THE NEW TORYISM. 445 



usage has become well established, it becomes law by receiving au- 

 thoritative recognition and defined form. Manifestly, then. Liberalism 

 in the past, by its practice of limitation, was preparing the way for the 

 principle of limitation. 



But, returning from these more general considerations to the special 

 question, I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys 

 is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery 

 he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the number 

 and degree of the restraints it imposes on him ; and that, whether this 

 machinery is or is not one which he has shared in making, its actions 

 are not of the kind proper to Liberalism if they increase such restraints 

 beyond those which are needful for preventing him from directly or 

 indirectly aggressing on his fellows — needful, that is, for maintaining 

 the liberties of his fellows against his invasions of them ; restraints 

 which are, therefore, to be distinguished as negatively coercive, not 

 positively coercive. 



I doubt not, however, that the Liberal, and still more the sub- 

 species Radical, who more than any other in these latter days seems 

 under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is 

 warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able, will con- 

 tinue to protest. Knowing that his aim is popular benefit of some 

 kind, to be achieved in some way, and believing that the Tory is, con- 

 trariwise, prompted by class-interest and the desire to maintain class- 

 power, he will regard it as palpably absurd to group him as one of 

 the same genus — will scorn, as mere chop-logic, the reasoning used to 

 prove this. 



Perhaps an analogy will help him to see its validity. If, away in 

 the far East, where personal government is the only form of govern- 

 ment known, he heard from the inhabitants the account of a struggle 

 by which they had deposed a cruel and vicious despot, and put in 

 his place one whose acts proved his desire for their welfare — if, after 

 listening to their self-gratulations, he told them that they had not es- 

 sentially changed the nature of their government, he would greatly 

 astonish them ; and probably he would have difficulty in making them 

 understand that the substitution of a benevolent despot for a malevo- 

 lent despot still left the government a despotism. Similarly with Tory- 

 ism as rightly conceived. Standing as it does for coercion by the 

 state versus the freedom of the individual, Toryism remains Toryism, 

 whether it extends this coercion for selfish or unselfish reasons. As 

 certainly as the despot remains a despot, whether his motives are good 

 or bad, so certainly does the Tory remain a Tory, whether he has 

 egoistic or altruistic motives for using state-power to restrict indi- 

 vidual liberty, beyond the degree required for maintaining the liber- 

 ties of other individuals. The altruistic Tory as well as the egoistic 

 Tory belongs to the genus Tory, though he forms a new species of the 

 genus. And both stand in distinct contrast with the Liberal as defined 



