312 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



aggressors, ask whether the benefit to the hungry man who takes bread 

 from a baker's shop, is or is not greater than the injury inflicted on the 

 baker : we consider not the special effects but the general effects which 

 arise if property is insecure. But when the State exacts further 

 amounts from individuals, or further restrains their liberties, we con- 

 sider only the direct and proximate effects, and ignore the indirect and 

 distant effects which arise when these invasions of individual rights 

 are continually multiplied. We do not see that by accumulated small 

 infractions of them, the vital conditions to life, individual and social, 

 come to be so little fulfilled that the life decays. 



Yet the decay thus caused becomes manifest where the policy is 

 pushed to an extreme. Any one who studies, in the writings of MM. 

 Taine and De Tocqueville, the state of things which preceded the 

 French Revolution, will see that that tremendous catastrophe came 

 about from so excessive a regulation of men's actions in all their de- 

 tails, and such an enormous drafting away of the products of their 

 actions to maintain the regulating organization, that life was fast be- 

 coming impracticable. The empirical utilitarianism of that day, like 

 the empirical utilitarianism of our day, differed from the rational 

 utilitarianism in this, that it contemplated only the effects of particu- 

 lar interferences on the actions of particular classes of men, and ignored 

 the effects produced by a multiplicity of such interferences upon the 

 lives of men at large. And if we ask what then made, and what now 

 makes, this error possible, we find it to be the political superstition 

 that governmental power is subject to no restraints. 



When that " divinity " which " doth hedge a king," and which in 

 our day has left a glamour around the body inheriting his power, has 

 quite faded away — when it begins to be seen clearly that, in a popu- 

 larly-governed nation, the government is simply a committee of man- 

 agement ; it will also be seen that this committee of management has 

 no intrinsic authority. The inevitable conclusion wdll be that its au- 

 thority is given by those appointing it ; and has just such bounds as 

 they choose to impose. Along with this will go the further conclusion 

 that the laws it passes are not in themselves sacred ; but that what- 

 ever sacredness they have, is entirely due to the ethical sanction — an 

 ethical sanction which, as we find, is derivable from the laws of hu- 

 man life as carried on under social conditions. And there will come 

 the corollary that when they have not this ethical sanction they have 

 no sacredness, and may rightly be challenged. 



The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit 

 to the powers of kings. The function of true Liberalism in the future 

 will be that of putting a limit to the powers of Parliaments. 



