1917] on Some Guarantees of Liberty 105 



for a higher object is not imposed (upon it)." In the course of our 

 history we, too, have known and resisted, not without success, the 

 doctrines of divine right and the tyranny of Kings and State officials 

 claiming to possess a semi-transcendental authority deriving from 

 their position as delegates of royalty ; but we have fortunately never 

 had a Hegel or a Treitschke to frame for the British State a pseudo- 

 scientific character of absolutism. In any case our national sense of 

 humour would probably have saved us from taking seriously the 

 pretentious phrase-making of a philosopher like Hegel, which the 

 keen critical sense of Schopenhauer, in his Kritik der Kantischen 

 Philosophies castigated as follows : — " The greatest impudence in 

 dishing up pure nonsense, in pasting together wild and senseless 

 tissues of words, such as have hitherto been found only in lunatic 

 asylums, appeared in Hegel and became the instrument of the 

 grossest general mystification ever seen^with a success that will 

 seem fabulous to posterity and will remain a monument of German 

 foolishness." Xevertheless we have not entirely escaped the con- 

 tagion of Hegel's " German foolishness." Some of our writers and 

 political thinkers have mistaken it for transcendental wisdom. The 

 effects of their advocacy of German ideas are clearly to be discerned. 

 AVe need therefore to be on our guard lest we go astray when we 

 presently find ourselves confronted by unforeseen consequences of 

 the great sacrifices of individual liberty which we have made — and 

 rightly made — during the war in the cause of national self- 

 preservation. 



These sacrifices have been prompted by the sound and healthy 

 instinct that recognizes the sense of responsibility towards the com- 

 munity 0' the part of the individual to be an indispensaljle corollary 

 ■of individual freedom in the community. This sense of responsi- 

 bility is the very basis of freedom. All changes in State reorganiza- 

 tion that tend to shift responsibility from the individual on to the 

 State and to make individuals feel that others are watching over and 

 for them, need to be accompanied by a corresponding increase in the 

 moral and political virility of the individual. Otherwise the weaken- 

 ing of his sense of personal responsibility would tend to diminish 

 the security of the community as a whole. 



There is some analogy between the true doctrine of individual 

 freedom in a free community and that of the Roman Church in 

 regard to the "rights " of its members. Some twenty years ago an 

 enterprising Roman prelate sought to prove that the doctrine of his 

 Church was entirely compatible with the passage in the American Con- 

 stitution which declares every man to have a natural right to " life, 

 liberty and the pursuit of happiness." He was presently admonished 

 by the ecclesiastical authorities and instructed that the only "rights" 

 possessed by Christians are contingent upon the performance of their 

 duty — the duty of saving their souls. Though the doctrine of civil 

 liberty in an organized community cannot be thus dogmatically 



