aggressors, ask whether the benefit to the hungry man who takes bread from a baker's shop, is or is not greater than the injury inflicted on the baker: we consider not the special effects but the general effects which arise if property is insecure. But when the State exacts further amounts from individuals, or further restrains their liberties, we consider only the direct and proximate effects, and ignore the indirect and distant effects which arise when these invasions of individual rights are continually multiplied. We do not see that by accumulated small infractions of them, the vital conditions to life, individual and social, come to be so little fulfilled that the life decays.
Yet the decay thus caused becomes manifest where the policy is pushed to an extreme. Any one who studies, in the writings of MM. Taine and De Tocqueville, the state of things which preceded the French Revolution, will see that that tremendous catastrophe came about from so excessive a regulation of men's actions in all their details, and such an enormous drafting away of the products of their actions to maintain the regulating organization, that life was fast becoming impracticable. The empirical utilitarianism of that day, like the empirical utilitarianism of our day, differed from the rational utilitarianism in this, that it contemplated only the effects of particular interferences on the actions of particular classes of men, and ignored the effects produced by a multiplicity of such interferences upon the lives of men at large. And if we ask what then made, and what now makes, this error possible, we find it to be the political superstition that governmental power is subject to no restraints.
When that "divinity" which "doth hedge a king," and which in our day has left a glamour around the body inheriting his power, has quite faded away—when it begins to be seen clearly that, in a popularly-governed nation, the government is simply a committee of management; it will also be seen that this committee of management has no intrinsic authority. The inevitable conclusion will be that its authority is given by those appointing it; and has just such bounds as they choose to impose. Along with this will go the further conclusion that the laws it passes are not in themselves sacred; but that whatever sacredness they have, is entirely due to the ethical sanction—an ethical sanction which, as we find, is derivable from the laws of human life as carried on under social conditions. And there will come the corollary that when they have not this ethical sanction they have no sacredness, and may rightly be challenged.
The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the powers of kings. The function of true Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the powers of Parliaments.
