WHAT IS CIVIL LIBERTY? 295 



litical vicissitudes, but the dogma of natural rights was aiding 

 them all the time, by undermining the institutions of the law, 

 and by destroying the confidence of the ruling classes, so far as 

 they were religious and humane, in the justice of the actual sit- 

 uation. 



Therefore the most important fact in regard to the history of 

 the dogma of natural liberty is that that dogma has never had an 

 historical foundation, but is the purest example that could be 

 brought forward of an out-and-out a priori dogma ; that this 

 dogma, among the most favored nations, helped and sustained the 

 emancipation of the masses ; and that, by contagion, it has, in the 

 nineteenth century, spread liberty to the uttermost parts of the 

 earth. At no time during this movement could anybody, by 

 looking backward to history, have found any warrant for the 

 next step to be made in advance. On the contrary, he would 

 have found only warning not to do anything. Such must always 

 be the effect of any appeal to history, as to what we ought to do, 

 or as to what ought to be. It is a strange situation in which we 

 find ourselves, when those of us who are most unfriendly to " met- 

 aphysics," and have most enthusiastic devotion to history, find 

 ourselves compelled to remonstrate against half -educated denial 

 of what speculative philosophy has done and may do for mankind, 

 and also to remonstrate against the cant of an historical method 

 which makes both history and method ridiculous. To go off and 

 begin to talk about history, in the crisis of a modern discussion, 

 is the last and best device of reaction and obscurantism. 



Let it be noticed also that from our present standpoint this 

 doctrine has lost nearly all the arguments which were ever 

 brought to its support. The notion of natural rights is not now 

 held by anybody in the sense of reference to some original histori- 

 cal state of the human race. The biblical scholars would scarcely 

 avow the exegesis by which the doctrine was got out of the Script- 

 ures. The dogma to-day does not stand on the ground of an in- 

 ference from any religious doctrine. The doctrine of evolution, 

 instead of supporting the natural equality of all men, would give 

 a demonstration of their inequality ; and the doctrine of the strug- 

 gle for existence would divorce liberty and equality as incompat- 

 ible with each other. The doctrine, thus stripped of all the props 

 which have been brought to its support, would remain only a poetic 

 inspiration ; but, if all this is admitted, if its historic legitimacy is 

 all taken away, does that detract anything from the beneficence 

 of the doctrine in history, or render invalid a single institution 



refined and beautiful an application of the " teachings of history " as could possibly have 

 been made to that case, yet it requires very little knowledge of the case as it really stood 

 to see that this programme was as unpractical and pedantic as the wildest proposition 

 which could have been made by an a priori philosopher. 



