254 SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL 



he is enabled to hold his own against industrial competitors 

 who are not restrained by social and humanitarian con- 

 siderations. I think it possible to go further, and to say 

 that even the immoral or unsocialized person is not really 

 wronged by any such regulations, nor deprived of any of 

 his rights. Liberj^jto_^o^wmn^^^scar^ly^^^/, but 

 the use of it is the perversion or negation of a right. The 

 wrong employment of a right always endangers it. There 

 is hardly any right more fundamental than the right to be 

 free. It is the origin and condition of all others, for free- 

 dom is the element within which alone a distinctively 

 human life is possible. Nevertheless the state can step in, 

 under certain circumstances, and take it away, immuring 

 the individual within four walls. And this is done not 

 merely in order to protect society against the criminal. It 

 is better for the criminal himself to be walled in than to 

 follow his evil ways unhindered, even although he may not 

 acknowledge it. Punishment may very well be, and always 



is, when it fulfils its purpose, the only way left to us to 

 protect the criminal against himself and restore to him his 

 violated humanity. 



I do not think, therefore, that the social tendencies of 

 the present day point to a limitation of individual inde- 

 pendence and enterprise, even although legislation is 

 prohibitive as against certain alleged rights and the positive 

 functions of society are being constantly enlarged. I 

 think we may look forward to the future not without 

 confidence. But that confidence were sadly misplaced if 

 it were true that law and liberty were like two sections of 

 a confined surface ; if social ends and individual ends were 

 mutually exclusive ; if the prohibition of the misuse of 

 wealth and of the power it gives threatened the right to 



