WIT AT IS CIVIL LIBERTY? 291 



tion the fatal effects sprung from the spread of education. While 

 thoughtless or superficial writers pretend to find in education the 

 remedy of all social evils, as a matter of fact education has become 

 the source of a vast amount of human suffering in modern times, 

 under which those whose education is their only patrimony or 

 source of income suffer most." * This is sufficiently explicit, and 

 also manifests the solidarity of all forms of liberty and modern 

 civilization. Those who attack them all show that they appre- 

 ciate the truth of things a great deal better than those who try to 

 attack some and save others. 



4. Then there are the philosophers of the newest school, who, 

 seizing upon the plain fact that all liberty is subject to moral re- 

 straints, as we shall presently see, are forcing upon us, or trying 

 to force upon us, by legislation, restraints on liberty derived from 

 altruistic dogmas, and, in general, under the high-sounding name 

 of ethics, are assuming a charter for interference wherever they 

 choose to allege that they have moral grounds for believing that 

 things ought to be as they want them. 



5. Finally, the anarchists, taking liberty to mean that a man 

 ought to be a law unto himself, and that there should be no other 

 law, have shown from another side that we should try to find out 

 what liberty is. 



The History of the Dogma of Natural Liberty. — The his- 

 tory of the dogma of the natural liberty of all men, with the cog- 

 nate dogma of the natural equality of all men, would be an im- 

 portant topic for exhaustive treatment by itself. From the notes 

 which I have made on the subject I condense as far as possible 

 the following view of it : 



Slavery in the classical states seems to have rested upon the 

 law of war, that the vanquished man with his family and all his 

 property fell under the good pleasure of the conqueror. Xenophon 

 states this law explicitly: "The law is well known among all 

 men that, when a state goes to war, the property and bodies of all 

 in the state are the property of the captors. You will, therefore, 

 not possess wrongfully whatever you get, but, if you permit them 

 to retain anything, it will be out of humanity." \ It seems that 

 the reason why slaves in antiquity so universally accepted their 

 fate was that they understood that such was the fortune of war. 

 They acquiesced in it as according to the rules of the game. The 

 earliest writer in date whom I have found who utters the dogma 

 of liberty is Philemon (fl. c. 350 B. c.) : " No one by nature ever 

 was born a slave, but ill-fortune enslaved the body." % Aristotle 

 discusses the subject in the third and fourth chapters of the first 



* Karoly, "The Dilemmas of Labor and Education," London, 1884, introd., x. 

 f " Kyroped.," vii, 5, 73. Cf. " Memorab.," ii, 2, 2, and Polybius, ii, 5S, 9. 

 % Frag. 39 in ileineke, " Com. Graec," iv, S. 4f. 



