THE NEW TORYISM. 443 



additional staff of officers, and partly to meet the outlay for new pub- 

 lic institutions, such as board-schools, free libraries, public museums, 

 baths and wash-houses, recreation-grounds, etc., local rates are year 

 after year increased, as the general taxation is increased by grants to 

 the departments of science and art, etc. Every one of these involves 

 further coercion — restricts still more the free action of the citizen. 

 For the implied address accompanying every additional exaction is : 

 " Hitherto you have been free to spend this portion of your earnings 

 in any way which pleased you ; hereafter you shall not so spend it, 

 but we will spend it for the general benefit." Thus, either directly 

 or indirectly, and in most cases both at once, the citizen is, at each 

 further stage in the growth of this compulsory legislation, deprived 

 in one or other way of some liberty which he previously had. 



Such, then, are the doings of the party which claims the name of 

 Liberal, and which calls itself Liberal as being the advocate of ex- 

 tended freedom. 



I doubt not that many a so-called Liberal will have read the pre- 

 ceding section with impatience, wanting, as he does, to point out an 

 immense oversight which he thinks destroys the validity of the argu- 

 ment. " You forget," he wishes to say, " the fundamental difference 

 between the power which, in the past, established those restraints that 

 Liberalism abolished, and the power which, in the present, establishes 

 the restraints you call anti-Liberal. You forget that the one was an 

 irresponsible power, while the other is a responsible power. You for- 

 get that, if by the recent legislation of Liberals people are variously 

 regulated, the body which regulates them is of their own creating, 

 and has their warrant for its acts." 



My answer is, that I have not forgotten this difference, but am 

 prepared to contend that the difference is in large measure irrelevant 

 to the issue. 



In the first place, the real issue is whether the lives of citizens are 

 more interfered with than they were ; not the nature of the agency 

 which interferes with them. Take a simpler case. A member of a 

 trades-union has joined others in establishing an organization of a 

 purely representative character. By it he is compelled to turn out 

 if a majority so decide ; he is forbidden to accept work save under 

 the conditions they dictate ; he is prevented from profiting by his 

 superior ability or energy to the extent he might do were it not for 

 their interdict. And he can not disobey without abandoning those 

 pecuniary benefits of the organization for which he has subscribed, 

 and bringing on himself the persecution, and perhaps violence, of his 

 fellows. Is he any the less coerced because the body coercing him 

 is one which he had an equal voice with the rest in forming ? 



In the second place, if it be objected that the analogy is faulty, 

 since the governing body of a nation, to which, as protector of the 



