al­lowed to ali­en­ate his free­dom. These reas­ons, the force of which is so con­spicu­ous in this pe­cu­liar case, are evid­ently of far wider ap­plic­a­tion; yet a limit is every­where set to them by the ne­ces­sit­ies of life, which con­tinu­ally re­quire, not in­deed that we should resign our free­dom, but that we should con­sent to this and the other lim­it­a­tion of it. The prin­ciple, how­ever, which de­mands un­con­trolled free­dom of ac­tion in all that con­cerns only the agents them­selves, re­quires that those who have be­come bound to one an­other, in things which con­cern 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 that re­late to money or money’s worth, of which one can ven­ture to say that there ought to be no liberty whatever of re­tracta­tion. Baron Wil­helm von Hum­boldt, in the ex­cel­lent es­say from which I have already quoted, states it as his con­vic­tion, that en­gage­ments which in­volve per­sonal re­la­tions or ser­vices, should never be leg­ally bind­ing bey­ond a lim­ited dur­a­tion of time; and that the most im­port­ant of these en­gage­ments, mar­riage, hav­ing the pe­cu­li­ar­ity that its ob­jects are frus­trated un­less the feel­ings of both the 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 dis­ser­ta­tion had not ob­liged him in this in­stance to con­tent him­self with enun­ci­at­ing his con­clu­sion without dis­cuss­ing the premises, he would doubt­less have re­cog­nised that the ques­tion can­not be de­cided on grounds so simple as those to which he con­fines him­self. When a per­son, either by ex­press prom­ise or by con­duct, has en­cour­aged an­other to rely upon his con­tinu­ing to act in a cer­tain way—to build ex­pect­a­tions and cal­cu­la­tions, and stake any part of his plan of life upon 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 placed third parties in any pe­cu­liar po­s­i­tion, or, as in the case of mar­riage, has even called third parties into ex­ist­ence, ob­lig­a­tions arise on the part of both the con­tract­ing parties to­wards those third per­sons, the ful­fil­ment of which, or at all events the mode of ful­fil­ment, must be greatly af­fected by the con­tinu­ance or dis­rup­tion of the re­la­tion between the ori­ginal parties to the con­tract. It does not fol­low, nor can I ad­mit, that these ob­lig­a­tions ex­tend to re­quir­ing the ful­fil­ment of the con­tract 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 in the legal free­dom of the parties to re­lease them­selves from the en­gage­ment (and I also hold that they ought not to make much dif­fer­ence), they ne­ces­sar­ily make a great dif­fer­ence in the moral free­dom. A per­son is bound to take all these cir­cum­stances into ac­count, be­fore resolv­ing on a step which may af­fect such im­port­ant in­terests of oth­ers; and if he does not al­low proper weight to those in­terests, he is mor­ally re­spons­ible for the wrong. I have made these ob­vi­ous re­marks for the bet­ter il­lus­tra­tion of 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 was everything, and that of grown per­sons noth­ing.

I have already ob­served that, ow­ing to the ab­sence of any 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, in the mod­ern European world, the sen­ti­ment of liberty is the strongest, 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 in act­ing for an­other, un­der the pre­text that the af­fairs of an­other are his own af­fairs. The State, while it re­spects the liberty of each in what spe­cially re­gards him­self, is bound to main­tain a vi­gil­ant con­trol over his ex­er­cise of any power which it al­lows him to pos­sess over oth­ers. This ob­lig­a­tion is al­most en­tirely dis­reg­arded in the case of the fam­ily re­la­tions, a case, in its dir­ect in­flu­ence on hu­man hap­pi­ness, more im­port­ant than all oth­ers taken to­gether. The al­most des­potic power of hus­bands over wives need not be en­larged upon here be­cause noth­ing more is needed for the com­plete re­moval of the evil, than that wives should have the same rights, and should re­ceive the pro­tec­tion of law in the same man­ner, as all other per­sons; and be­cause, on this sub­ject, the de­fend­ers of es­tab­lished in­justice do not avail them­selves of the plea of liberty, but stand forth openly as the cham­pi­ons of power. It is in the case of chil­dren, that mis­ap­plied no­tions of liberty are a real obstacle to the ful­fil­ment by the State of 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 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 the gen­er­al­ity of man­kind 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 who is born its cit­izen? Yet who is there that is not afraid to re­cog­nise and as­sert this truth? Hardly any­one in­deed will deny that it is one of the most sac­red du­ties of the par­ents (or, as law and us­age now stand, the father), after sum­mon­ing a hu­man be­ing into the world, to give to that be­ing an edu­ca­tion fit­ting him to per­form his part well in life to­wards oth­ers and to­wards him­self. But while this is un­an­im­ously de­clared to be the father’s duty, scarcely any­body, in this coun­try, will bear to hear of ob­li­ging him to per­form it. In­stead of his be­ing re­quired to make any ex­er­tion or sac­ri­fice for se­cur­ing edu­ca­tion to the child, it is left to his choice to ac­cept it or not when it is provided gratis! It still re­mains un­re­cog­nised, 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 charge, as far as pos­sible, of the par­ent.

Were the duty of en­for­cing uni­ver­sal edu­ca­tion once ad­mit­ted, there would be an end to the dif­fi­culties about what the State should teach, and how it should teach, which now con­vert the sub­ject into a mere bat­tle­field for sects and parties, caus­ing the time and la­bour which should have been spent in edu­cat­ing, to be wasted in quar­rel­ling about edu­ca­tion. If the gov­ern­ment would make up its mind to re­quire for every child a good edu­ca­tion, it might save it­self the trouble of provid­ing one. It might leave to par­ents to ob­tain the edu­ca­tion where and how they pleased, and con­tent it­self with help­ing to pay the school fees of the poorer class of chil­dren, and de­fray­ing the en­tire school ex­penses of those who have no one else to pay for them. The ob­jec­tions which are urged with reason against State edu­ca­tion, do not ap­ply to the en­force­ment of edu­ca­tion by the State, but to the State’s tak­ing upon it­self to dir­ect that edu­ca­tion; which is a totally dif­fer­ent thing. That the whole or any large part of the edu­ca­tion of the people should be in State hands, I go as far as any­one in de­prec­at­ing. All that has been said of the im­port­ance of in­di­vidu­al­ity of char­ac­ter, and di­versity in opin­ions and modes of con­duct, in­volves, as of the same un­speak­able im­port­ance, di­versity of edu­ca­tion. A gen­eral State edu­ca­tion is a mere con­triv­ance for mould­ing people to be ex­actly like one an­other; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the pre­dom­in­ant power in the gov­ern­ment, whether this be 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 nat­ural tend­ency to one over the body. An edu­ca­tion es­tab­lished and con­trolled by the State, should only ex­ist, if it ex­ist at all, as one among many com­pet­ing ex­per­i­ments, car­ried on for the pur­pose of ex­ample and stim­u­lus, to keep the oth­ers up to a cer­tain stand­ard of ex­cel­lence. Un­less, in­deed, when so­ci­ety in gen­eral is in so back­ward a state that it could not or would not provide for it­self any proper in­sti­tu­tions of edu­ca­tion, un­less the gov­ern­ment un­der­took the task; then, in­deed, the gov­ern­ment may, as the less of two great evils, take upon it­self the busi­ness of schools and uni­ver­sit­ies, as it may that of joint stock com­pan­ies, when private en­ter­prise, in a shape fit­ted for un­der­tak­ing great works of in­dustry, does not ex­ist in the coun­try. But in gen­eral, if the coun­try con­tains a suf­fi­cient num­ber of per­sons qual­i­fied to provide edu­ca­tion un­der gov­ern­ment aus­pices, the same per­sons would be able and will­ing to give an equally good edu­ca­tion on the vol­un­tary prin­ciple, un­der the as­sur­ance of re­mu­ner­a­tion af­forded by a law ren­der­ing edu­ca­tion com­puls­ory, com­bined with State aid to those un­able to de­fray the ex­pense.

The in­stru­ment for en­for­cing the law could be no other than 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 as­cer­tain if he (or she) is able to read. If a child proves un­able, the father, un­less he has some suf­fi­cient ground of ex­cuse, might be sub­jec­ted to a mod­er­ate fine, to be worked out, if ne­ces­sary, by his la­bour, and the child might be put to school at his ex­pense. Once in every year the ex­am­in­a­tion should be re­newed, with a gradu­ally ex­tend­ing 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 all who come up to a cer­tain stand­ard of pro­fi­ciency might claim a cer­ti­fic­ate. To pre­vent the State from ex­er­cising, through these ar­range­ments, 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, even in the higher class of ex­am­in­a­tions, be con­fined to facts and pos­it­ive sci­ence ex­clus­ively. The ex­am­in­a­tions on re­li­gion, polit­ics, or other dis­puted top­ics, should not turn on the truth or false­hood of opin­ions, but on the mat­ter of fact that such and such an opin­ion is held, on such grounds, by such au­thors, or schools, or churches. Under this sys­tem, the rising gen­er­a­tion would be no worse off in re­gard to all dis­puted truths, than they are at present; they would be brought up either church­men or dis­sent­ers as they now are, the state merely tak­ing care that they should be in­struc­ted church­men, or in­struc­ted dis­sent­ers. There would be noth­ing to hinder them from be­ing taught re­li­gion, if their par­ents chose, at the same schools where they were taught other things. 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 pos­sesses the know­ledge, re­quis­ite 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 both in Locke and in Kant, whichever of the two he takes up with, or even if with neither: and there is no reas­on­able ob­jec­tion to ex­amin­ing an athe­ist in the evid­ences of Chris­tian­ity, provided he is not re­quired to pro­fess a be­lief in them. The ex­am­in­a­tions, how­ever, in the higher branches of know­ledge should, I con­ceive, be en­tirely vol­un­tary. It would be giv­ing too dan­ger­ous a power to gov­ern­ments, were they al­lowed to ex­clude any­one from pro­fes­sions, even from the pro­fes­sion of teacher, for al­leged de­fi­ciency of qual­i­fic­a­tions: and I think, with Wil­helm von Hum­boldt, that de­grees, or other pub­lic cer­ti­fic­ates of sci­entific or pro­fes­sional ac­quire­ments, should be given to all who present them­selves for ex­am­in­a­tion, and stand the test; but that such cer­ti­fic­ates should con­fer no ad­vant­age over com­pet­it­ors, other than the weight which may be at­tached to their testi­mony by pub­lic opin­ion.

It is not in the mat­ter of edu­ca­tion only, 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 former al­ways, and in many cases for the lat­ter also. The fact it­self, of caus­ing the ex­ist­ence of a hu­man be­ing, is one of the most re­spons­ible ac­tions in the range of hu­man life. To un­der­take this re­spons­ib­il­ity—to be­stow a life which may be either a curse or a bless­ing—un­less the be­ing on whom it is to be be­stowed will have at least the or­din­ary chances of a de­sir­able ex­ist­ence, is a crime against that be­ing. And in a coun­try either over-peopled, 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 all who live by the re­mu­ner­a­tion of their la­bour. The laws which, in many coun­tries on the Contin­ent, for­bid mar­riage un­less the parties can show that they have the means of sup­port­ing a fam­ily, do not ex­ceed the le­git­im­ate powers of the state: and whether such laws be ex­pedi­ent or not (a ques­tion mainly de­pend­ent on local cir­cum­stances and feel­ings), they are not ob­jec­tion­able as vi­ol­a­tions of liberty. Such laws are in­ter­fer­ences of the state to pro­hibit a mis­chiev­ous act—an act in­jur­i­ous to oth­ers, which ought to be a sub­ject of rep­rob­a­tion, and so­cial stigma, even when it is not deemed ex­pedi­ent to su­per­add legal pun­ish­ment. Yet the cur­rent ideas of liberty, which bend so eas­ily to real in­fringe­ments of the free­dom of the in­di­vidual, in things which con­cern only him­self, would re­pel the at­tempt to put any re­straint upon his in­clin­a­tions when the con­sequence of their in­dul­gence is a life, or lives, of wretched­ness and de­prav­ity to the off­spring, with man­i­fold evils to those suf­fi­ciently within reach to be in any way af­fected by their ac­tions. When we com­pare the strange re­spect of man­kind 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 the last place a large class of ques­tions re­spect­ing the lim­its of gov­ern­ment in­ter­fer­ence, which, though closely con­nec­ted with the sub­ject of this Es­say, do not, in strict­ness, be­long to it. These are cases in which the reas­ons against in­ter­fer­ence do not turn upon the prin­ciple of liberty: the ques­tion is not about re­strain­ing the ac­tions of in­di­vidu­als, but about help­ing them: it is asked whether the gov­ern­ment should do, or cause to be 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 is not such as to in­volve in­fringe­ment of liberty, may be of three kinds.

The first is, when the thing to be done is likely to be bet­ter done by in­di­vidu­als than by the gov­ern­ment. Speak­ing gen­er­ally, there is no one so fit to con­duct any busi­ness, or to de­term­ine how or by whom it shall be con­duc­ted, as those who are 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 en­larged upon by polit­ical eco­nom­ists, and is not par­tic­u­larly re­lated to the prin­ciples of this Es­say.

The second ob­jec­tion is more nearly al­lied to our sub­ject. In many cases, though in­di­vidu­als may not do the par­tic­u­lar thing so well, on the av­er­age, as the of­ficers of gov­ern­ment, 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 mode of strength­en­ing their act­ive fac­ulties, ex­er­cising their judg­ment, and giv­ing them a fa­mil­iar know­ledge of the sub­jects with which they are thus left to deal. This is a prin­cipal, though not the sole, re­com­mend­a­tion of jury trial (in cases not polit­ical); of free and pop­u­lar local and mu­ni­cipal in­sti­tu­tions; 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 a dif­fer­ent oc­ca­sion from the present 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 the com­pre­hen­sion of joint in­terests, the man­age­ment of joint con­cerns—ha­bitu­at­ing them to act from pub­lic or semi-pub­lic motives, and guide their con­duct by aims which unite in­stead of isol­at­ing them from one an­other. Without these habits and powers, a free con­sti­tu­tion can neither be worked nor pre­served, as is ex­em­pli­fied by the too-of­ten trans­it­ory nature of polit­ical free­dom in coun­tries where it does not rest upon 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 pe­cu­ni­ary means, is fur­ther re­com­men­ded by all the ad­vant­ages which have been set forth in this Es­say as be­long­ing to in­di­vidu­al­ity of de­vel­op­ment, and di­versity of modes of ac­tion. Govern­ment op­er­a­tions tend to be every­where alike. With in­di­vidu­als and vol­un­tary as­so­ci­ations, on the con­trary, there are var­ied ex­per­i­ments, and end­less di­versity of ex­per­i­ence. What the State can use­fully do, is to make it­self a cent­ral de­pos­it­ory, and act­ive cir­cu­lator and dif­fuser, of the ex­per­i­ence res­ult­ing from many tri­als. Its busi­ness is to en­able each ex­per­i­ment­al­ist to be­ne­fit by the ex­per­i­ments of oth­ers, 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 su­per­ad­ded to those already ex­er­cised by the gov­ern­ment, causes its in­flu­ence over hopes and fears to be more widely dif­fused, and con­verts, more and more, the act­ive and am­bi­tious part of the pub­lic into hangers-on of the gov­ern­ment, or of some party which aims 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 of them branches of the gov­ern­ment; if, in ad­di­tion, the mu­ni­cipal cor­por­a­tions and local boards, with all that now de­volves on 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 rise in life; not all the free­dom of the press and pop­u­lar con­sti­tu­tion of the le­gis­lature would make this or any other coun­try free oth­er­wise than in name. And the evil would be greater, the more ef­fi­ciently and sci­en­tific­ally the ad­min­is­trat­ive ma­chinery was con­struc­ted—the more skil­ful the ar­range­ments for ob­tain­ing the best qual­i­fied hands and heads with which to work it. In Eng­land it has of late been pro­posed that all the mem­bers of the civil ser­vice of gov­ern­ment should be se­lec­ted by com­pet­it­ive ex­am­in­a­tion, to ob­tain for those em­ploy­ments the most in­tel­li­gent and in­struc­ted per­sons pro­cur­able; and much has been said and writ­ten for and against this 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 hold out suf­fi­cient pro­spects of emolu­ment and im­port­ance 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 pro­pos­i­tion, as an an­swer to its prin­cipal dif­fi­culty. Com­ing from the op­pon­ents it is strange enough. What is urged as an ob­jec­tion is the safety-valve of the pro­posed sys­tem. If in­deed all the high tal­ent of the coun­try could be drawn into the ser­vice of the gov­ern­ment, a pro­posal tend­ing to bring about that res­ult might well in­spire un­eas­i­ness. If every part of the busi­ness of so­ci­ety which re­quired 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, 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 all things: the mul­ti­tude for dir­ec­tion and dic­ta­tion in all they had to do; the able and as­pir­ing for per­sonal ad­vance­ment. To be ad­mit­ted into the ranks of this bur­eau­cracy, and when ad­mit­ted, to rise therein, would be the sole ob­jects of am­bi­tion. Under this re­gime, not only is the out­side pub­lic ill-qual­i­fied, for want of prac­tical ex­per­i­ence, to cri­ti­cise or check the mode of op­er­a­tion of the bur­eau­cracy, but even if the ac­ci­dents of des­potic or the nat­ural work­ing of pop­u­lar in­sti­tu­tions oc­ca­sion­ally raise to the sum­mit a ruler or rulers of re­form­ing in­clin­a­tions, no re­form can be ef­fected which is con­trary to the in­terest of the bur­eau­cracy. Such is the mel­an­choly con­di­tion of the Rus­sian em­pire, as is shown in the ac­counts of those who have had suf­fi­cient op­por­tun­ity of ob­ser­va­tion. 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, by merely re­frain­ing from car­ry­ing it into ef­fect. In coun­tries of more ad­vanced civil­isa­tion and of 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 from the State not only leave to do it, but even how it is to be done, nat­ur­ally hold the State re­spons­ible for all evil which be­falls them, and when the evil ex­ceeds their amount of pa­tience, they rise against the gov­ern­ment and make what is called a re­volu­tion; whereupon 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 it did be­fore; the bur­eau­cracy be­ing un­changed, and nobody else be­ing cap­able of tak­ing their place.

A very dif­fer­ent spec­tacle is ex­hib­ited among a people ac­cus­tomed to trans­act their own busi­ness. In France, a large part of the people hav­ing been en­gaged in mil­it­ary ser­vice, many of whom have held at least the rank of non­com­mis­sioned of­ficers, there are in every pop­u­lar in­sur­rec­tion sev­eral per­sons 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; let them be left without a gov­ern­ment, every 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 this is cer­tain to be free; it will never let it­self be en­slaved by any man or body of men be­cause these are able to seize and pull the reins of the cent­ral ad­min­is­tra­tion. No bur­eau­cracy can hope to make such a people as this do or un­dergo any­thing that they do not like. But where everything is done through the bur­eau­cracy, noth­ing to which the bur­eau­cracy is really ad­verse 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 in draw­ing to it­self and edu­cat­ing for it­self the per­sons of greatest ca­pa­city from all ranks of the com­munity, the more com­plete is the bond­age of all, 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 cul­tiv­ator. An in­di­vidual Je­suit is to the ut­most de­gree of abase­ment the slave of his or­der, though the or­der it­self ex­ists for the col­lect­ive power and im­port­ance of its mem­bers.

It is not, also, to be for­got­ten, that the ab­sorp­tion of all the prin­cipal abil­ity of the coun­try into the gov­ern­ing body is fatal, sooner or later, to the men­tal activ­ity and pro­gress­ive­ness of the body it­self. Ban­ded to­gether as they are—work­ing a sys­tem which, like all sys­tems, ne­ces­sar­ily pro­ceeds in a great meas­ure by fixed rules—the of­fi­cial body are un­der the con­stant tempta­tion of sink­ing into in­dol­ent routine, or, if they now and then desert that mill-horse round, of rush­ing into some half-ex­amined crudity which has struck the fancy of some lead­ing mem­ber of the corps: and the sole check to these closely al­lied, though seem­ingly op­pos­ite, tend­en­cies, the only stim­u­lus which can keep the abil­ity of the body it­self up to a high stand­ard, is li­ab­il­ity 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 fur­nish­ing it with the op­por­tun­it­ies and ex­per­i­ence ne­ces­sary for a cor­rect judg­ment of great prac­tical af­fairs. If we would pos­sess per­man­ently a skil­ful and ef­fi­cient body of func­tion­ar­ies—above all, a body able to ori­gin­ate and will­ing to ad­opt im­prove­ments; if we would not have our bur­eau­cracy de­gen­er­ate into a ped­anto­cracy, this body must not en­gross all the oc­cu­pa­tions which form and cul­tiv­ate the fac­ulties re­quired for the gov­ern­ment of man­kind.

To de­term­ine the point at which evils, so for­mid­able to hu­man free­dom and ad­vance­ment, be­gin, or rather at which they be­gin to pre­dom­in­ate over the be­ne­fits at­tend­ing the col­lect­ive ap­plic­a­tion of the force of so­ci­ety, un­der its re­cog­nised chiefs, for the re­moval of the obstacles which 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 into gov­ern­mental chan­nels too great a pro­por­tion of the gen­eral activ­ity, is one of the most dif­fi­cult and com­plic­ated ques­tions in the art of gov­ern­ment. It is, in a great meas­ure, a ques­tion of de­tail, in which many and vari­ous con­sid­er­a­tions must be kept in view, and no ab­so­lute rule can be laid down. But I be­lieve that the prac­tical prin­ciple in which safety resides, the ideal to be kept in view, the stand­ard by which to test all ar­range­ments in­ten­ded for over­com­ing the dif­fi­culty, may be con­veyed 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 which is not bet­ter left to the per­sons 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 all the loc­al­it­ies, from everything ana­log­ous which is done in for­eign coun­tries, and from the gen­eral prin­ciples of polit­ical sci­ence. This cent­ral or­gan should have a right to know all that is done, and its spe­cial duty should be that of mak­ing the know­ledge ac­quired in one place avail­able for oth­ers. Eman­cip­ated from the petty pre­ju­dices and nar­row views of a loc­al­ity by its el­ev­ated po­s­i­tion and com­pre­hens­ive sphere of ob­ser­va­tion, its ad­vice would nat­ur­ally carry much au­thor­ity; but its ac­tual power, as a per­man­ent in­sti­tu­tion, should, I con­ceive, be lim­ited to com­pel­ling the local of­ficers to obey the laws laid down for their guid­ance. In all things not provided for by gen­eral rules, those of­ficers should be left to their own judg­ment, un­der re­spons­ib­il­ity to their con­stitu­ents. For the vi­ol­a­tion of rules, they should be re­spons­ible to 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 into ef­fect, ap­peal­ing, ac­cord­ing to the nature of the case, to the tribunal to en­force the law, or to the con­stitu­en­cies to dis­miss the func­tion­ar­ies who had not ex­ecuted it ac­cord­ing to its spirit. Such, in its gen­eral con­cep­tion, is the cent­ral su­per­in­tend­ence which the Poor Law Board is in­ten­ded 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, for the cure of rooted habits of mal­ad­min­is­tra­tion in mat­ters deeply af­fect­ing not the loc­al­it­ies merely, but the whole com­munity; since no loc­al­ity has a moral right to make it­self by mis­man­age­ment a nest of pau­per­ism, ne­ces­sar­ily over­flow­ing into other loc­al­it­ies, and im­pair­ing the moral and phys­ical con­di­tion of the whole la­bour­ing com­munity. The powers of ad­min­is­trat­ive co­er­cion and sub­or­din­ate le­gis­la­tion pos­sessed by the Poor Law Board (but which, ow­ing to the state of opin­ion on the sub­ject, are very scantily ex­er­cised by them), though per­fectly jus­ti­fi­able in a case of first-rate na­tional in­terest, would be wholly out of place in the su­per­in­tend­ence of in­terests purely local. But a cent­ral or­gan of in­form­a­tion and in­struc­tion for all the loc­al­it­ies, would be equally valu­able in all de­part­ments of ad­min­is­tra­tion. A gov­ern­ment can­not have too much of the kind of activ­ity which does not im­pede, but aids and stim­u­lates, in­di­vidual ex­er­tion and de­vel­op­ment. The mis­chief be­gins when, in­stead of call­ing forth the activ­ity and powers of in­di­vidu­als and bod­ies, it sub­sti­tutes its own activ­ity for theirs; when, in­stead of in­form­ing, ad­vising, and, upon oc­ca­sion, de­noun­cing, it makes them work in fet­ters, or bids them stand aside and does their work in­stead of 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 of ad­min­is­trat­ive skill, or of that semb­lance of it which prac­tice gives, in the de­tails of busi­ness; a State which dwarfs its men, in or­der that they may be more do­cile in­stru­ments in its hands even for be­ne­fi­cial pur­poses, will find that with small men no great thing 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, in or­der that the ma­chine might work more smoothly, it has pre­ferred to ban­ish.