WHAT IS CIVIL LIBERTY? 299 



to force them to stay.* If the landlord wants to turn his land to 

 other use, it is a servitude for him if he can not evict his tenants. 

 The modern peasant proprietor is one in whose status all these 

 privileges and servitudes have met, coalesced, and disappeared, so 

 that they are all summed up in the question whether his land is 

 worth holding and tilling, subject to the taxes which must be paid 

 on it. 



In all these variations and mutations of social status and of 

 the relations of classes, which we might pursue with any amount 

 of detail through the history of the last fifteen hundred years, 

 where is there any such thing as personal liberty of the sort which 

 means doing as one likes ? None have had it but those who were 

 privileged — that is to say, it has lain entirely outside of civil lib- 

 erty. It has had the form of an artificial social monopoly, and 

 the fact has come out distinctly that liberty to do as you please in 

 this world is only possible as a monopoly, but that it is the most 

 valuable monopoly in the world, provided you can get it as a 

 monopoly. You would realize it when you got into the position 

 of Nero, or Louis XIV, or Catharine II. 



We may gather some other cases in point. 



A man who expects to go to the almshouse in his old age may 

 regard a law of settlement as his patent of security, because it 

 defines and secures his place of refuge. A man who is in the 

 same status, but who is determined to better his condition by en- 

 ergy and enterprise, tries to move. He finds the law of settlement 

 a curse, which may hold him down and force him to become a 

 pauper. 



If you are not able to make your own way in the world, you 

 want to be protected by status. If you have ambition and ability 

 to make a career for yourself, you find that status holds you down. 

 In the former case it holds you up, or keeps you from falling ; in 

 the latter it holds you down, or keeps you from rising. On the 

 whole, therefore, it keeps the society stagnant. If numbers do 

 not increase very much, there may not be much suffering. If 

 numbers do increase, there will be mendicancy, pauperism, vaga- 

 bondage, and brigandage. It is a matter of great surprise that so 

 little investigation has been expended on the vagabondage of the 

 middle ages. The students of that period have kept their atten- 

 tion on those who were inside of its institutions. The test of the 

 mediaeval system is to be found in a study of those who were kept 

 out of its institutions. 



If it is a mark of a free man, as in early Rome, to do military 

 duty, every one may regard that function as a right or privilege, 

 rather than as a burden or duty. It may carry with it privileges 



* It was so in Denmark in the last century. See Falbe-Hansen, " Stavnsbaands- 

 Losningen," and the "Nation," 1889, p. 123. 



