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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
UTILITARIANISM
BY
JEREMY BENTHAM.
Price Threepence.
LONDON:
PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY,.
28 Stonecutter. Street, E.O.
1890.
�LONDON:
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY G. W. FOOTE,
28 STONECUTTER STREET, E.C.
�Mo Co
PUBLISHER ’S
NOTE.
The following reprint is from Bentham’s Introduction to the
Principles of Morals and Legislation. This is one of his most
important and characteristic works. The first edition was
printed in 1780, and published in 1789. “A New Edition,
corrected by the Author ” was published in 1823. This ex
explains the different styles observable in the footnotes.
Bentham’s early writing was lucid and direct, his plater
writing was somewhat turbid and much involved.
This reprint comprises the first two chapters of Bentham’s
work. Two or three footnotes, of no present importance or
application, -have been omitted. For .the sake of convenience
two very long footnotes to the second chapter have been
printed as appendices.
A title had to be selected for the reprint, and Utilitarianism,
has been chosen. There is no danger of its being confused
with the larger work of John Stuart Mill.
��CHAPTER I.
OF THE PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY.
L Nature has placed mankind under the governance of
two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them
alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine
what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and
wrong, on the other the chain of causesand effects, are fastened to
their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all
we think : every effort we can make to throw off our subjection,
will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man
may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will
remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility
*
recognises this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation
of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of
felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which
* Note by the Author, July 1822.
To this denomination has of late been added, or substituted, the
greatest happiness or greatest felicity principle : this for shortness, instead
of saying at length that principle which states the greatest happiness of
all those whose interest is in question, as being the right and proper,
and only right and proper and universally desirable, end of human action :
of human action in every situation, and in particular in that of a func
tionary or set of functionaries exercising the powers of Government. The
word utility does not so clearly point to the ideas of pleasure and pain as
the words happiness and felicity do : nor does it lead us to the considera
tion of the number of the interests affected ; to the number, as being the
circumstance, which contributes, in the largest proportion, to the forma
tion of the standard here in question ; the standard of right and wrong,
by which alone the propriety of human conduct, in every situation, can
with propriety be tried. This want of a sufficiently manifest connexion
between the ideas of happiness and pleasure on the one hand, and the idea
of utility on the other, I nave every now and then found operating, and
with but too much efficiency, as a bar to the acceptance, that might
otherwise have been given, to this principle.
�6
Uti litarianism.
attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in
caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.
But enough of metaphor and declamation : it is not by such
means that moral science is to be improved.
II. The principle of utility is the foundation of the present
work; it will be proper therefore at the outset to give an ex
plicit and determinate account of what is meant by it. By
the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves
*
or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the
tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the
happiness of the party whose interest is in question : or, what
is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that
happiness. I say of every action whatsoever; and therefore
not only of every action of a private individual, but of every
measure of government.
III. By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby
it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happi
ness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or
(what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening
of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose
interest is considered : if that party be the community in
general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular
individual, then the happiness of that individual.
IV. The interest of the community is one of the most
general expressions that can occur in the phraseology of
morals : no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost. When
it has a meaning, it is this. The community is a fictitious body,
composed of the individual persons who are considered as con
stituting as it were its members. The interest of the com
* The word principle is derived from the Latin principium : which
seems to be compounded of the two words primus, first, or chief, and
cipium, a termination which seems to be derived from capio, to take, as in
mancipium, municipium; to which are analogous auceps, forceps and
Others. It is a term of very vague and very extensive signification : it is
applied to any thing which is conceived to serve as a foundation or
beginning to any series of operations : in some cases, of physical opera
tions ; but of mental operations in the present case.
The principle here in question may be taken for an act of the mind ; a
sentiment; a sentiment of approbation ; a sentiment which, when applied
■ to an action, approves of its utility, as that quality of it by which the
measure of approbation or disapprobation bestowed upon it ought to be
governed.
�Uti litarianism.
7
munity then is, what ?—the sum of the interests of the several
members who compose it.
V. It is in vain to talk of the interest of the community,
without understanding what is the interest of the individual.
*
A thing is said to promote the interest, or to be for the interest,
of an individual, when it tends to add to the sum total of his
pleasures : or, what comes to the same thing, to diminish the
sum total of his pains.
VI. An action then may be said to be conformable to the
principle of utility, or, for shortness sake, to utility (meaning
with respect to the community at large) when the tendency it
has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than
any it has to diminish it.
VII. A measure of government (which is but a particular
kind of action, performed by a particular- person or persons)
may be said to be conformable to or dictated by the principle
of utility, when in like manner the tendency which it has to
augment the happiness of the community is greater than any
which it has to diminish it.
VIII. When an action, or in particular a measure of govern
ment, is supposed by a man to be conformable to the principle
or utility, it may(be convenient, for the purposes of discourse, to
imagine a kind of law or dictate, called a law or dictate of
utility: and to speak of the action in question, as being con
formable to such law or dictate.
IX. A man may be said to be a partisan of the principle of
utility, when the approbation or disapprobation he annexes to
any action, or to any measure, is determined by and propor
tioned to the tendency which he conceives it to have to augment
or to diminish the happiness of the community: or in other
words, to its conformity or unconformity to the laws or dictates
of utility.
X. Of an action that is conformable to the principle of utility,
one may always say eithei- that it is one that ought to be done,
©r at least that it is not one that ought not to be done. One
may say also, that it is right it should be done ; at least that it
is not wrong it should be done : that it is a right action; at
least that it is not a wrong action. When thus interpreted, the
* Interest is one of those words, which not having any superior genus,
eannot in the ordinary way be defined.
�Utilitarianism.
words ought, and right and wrong, and others of that stamp,
have a meaning: when otherwise, they have none.
XI. Has the rectitude of this principle been ever formally
contested? It should seem that it had, by those who have not
known what they have been meaning. Is it susceptible of any
direct proof ? it should seem not: for that which is used to
prove everything else, cannot itself be proved: a chain of
proofs must have their commencement somewhere. To give
.such proof is as impossible as it is needless.
XII. Not that there is or ever has been that human creature
breathing, however stupid or perverse, who has not on many,
perhaps on most occasions of his life, deferred to it. By the
natural constitution of the human frame, on most occasions of
their lives men in general embrace this principle, without
thinking of it: if not for the ordering of their own actions, yet
for the trying of their own actions, as well as of those of other
men. There have been, at the same time, not many, perhaps,
even of the most intelligent, who have been disposed to embrace
it purely and without reserve. There are even few who have
not taken some occasion or other to quarrel with it, either on
account of their not understanding always how to apply it, or
on account of some prejudice or other which they were afraid
to examine into, or could not bear to part with. For such is
the stuff that man is made of : in principle and in practice, in
a right track, and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human
qualities is consistency.
XIII. When a man attempts to combat the principle of
utility, it is with reasons drawn, without his being aware of it,
from that very principle itself. His arguments, if they prove
*
anything, prove not that the principle is wrong, but that,
according to the applications he supposes to be made of it, it is
misapplied. Is it possible for a man to move the earth ?
Yes ; but he must first find out another earth to stand upon.
XIV. To disprove the propriety of it by arguments is im
possible ; but, from the causes that have been mentioned, or
from some confused or partial view of it, a man may happen to
_ * “ The principle of utility (I have heard it said), is a dangerous prin
ciple : it is dangerous on certain occasions to consult it.” This is as
much as to say, what ? that it is not consonant to utility, to consult
utility : in short, that it is not consulting it, to consult it.
�Utilitarianism.
9
be disposed not to relish it. Where this is the case, if he
thinks the settling of his opinions on such a subject worth the
trouble, let him take the following steps, and at length, perhaps,
h® may come to reconcile himself to it.
1. Let him settle with himself, whether he would wish to
discard this principle altogether; if so, let him considei’ what
it is that all his reasonings (in matters of politics especially)
can amount to ?
2. If he would, let him settle with himself, whether he would
judge and act without any principle, or whether there is any
other he would judge and act by ?
3. If there be, let him examine and satisfy himself whethei’
the principle he thinks he has found is really any separate in
telligible principle; or whether it be not a mere principle in
words, a kind of phrase, which at bottom expresses neither
more nor less than the mere averment of his own unfounded
sentiments ; that is, what in another person he might be apt to
call caprice?
4. If he is inclined to think that his own approbation or dis
approbation, annexed to the idea of an act, without any regard
to its consequences, is a sufficient foundation for him to judge
and act upon, let him ask himself whether his sentiment is to
be a standard of right and wrong, with respect to every other
man, or whether every man’s sentiment’has the same privilege
©f being a standard to itself ?
5. In the first case, let him ask himself whether his prin
ciple is not despotical, and hostile to all the rest of human race ?
6. In the second case, whether it is not anarchial, and
whether at this rate there are not as many different standards
of right and wrong as there are men ? and whether even to the
same man, the same thing, which is right to-day, may not
(without the least change in its nature) be wrong to-morrow ?
and whether the same thing is not right and wrong in the same
place at the same time ? and in either case, whether all argu
ment is not at an end ? and whether, when two men have said,
* I like this,” and “ I don’t like it,” they can (upon such a
principle) have anything more to say ?
7. If he should have said to himself, No : for that the senti
ment which he proposes as a standard must be grounded on
reflection, let him say on what particulars the reflection is to
�10
Utilitarianism.
turn ? if on particulars having relation to the utility of the act,
then let him say whether this is not deserting his own prin
ciple, and borrowing assistance from that very one in opposition
to which he sets it up : or if not on those particulars, on what
other particulars ?
8. If he should be for compounding the matter, and adopting
his own principle in part, and the principle of utility in part,
let him say how far he will adopt it ?
9. When he has settled with himself where he will stop, then
let him ask himself how he justifies to himself the adopting it
so far ? and why he will not adopt it any farther ?
10. Admitting any other principle than the principle of
utility to be a right principle, a principle that it is right for a
man to pursue; admitting (what is not true) that the word
right can have a meaning without reference to utility, let him
say whether there is any such thing as a motive that a man can
have to pursue the dictates of it: if there is, let him say what
that motive is, and how it is to be distinguished from those
which enforce the dictates of utility; if not, then lastly let
him say what it is this other principle can be good for ?
�Uti litarianism.
11
CHAPTER II.
OF PRINCIPLES ADVERSE TO THAT OF UTILITY.
I. If the principle of utility be a right principle to be
governed by, and that in all cases, it follows from ’what has
been just observed, that whatever principle differs from it in
any case must necessarily be a wrong one. To prove any other
principle, therefore, to be a wrong one, there needs no more
than just to show it to be what it is, a principle of which the
dictates are in some point or other different from those of the
principle of utility : to state it is to confute it.
II. A principle may be different from that of utility in two
ways: 1. By being constantly opposed to it: this is the case
with a principle which may be termed the principle of asceti
*
cism 2. By being sometimes opposed to it, and sometimes
not, as it may happen : this is the case with another, which
may be termed the principle of sympathy and antipathy.
III. By the principle of asceticism I mean that principle,
which, like the principle of utility, approves or disapproves of
any action, according to the tendency which it appears to have
* Ascetic is a term that has been, sometimes applied to monks. It comes
from a G-reek word which signifies exercise. The practices by which
monks sought to distinguish themselves from other men were called their
exercises. These exercises consisted in so many contrivances they had
for tormenting themselves. By this they thought to ingratiate them
selves with the Deity. For the Deity, said they, is a Being of infinite
benevolence : now a Being of the most ordinary benevolence is pleased
to see others make themselves as happy as they can : therefore to make
ourselves as unhappy as we can is the way to please the Deity. If any
body asked them, what motive they could find for doing all this ? Oh ! said
they, you are not to imagine that we are punishing ourselves for nothing :
we know very well what we are about. You are to know, that for every
grain of pain it costs us now, we are to have a hundred grains of pleasure
by and by. The case is, that God loves to see us torment ourselves at
present; indeed he has as good as told us so. But this is done only to
try us, in order just to see how we should behave : which it is plain he
could not know, without making the experiment. Now then, from the
satisfaction it gives him to see us make ourselves as unhappy as we can
make ourselves in this present life, we have a sure proof of the satis
faction it will give him to see us as happy as he can make us in a life to
come.
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Utilitarianism.
to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose
interest is in question; but in an inverse manner: approving
of actions in as far as they tend to diminish his happiness;
disapproving of them in as far as they tend to augment it.
IV. It is evident that any one who reprobates any the least
particle of pleasure, as such, from whatever source derived, is
pro tanto a partisan of the principle of asceticism. It is only
upon that principle, and not from the principle of utility, that
the most abominable pleasure which the vilest of malefactors
ever reaped from his crime would be to be reprobated, if it
stood alone. The case is, that it never does stand alone; but
is necessarily followed by such a quantity of pain (or, what
comes to the same thing, such a chance for a certain quantity
of pain), that the pleasure in comparison of it, is as nothing:
and this is the true and sole, but perfectly sufficient, reason for
making it a ground for punishment.
V. There are two classes of men of very different com
plexions, by whom the principle of asceticism appears to have
been embraced; the one a set of moralists, the other a set of
religionists. Different accordingly have been the motives
which appear to have recommended it to the notice of these
different parties. Hope, that is the prospect of pleasure, seems
to have animated the former : hope, the aliment of philosophic
pride : the hope of honor and reputation at the hands of men.
Fear, that is the prospect of pain, the latter : fear, the offspring
of superstitious fancy : the fear of future punishment at the
hands of a splenetic and revengeful Deity. I say in this case
fear: for of the invisible future, fear is more powerful than
hope. These circumstances characterise the two different
parties among the partisans of the principle of asceticism ; the
parties and their motives different, the principle the same.
VI. The religious party, however, appear to have carried it
farther than the philosophical: they have acted more con
sistently and less wisely. The philosophical party have
scarcely gone farther than to reprobate pleasure : the religious
party have frequently gone so far as to make it a matter of
merit and of duty to court pain. The philosophical party have
hardly gone farther than the making pain a matter of indiffer
ence. It is no evil, they have said: they have not said, it is a
good. They have not so much as reprobated all pleasure in
�Utilitarianism.
13
tike tamp. They have discarded only what they have called
the gross ; that is, such as are organical, or of which the origin
is easily traced up to such as are organical: they have even
cherished and magnified the refined. Yet this, however, not
under the name of pleasure : to cleanse itself from the sordes
of its impure original, it was necessary it should change its
name : the honorable, the glorious, the reputable, the becoming,
the honestum, the decorum, it was to be called: in short, any
thing but pleasure.
VII. From these two sources have flowed the doctrines from
which the sentiments of the bulk of mankind have all along
received a tincture of this principle; some from the philo
sophical, some from the religious, some from both. Men of
education more frequently from the philosophical, as more
suited to the elevation of their sentiments : the vulgar more
frequently from the superstitious, as more suited to the narrow
ness of their intellect, undilated by knowledge : and to the
abjectness of their condition, continually open to the attacks
of fear. The tinctures, however, derived from the two sources,
would naturally intermingle, insomuch that a man would not
always know by which of them he was most influenced : and
they would often serve to corroborate and enliven one another.
It was this conformity that made a kind of alliance between
parties of a complexion otherwise so dissimilar : and disposed
them to unite upon various occasions against the common
enemy, the partisan of the principle of utility, whom they
joined in branding with the odious name of Epicurean.
VIII. The principle of asceticism, however, with whatever
fWarmth it may have been embraced by its partizans as a rule of
private conduct, seems not to have been carried to any consider
able length, when applied to the business of government. In a
few instances it has been carried a little way by the philosophical
party ; witness the Spartan regimen. Though then, perhaps, it
maybe considered as having been a measure of security : and an
application, though a precipitate and perverse application, of
the principle of utility. Scarcely in any instances, to any con
siderable length, by the religious: for the various monastic
orders, and the societies of the Quakers, Dumplers, Moravians,
and other religionists, have been free societies, whose regimen
Bo man has been astricted to without the intervention of his
�14
Ut i litarian ism.
own consent. Whatever merit a man may have thought there
would be in making himself miserable, no such notion seems ever
to have occurred to any of them, that it may be a merit, much less
a duty, to make others miserable : although it should seem that
if a certain quantity of misery were a thing so desirable, it would
not matter much whether it were brought by each man upon
himself, or by one man upon another. It is true, that from the
same source from whence, among the religionists, the attach
ment to the principle of asceticism took its rise, flowed other
doctrines and practices, from which misery in abundance was
produced in one man by the instrumentality of another : wit
ness the holy wars, and the persecutions for religion. But the
passion for producing misery in these cases proceeded upon
some special ground : the exercise of it was confined to persons
of particular description: they were tormented, not as men,
but as heretics and infidels. To have inflicted the same
miseries on their fellow-believers and fellow-sectaries, would
have been as blameable in the eyes even of these religionists,
as in those of a partisan of the principle of utility. For a man
to give himself a certain number of stripes was indeed meri
torious : but to give the same number of stripes to another
man, not consenting, would have, been a sin. We read of
saints, who for the good of their souls, and the mortification
of their bodies, have voluntarily yielded themselves a prey to
vermin : but though many persons of this class have wielded
the reins of empire, we read of none who have set themselves
to work, and made laws on purpose, with a view of stocking
the body politic with the breed of highwaymen, housebreakers,
or incendiaries. If at any time they have suffered the nation
to be preyed upon by swarms of idle pensioners, or useless
placemen, it has rather been from negligence and imbecility,
than from any settled plan for oppressing and plundering of
the people. If at any time they have sapped the sources of
national wealth, by cramping commerce, and driving the
inhabitants into emigration, it has been with other views, and
in pursuit of other ends. If they have declaimed against the
pursuit of pleasure, and the use of wealth, they have commonly
stopped at declamation: they have not, like Lycurgus, made
express ordinances for the purpose of banishing the precious
metals. If they have established idleness by a law, it has
�Utilitarianism.
15
been not because idleness, the mother of vice and misery, is
itself a virtue, but because idleness (say they) is the road to
holiness. If under the notion of fasting, they have joined in
the plan of confining their subjects to a diet, thought by some
to be of the most nourishing and prolific nature, it has been
not for the sake of making them tributaries to the nations by
whom that diet was to be supplied, but for the sake of mani
festing their own power, and exercising the obedience of the
people. If they have established, or suffered to be established,
punishments for the breach of celibacy, they have done no
more than comply with the petitions of those deluded rigorists.
who, dupes to the ambitious and deep-laid policy of their
rulers, first laid themselves under that idle obligation by
a vow.
IX. The principle of asceticism seems originally to have been
the reverie of certain hasty speculators, who having perceived,
(Jr fancied, that certain' pleasures, when reaped in certain cir
cumstances, have, at the long run, been attended with pains more
than equivalent to them, took occasion to quarrel with every
thing that offered itself under the name of pleasure. Having
then got thus far, and having forgot the point which they set
out from, they pushed on, and went so much further as to think
it meritorious to fall in love with pain. Even this, we see, is
at bottom but the principle of utility misapplied.
X. The principle of utility is capable of being consistently
pursued; and it is but tautology to say, that the more con
sistently it is pursued, the better it must ever be for human
kind. The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can
be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one
tenth part of the inhabitants of this earth pursue it consistently,
and in a day’s time they will have turned it into a hell.
XI. Among principles adverse to that of utility, that which
*
at this day seems to have most influence in matters of govern
ment, is what may be called the principle of sympathy and
antipathy. By the principle of sympathy and antipathy, I
mean that principle which approves or disapproves of certain
actions, not on account of their tending to augment the happi
ness, nor yet on account of their tending to diminish the
See Appendix I.
�16
Utilitarianism.
happiness of the party whose interest is in question, but merely
because a man finds himself disposed to approve or disapprove
of them: holding up that approbation or disapprobation as a
sufficient reason for itself, and disclaiming the necessity of
looking out for any extrinsic ground. Thus far in the general
department of morals : and in the particular department of
politics, measuring out the quantum (as well as determining
the ground) of punishment,by the degree of the disapprobation.
XII. It is manifest, that this is rather a principle in name
than in reality : it is not a positive principle of itself, so much
as a term employed to signify the negation of all principle.
What one expects to find in a principle is something that points
out some external consideration, as a means of warranting and
guiding the internal sentiments of approbation and disappro
bation : this expectation is but ill fulfilled by a proposition,
which does neither more nor less than hold up each of those
sentiments as a ground and standard for itself.
XIII. In looking over the catalogue of human actions (says
a partisan of this principle) in order to determine which of
them are to be marked with the seal, of disapprobation, you
need but to take counsel of your own feelings : whatever you
find in yourself a propensity to condemn, is wrong for that
very reason. For the same reason it is also meet for punish
ment : in what proportion it is adverse to utility, or whether it
be adverse to utility at all, is a matter that makes no difference.
In that same proportion also is it meet for punishment: if you
hate much, punish much : if you hate little, punish little :
punish as you hate. If you hate not at all, punish not at all:
the fine feelings of the soul are not to be overborne and
tyrannised by the harsh and rugged dictates of political utility.
XIV. The various systems that have been formed concerning
the standard of right and wrong, may all be reduced to the
principle of sympathy and antipathy. One account may serve
for all of them. They consist all of them in so many con
trivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external
standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept of the
author’s sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself. The
phrases different, but the principle the same.
*
See Appendix II.
�Utilitarianism.
17
XV. It is manifest, that the dictates of this principle will
frequently coincide with those of utility, though perhaps with
out intending any such thing. Probably more frequently than
not: and hence it is that the business of penal justice is carried
on upon that tolerable sort of footing upon which we see it
carried on in common at this day. For what more natural or
more general ground of hatred to a practice can there be, than
the mischievousness of such practice ? What all men are
exposed to suffer by, all men will be disposed to hate. It is
far yet, however, from being a constant ground : for when a
man suffers, it is not always that he knows what it is he suffers
by. A man may suffer grievously, for instance, by a new tax,
without being able to trace up the cause of his sufferings to the
injustice of some neighbor, who has eluded the payment of an
old one.
XVI. The principle of sympathy and antipathy is most apt
to err on the side of severity. It is for applying punishment
in many cases which deserve none : in many cases which
deserve some, it is for applying more than they deserve.
There is no incident imaginable, be it ever so trivial, and so
remote from mischief, from which this principle may not extract
a ground of punishment. Any difference in taste : any differ
ence in opinion : upon one subject as well as upon another.
No disagreement so trifling which perseverance and altercation
will not render serious. Each becomes in the other’s eyes an
enemy, and, if laws permit, a criminal. This is one of the
*
*_King James the First of England had conceived a violent antipathy
against Arians : two of whom he burnt. This gratification he procured
himself without much difficulty : the notions of the times were favorable
to it. He wrote a furious book against Vorstius, for being what was
called an Arminian : for Vorstius was at a distance. He also wrote a
furious book called A Counterblast to Tobacco, against the use of that drug
which Sir Walter Raleigh had then lately introduced. Had the notions
of the times co-operated with him, he would have burnt the Anabaptist
and the smoker of tobacco in the same fire. However he had the satis
faction of putting Raleigh to death afterwards, though for another crime
Disputes concerning the comparative excellence of French and Italian
music have occasioned very serious bickerings at Paris. One of the
parties would not have been sorry (says Mr. D’Alembert) to have
brought government into the quarrel. Pretences were sought after and
Urged. Long before that, a dispute of like nature, and of at least equal
warmth, had been kindled at London upon the comparative merits of two
©omposers at London ; where riots between the approvers and disapprovers of a new play are, at this day, not unfrequent. The ground of
quarrel between the Big-endians and the Little-endians in the fable, was
B
�18
Utilitarianism.
circumstances by which the human race is distinguished (not
much indeed to its advantage) from the brute creation.
XVII. It is not, however, by any means unexampled for this
principle to err on the side of lenity. A near and perceptible
mischief moves antipathy. A remote and imperceptible mis
chief, though not less real, has no effect. Instances in proof of
this will occur in numbers in the course of the work. It
would be breaking in upon the order of it to give them here.
XVIII. It may be wondered, perhaps, that in all this while
no mention has been made of the theological principle; meaning
that principle which professes to recur for the standard of right
and wrong to the will of God. But the case is, this is not in
fact a distinct principle. It is never anything more or less
than one or other of the three before-mentioned principles presenting itself under another shape. The will of God here
meant cannot be his revealed will, as contained in the sacred
writings : for that is a system which nobody ever thinks of
recurring to at this time of day, for the details of political
administration : and even before it can be applied to the details
of private conduct, it is universally allowed, by the most
eminent divines of all persuasions, to stand in need of pretty
ample interpretations ; else to what use are the works of those
divines ? And for the guidance of these interpretations, it is
also allowed, that some other standard must be assumed. The
will then which is meant on this occasion, is that which may
be called the presumptive will: that is to say, that which is
presumed to be his will on account of the conformity of its
dictates to those of some other principle. What then may be
this other principle ? it must be one or other of the three men
tioned above : for there cannot, as we have seen, be any more.
It is plain, therefore, that, setting revelation out of the questipn,
no light can ever be thrown upon the standard of right and
wrong, by anything that can be said upon the question, what
is God’s will. We may be perfectly sure, indeed, that what
not more frivolous than many an one which has laid empires desolate.
In Russia, it is said, there was a time when some thousands of persons
lost their lives in a quarrel, in which the government had taken part,
about the number of fingers to be used in making the sign of the cross.
This was in days of yore: the ministers of Catherine II. are better
instructed than to take any other part in such disputes, than of preventing
the parties concerned from doing one another a mischief.
�Utilitarianism.
19'
ever is right is conformable to the will of God: but so far is
that from answering the purpose of showing us what is right,that it is necessary to know first whether a thing is right, in
order to know from thence whether it be conformable to the
will of God.
*
XIX. There are two things which are very apt to be con
founded, but which it imports us carefully to distinguish :—the
motive or cause, which, by operating on the mind of an indi
vidual, is productive of any act: and the ground or reason
which warrants a legislator, or other bystander, in regarding
that act with an eye of approbation. When the act happens,,
in the particular instance in question, to be productive of
effects which we approve of, much more if we happen to
observe that the same motive may frequently be productive, inother instances, of the like effects, we are apt to transfer our'
approbation to the motive itself, and to assume, as the just
ground for the approbation we bestow on the act, the circum
stance of its originating from that motive. It is in this way
that the sentiment of antipathy has often been considered as a
just ground of action. Antipathy, for instance, in such or such
a case, is the cause of an action which is attended with good
effects: but this does not make it a right ground of action in
that case, any more than in any other. Still farther. Not only
the effects are good, but the agent sees beforehand that they
will be so. This may make the action indeed a perfectly righ
action : but it does not make antipathy a right ground of action
* The principle of theology refers everything to God’s pleasure. Bu
what is God’s pleasure ? God does not, he confessedly does not now
either speak or write to us. How then are we to know what is his
pleasure ? By observing what is our own pleasure, and pronouncing it
to be his. Accordingly, what is called the pleasure of God, is and must
necessarily be (revelation apart) neither more nor less than the good
pleasure of the person, whoever he be, who is pronouncing what he
believes, or pretends, to be God’s pleasure. How know you it to be God’s
pleasure that such or such an act should be abstained from? whence
come you even to suppose as much ? “ Because the engaging in it would,
I imagine, be prejudicial upon the whole to the happiness of mankind ” ■
says the partisan of the principle of utility : “ Because the commission of
it is attended with a gross and sensual, or at least with a trifling and
transient satisfaction ” ; says the partisan of the principle of asceticism :
“ Because I detest the thoughts of it ; and I cannot, neither ought I to
be called upon to tell why,” says he who proceeds upon the principle of
antipathy. In the words of one or other of these must that person neces
sarily answer (revelation apart) who professes to take for his standard
the will of God.
�20
TJti litarianism.
For the same sentiment of antipathy, if implicitly deferred to,
may he, and very frequently is, productive of the very worst
■effects. Antipathy, therefore, can never be a right ground of
action. No more, therefore, can resentment, which, as will be
seen more particularly hereafter, is but a modification of anti
pathy. The only right ground of action, that can possibly
subsist, is, after all, the consideration of utility, which, if it is
a right principle of action, and of approbation, in any one case,
is so in every other. Other principles in abundance, that is,
other motives, may be the reasons why such and such an act
has been done : that is, the reasons or causes of its being
done : but it is this alone that can be the reason why it might
or ought to have been done. Antipathy or resentment requires
always to be regulated, to prevent its doing mischief: to be
regulated by what ? always by the principle of utility. The
principle of utility neither requires nor admits of any other
regulator than itself.
�IJtilitarianism.
21
APPENDIX I. to CHAPTER II.
[Bentham’s long footnote to “Among principles adverse,” in Section XT.,
is here printed as an Appendix.]
The following Note was first printed in January 1789.
It ought rather to have been styled, more extensively, the
principle of caprice. Where it applies to the choice of actions
to be marked out for injunction or prohibition, for reward or
punishment (to stand, in a word, as subjects for obligations to
be imposed), it may indeed with propriety be termed, as in the
text, the principle of sympathy and antipathy. But this apellative does not so well apply to it, when occupied in the choice
of the events which are to serve as sources of title with respect
to rights: where the actions prohibited and allowed, the obli
gations and rights, being already fixed, the only question is,
under what circumstances a man is to be invested with the one
or subjected to the other ? from what incidents occasion is to
be taken to invest a man, or to refuse to invest him, with the
on®, or to subject him to the other? In this latter case it may
more appositely be characterised by the name of the phantastic
principle. Sympathy and antipathy are affections of the
sensible faculty. But the choice of titles with respect to rights,
especially with respect to proprietary rights, upon grounds un
connected with utility, has been in many instances the work,
not of the affections but of the imagination.
When, in justification of an article of English Common Law,
calling uncles to succeed in certain cases in preference to
fathers, Lord Coke produced a sort of ponderosity he had dis
covered in rights, disqualifying them from ascending in a
straight line, it was not that he loved uncles particularly, or
hated fathers, but because the analogy, such as it was, was
what his imagination presented him with, instead of a reason,
and because, to a judgment unobservant of the standard of
utility, or unacquainted with the art of consulting it, where
affection is out of the way, imagination is the only guide.
�22
Utilitarianism.
When I know not what ingenions grammarian invented the
proposition Delegatus non potest delegare, to serve as a rule of
law, it was not surely that he had any antipathy to delegates
of the second order, or that it was any pleasure to him to think
of the ruin which, for want of a manager at home, may befal
the affairs of a traveller, whom an unforeseen accident has
deprived of the object of his choice : it was, that the incon
gruity, of giving the same law to objects so contrasted as
active and passive are, was not to be surmounted, and that
-atus chimes, as well as it contrasts, with -are.
When that inexorable maxim (of which the dominion is no
more to be defined, than the date of its birth, or the name of
its father, is to be found), was imported from England for the
government of Bengal, and the whole fabric of judicature was
-crushed by the thunders of ex post facto justice, it was not
surely that the prospect of a blameless magistracy perishing
in prison afforded any enjoyment to the unoffended authors of
their misery; but that the music of the maxim, absorbing the
whole imagination, had drowned the cries of humanity along
with the dictates of common sense. Fiat Justitia, ruat coelum,
®ays another maxim, as full of extravagance as it is of har
mony : Go heaven to wreck—so justice be but done :—and
what is the ruin of kingdoms, in comparison of the wreck of
heaven ?
So again, when the Prussian chancellor, inspired with the
wisdom of I not what Roman sage, proclaimed in good Latin,
for the edification of German ears, Servitus servitutis nondatur
[Cod. Fred. tom. ii., par. 2., liv. 2., tit. x., § 6, p. 308] it was
not that he had conceived any aversion to the life-holder who,
during the continuance of his term, should wish to gratify a
neighbor with a right of way or water, or to the neighbor who
should wish to accept of the indulgence; but that, to a juris
prudential ear, -tus -tutis sound little less melodious than -atus
-are. Whether the melody of the maxim was the real reason
of the rule, is not left open to dispute : for it is ushered in by
the conjuction quia, reason’s appointed harbinger: quia ser
vitus servitutus non datur.
Neither would equal melody have been produced, nor indeed
could similar melody have been called for, in either of these
instances, by the opposite provision : it is only when they are
�Utilitarianism.
23
opposed to general rules, and not when by their conformity
they are absorbed in them, that more specific ones can obtain
a separate existence. Delegatus potest delegare, and Servitus
servitutis datur, provisions already included under the
general adoption of contracts, would have been as unnecessary
to the apprehension and the memory, as, in comparison of their
energetic negatives, they are insipid to the ear.
Were the inquiry diligently made, it would be found that
the goddess of harmony has exercised more influence, however
latent, over the dispensations of Themis, than her most dili
gent historiographers, or even her most passionate panegyrists,
seem to have been aware of. Every one knows, how, by the
ministry of Orpheus, it was she who first collected the sons of
wen beneath the shadow of the sceptre: yet, in the midst of
continual experience, men seem yet to learn, with what suc
cessful diligence she has labored to guide it in its course.
Every one knows that measured numbers were the language
of the infancy of law : none seem to have observed, with what
imperious sway they have governed her maturer age. In
English jurisprudence in particular, the connexion betwixt law
and music, however less perceived than in Spartan legislation,
is not perhaps less real nor less close. The music of the Office,
though not of the same kind, is not'less musical in its kind,
than the music of the Theatre ; that which hardens the heart,
than that which softens it—sostenutos as long, cadences as
sonorous; and those governed by rules, though not yet pro
mulgated, not less determinate, Search indictments, pleadings,
p roceedings in chancery, conveyances : whatever trespasses
you may find against truth or common sense, you will find
none against the laws of harmony. The English Liturgy,
justly as this quality has been extolled in that sacred office,
possesses not a greater measure of it, than is commonly to be
found in an English Act of Parliament. Dignity, simplicity,
brevity, precision, intelligibility, possibility of being retained
or so much as apprehended, every thing yields to Harmony.
Volumes might be filled, shelves loaded, with the sacrifices
that are made to this insatiate power. Expletives, her ministers
in Grecian poetry, are not less busy, though in different shape
and bulk, in English legislation—in the former they are mono
syllables, in the latter they are whole lines.
�24
Utilitarianism.
To return to the principle of sympathy and antipathy: a
term preferred at first, on account of its impartiality, to the
principle of caprice. The choice of an appellative, in the
above respects too narrow, was owing to my not having at that
time extended my views over 1he civil branch of the law, any
otherwise than as I had found it inseparably involved in the
penal. But when we come to the former branch we shall see
the phantastic principle making at least as great a figure there,
as the principle of sympathy and antipathy in the latter.
In the days of Lord Ooke the light of utility can scarcely be
said to have as yet shone upon the face of Common Law. If
a faint ray of it, under the name of the argumentum ab inconvenienti, is to be found in a list of about twenty topics exhi
bited by that great lawyer as the co-ordinate leaders of that
all-perfect system, the admission, so circumstanced, is as sure
a proof of neglect, as, to the statues of Brutus and Cassius,
exclusion was a cause of notice. It stands neither in the front
nor in the rear, nor in any post of honor; but huddled in
towards the middle, without the smallest mark of preference.
[Ooke, Littleton, 11. a.] Nor is this Latin inconvenience by
any means the same thing with the English one. It stands dis
tinguished from mischief: and because by the vulgar it is
taken for something less bad, it is given by the learned as
something worse. The law prefers a mischief to an inconveni
ence, says an admired maxim, and the more admired, because
as nothing is expressed by it, the more is supposed to be
understood.
Not that there is any avowed, much less a constant opposi
tion, between the prescriptions of utility and the operations o f
the common law—such constancy we have seen to be too much
even for ascetic fervor. [Supra, par. x.] From time to time instinct
would unavoidably betray them into the paths of reason
instinct which, however it may be cramped, can never be killed
by education. The cobwebs spun out of the materials brought
together by “ the competition of opposite analogies,” can never
have ceased being warped by the silent attraction of the
rational principle, though it should have been, as the needle
is by the magnet, without the privity of conscience.
�Uti litarianism.
25
APPENDIX II. to CHAPTER II.
[Bentham’s second long footnote to the end of Section XIV. is also
printed here as an appendix.]
It is curious enough to observe the variety of inventions
that men hit upon, and the variety of phrases they have brought
forward, in order to conceal from the world, and, if possible,
from themselves, this very general and therefore very par
donable self-sufficiency.
1. One man says, he has a thing made on purpose to tell him
what is right and what is wrong ; and that it is called a moral
sense: and then he goes to work at his ease, and says, such
a thing is right and such a thing is wrong—why ? “ because
my moral sense tells me it is.”
2. Another man comes and alters the phrase : leaving out
moral, and putting in common, in the room of it. He then tells
you, that his common sense teaches him what is right and
wrong, as surely as the other’s moral sense did: meaning by
common sense, a sense of some kind or other, which, he says,
is possessed by all mankind : the sense of those, whose sense
is not the same as the author’s, being struck out of the account
as not worth taking. This contrivance does better than the
other; for a moral sense, being a new thing, a man may feel
about him a good while without being able to find it out: but
common sense is as old as the creation; and there is no man
but would be ashamed to be thought not to have as much of it
as his neighbors. It has another great advantage : by appear
ing to share power, it lessens envy: for when a man gets up
upon this ground, in order to anathematise those who differ
from him, it is not by a sic volo sic jubeo, but by a velitis
'jubeatis.
3. Another man comes, and says, that as to a moral sense
indeed, he cannot find that he has any such thing; that however he has an understanding, which will do quite as well-
�26
Utilitarianism.
This understanding, he says, is the standard of right and
wrong : it tells him so and so. All good and wise men under
stand as he does : if other men’s understandings differ in any
point from his, so much the worse for them : it is a sure sign
they are either defective or corrupt.
4. Another man says, that there is an eternal and immutable
Rule of Right: that that rule of right dictates so and so : and
then he begins giving you his sentiments upon any thing that
comes uppermost: and these sentiments (you are to take for
granted) are so many branches of the eternal rule of right.
5. Another man, or perhaps the same man (it’s no matter)
says, that there are certain practices conformable, and others
repugnant, to the Fitness of Things; and then he tells you, at
his leisure, what practices are conformable and what repug
nant : just as he happens to like a practice or dislike it.
6. A great multitude of people are continually talking of the
Law of Nature ; and then they go on giving you their sentiments
about what is right and what is wrong; and these sentiments,
you are to understand, are so many chapters and sections of
the Law of Nature.
7. Instead of the phrase, Law of Nature, you have sometimes
Law of Reason, Right Reason, Natural Justice, Natural Equity,
Good Order. Any of them will do equally well. This latter
is ‘ most used in politics. The three last are much more
tolerable than the others, because they do not very explicitly
claim to be any thing more than phrases: they insist but
feebly upon the being looked upon as so many positive
standards of themselves, and seem content to be taken, upon
occasion, for phrases expressive of the conformity of the thing
in question to the proper standard, whatever that may be. On
most occasions, however, it will be better to say utility : utility
is clearer, as referring more explicitly to pain and pleasure.
8. We have one philosopher, who says, there is no harm in
any thing in the world but in telling a lie: and that if, for
example, you were to murder youi' own father, this would only
b e a particular way of saying, he was not your father. Of
course, when this philosopher sees any thing that he does not
like, he says, it is a particular way of telling a lie. It is
saying, that the act ought to be done, or may be done, when,
i n truth, it ought not to be done.
�Utilitarianism.
9. The fairest and openest of them all is that sort of man
who speaks out, and says, I am of the number of the Elect:
now God himself takes care to inform the Elect what is right:
and that with so good effect, and let them strive ever so, they
cannot help not only' knowing it but practising it. If there
fore a man wants to know what is right and what is wrong, he
has nothing to do but to come to me.
It is upon the principle of antipathy that such and such acts
are often reprobated on the score of their being unnatural: the
practice of exposing children, established among the Greeks
and Romans, was an unnatural practice. Unnatural, when it
means any thing, means unfrequent: and there it means some
thing ; although nothing to the present purpose. But here it
means no such thing: for the frequency of such acts is perhaps
the great complaint. It therefore means nothing; nothing I
mean, which there is in the act itself. All it can serve to
express is, the disposition of the person who is talking of it :
the disposition he is in to be angry at the thoughts of it. Does
it merit his anger? Very likely it may : but whether it does
or no is a question, which, to be answered rightly, can only be
answered upon the principle of utility.
Unnatural is as good a word as moral sense, or common
sense ; and would be as good a foundation for a system. Such
an act is unnatural; that is, repugnant to nature : for I do not
like to practise it; and, consequently, do not practise it. It is
therefore repugnant to what ought to be the nature of every
body else.
The mischief comfnon to all these ways of thinking and
arguing (which, in truth, as we have seen, are but one and the
same method, couched in different forms of wordsj is their
serving as a cloke, and pretence, and aliment, to despotism :
if not a despotism in practice, a despotism however in dis
position : which is but too apt, when pretence and power offer,
to show itself in practice. The consequence is, that with
intentions very commonly of the purest kind, a man becomes
a torment either to himself or his fellow-creatures. If he be
of the melancholy cast, he sits in silent grief, bewailing their
blindness and depravity : if of the irascible, he declaims with
fury and virulence against all who differ from him; blowing
the coals of fanaticism, and branding with the charge of
�28
Utilitarianism.
corruption and insincerity, every man who does not think, or
*
profess to think, as he does.
If such a man happens to possess the advantage of style, his
book may do a considerable deal of mischief before the nothing
ness of it is understood.
These principles, if such they can be called, it is more
frequent to see applied to morals than to politics : but their
influence extends itself to both. In politics, as well as morals,
a man will be at least equally glad of a pretence for deciding
any question in the manner that best pleases him, without the
trouble of inquiry. If a man is an infallible judge of what is
right and wrong in the actions of private individuals, why not
in the measures to be observed by public men in the direction
of those actions ? Accordingly (not to mention other chimeras)
I have more than once known the pretended law of nature set
up in legislative debates, in opposition to arguments derived
from the principle of utility.
“ But is it never, then, from any other considerations than
those of utility, that we derive our notions’of right and wrong?”
I do not know : I do not care. Whether a moral sentiment
can be originally conceived from any other source than a view
of utility, is one question: whether upon examination and
reflection it can, in point of fact, be actually persisted in and
justified on any other ground, by a person reflecting within
himself, is another : whether in point of right it can properly
be justified on any other ground, by a person addressing him
self to the community is a third. The two first are questions
of speculation: it matters not, comparatively speaking, how
they are decided. The last is a question of practice : the
decision of it is of as much importance as that of any can be.
“ I feel in myself,” (say you) “ a disposition to approve of such
or such an action in a moral view : but this is not owing to any
notions I have of its being a useful one to the community. I do
not pretend to know whether it beauseful one or not : it may be,
for aught I know, a mischievous one.” “ But is it then,” (say I)
“ a mischievous one ? examine; and if you can make yourself
sensible that it is so, then, if duty means anything, that is,
moral duty, it is your duty at least to abstain from it: and
more than that, if it is what lies in your power, and can be
done without too great a sacrifice, to endeavor to prevent it.
�Utilitarianism.
29
It is not your cherishing the notion of it in your bosom, and
giving it the name of virtue, that will excuse you.”
“ I feel in myself,” (say you again) “ a disposition to detest
such or such an action in a moral view; but this is not owing
to any notions I have of its being a mischievous one to the
community. I do not pretend to know whether it be a mis
chievous one or not: it may be not a mischievous one : it may
be, for aught I know, an useful one.”—“May it indeed,” (say I)
“an useful one ? but let me tell you then,that unless duty, and
right and wrong, be just what you please to make them, if it
really be not a mischievous one, and anybody has a mind to
do it, it is no duty of yours, but on the contrary, it would be
very wrong in you, to take upon you to prevent him : detest it
within yourself as much as you please; that may be a very
.good reason (unless it be also a useful one) for your not doing
it yourself: but if you go about, by word or deed, to do any
thing to hinder him, or make him suffer for it, it is you and
not he, that have done wrong; it is not youi- setting yourself
to blame his conduct, or branding it with the name of vice,
that will make him culpable, or you blameless. Therefore, if
you can make yourself content that he shall be of one mind,
and you of another, about that matter, and so continue, it is
well: but if nothing will serve you, but that you and he
must needs be of the same mind, I’ll tell you what you have
to do: it is for you to get the better of you antipathy, not
for him to truckle to it.”
�I
�
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Utilitarianism
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Bentham, Jeremy [1748-1832]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 29 p. ; 19 cm.
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1890
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Utilitarianism
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No. 13.—R. P. A. CHEAP REPRINTS.
A Renowned Work
53
Ol® LIBERTY
BY
T<JOHN STUART MILL
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�CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
Introductory
9
CHAPTER II.
Of the Liberty of Thought
and
Discussion
19
CHAPTER III.
Of Individuality, as one of the Elements of Well-being
46
CHAPTER IV.
Of
the Limits to the
Individual -
Authority of Society over the
- .
60
CHAPTER V.
Applications
74
A
�ON LIBERTY
BY
JOHN STUART MILL
[issued for
the rationalist press association, limited]
WATTS & CO.,
17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
1903
�The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument
unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and
essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.
—Wilhelm von Humboldt : Sphere and Duties of Government.
�JOHN STUART MILL
John Stuart Mill, philosopher, politi house of Jeremy Bentham; had contributed
cal economist, and reformer—described by to the Traveller • and had written to the
Mr. Gladstone as “the saint of Rationalism” Morning Chronicle letters of protest against
—was born in London on May 20th, 1806. the savage prosecutions for blasphemy
He died at Avignon on May Sth, 1873. which raged so fiercely round the heroic
The sixty-seven years of his life were filled figure of Richard Carlile during the stormy
with strenuous intellectual labour, and with years of reaction which followed Waterloo.
loyal and devoted service to the causes of Professor Bain tells us that when, in 1822,
goodness, humanity, and truth. If it may Mill visited Cambridge, “his immense con
be truly said that to labour is to worship, versational power ” made a deep impression
these were the shrines at which Mill on the undergraduates, notwithstanding
worshipped with a fervour that could not their familiarity with the copious verbal
be surpassed by the devotee of any super resources of Macaulay and Austin.
Mill soon stepped into the wider literary
natural religion.
Under the stern tuition of his father, and philosophical arena in which he was
James Mill—himself an acute thinker, and destined to render so much valuable
a distinguished ■writer—John Stuart Mill service. In 1824 he became a frequent
began to study Greek when he was three contributor to the new Westminster
years old, passed on to Latin in his eighth Review, and acquired considerable reputa
year, and, at the age of twelve, commenced tion as a powerful advocate of the philo
an elaborate course of study in political sophical Radicalism which was associated
economy, logic, and metaphysics. In 1823 with the names of Bentham and Jameshe entered the India House as junior clerk Mill. But it is worthy of note that he had1
in the Examiner’s office, and it is not sur not been converted by his father’s system
prising to find that, at this period, he was of education into a mere intellectual
described as “ a disquisitive youth ” by the machine, or reduced to an empty echo of
Examiner, Thomas Love Peacock, the his father’s thought. Throughout life he
poet and novelist. His intellectual attain was distinguished by extreme candour and
ments were immense. He had read widely honesty of intellect; he was always anxious
on many subjects in Greek, English, Latin, to accord to others the independence and
and French, and was already a logician, a liberty of thought and speech which hemetaphysician, and a political and social claimed for himself; and there was no
reformer. His practical achievements were thinker more ready to admit and to adopt
also remarkable for his years, and seemed whatever might be sound in the argument
to foreshadow an illustrious career. He of an opponent. It was this openness and
had formed a Utilitarian Society at the freedom of mind which led him to widen
�6
JOHN STUART MILL
the somewhat narrow grooves of Benthamic
thought, and, on certain questions, to take
up an attitude with which the original Utili
tarians could have no sympathy.
In 1826 Mill entered on a period of
mental crisis which lasted for two or three
years. Asking himself whether, supposing
all his objects in life were realised, it would
be a great joy and happiness to him, “ an
irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly
answered, ‘No.’” At this his heart sank
within him; “ the end had ceased to charm,
and how could there ever again be any
interest in the means ? I seemed to have
nothing left to live for.” Mill tells us that at
this time he was “ in a dull state of nerves,”
and we agree with Professor Bain that the
crisis was mainly due to physical causes
and to the overworking of the brain. Mr.
W. L. Courtney, in his Life ofJohn Stuart
Mill, describes this period of melancholy
as “ the shipwreck of Rationalism,” but
that is clearly a misstatement. The feeling
that there is nothing worth living for is not
uncommon among young people of a
thoughtful type; it has no necessary
connection either with Rationalism or with
■Christianity ; and Mill’s depression would
not have been removed if he could have
believed that the end of man was to glorify
God and enjoy him for ever. Time, new
and congenial companionships, and the
poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley, formed
the healing influences under which Mill’s
despair slowly passed away, never to return.
This crisis over, he gradually settled
down to the serious work of his life. He
had made rapid progress in the India
House, his salary rising from £30 per
annum, in 1823, to £600 per annum, in
1828; and in 1856 he was appointed
Examiner, with a salary of £2,000 a year.
This post he held until the end of 1858,
when the East India Company was extin
guished by the British Government, and
Mill was superannuated on a pension of
£1,500 per annum. His official duties left
him ample time for his cherished literary
and philosophical pursuits. His industry
was very great. He remarks that his
writings from 1832 to 1834, even if the
newspaper articles were left out, would
make a large volume. For several years,
from 1834 onward, his intellectual energies
were mainly concentrated on his System of
Logic, which was published in 1843, and
ultimately ran through eight editions. No
student of philosophy can afford to neglect
this masterly work. Acute, lucid, and
profound, it has been used as a text-book
at the Universities, and it would be difficult
to overrate its value as a philosophical
presentation of the principles underlying
modern scientific investigation.
The Logic was followed, in 1848, by
Principles of Political Economy, which is,
perhaps, the most interesting and sugges
tive book in the English language on this
great topic. Taking as its foundation
some of the main propositions of Ricardo
and Malthus, Mill adds the ripe results of
his own varied and extensive reading,
thinking, and observation, and applies the
principles of the science in a practical
manner to existing social conditions.
With his introduction to Mrs. John
Taylor in 1831 there had commenced the
most remarkable and most valued friend
ship of his life. Twenty years afterwards,
on the death of her husband, she became
Mill’s wife, and the perfect happiness of
this ideal union remained unbroken until
her death at Avignon in 1858. No one
doubts that the relations which existed
between Mill and Mrs. Taylor during her
first husband’s lifetime were of a purely
platonic character; and it is equally impos
sible to doubt that, while she exerted great
�JOHN STUART MILL
7
influence over Mill, his extravagant lauda member for Westminster, and, although
tions of her genius rested on a very slender scarcely fitted to shine as an orator, he
basis of fact. She appears to have been achieved considerable success by speeches
a woman of considerable ability and of on Reform, on the Cattle Plague Bill, on
a highly sympathetic temperament, and
Irish questions, and on other subjects.
it is probable that Mill, being powerfully He was defeated at the general election of
attracted by her sympathy, was led to take an 1868 by Mr. W. H. Smith (who afterwards
exaggerated view of her talents. He tells us became Conservative leader of the House
that the article on “The Enfranchisement of Commons), and retired, not unwillingly,
of Women ” which appeared in the West- into private life at Avignon. In 1867 he
minster Review for July, 1851, and is published his Subjection of Women, which
reprinted in his Dissertations and Discus is an amplification of the article on “ The
sions, Vol. II., was mainly her production ; Enfranchisement of Women” referred to
and we are able to gather from this essay above. It is a powerful plea for the
that, although possessed of great talent, equality of the sexes, urging that there
she was not the extraordinary genius so should be “ no power or privilege on the
loudly proclaimed by Mill.
one side nor disability on the other.” The
Meanwhile, through all the joys and Autobiography was completed, and the
vicissitudes of private life—personal illness, third of his posthumous Essays on Religion
marriage, bereavement—the current of was written, between the years 1868 and
Mill’s public work flowed steadily onward.
1873The essay On Liberty, which, he tells us,
Mill was educated by his father as a
was the joint production of himself and Rationalist, and he remained a Rationalist
his wife, was published in 1859, after her to the end of his life. As he himself wrote,
death. Charles Kingsley, who read it he was one who had “ not thrown off
through at a sitting, declared that “it made religious belief, but never had it: I grew
him a clearer-headed, braver-minded man up in a negative state with regard to it.”
on the spot.” Between the years 1858 and On the subject of religion, both the Mills
1865 Mill also published several important held opinions which are now included
political and philosophical works, including under the term Agnosticism. But, though
Representative Government, essays on a Rationalist, John Mill, we read, had a
Utilitarianism, and An Examination of favourite text: “ Work while it is day, for
Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. All the night cometh when no man can work ”;
these books possess permanent value, and and when, shortly before his death, he was
will repay close and careful study. During told that the end was near, he calmly said,
the American Civil War Mill’s sympathies “ My work is done.” Yes, his work was
and interest were strongly enlisted in favour done, and may we not say with truth of
of the North, and, by articles contributed this “saint of Rationalism” that his “works
in 1862 to Fraser's Magazine and the do follow ” him ? He has joined
Westminster Review, he did something to
“ The choir invisible
stem the tide of feeling which ran so
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence.”
strongly in England on the side of the
Confederate States.
W. B. Columbine.
In 1865 he entered Parliament as
�DEDICATION
To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer,
and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings—the friend
and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest
incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward—I dedicate
this volume.
Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs
as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a
very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision;
some of the most important portions having been reserved for a
more careful re-examination, which they are now never destined to
receive.
Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half
the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave,
I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely
to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted
by her all but unrivalled wisdom.
�ON LIBERTY
Chapter I.
INTRODUCTORY
The subject of this Essay is not the socalled Liberty of the Will, so unfortu
nately opposed to the misnamed doctrine
of Philosophical Necessity ; but Civil or
Social Liberty : the nature and limits of
the power which can be legitimately
exercised by society over the individual.
A question seldom stated, and hardly
ever discussed, in general terms, but
which profoundly influences the prac
tical controversies of the age by its latent
presence, and is likely soon to make
itself recognised as the vital question of
the future. It is so far from being new
that, in a certain sense, it has divided
mankind almost from the remotest ages;
but in the stage of progress into which
the more civilised portions of the species
have now entered it presents itself under
new conditions, and requires a different
and more fundamental treatment.
The struggle between Liberty and
Authority is the most conspicuous
feature in the portions of history with
which we are earliest familiar, particu
larly in that of Greece, Rome, and
England. But in old times this contest
was between subjects, or some classes of
subjects, and the Government. By
liberty was meant protection against the
tyranny of the political rulers. The
rulers were conceived (except in some of
the popular Governments of Greece) as
in a necessarily antagonistic position to
the people whom they ruled. They con
sisted of a governing One, or a govern
ing tribe or caste, who derived their
authority from inheritance or conquest,
who, at all events, did not hold it at the
pleasure of the governed, and whose
supremacy men did not venture, perhaps
did not desire, to contest, whatever pre
cautions might be taken against its
oppressive exercise. Their power was
regarded as necessary, but also as highly
dangerous—as a weapon which they
would attempt to use against their sub
jects, no less than against external
enemies. To prevent .the weaker mem
bers of the community from being preyed
upon by innumerable vultures, it was
needful that there should be an animal
of prey stronger than the rest commis
sioned to keep them down. But as the
•king of the vultures •would be no less
bent upon preying on the flock than any
of the minor harpies, it was indispen
sable to be in a perpetual attitude of
defence against his beak and claws. The
aim, therefore, of patriots was to set
limits to the power which the ruler
should be suffered to exercise over the
community; and this limitation was what
they meant by liberty. It was attempted
�IO
ON LIBERTY
in two ways. First, by obtaining a re
cognition of certain immunities, called
political liberties or rights, which it was
to be regarded as a breach of duty in the
ruler to infringe, and which, if he did
infringe, specific resistance, or general
rebellion, was held to be justifiable. A
second, and generally a later, expedient
was the establishment of constitutional
checks, by which the consent of the
community, or of a body of some sort, sup
posed to represent its interests, was made
a necessary condition to some of the more
important acts of the governing power.
To the first of these modes of limitation
the ruling power, in most European
countries, was compelled, more or less, to
submit. It was not so with the second;
and, to attain this—or, when already in
some degree possessed, to attain it more
completely — became everywhere the
principal object of the lovers of liberty.
And so long as mankind were content to
combat one enemy by another, and to
be ruled by a master, on condition of
being guaranteed more or less effica
ciously against his tyranny, they did not
carry their aspirations beyond this point.
A time, however, came, in the progress
of human affairs, when men ceased to
think it a necessity of nature that their
governors should be an independent
power, opposed in interest to themselves.
It appeared to them much better that
the various magistrates of the State should
be their tenants or delegates, revocable
at their pleasure. In that way alone, it
seemed, could they have complete security
that the powers of government would
never be abused to their disadvantage.
By degrees this new demand for elective
and temporary rulers became the promi
nent object of the exertions of the
popular party, wherever any such party
existed; and superseded, to a con
siderable extent, the previous efforts to
limit the power of rulers. As the struggle
proceeded for making the ruling power
emanate from the periodical choice of
the ruled, some persons began to think
that too much importance had been
attached to the limitation of the power
itself.
That (it might seem) was a
resource against rulers whose interests
were habitually opposed to those of the
people. What was now wanted was,
that the rulers should be identified with
the people; that their interest and will
should be the interest and will of the
nation. The nation did not need to be
protected against its own will. There
was no fear of its tyrannising over itself.
Let the rulers be effectually responsible
to it, promptly removable by it, and it
could afford to trust them with power
of which it could itself dictate the use
to be made. The power was but the
nation’s own power, concentrated, and
in a form convenient for exercise. This
mode of thought, or rather perhaps of
feeling, was common among the last
generation of European liberalism, in
the Continental section of which it still
apparently predominates. Those who
admit any limit to what a Government
may do, except in the case of such
Governments as they think ought not to
exist, stand out as brilliant exceptions
among the political thinkers of the Con
tinent. A similar tone of sentiment
might by this time have been prevalent
in our own country if the circumstances
which for a time encouraged it had con
tinued unaltered.
But in political and philosophical
theories, as well as in persons, success
discloses faults and infirmities which
failure might have concealed from obser
vation. The notion, that the people
have no need to limit their power over
�INTRODUCTOR Y
themselves, might seem axiomatic, when
popular government was a thing only
dreamed about, or read of as having
existed at some distant period of the
past. Neither was that notion neces
sarily disturbed by such temporary aber
rations as those of the French Revolu
tion, the worst of which were the work
of an usurping few, and which, in any
case, belonged, not to the permanent
working of popular institutions, but to a
sudden and convulsive outbreak against
monarchical and aristocratic despotism.
In time, however, a democratic republic
came to occupy a large portion of the
earth’s surface, and made itself felt as
one of the most powerful members of
the community of nations; and elective
and responsible government became sub
ject to the observations and criticisms
which wait upon a great existing fact.
It was now’ perceived that such phrases
as “self-government” and “the power
of the people over themselves ” do not
express the true state of the case. The
“ people ” who exercise the pow’er are
not always the same people with those
over whom it is exercised; and the “ selfgovernment ” spoken of is not the
government of each by himself, but of
each by all the rest. The will of the
people, moreover, practically means the
will of the most numerous or the most
active part of the people ; the majority,
or those who succeed in making them
selves accepted as the majority: the
people, consequently, may desire to
oppress a part of their number, and
precautions are as much needed against
this as against any other abuse of power.
The limitation, therefore, of the power of
government over individuals loses none
of its importance w’hen the holders of
pow'er are regularly accountable to the
community—that is, to the strongest party |
ii
therein. This view of things, recom
mending itself equally to the intelligence
of thinkers and to the inclination of
those important classes in European
society to whose real or supposed inte
rests democracy is adverse, has had no
difficulty in establishing itself; and in
political speculations “ the tyranny of the
majority ” is now generally included
among the evils against which society
requires to be on its guard.
Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of
the majority was at first, and is still
vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operat
ing through the acts of the public autho
rities. But reflecting persons perceived
that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate
individuals who compose it—its means
of tyrannising are not restricted to the
acts which it may do by the hands of its
political functionaries. Society can and
does execute its own mandates: and if it
issues wrong mandates instead of right,
or any mandates at all in things with
which it ought not to meddle, it practises a
social tyranny more formidable than many
kinds of political oppression, since, though
not usually upheld by such extreme penal
ties, it leaves fewer means of escape,
penetrating much more deeply into the
details of life, and enslaving the soul
itself. Protection, therefore, against the
tyranny of the magistrate is not enough :
there needs protection also against the
tyranny of the prevailing opinion and
feeling; against the tendency of society
to impose, by other means than civil/
penalties, its own ideas and practices as
rules of conduct on those who dissent
from them ; to fetter the development,
and, if possible, prevent the formation,
of any individuality not in harmony with
its ways, and compels all characters to
fashion themselves upon the model of its
�12
ON LIBERTY
own. There is a limit to the legitimate
interference of collective opinion with
individual independence : and to find
that limit, and maintain it against en
croachment, is as indispensable to a
good condition of human affairs as pro
tection against political despotism.
But, though this proposition is not
likely to be contested in general terms,
the practical question, where to place the
limit—how to make the fitting adjust
ment between individual independence
and social control—is a subject on which
nearly everything remains to be done.
All that makes existence valuable to any
one depends on the enforcement of
restraints upon the actions of other
people. Some rules of conduct, there
fore, must be imposed, by law in the
first place, and by opinion on many
things which are not fit subjects for the
operation of law. What these rules
should be is the principal question in
human affairs; but if we except a few of
the most obvious cases, it is one of those
which least progress has been made in
resolving. No two ages, and scarcely
any two countries, have decided it alike;
and the decision of one age or country
is a wonder to another. Yet the people
of any given age and country no more
suspect any difficulty in it than if it were
a subject on which mankind had always
been agreed. The rules which obtain
among themselves appear to them selfevident and self-justifying. This all but
universal illusion is one of the examples
of the magical influence of custom,
which is not only, as the proverb says, a
second nature, but is continually mis
taken for the first. The effect of custom,
in preventing any misgiving respecting
the rules of conduct which mankind
impose on one another, is all the more
complete because the subject is one on
which it is not generally considered
necessary that reasons should be given,
either by one person to others, or by
each to himself. People are accustomed
to believe, and have been encouraged in
the belief by some who aspire to the
character of philosophers, that their
feelings on subjects of this nature are
better than reasons, and render reasons
unnecessary.
The practical principle
which guides them to their opinions on
the regulation of human conduct is the
feeling in each person’s mind that every
body should be required to act as he,
and those with whom he sympathises,
would like them to act. No one, indeed,
acknowledges to himself that his stan
dard of judgment is his own liking; but
an opinion on a point of conduct not
supported by reasons can only count as
one person’s preference; and if the
reasons, when given, are a mere appeal
to a similar preference felt by other
people, it is still only many people’s
liking instead of one. To an ordinary
man, however, his own preference, thus
supported, is not only a perfectly satis
factory reason, but the only one he
generally has for any of his notions of
morality, taste, or propriety which are
not expressly written in his religious
creed; and his chief guide in the inter
pretation even of that. Men’s opinions,
accordingly, on what is laudable or
blameable are affected by all the multi
farious causes which influence their
wishes in regard to the conduct of
others, and which are as numerous as
those which determine their wishes on
any other subject.
Sometimes their
reason—at other times their prejudices
or superstitions : often their social affec
tions, not seldom their anti-social ones,
their envy or jealousy, their arrogance or
contemptuousness: but most commonly,
�INTRODUCTORY
their desires or fears for themselves—
their legitimate or illegitimate self-inte
rest. Wherever there is an ascendant
class, a large portion of the morality of
the country emanates from its class
interests, and its feelings of class supe
riority. The morality between Spartans
and Helots, between planters and
negroes, between princes and subjects,
between nobles and roturiers, between
men and women, has been for the most
part the creation of these class interests
and feelings; and the sentiments thus
generated react in turn upon the moral
feelings of the members of the ascendant
class in their relations among themselves.
Where, on the other hand, a class, for
merly ascendant, has lost its ascendancy,
or where its ascendancy is unpopular, the
prevailing moral sentiments frequently
bear the impress of an impatient dislike
of superiority. Another grand deter
mining principle of the rules of conduct,
both in act and forbearance, which have
been enforced by law or opinion has
been the servility of mankind towards
the supposed preferences or aversions of
their temporal masters or of their gods.
This servility, though essentially selfish,
is not hypocrisy : it gives rise to perfectly
genuine sentiments of abhorrence; it
made men burn magicians and heretics.
Among so many baser influences, the
general and obvious interests of society
have of course had a share, and a large
one, in the direction of the moral senti
ments: less, however, as a matter of
reason, and on their own account, than
as a consequence of the sympathies and
antipathies which grew out of them; and
sympathies and antipathies which had
little or nothing to do with the interests
of society have made themselves felt in
the establishment of moralities with
quite as great force.
13
The likings and dislikings of society,
or of some powerful portion of it, are
thus the main thing which has practi
cally determined the rules laid down for
general observance, under the penalties
of law or opinion. And, in general, those
who have been in advance of society in
thought and feeling have left this con
dition of things unassailed in principle,
however they may have come into con
flict with it in some of its details. They
have occupied themselves rather in inquir
ing what things society ought to like or
dislike than in questioning whether its
likings or dislikings should be a law
to individuals. They preferred endea
vouring to alter the feelings of mankind
on the particular points on which they
were themselves heretical, rather than
make common cause in defence of free
dom, with heretics generally. The only
case in which the higher ground has been
taken on principle and maintained with
consistency, by any but an individual
here and there, is that of religious belief:
a case instructive in many ways, and
not least so as forming a most striking
instance of the fallibility of what is called
the moral sense; for the odium theologicum, in a sincere bigot, is one of the
most unequivocal cases of moral feeling.
Those who first broke the yoke of what
called itself the Universal Church were,
in general, as little willing to permit
difference of religious opinion as that
Church itself. But when the heat of the
conflict was over, without giving a com
plete victory to any party, and each Church
or sect was reduced to limit its hopes
to retaining possession of the ground
it already occupied; minorities, seeing
that they had no chance of becoming
majorities, were under the necessity of
pleading to those whom they could not
convert, for permission to differ. It is
�U
ON LIBERTY
accordingly on this battle field, almost
solely, that the rights of the individual
against society have been asserted on
broad grounds of principle, and the
claim of society to exercise authority
over dissentients openly controverted.
The great writers to whom the world
owes what religious liberty it possesses
have mostly asserted freedom of con
science as an indefeasible right, and
denied absolutely that a human being is
accountable to others for his religious
belief. Yet so natural to mankind is
intolerance in whatever they really care
about that religious freedom has hardly
anywhere been practically realised, except
where religious indifference, which dis
likes to have its peace disturbed by
theological quarrels, has added its weight
to the scale. In the minds of almost all
religious persons, even in the most tole
rant countries, the duty of toleration is
admitted with tacit reserves. One person
will bear with dissent in matters of
Church government, but not of dogma;
another can tolerate everybody, short of
a Papist or an Unitarian ; another, every
one who believes in revealed religion; a
few extend their charity a little further,
but stop at the belief in a God and in a
future state. Wherever the sentiment of
the majority is still genuine and intense,
it is found to have abated little of its
claim to be obeyed.
In England, from the peculiar circum
stances of our political history, though
the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier,
that of law is lighter, than in most other
countries of Europe; and there is con
siderable jealousy of direct interference,
by the legislative or the executive power,
with private conduct; not so much from
any just regard for the independence of
the individual, as from the still subsisting
habit of looking on the Government as
representing an opposite interest to the
public. The majority have not yet
learnt to feel the power of the Govern
ment their power, or its opinions their
opinions. When they do so, individual
liberty will probably be as much exposed
to invasion from the Government as it
already is from public opinion. But, as
yet, there is a considerable amount of
feeling ready to be called forth against
any attempt of the law to control indi
viduals in things in which they have not
hitherto been accustomed to be con
trolled by it; and this with very little
discrimination as to whether the matter
is, or is not, within the legitimate sphere
of legal control; insomuch that the
feeling, highly salutary on the whole, is
perhaps quite as often misplaced as well
grounded in the particular instances of
its application. There is, in fact, no
recognised principle by which the pro
priety or impropriety of Government inter
ference is customarily tested. People
decide according to their personal pre
ferences. Some, whenever they see any
good to be done, or evil to be remedied,
would willingly instigate the Government
to undertake the business ; while others
prefer to bear almost any amount of
social evil rather than add one to the
departments of human interests amenable
to governmental control. And men
range themselves on one or the other
side in any particular case, according to
this general direction of their sentiments ;
or according to the degree of interest
which they feel in the particular thing
which it is proposed that the Govern
ment should do; or according to the
belief they entertain that the Government
would or would not do it in the manner
they prefer; but very rarely on account
of any opinion to which they consistently
adhere, as to what things are fit to be
�INTRODUCTORY
done by a Government. And it seems
to me that, in consequence of this
absence of rule or principle, one side is
at present as often wrong as the other:
the interference of Government is, with
about equal frequency, improperly in
voked and improperly condemned.
The object of this Essay is to assert
one very simple principle, as entitled to
govern absolutely the dealings of society
with the individual in the way of com
pulsion and control, whether the means
used be physical force in the form of
legal penalties, or the moral coercion of
public opinion. The principle is, that
the sole end for which mankind are
warranted, individually or collectively,
in interfering with the liberty of action
of any of their number is self-protec
tion. That the only purpose for which
power can be rightfully exercised over
any member of a civilised community,
against his will, is to prevent harm to
others. His own good, either physical
or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
He cannot rightfully be compelled to do
or forbear because it will be better for
him to do so, because it will make him
happier, because, in the opinions of
others, to do so would be wise, or even
right. These are good reasons for
remonstrating with him, or reasoning
with him, or pursuing him, or entreating
him, but not for compelling him, or
visiting him with an evil in case he do
otherwise. To justify that, the conduct
from which it is desired to deter him must
be calculated to produce evil to some one
else. The only part of the conduct of
any one, for which he is amenable to
society, is that which concerns others.
In the part which merely concerns him
self his independence is, of right, abso
lute. Over himself, over his own body
and mind, the individual is sovereign.
15
It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say
that this doctrine is meant to apply
only to human beings in the maturity of
their faculties. We are not speaking of
children, or of young persons below the
age which the law may fix as that of
manhood or womanhood. Those who
are still in a state to require being taken
care of by others must be protected
against their own actions as well as
against external injury. For the same
reason, we may leave out of considera
tion those backward states of society in
which the race itself may be considered
as in its nonage. The early difficulties
in the way of spontaneous progress are
so great that there is seldom any choice
of means for overcoming them; and a
ruler full of the spirit of improvement is
warranted in the use of any expedients
that will attain an end perhaps other
wise unattainable. Despotism is a legiti
mate mode of government in dealing with
barbarians, provided the end be their
improvement, and the means justified by
actually effecting that end. Liberty, as
a principle, has no application to any
state of things anterior to the time when
mankind have become capable of being
improved by free and equal discussion.
Until then there is nothing for them
but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a
Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as
to find one. But as soon as mankind
have attained the capacity of being
guided to their own improvement by
conviction or persuasion (a period long
since reached in all nations with whom
we need here concern ourselves), com
pulsion, either in the direct form or in
that of pains and penalties for noncompliance, is no longer admissible as
a means to their own good, and justifi
able only for the security of others.
It is proper to state that I forego any
�i6
ON LIBERTY
advantage which could be derived to my
argument from the idea of abstract right,
as a thing independent of utility. I
regard utility as the ultimate appeal on
all ethical questions; but it must be
utility in the largest sense, grounded on
the permanent interests of a man as a
progressive being. Those interests, I
contend, authorise the subjection of
individual spontaneity to external control
only in respect to those actions of each
which concern the interest of other
people. If any one does an act hurtful
to others, there is a frima facie case for
punishing him, by law, or, where legal
penalities are not safely applicable, by
general disapprobation. There are also
many positive acts for the benefit of
others which he may rightfully be com
pelled to perform—such as to give
evidence in a court of justice; to bear
his fair share in the common defence,
or in any other joint work necessary to
the interest of the society of which he
enjoys the protection; and to perform
certain acts of individual beneficence,
such as saving a fellow-creature’s life, or
interposing to protect the defenceless
against ill-usage—things which, whenever
it is obviously a man’s duty to do, he
may rightfully be made responsible to
society for not doing. A person may
cause evil to others not only by his
actions, but by his inaction; and in either
case he is justly accountable to them for
the injury. The latter case, it is true,
requires a much more cautious exercise
of compulsion than the former.
To
make any one answerable for doing evil
to others is the rule; to make him
answerable for not preventing evil is,
comparatively speaking, the exception.
Yet there are many cases clear enough
and grave enough to justify that excep
tion. In all things which regard the
external relations of the individual he is
jure amenable to those whose inte
rests are concerned, and, if need be, to
society as their protector. There are
often good reasons for not holding him
to the responsibility; but these reasons
must arise from the special expediences
of the case: either because it is a kind
of case in which he is on the whole
likely to act better when left to his own
discretion than when controlled in any
way in which society have it in their
power to control him, or because the
attempt to exercise control would pro
duce other evils greater than those
which it would prevent. When such
reasons as these preclude the enforce
ment of responsibility, the conscience of
the agent himself should step into the
vacant judgment-seat, and protect those
interests of others which have no ex
ternal protection, judging himself all
the more rigidly because the case does
not admit of his being made accountable
to the judgment of his fellow-creatures.
But there is a sphere of action in
which society, as distinguished from the
individual, has, if any, only an indirect
interest—comprehending all that portion
of a person’s life and conduct which
affects only himself, or, if it also affects
others, only with their free, voluntary,
and undeceived consent and participa
tion. When I say only himself, I mean
directly, and in the first instance, for
whatever’ affects himself may affect
others through himself; and the objec
tion which may be grounded on this con
tingency will receive consideration in the
sequel. This, then, is the appropriate
region of human liberty. It comprises,
first, the inward domain of conscious
ness : demanding liberty of conscience,
in the most comprehensive sense ; liberty
of thought and feeling ; absolute freedom
�INTRODUCTORY
of opinion and sentiment on all subjects,
practical or speculative, scientific, moral,
or theological. The liberty of expressing
and publishing opinions may seem to
fall under a different principle, since it
belongs to that part of the conduct of an
individual which concerns other people;
but, being almost of as much importance
as the liberty of thought itself, and resting
in great part on the same reasons, is
practically inseparable from it. Secondly,
the principle requires liberty of tastes
and pursuits; of framing the plan of our
life to suit our own character; of doing
as we like, subject to such consequences
as may follow—without impediment from
our fellow-creatures so long as what we
do does not harm them, even though
they should think our conduct foolish,
perverse, or wrong. Thirdly, from this
liberty of each individual follows the
liberty, within the same limits, of com
bination among individuals ; freedom to
unite, for any purpose not involving harm
to others, the persons combining being
supposed to be of full age, and not forced
or deceived.
No society in which these liberties
are not, on the whole, respected is free,
whatever may be its form of government;
and none is completely free in which
they do not exist absolute and unqualified.
The only freedom which deserves the
name is that of pursuing our own good
in our own way, so long as we do not
attempt to deprive others of theirs, or
impede their efforts to obtain it. Each
is the proper guardian of his own health,
whether bodily or mental and spiritual.
Mankind are greater gainers by suffering
each other to live as seems good to them
selves than by compelling each to live
as seems good to the rest.
Though this doctrine is anything but
new, and, to some persons, may have the
17
air of a truism, there is no doctrine which
stands more directly opposed to the
general tendency of existing opinion and
practice. Society has expended fully as
much effort in the attempt (according to
its lights) to compel people to conform
to its notions of personal as of social
excellence. The ancient commonwealths
thought themselves entitled to practise,
and the ancient philosophers counte
nanced, the regulation of every part of
private conduct by public authority, on
the ground that the State had a deep
interest in the whole bodily and mental
discipline of every one of its citizens—a
mode of thinking which may have been
admissible in small Republics surrounded
by powerful enemies, in constant peril
of being subverted by foreign attack or
internal commotion, and to which even
a short interval of relaxed energy and
self-command might so easily be fatal,
that they could not afford to wait for the
salutary permanent effects of freedom.
In the modern world the greater size of
political communities, and, above all, the
separation between spiritual and temporal
authority (which placed the direction of
men’s consciences in other hands than
those which controlled their worldly
affairs), prevented so great an interference
by law in the details of private life; but
the engines of moral repression have
been wielded more strenuously against
divergence from the reigning opinion in
self-regarding than even in social matters;
religion, the most powerful of the elements
which have entered into the formation of
moral feeling, having almost always been
governed either by the ambition of a
hierarchy, seeking control over every
department of human conduct, or by the
spirit of Puritanism. And some of those
modern reformers who have placed them
selves in strongest opposition to the
c
�i8
ON LIBERTY
religions of the past have been noway
behind either Churches or sects in their
assertion of the right of spiritual domina
tion : M. Comte, in particular, whose
social system, as unfolded in his Systeme
de Politique Positive, aims at establishing
(though by moral more than by legal
appliances) a despotism of society over
the individual surpassing anything con
templated in the political ideal of the
most rigid disciplinarian among the
ancient philosophers.
Apart from the peculiar tenets of in
dividual thinkers, there is also in the
world at large an increasing inclination
to stretch unduly the powers of society
over the individual, both by the force of
opinion and even by that of legislation ;
and as the tendency of all the changes
taking place in the world is to strengthen
society and diminish the power of the
individual, this encroachment is not one
of the evils which tend spontaneously to
disappear, but, on the contrary, to grow
more and more formidable. The dis
position of mankind, whether as rulers
or as fellow-citizens, to impose their own
opinions and inclinations as a rule of
conduct on others, is so energetically
supported by some of the best and by
some of the worst feelings incident to
human nature that it is hardly ever kept
under restraint by anything but want of
power; and as the power is not declin
ing, but growing, unless a strong barrier
of moral conviction can be raised against
the mischief, we must expect, in the
present circumstances of the world, to
see it increase.
It will be convenient for the argument
if, instead of at once entering upon the
general thesis, we confine ouselves, in the
first instance, to a single branch of it, on
which the principle here stated is, if not
fully, yet to a certain point, recognised by
the current opinions. This one branch is
the Liberty of Thought, from which it is
impossible to separate the cognate liberty
of speaking and of writing. Although
these liberties, to some considerable
amount, form part of the political morality
of all countries which profess religious
toleration and free institutions, the
grounds, both philosophical and practical,
on which they rest are perhaps not so
familiar to the general mind, nor so
thoroughly appreciated by many, even of
the leaders of opinion, as might have
been expected. Those grounds, when
rightly understood, are of much wider
application than to only one division of
the subject, and a thorough consideration
of this part of the question will be found
the best introduction to the remainder.
Those to whom nothing which I am about
to say will be new may, therefore, I hope,
excuse me if, on a subject which for now
three centuries has been so often dis
cussed, I venture on one discussion more.
�1
OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
Chapter II.
OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by
when any defence would be necessary of
the “ liberty of the press ” as one of
the securities against corrupt or tyrannical
government. No argument, we may
suppose, can now be needed against
permitting a legislature or an executive,
not identified in interest with the people,
to prescribe opinions to them, and deter
mine what doctrines or what arguments
they shall be allowed to hear. This
aspect of the question, besides, has been
so often and so triumphantly enforced
by preceding writers that it needs not
be especially insisted on in this place.
Though the law of England, on the
subject of the press, is as servile to this
day as it was in the time of the Tudors,
there is little danger of it being actually
put in force against political discussion,
except during some temporary panic,
when fear of insurrection drives ministers
and judges from their propriety / and,
j
1 These words had scarcely been written when,
as if to give them an emphatic contradiction,
occurred the Government Press Prosecutions of
1858. That ill-judged interference with the
liberty of public discussion has not, however,
induced me to alter a single word in the text,
nor has it at all weakened my conviction that,
moments of panic excepted, the era of pains and
penalties for political discussion has, in our own
country, passed away. For, in the first place,
the prosecutions were not persisted in ; and, in
the second, they were never, properly speaking,
political prosecutions. The offence charged was
not that of criticising institutions, or the acts or
persons of rulers, but of circulating what was
deemed an immoral doctrine, the lawfulness of
Tyrannicide.
If the arguments of the present chapter are of
speaking generally, it is not, in constitu
tional countries, to be apprehended that
the Government, whether completely
responsible to the people or not, will
often attempt to control the expression
of opinion, except when in doing so it
makes itself the organ of the general
intolerance of the public.
Let us
suppose, therefore, that the Government
is entirely at one with the people, and
never thinks of exerting any power of
coercion unless in agreement with what
it conceives to be their voice. But
I deny the right of the people to exercise
such coercion, either by themselves or
by their Government. The power itself
any validity, there ought to exist the fullest
liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter
of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however
immoral it may be considered. It would, there
fore, be irrelevant and out of place to examine
here whether the doctrine of Tyrannicide
deserves that title. I shall content myself with
saying that the subject has been at all times one
of the open questions of morals ; that the act
of a private citizen in striking down a criminal
who, by raising himself above the law, has
placed himself beyond the reach of legal punish
ment or control, has been accounted by whole
nations, and by some of the best and wisest of
men, not a crime, but an act of exalted virtue ;
and that, right or wrong, it is not of the nature of
assassination, but of civil war. As such, I hold
that the instigation to it, in a specific case, may
be a proper subject of punishment, but only if
an overt act has followed, and at least a probable
connection can be established between the act
and the instignation. Even then it is not a
foreign Government, but the very Government
assailed, which alone, in the exercise of selfdefence, can legitimately punish attacks directed
against its own existence.
�20
ON LIBERTY
is illegitimate. The best Government has
no more title to it than the worst. It
is as noxious, or more noxious, when
exerted in accordance with public opinion
than when in opposition to it. If all
mankind minus one were of one opinion,
and only one person were of the contrary
opinion, mankind would be no more
justified in silencing that one person
than he, if he had the power, would be
justified in silencing mankind. Were an
opinion a personal possession of no
value except to the owner; if to be
obstructed in the enjoyment of it were
simply a private injury, it would make
some difference whether the injury was
inflicted only on a few persons or on
many. But the peculiar evil of silencing
the expression of an opinion is that it is
robbing the human race ; posterity as
well as the existing generation; those
who dissent from the opinion, still more
than those who hold it. If the opinion
is right, they are deprived of the oppor
tunity of exchanging error for truth; if
wrong, they lose, what is almost as great
a benefit, the clearer perception and
livelier impression of truth, produced by
its collision with error.
It is necessary to consider separately
these two hypotheses, each of which has
a distinct branch of the argument corre
sponding to it. We can never be sure
that the opinion we are endeavouring to
stifle is a false opinion; and if we were
sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
First, the opinion which it is attempted
to suppress by authority may possibly be
true. Those who desire to suppress it
of course deny its truth ; but they are
not infallible. They have no authority
to decide the question for all mankind,
and exclude every other person from the
means of judging. To refuse a hearing
to an opinion because they are sure that
it is false is to assume that their certainty
is the same thing" as absolute certainty.
All silencing of discussion is an assump
tion of infallibility. Its condemnation may
be allowed to rest on this common argu
ment, not the worse for being common.
Unfortunately for the good sense of
mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far
from carrying the weight in their practical
judgment which is always allowed to
it in theory; for, w’hile every one well
knows himself to be fallible, few think it
necessary to take any precautions against
their own fallibility, or admit the suppo
sition that any opinion of which they
feel very certain may be one of the
examples of the error to which they
acknowledge themselves to be liable.
Absolute princes, or others who are
accustomed to unlimited deference,
usually feel this complete confidence in
their own opinions on nearly all subjects.
People more happily situated, who some
times hear their opinions disputed, and
are not wholly unused to be set right
when they are wrong, place the same
unbounded reliance only on such of
their opinions as are shared by all who
surround them, or to whom they habitu
ally defer ; for in proportion to a man’s
want of confidence in his own solitary
judgment does he usually repose, with
implicit trust, on the infallibility of “ the
world ” in general. And the world, to
each individual, means the part of it with
which he comes in contact—his party,
his sect, his church, his class of society :
the man may be called, by comparison,
almost liberal and large-minded to whom
it means anything so comprehensive as
his own country or his own age. Nor is
his faith in this collective authority at all
shaken by his being aware that other
ages, countries, sects, churches, classes,
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
and parties have thought, and even now
think, the exact reverse. He devolves
upon his own world the responsibility of
being in the right against the dissentient
worlds of other people; and it never
troubles him that mere accident has
decided which of these numerous worlds
is the object of his reliance, and that the
same causes which make him a Church
man in London would have made him
a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin. Yet
it is as evident in itself as any amount
of argument can make it that ages are
no more infallible than individuals—every
age having held many opinions which
subsequent ages have deemed not only
false but absurd; and it is as certain that
many opinions, now general, will be
rejected by future ages as it is that many,
once general, are rejected by the present.
The objection likely to be made to
this argument would probably take some
such form as the following. There is no
greater asstfmption of infallibility in for
bidding the propagation of error than in
any other thing which is done by public
authority on its own judgment and respon
sibility. Judgment is given to men that
they may use it. Because it may be used
erroneously, are men to be told that they
ought not to use it at all ? To prohibit
what they think pernicious is not claiming
exemption from error, but fulfilling the
duty incumbent on them, although fal
lible, of acting on their conscientious
conviction. If we were never to act on
our opinions because those opinions
may be wrong, we should leave all our
interests uncared for and all our duties
unperformed. An objection which applies
to all conduct can be no valid objection
to any conduct in particular. It is the
duty ot Governments, and of individuals,
to form the truest opinions they can ; to
form them carefully, and never impose
21
them upon others unless they are quite
sure of being right. But when they are
sure (such reasoners may say), it is
not conscientiousness, but cowardice, to
shrink from acting on their opinions, and
allow doctrines which they honestly think
dangerous to the welfare of mankind,
either in this life or in another, to be scat
tered abroad without restraint, because
other people, in less enlightened times,
have persecuted opinions now believed
to be true. Let us take care, it may be
said, not to make the same mistake ; but
Governments and nations have made
mistakes in other things which are not
denied to be fit subjects for the exercise
of authority: they have laid on bad
taxes, made unjust wars. Ought we,
therefore, to lay on no taxes, and, under
whatever provocation, make no wars?
Men and Governments must act to the
best of their ability. There is no such
thing as absolute certainty, but there is
assurance sufficient for the purposes of
human life. We may, and must, assume
our opinion to be true for the guidance
of our own conduct; and it is assuming
no more when we forbid bad men to
pervert society by the propagation of
opinions which we regard as false and
pernicious.
I answer, that it is assuming very much
more. There is the greatest difference
between presuming an opinion to be true,
because, with every opportunity for con
testing it, it has not been refuted, and
assuming its truth for the purpose of
not permitting its refutation. Complete
liberty of contradicting and disproving
our opinion is the very condition which
justifies us in assuming its truth for
purposes of action; and on no other
terms can a being with human faculties
have any rational assurance of beinz
right.
�22
ON LIBERT Y
When we consider either the history so ? Because he has kept his mind open
of opinion or the ordinary conduct of to criticism of his opinions and conduct.
human life, to what is it to be ascribed Because it has been his practice to listen
that the one and the other are no worse to all that could be said against him ;
than they are? Not certainly to the to profit by as much of it as was just,
inherent force of the human under and expound to himself, and upon occa
standing ; for, on any matter not self- sion to others, the fallacy of what was
evident, there are ninety-nine persons fallacious. Because he has felt that the
totally incapable of judging of it for one only way in which a human being can
who is capable; and the capacity of the make some approach to knowing the
hundredth person is only comparative; whole of a subject is by hearing what
for the majority of the eminent men of can be said about it by persons of every
every past generation held many opinions variety of opinion, and studying all modes
now known to be erroneous, and did or in which it can be looked at by every
approved numerous things which no one character of mind. No wise man ever
will now justify. Why is it, then, that acquired his wisdom in any mode but
there is on the whole a preponderance this, nor is it in the nature of human
among mankind of rational opinions and intellect to become wise in any other
rational conduct ? If there really is this manner. The steady habit of correcting
preponderance — which there must be and completing his own opinion by col
unless human affairs are, and have always lating it with those of others, so far from
been, in an almost desperate state—it is causing doubt and hesitation in carrying
owing to a quality of the human mind, it into practice, is the only stable founda
the source of everything respectable in tion for a just reliance on it; for, being
man either as an intellectual or as a cognisant of all that can, at least obviously,
moral being—namely, that his errors are be said against him, and having taken
corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his up his position against all gainsay er s—
knowing that he has sought for objections
mistakes by discussion and experience.
and difficulties, instead of avoiding them,
Not by experience alone. There must
be discussion, to show how experience and has shut out no light which can be
is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions thrown upon the subject from any quarter
and practices gradually yield to fact and —he has a right to think his judgment
argument; but facts and arguments, to better than that of any person, or any
produce any effect on the mind, must be multitude, who have not gone through a
brought before it. Very dew facts are similar process.
It is not too much to require that
able to tell their own story without
comments to bring out their meaning. what the wisest ot mankind, those who
The whole strength and value, then, of are best entitled to trust their own judg
human judgment, depending on the one ment, find necessary to warrant their
property, that it can be set right when it relying on it, should be submitted to by
is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only that miscellaneous collection of a few
when the means of setting it right are kept wise and many foolish individuals, called
constantly at hand. In the case of any the public. The most intolerant of
person whose judgment is really deserv Churches, the Roman Catholic Church,
ing of confidence, how has it become even at the canonisation of a saint, admits,
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
and listens patiently to, a “devil’s advo
cate.” The holiest of men, it appears,
cannot be admitted to posthumous
honours until all that the devil could say
against him is known and weighed. If
even the Newtonian philosophy were not
permitted to be questioned, mankind
could not feel as complete assurance of
its truth as they now do. The beliefs
which we have most warrant for have
no safeguard to rest on, but a standing
invitation to the whole world to prove
them unfounded. If the challenge is
not accepted, or is accepted and the
attempt fails, we are far enough from
certainty still; but we have done the
best that the existing state of human
reason admits of; we have neglected
nothing that could give the truth a
chance of reaching us; if the lists are
kept open, we may hope that, if there be
a better truth, it will be found when the
human mind is capable of receiving it;
and in the meantime we may rely on
having attained such approach to truth
as is possible in our own day. This is
the amount of certainty attainable by a
fallible being, and this the sole way of
attaining it.
Strange it is that men should admit
the validity of the arguments for free
discussion, but object to their being
“pushed to an extreme”; not seeing
that, unless the reasons are good for an
extreme case, they are not good for any
case. Strange that they should imagine
that they are not assuming infallibility
when they acknowledge that there should
be free discussion on all subjects which
can possibly be doubtful, but think that
some particular principle or doctrine
should be forbidden to be questioned
because it is so certain; that is, because
they are certain that it is certain. To
call any proposition certain while there
23
is anyone who would deny its certainty
if permitted, but who is not permitted,
is to assume that we ourselves and those
who agree with us are the judges of
certainty, and judges without hearing the
other side.
In the present age—which has been
described as “ destitute of faith, but
terrified at scepticism ”—in which people
feel sure, not so much that their opinions
are true, as that they should not know
what to do without them—the claims of
an opinion to be protected from public
attack are rested not so much on its
truth as on its importance to society.
There are, it is alleged, certain beliefs,
so useful, not to say indispensable, to
well-being that it is as much the duty of
Governments to uphold those beliefs as
to protect any other of the interests of
society. In a case of such necessity,
and so directly in the line of their duty,
something less than infallibility may, it
is maintained, warrant, and even bind,
Governments to act on their own opinion,
confirmed by the general opinion of man
kind. It is also often argued, and still
oftener thought, that none but bad men
would desire to weaken these salutary
beliefs; and there can be nothing wrong,
it is thought, in restraining bad men, and
prohibiting what only such men would
wish to practise. This mode of thinking
makes the justification of restraints on
discussion not a question of the truth of
doctrines, but of their usefulness, and
flatters itself by that means to escape the
responsibility of claiming to be an infal
lible judge of opinions. But those who
thus satisfy themselves do not perceive
that the assumption of infallibility is
merely shifted from one point to another.
The usefulness of an opinion is itself
matter of opinion : as disputable, as open
to discussion, and requiring discussion as
�24
ON LIBERTY
much as the opinion itself. There is fix down the discussion to a concrete
the same need of an infallible judge of case; and I choose, by preference, the
opinions to decide an opinion to be cases which are least favourable to me—
noxious as to decide it to be false, unless in which the argument against freedom
the opinion condemned has full oppor of opinion, both on the score of truth
tunity of defending itself. And it will and on that of utility, is considered the
not do to say that the heretic may be strongest. Let the opinions impugned
allowed to maintain the utility or harm be the belief in a God and in a future
lessness of his opinion, though forbidden state, or any of the commonly received
to maintain its truth. The truth of an doctrines of morality. To fight the
opinion is part of its utility. If we would battle on such ground gives a great
know whether or not it is desirable that advantage to an unfair antagonist; since
a proposition should be believed, is it he will be sure to say (and many who
possible to exclude the consideration of have no desire to be unfair will say it
whether or not it is true ? In the opinion, internally), Are these the doctrines which
not of bad men, but of the best men, no you do not deem sufficiently certain to be
belief which is contrary to truth can be taken under the protection of law ? Is
really useful; and can you prevent such the belief in a God one of the opinions
men from urging that plea when they to feel sure of which you hold to be
are charged with culpability for denying assuming infallibility? But I must be
some doctrine which they are told is permitted to observe that it is not the
useful, but which they believe to be false? feeling sure of a doctrine (be it what it
Those who are on the side of received may) which I call an assumption of
opinions never fail to take all possible infallibility. It is the undertaking to
advantage of this plea: you do not find decide that question for others, without
them handling the question of utility as allowing them to hear what can be said
if it could be completely abstracted from on the contrary side. And I denounce
that of truth ; on the contrary, it is, above and reprobate this pretension not the
all, because their doctrine is “ the truth ” less if put forth on the side of my most
that the knowledge or the belief of it is solemn convictions. However positive
held to be so indispensable. There can anyone’s persuasion may be, not only of
be no fair discussion of the question of the falsity, but of the pernicious conse
usefulness when an argument so vital quences— not only of the pernicious
may be employed on one side but not consequences, but (to adopt expressions
on the other. And, in point of fact, when which I altogether condemn) the immo
law or public feeling do not permit the rality and impiety of an opinion; yet if,
truth of an opinion to be disputed, they in pursuance of that private judgment,
are just as little tolerant of a denial of its though backed by the public judgment
usefulness. The utmost they allow is an of his country or his cotemporaries, he
extenuation of its absolute necessity, or prevents the opinion from being heard
in its defence, he assumes infallibility.
of the positive guilt of rejecting it.
In order more fully to illustrate the And so far from the assumption being
mischief of denying a hearing to opinions less objectionable or less dangerous
because we, in our own judgment, have because the opinion is called immoral or
condemned them, it will be desirable to I impious, this is the case of all others in
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
which it is most fatal. These are exactly
the occasions on which the men of one
generation commit those dreadful mis
takes which excite the astonishment and
horror of posterity. It is among such
that we find the instances memorable in
history when the arm of the law has
been employed to root out the best men
and the noblest doctrines—with deplor
able success as to the men, though some
of the doctrines have survived to be (as
if in mockery) invoked in defence of.
similar conduct towards those who dissent
from them, or from their 'received inter
pretation.
Mankind can hardly be too often re
minded that there was once a man
named Socrates, between whom and the
legal authorities and public opinion of
his time there took place a memorable
collision. Born in an age and country
abounding in individual greatness, this
man has been handed down to us by
those who best knew both him and the
age as the most virtuous man in it;
while we know him as the head and
prototype of all subsequent teachers of
virtue, the source equally of the lofty
inspiration of Plato and the judicious
utilitarianism of Aristotle, “ i maestri di
color che sanno” the two headsprings of
ethical as of all other philosophy. This
acknowledged master of all the eminent
thinkers who have since lived—whose
fame, still growing after more than two
thousand years, all but outweighs the
whole remainder of the names which
make his native city illustrious—was put
to death by his countrymen, after a
judicial conviction, for impiety and im
morality. Impiety, in denying the gods
recognised by the State; indeed, his
accuser asserted (see the Apologia) that
he believed in no gods at all. Im
morality, in being, by his doctrines and
25
instructions, a “corrupter of youth.”
Of these charges the tribunal, there is
every ground for believing, honestly found
him guilty, and condemned the man who
probably of all then born had deserved
best of mankind to be put to death as a
criminal.
To pass from this to the only other
instance of judicial iniquity, the mention
of which, after the condemnation of
Socrates, would not be an anti-climax—
the event which took place on Calvary
rather more than eighteen hundred years
ago. The man who left on the memory
of those who witnessed his life and con
versation such an impression of his moral
grandeur that eighteen subsequent cen
turies have done homage to him as the
Almighty in person was ignominiously
put to death, as what ? Asa blasphemer.
Men did not merely mistake their bene
factor ; they mistook him for the exact
contrary of what he was, and treated him
as that prodigy of impiety, which they
themselves are now held to be, for their
treatment of him. The feelings with
which mankind now regard these lament
able transactions, especially the later of
the two, render them extremely unjust
in their judgment of the unhappy actors.
These were, to all appearance, not bad
men—not worse than men commonly
are, but rather the contrary; men who
possessed in a full, or somewhat more
than a full, measure the religious, moral,
and patriotic feelings of their time and
people : the very kind of men who, in
all times, our own included, have every
chance of passing through life blameless
and respected. The high-priest who rent
his garments when the words were pro
nounced, which, according to all the
ideas of his country, constituted the
blackest guilt, was in all probability quite
as sincere in his horror and indignation
�26
ON LIBERTY
as the generality of respectable and pious
men now are in the religious and moral
sentiments they profess; and most of
those who now shudder at his conduct,
if they had lived in his time, and been
born Jews, would have acted precisely as
he did. Orthodox Christians who are
tempted to think that those who stoned
to death the first martyrs must have
been worse men than they themselves are
ought to remember that one of those
persecutors was Saint Paul.
Let us add one more example, the
most striking of all, if the impressiveness
of an error is measured by the wisdom
and virtue of him who falls into it. If
ever anyone, possessed of power, had
grounds for thinking himself the best
and most enlightened among his con
temporaries, it was the Emperor Marcus
Aurelius. Absolute monarch of the
whole civilised world, he preserved
through life not only the most un
blemished justice, but, what was less to
be expected from his Stoical breeding,
the tenderest heart. The few failings
which are attributed to him were all on
the side of indulgence; while his writings,
the highest ethical product of the ancient
mind, differ scarcely perceptibly, if they
differ at all, from the most characteristic
teachings of Christ. This man, a better
Christian in all but the dogmatic sense
of the word than almost any of the
ostensibly Christian sovereigns who have
since reigned, persecuted Christianity.
Placed at the summit of all the previous
attainments of humanity, with an open,
unfettered intellect, and a character
which led him of himself to embody in
his moral writings the Christian ideal,
he yet failed to see that Christianity was
to be a good and not an evil to the
world, with his duties to which he was
so deeply penetrated. Existing society
he knew to be in a deplorable state.
But such as it was, he saw, or thought
he saw, that it was held together, and
prevented from being worse, by belief
and reverence of the received divinities.
As a ruler of mankind, he deemed it his
duty not to suffer society to fall in pieces;
and saw not how, if its existing ties were
removed, any others could be formed
which could again knit it together. The
new religion openly aimed at dissolving
these ties: unless, therefore, it was his
duty to adopt that religion, it seemed to
be his duty to put it down. Inasmuch,
then, as the theology of Christianity did
not appear to him true or of divine origin;
inasmuch as this strange history of a cru
cified God was not credible to him, and a
system which purported to rest entirely
upon a foundation to him so wholly
unbelievable could not be foreseen by
him to be that renovating agency which,
after all abatements, it has in fact proved
to be; the gentlest and most amiable of
philosophers and rulers, under a solemn
sense of duty, authorised the persecution
of Christianity. To my mind, this is one
of the most tragical facts in all history.
It is a bitter thought how different a
thing the Christianity of the world might
have been if the Christian faith had been
adopted as the religion of the empire
under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius
instead of those of Constantine. But it
would be equally unjust to him, and false
to truth, to deny that no one plea which
can be urged for punishing anti-Christian
teaching was wanting to Marcus Aurelius
for punishing, as he did, the propaga
tion of Christianity. No Christian more
firmly believes that Atheism is false, and
tends to the dissolution of society, than
Marcus Aurelius believed the same things
of Christianity—he who, of all men then
living, might have been thought the most
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
capable of appreciating it. Unless any
one who approves of punishment for the
promulgation of opinions flatters himself
that he is a wiser and better man than
Marcus Aurelius—more deeply versed in
the wisdom of his time, more elevated
in his intellect above it; more earnest
in his search for truth, or more singleminded in his devotion to it when found—
let him abstain from that assumption of
the joint infallibility of himself and the
multitude which the great Antoninus
made with so unfortunate a result.
Aware of the impossibility of defend
ing the use of punishment for restraining
irreligious opinions, by any argument
which will not justify Marcus Antoninus,
the enemies of religious freedom, w’hen
hard pressed, occasionally accept this
consequence, and say, with Dr. Johnson,
that the persecutors of Christianity were
in the right; that persecution is an
ordeal through which truth ought to pass,
and always passes successfully, legal
penalties being, in the end, powerless
against truth, though sometimes bene
ficially effective against mischievous
errors. This is a form of the argument for
religious intolerance sufficiently remark
able not to be passed without notice.
A theory which maintains that truth
may justifiably be persecuted because
persecution cannot possibly do it any
harm cannot be charged with being
intentionally hostile to the reception of
new truths; but we cannot commend
the generosity of its dealing with the
persons to whom mankind are indebted
for them. To discover to the world
something which deeply concerns it, and
of which it was previously ignorant; to
prove to it that it had been mistaken on
some vital point of temporal or spiritual
interest, is as important a service as a
human being can render to his fellow
27
creatures, and in certain cases, as in
those of the early Christians and of the
Reformers, those who think with Dr.
Johnson believe it to have been the most
precious gift which could be bestowed
on mankind. That the authors of such
splendid benefits should be requited by
martyrdom ; that their reward should be
to be dealt with as the vilest of criminals,
is not, upon this theory, a deplorable
error and misfortune, for which humanity
should mourn in sackcloth and ashes,
but the normal and justifiable state of
things. The propounder of a new truth,
according to this doctrine, should stand,
as stood, in the legislation of the Locrians,
the proposer of a new law, with a halter
round his neck, to be instantly tightened
if the public assembly did not, on hearing
his reasons, then and there adopt his pro
position. People who defend this mode of
treating benefactors cannot be supposed
to set much value on the benefit; and I
believe this view of the subject is mostly
confined to the sort of persons who think
that new truths may have been desirable
once, but that we have had enough of
them now.
But, indeed, the dictum that truth
always triumphs over persecution is one
of those pleasant falsehoods which men
repeat after one another till they pass
into commonplaces, but which all expe
rience refutes. History teems with in
stances of truth put down by persecution.
If not suppressed for ever, it may be
thrown back for centuries. To speak
only of religious opinions : the Refor
mation broke out at least twenty times
before Luther, and was put down.
Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra
Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was
put down. The Albigeois wrere put
down. The Vaudois w’ere put down.
The Lollards were put down.
The
�28
ON LIBERTY
Hussites were put down. Even after the
era of Luther, wherever persecution was
persisted in it was successful. In Spain,
Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire,
Protestantism was rooted out; and, most
likely, would have been so in England
had Queen Mary lived, or Queen
Elizabeth died. Persecution has always
succeeded, save where the heretics were
too strong a party to be effectually per
secuted.
No reasonable person can
doubt that Christianity might have
been extirpated in the Roman Empire.
It spread, and became predominant,
because the persecutions were only occa
sional, lasting but a short time, and
separated by long intervals of almost
undisturbed propagandism. It is a piece
of idle sentimentality that truth, merely
as truth, has any inherent power denied
to error, of prevailing against the dungeon
and the stake. Men are not more zealous
for truth than they often are for error,
and a sufficient application of legal or
even of social penalties will generally
succeed in stopping the propagation of
either. The real advantage which truth
has consists in this, that when an opinion
is true it may be extinguished once,
twice, or many times, but in the course
of ages there will generally be found
persons to rediscover it, until some one
of its reappearances falls on a time when
from favourable circumstances it escapes
persecution until it has made such head
as to withstand all subsequent attempts
to suppress it.
It will be said that we do not now
put to death the introducers of new
opinions; we are not like our fathers,
who slew the prophets : we even build
sepulchres to them. It is true we no
longer put heretics to death; and the
amount of penal infliction which modern
feeling would probably tolerate, even
against the most obnoxious opinions, is
not sufficient to extirpate them. But let
us not flatter ourselves that we are yet
free from the stain even of legal persecu
tion. Penalties for opinion, or at least
for its expression, still exist by law; and
their enforcement is not, even in these
times, so unexampled as to make, it at
all incredible that they may some day be
revived in full force. In the year 1857,
at the summer assizes of the county of
Cornwall, an unfortunate man,1 said to
be of unexceptionable conduct in all
relations of life, was sentenced to twentyone months’ imprisonment for uttering
and writing on a gate some offensive
words concerning Christianity. Within
a month of the same time, at the Old
Bailey, two persons, on two separate
occasions,2 were rejected as jurymen,
and one of them grossly insulted by the
judge and by one of the counsel, because
they honestly declared that they had
no theological belief; and a third, a
foreigner,3 for the same reason, was
denied justice against a thief. This
refusal of redress took place in virtue of
the legal doctrine that no person can be
allowed to give evidence in a court of
justice who does not profess belief in a
God (any god is sufficient) and in a
future state; which is equivalent to
declaring such persons to be outlaws,
excluded from the protection of the
tribunals; who may not only be robbed
or assaulted with impunity, if no one but
themselves, or persons of similar opinions,
be present, but anyone else may be
1 Thomas Pooley, Bodmin Assizes, July 31st,
1857. In December following he received a
free pardon from the Crown.
2 George Jacob Holyoake, August 17th, 1857;
Edward Truelove, July, 1857.
3 Baron de Gleichen, Marlborough Street
Police Court, August 4th, 1857.
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
robbed or assaulted with impunity, if the
proof of the fact depends on their evi
dence. The assumption on which this
is grounded is that the oath is worthless
of a person who does not believe in a
future state, a proposition which betokens
much ignorance of history in those who
assent to it (since it is historically true
that a large proportion of infidels in all
ages have been persons of distinguished
integrity and honour), and would be
maintained by no one who had the
smallest conception how many of the
persons in greatest repute with the world,
both for virtues and attainments, are well
known, at least to their intimates, to
be unbelievers. The rule, besides, is
suicidal, and cuts away its own founda
tion. Under pretence that Atheists must
be liars, it admits the testimony of all
Atheists who are willing to lie, and rejects
only those who brave the obloquy of
publicly confessing a detested creed
rather than affirm a falsehood. A rule
thus self-convicted of absurdity, so far as
regards its professed purpose, can be
kept in force only as a badge of hatred,
a relic of persecution—a persecution,
too, having the peculiarity that the
qualification for undergoing it is the
being cleaily proved not to deserve it.
The rule and the theory it implies are
hardly less insulting to believers than to
infidels. For if he who does not believe
in a future state necessarily lies, it
follows that they who do believe are only
prevented from lying, if prevented they
are, by the fear of hell. We will not do
the authors and abettors of the rule the
injury of supposing that the conception
which they have formed of Christian
virtue is drawn from their own conscious
ness.
These, indeed, are but rags and rem
nants of persecution, and may be thought
29
to be not so much an indication of the
wish to persecute as an example of that
very frequent infirmity of English minds
which makes them take a preposterous
pleasure in the assertion of a bad prin
ciple when they are no longer bad enough
to desire to carry it really into practice.
But, unhappily, there is no security in the
state of the public mind that the suspen
sion of worse forms of legal persecution,
which has lasted for about the space of a
generation, will continue. In this age the
quiet surface of routine is as often ruffled
by attempts to resuscitate past evils as
to introduce new benefits. What is
boasted of at the present time as the
revival of religion is always, in narrow
and uncultivated minds, at least as much
the revival of bigotry ; and where there
is the strong permanent leaven of intole
rance in the feelings of a people, which
at all times abides in the middle classes
of this country, it needs but little to
provoke them into actively persecuting
those whom they have never ceased to
think proper objects of persecution.1
1 Ample warning maybe drawn from the large
infusion of the passions of a persecutor, which
mingled with the general display of the worst
parts of our national character on the occasion
of the Sepoy insurrection. The ravings of
fanatics or charlatans from the pulpit may be
unworthy of notice ; but the heads of the
Evangelical party have announced as their
principle for the government of Hindoos and
Mohammedans, that no schools be supported by
public money in which the Bible is not taught,
and, by necessary consequence, that no public
employment be given to any but real or pretended
Christians. An Under-Secretary of State, in a
speech delivered to his constituents on November
12th, 1857, is reported to have said : “Tolera
tion of their faith” (the faith of a hundred
millions of British subjects), “ the superstition
which they called religion, by the British
Government, had had the effect of retarding the
■ ascendancy of the British name, and preventing
�3°
ON LIBERTY
For it is this—it is the opinions men
entertain, and the feelings they cherish,
respecting those who disown the beliefs
they deem important, which makes this
country not a place of mental freedom.
For a long time past, the chief mischief of
the legal penalties is that they strengthen
the social stigma. It is that stigma
which is really effective, and so effective
is it that the profession of opinions
which are under the ban of society is
much less common in England than is,
in many other countries, the avowal of
those which incur risk of judicial punish
ment. In respect to all persons but
those whose pecuniary circumstances
make them independent of the goodwill
of other people, opinion on this subject
is as efficacious as law; men might as
well be imprisoned as excluded from the
means of earning their bread. Those
whose bread is already secured, and who
desire no favours from men in power, or
from bodies of men, or from the public,
have nothing to fear from the open
avowal of any opinions, but to be illthought of and ill-spoken of, and this
it ought not to require a very heroic
mould to enable them to bear. There
the salutary growth of Christianity.......Tolera
tion was the great corner-stone of the religious
liberties of this country ; but do not let them
abuse that precious word ‘toleration.’ As he
understood it, it meant the complete liberty to
all, freedom of worship, among Christians who
worshipped upon the same foundation. It meant
toleration of all sects and denominations of Chris
tians who believed in the one mediation.'1' I
’
desire to call attention to the fact, that a man
who has been deemed fit to fill a high office in
the government of this country under a Liberal
Ministry maintains the doctrine that all who do
not believe in the divinity of Christ are beyond
the pale of toleration. Who, after this imbecile
display, can indulge the illusion that religious
persecution has passed away, never to return ?
is no room for any appeal ad misericordiam in behalf of such persons. But
though we do not now inflict so much
evil on those who think differently from
us as it was formerly our custom to do,
it may be that we do ourselves as much
evil as ever by our treatment of them.
Socrates was put to death, but the
Socratic philosophy rose like the sun in
heaven, and spread its illumination over
the whole intellectual firmament. Chris
tians were cast to the lions, but the
Christian Church grew up a stately and
spreading tree, overtopping the older
and less vigorous growths, and stifling
them by its shade. Our merely social
intolerance kills no one, roots out no
opinions, but induces men to disguise
them, or to abstain from any active effort
for their diffusion. With us heretical
opinions do not perceptibly gain, or
even lose ground in each decade or
generation; they never blaze out far and
wide, but continue to smoulder in the
narrow circles of thinking and studious
persons among whom they originate,
without ever lighting up the general
affairs of mankind with either a true or
deceptive light. And thus is kept up a
state of things very satisfactory to some
minds, because, without the unpleasant
process of fining or imprisoning anybody,
it maintains all prevailing opinions out
wardly undisturbed, while it does not
absolutely interdict the exercise of reason
by dissentients afflicted with the malady
of thought. A convenient plan for
having peace in the intellectual world,
and keeping all things going on therein
very much as they do already. But the
price paid for this sort of intellectual
pacification is the sacrifice of the entire
moral courage of the human mind. A
state of things in which a large portion
of the most active and inquiring intellects
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
find it advisable to keep the general
principles and grounds of their convic
tions within their own breasts, and
attempt, in what they address to the
public, to fit as much as they can of
their own conclusions to premises which
they have internally renounced, cannot
send forth the open, fearless characters,
and logical, consistent intellects, who
once adorned the thinking world. The
sort of men who can be looked for under
it are either mere conformers to common
place or time-servers for truth, whose
arguments on all great subjects are meant
for their hearers, and are not those which
have convinced themselves. Those who
avoid this alternative do so by narrow
ing their thoughts and interest to things
which can be spoken of without venturing
within the region of principles—that is,
to small practical matters, which would
come right of themselves, if but the
minds of mankind were strengthened
and enlarged, and which will never be
made effectually right until then ; while
that which would strengthen and enlarge
men’s minds, free and daring speculation
on the highest subjects, is abandoned.
Those in whose eyes this reticence on
the part of heretics is no evil should
consider, in the first place, that in conse
quence of it there is never any fair and
thorough discussion of heretical opinions;
and that such of them as could not stand
such a discussion, though they may be
prevented from spreading, do not disap
pear. But it is not the minds of heretics
that are deteriorated most by the ban
placed on all inquiry which does not
end in the orthodox conclusions. The
greatest harm done is to those who are
not heretics, and whose whole mental
development is cramped, and their reason
cowed, by the fear of heresy. Who can
compute what the world loses in the
3i
multitude of promising intellects com
bined with timid characters, who dare
not follow out any bold, vigorous, inde
pendent train of thought, lest it should
land them in something which would
admit of being considered irreligious or
immoral? Among them we may occa
sionally see some man of deep conscien
tiousness and subtle and refined under
standing, who spends a life in sophisti
cating with an intellect which he cannot
silence, and exhausts the resources of
ingenuity in attempting to reconcile the
promptings of his conscience and reason
with orthodoxy, which yet he does not
perhaps to the end succeed in doing.
No one can be a great thinker who does
not recognise that as a thinker it is his
first duty to follow his intellect to what
ever conclusions it may lead. Truth
gains more even by the errors of one
who, with due study and preparation,
thinks for himself than by the true
opinions of those who only hold them
because they do not suffer themselves to
think. Not that it is solely or chiefly
to form great thinkers that freedom of
thinking is required. On the contrary, it
is as much and even more indispensable
to enable average human beings to attain
the mental stature which they are capable
of. There have been, and may again be,
great individual thinkers in a general
atmosphere of mental slavery. But there
never has been, nor ever will be, in
that atmosphere an intellectually active
people. Where any people has made a
temporary approach to such a character,
it has been because the dread of hetero
dox speculation was for a time suspended.
Where there is a tacit convention that
principles are not to be disputed; where
the discussion of the greatest questions
which can occupy humanity is considered
to be closed, we cannot hope to find that
�32
ON LIBERTY
generally high scale of mental activity
which has made some periods of history
so remarkable. Never when controversy
avoided the subjects which are large and
important enough to kindle enthusiasm
was the mind of a people stirred up from
its foundations and the impulse given
which raised even persons of the most
ordinary intellect to something of the
dignity of thinking beings. Of such we
have had an example in the condition
of Europe during the times immediately
following the Reformation; another,
though limited to the continent and to
a more cultivated class, in the specula
tive movement of the latter half of the
eighteenth century; and a third, of still
briefer duration, in the intellectual fermen
tation of Germany during the Goethian
and Fichtean period. These periods
differed widely in the particular opinions
which they developed; but were alike
in this, that during all three the yoke of
authority was broken. In each an old
mental despotism had been thrown off,
and no new one had yet taken its place.
The impulse given at these three periods
has made Europe what it now is. Every
single improvement which has taken
place either in the human mind or in
institutions may be traced distinctly to
one or other of them. Appearances have
for some time indicated that all three
impulses are well-nigh spent; and we
can expect no fresh start until we again
assert our mental freedom.
Let us now pass to the second division
of the argument, and, dismissing the
supposition that any of the received
opinions may be false, let us assume
them to be true, and examine into the
worth of the manner in which they are
likely to be held when their truth is not
freely and openly canvassed. However
unwillingly a person who has a strong
opinion may admit the possibility that
his opinion may be false, he ought to be
moved by the consideration that, however
true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently,
and fearlessly discussed, it will be held
as a dead dogma, not a living truth.
There is a class of persons (happily
not quite so numerous as formerly) who
think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly to what they think true,
though he has no knowledge whatever
of the grounds of the opinion, and could
not make a tenable defence of it against
the most superficial objections. Such
persons, if they can once get their creed
taught from authority, naturally think
that no good, and some harm, comes
of its being allowed to be questioned.
Where their influence prevails, they make
it nearly impossible for the received
opinion to be rejected wisely and con
siderately, though it may still be rejected
rashly and ignorantly; for to shut out
discussion entirely is seldom possible,
and, when it once gets in, beliefs not
grounded on conviction are apt to give
way before the slightest semblance of an
argument. Waving, however, this possi
bility—assuming that the true opinion
abides in the mind, but abides as a
prejudice, a belief independent of, and
proof against, argument—this is- not the
way in which truth ought to be held by
a rational being. This is not knowing
the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one
superstition the more, accidentally cling
ing to the words which enunciate a truth.
If the intellect and judgment of man
kind ought to be cultivated, a thing which
Protestants at least do not deny, on what
can these faculties be more appropriately
exercised by anyone than on the things
which concern him so much that it is
considered necessary for him to hold
opinions on them? If the cultivation
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
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of the understanding consists in one
thing more than in another, it is surely
in learning the grounds of one’s own
opinions. Whatever people believe, on
subjects on which it is of the first impor
tance to believe rightly, they ought to
be able to defend against at least the
common objections. But someone may
say: “ Let them be taught the grounds
of their opinions. It does not follow
that opinions must be merely parroted
because they are never heard contro
verted. Persons who learn geometry
do not simply commit the theorems to
memory, but understand and learn like
wise the demonstrations; and it would
be absurd to say that they remain
ignorant of the grounds of geometrical
truths because they never hear anyone
deny and attempt to disprove them.”
Undoubtedly ; and such teaching suffices
on a subject like mathematics, where
there is nothing at all to be said on
the wrong side of the question. The
peculiarity of the evidence of mathe
matical truths is that all the argument
is on one side. There are no objections,
and no answers to objections. But on
every subject on which difference of
opinion is possible the truth depends
on a balance to be struck between two
sets of conflicting reasons. Even in
natural philosophy there is always some
other explanation possible of the same
facts; some geocentric theory instead of
heliocentric, some phlogiston instead of
oxygen; and it has to be shown why
that other theory cannot be the true one;
and until this is shown, and until we
know how it is shown, we do not under
stand the grounds of our opinion. But
when we turn to subjects infinitely more
complicated, to morals, religion, politics,
social relations, and the business of life,
three-fourths of the arguments for every
33
disputed opinion consist in dispelling
the appearances which favour some
opinion different from it. The greatest
orator save one of antiquity has left it
on record that he always studied his
adversary’s case with as great, if not still
greater, intensity than even his own.
What Cicero practised as the means of
forensic success requires to be imitated
by all who study any subject, in order to
arrive at the truth. He who knows only
his own side of the case knows little of
that. His reasons may be good, and no
one may have been able to refute them.
But if he is equally unable to refute the
reasons on the opposite side, if he does
not so much as know what they are, he
has no ground for preferring either
opinion. The rational position for him
would be suspension of judgment; and,
unless he contents himself with that, he
is either led by authority, or adopts, like
the generality of the world, the side to
which he feels most inclination. Nor
is it enough that he should hear the
arguments of adversaries from his own
teachers presented as they state them,
and accompanied by what they offer as
refutations. That is not the way to do
justice to the arguments or bring them
into real contact with his own mind.
He must be able to hear them from
persons who actually believe them, who
defend them in earnest, and do their
very utmost for them. He must know
them in their most plausible and persua
sive form; he must feel the whole force
of the difficulty which the true view of
the subject has to encounter and dispose
of; else he will never really possess him
self of the portion of truth which meets
and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine
in a hundred of what are called educated
men are in this condition—even of those
who can argue fluently for their opinions.
�34
ON LIBERTY
Their conclusion may be true, but it
might be false for anything they know;
they have never thrown themselves into
the mental position of those who think
differently from them, and considered
what such persons may have to say ; and
consequently they do not, in any proper
sense of the word, know the doctrine
which they themselves profess. They
do not know those parts of it which
explain and justify the remainder; the
considerations which show that a fact
which seemingly conflicts with another
is reconcilable with it, or that, of two
apparently strong reasons, one and not
the other ought to be preferred. All
that part of the truth which turns the
scale, and decides the judgment of a
completely informed mind, they are
strangers to; nor is it ever really known
but to those who have attended equally
and impartially to both sides, and en
deavoured to see the reasons of both in
the strongest light. So essential is this
discipline to a real understanding of
moral and human subjects that, if oppo
nents of all important truths do not exist,
it is indispensable to imagine them, and
supply them with the strongest arguments
which the most skilful devil’s advocate
can conjure up.
To abate the force of these considera
tions, an enemy of free discussion may
be supposed to say that there is no
necessity for mankind in general to know
and understand all that can be said
against or for their opinions by philoso
phers and theologians. That it is not
needful for common men to be able to
expose all the misstatements or fallacies
of an ingenious opponent. That it is
enough if there is always somebody
capable of answering them, so that
nothing likely to mislead uninstructed
persons remains unrefuted. That simple
minds, having been taught the obvious
grounds of the truths inculcated on them,
may trust to authority for the rest, and,
being aware that they have neither know
ledge nor talent to resolve every difficulty
which can be raised, may repose in the
assurance that all those which have been
raised have been or can be answered by
those who are specially trained to the
task.
Conceding to this view of the subject
the utmost that can be claimed for it by
those most easily satisfied with the
amount of understanding of truth which
ought to accompany the belief of it—
even so, the argument for free discussion
is no way weakened. For even this
doctrine acknowledges that mankind
ought to have a rational assurance that
all objections have been satisfactorily
answered; and how are they to be
answered if that which requires to be
answered is not spoken ? or how can the
answer be known to be satisfactory if
the objectors have no opportunity of
showing that it is unsatisfactory ? If not
the public, at least the philosophers and
theologians who are to resolve the diffi
culties, must make themselves familiar
with those difficulties in their most
puzzling form; and this cannot be accom
plished unless they are freely stated, and
placed in the most advantageous light
which they admit of. The Catholic
Church has its own way of dealing with
this embarrassing problem. It makes a
broad separation between those who can
be permitted to receive its doctrines on
conviction and those who must accept
them on trust. Neither, indeed, are
allowed any choice as to what they will
accept; but the clergy, such at least as
can be fully confided in, may admissibly
and meritoriously make themselves ac
quainted with the arguments of opponents,
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
in order to answer them, and may, there
fore, read heretical books—the laity, not
unless by special permission, hard to be
obtained. This discipline recognises a
knowledge of the enemy’s case as bene
ficial to the teachers, but finds means,
consistent with this, of denying it to the
rest of the world; thus giving to the
elite more mental culture, though not
more mental freedom, than it allows to
the mass. By this device it succeeds in
obtaining the kind of mental superiority
which its purposes require ; for, though
culture without freedom never made a
large and liberal mind, it can make a
clever nisi prius advocate of a cause.
But in countries professing Protestantism
this resource is denied; since Protestants
hold, at least in theory, that the respon
sibility for the choice of a religion must
be borne by each for himself, and cannot
be thrown off upon teachers. Besides,
in the present state of the world it is
practically impossible that writings which
are read by the instructed can be kept
from the uninstructed. If the teachers
of mankind are to be cognisant of all
they ought to know, everything must be
free to be written and published without
restraint.
If, however, the mischievous operation
of the absence of free discussion, when
the received opinions are true, were
confined to leaving men ignorant of the
grounds of those opinions, it might be
thought that this, if an intellectual, is no
moral evil, and does not affect the worth
of the opinions regarded in their influence
on the character. The fact, however, is
that not only the grounds of the opinion
are forgotten in the absence of discussion,
but too often the meaning of the opinion
itself. The words which convey it cease
to suggest ideas, or suggest only a small
portion of those they were originally
35
employed to communicate. Instead of
a vivid conception and a living belief,
there remain only a few phrases retained
by rote ; or, if any part, the shell and
husk only of the meaning is retained,
the finer essence being lost. The great,
chapter in human history which this fact
occupies and fills cannot be too earnestly
studied and meditated on.
It is illustrated in the experience of
almost all ethical doctrines and religious
creeds. They are all full of meaning and
vitality to those who originate them, and
to the direct disciples of the originators.
Their meaning continues to be felt in
undiminished strength, and is perhaps
brought out into even fuller conscious
ness, so long as the struggle lasts to give
the doctrine or creed an ascendancy over
other creeds. At last it either prevails
and becomes the general opinion, or its
progress stops : it keeps possession of
the ground it has gained, but ceases to
spread further. When either of these
results has become apparent, controversy
on the subject flags, and gradually dies
away. The doctrine has taken its place,
if not as a received opinion, as one of
the admitted sects or divisions of opinion;
those who hold it have generally inherited
not adopted it; and conversion from one
of these doctrines to another, being now
an exceptional fact, occupies little place
in the thoughts of their professors.
Instead of being, as at first, constantly
on the alert either to defend themselves
against the world or to bring the world
over to them, they have subsided into
acquiescence, and neither listen when they
can help it to arguments against their
creed nor trouble dissentients (if there
be such) with arguments in its favour.
From this time may usually be dated the
decline in the living power of the doctrine.
We often hear the teachers of all creeds
�36
ON LIBERTY
lamenting the difficulty of keeping up in
To what an extent doctrines intrinsi
the minds of believers a lively apprehen cally fitted to make the deepest impres
sion of the truth which they nominally sion upon the mind may remain in it as
recognise, so that it may penetrate the dead beliefs, without being ever realised
feelings and acquire a real mastery over in the imagination, the feeling, or the
the conduct. No such difficulty is com understanding, is exemplified by the
plained of while the creed is still fighting manner in which the majority of believers
for its existence; even the weaker com hold the doctrines of Christianity. By
batants then know and feel what they are Christianity I here mean what is accoun
fighting for, and the difference between it ted such by all Churches and sects—the
and other doctrines; and in that period maxims and precepts contained in the
of every creed’s existence not a few New Testament. These are considered
persons may be found who have realised sacred, and accepted as laws, by all pro
its fundamental principles in all the forms fessing Christians. Yet it is scarcely too
of thought, have weighed and considered much to say that not one Christian in a;
them in all their important bearings, and thousand guides or tests his individual
have experienced the full effect on the conduct by reference to those laws. The
character which belief in that creed standard to which he does refer it is the
ought to produce in a mind thoroughly custom of his nation, his class, or his
imbued with it. But when it has come religious profession. He has thus, on
to be an hereditary creed, and to be the one hand, a collection of ethical
received passively, not actively—when maxims which he believes to have been
the mind is no longer compelled, in the vouchsafed to him by infallible wisdom
same degree as at first, to exercise its as rules for his government; and, on the
vital powers on the questions which its other, a set of every-day judgments and
belief presents to it, there is a progressive practices which go a certain length with
tendency to forget all of the belief except some of those maxims, not so great a
the formularies, or to give it a dull and length with others, stand in direct oppo
torpid assent, as if accepting it on trust sition to some, and are, on the whole, a
dispensed with the necessity of realising compromise between the Christian creed
it in consciousness, or testing it by per and the interests and suggestions of
sonal experience, until it almost ceases worldly life. To the first of these stan
to connect itself at all with the inner life dards he gives his homage; to the other
of the human being. Then are seen the his real allegiance. All Christians believe ’
cases, so frequent in this age of the world that the blessed are the poor and humble
as almost to form the majority, in which and those who are ill-used by the world;
the creed remains, as it were, outside the that it is easier for a camel to pass
mind, incrusting and petrifying it against through the eye of a needle than for a
all other influences addressed to the rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven;
higher parts of our nature; manifesting that they should judge not, lest they be
its power by not suffering any fresh and judged; that they should swear not at
living conviction to get in, but itself doing all; that they should love their neighbour
nothing for the mind or heart, except as themselves; that if one take their cloak,
standing sentinel over them to keep them they should give him their coat also; that
they should take no thought for the
vacant.
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
37
morrow; that, if they would be perfect, owing that Christianity now makes so
they should sell all that they have and little progress in extending its domain,
give it to the poor. They are not insincere and, after eighteen centuries, is still nearly
when they say that they believe these confined to Europeans and the descen
things. They do believe them, as people dants of Europeans. Even with the
believe what they have always heard strictly religious, who are much in earnest
lauded and never discussed. But, in the about their doctrines, and attach a greater
sense of that living belief which regulates amount of meaning to many of them
conduct, they believe these doctrines just than people in general, it commonly
up to the point to which it is usual to happens that the part which is thus
act upon them. The doctrines in their comparatively active in their minds is
integrity are serviceable to pelt adversaries that which was made by Calvin, or Knox,
with ", and it is understood that they are or some such person much nearer in
to be put forward (when possible) as the character to themselves. The sayings
reasons for whatever people do that they of Christ co-exist passively in their minds,
think laudable. But anyone who re producing hardly any effect beyond what
minded them that the maxims require is caused by mere listening to words soan affinity of things which they never amiable and bland. There are many
even think of doing, would gain nothing reasons, doubtless, why doctrines which
but to be classed among those very un- | are the badge of a sect retain more of
popular characters who affect to be better their vitality than those common to all
than other people. The doctrines have recognised sects, and why more pains
no hold on ordinary believers—are not are taken by teachers to keep their
a power in their minds. They have an meaning alive ; but one reason certainly
habitual respect for the sound of them, is that the peculiar doctrines are more
but no feeling which spreads from the questioned, and have to be oftener de
words to the things signified, and forces fended against gainsayers. Both teachers
the mind to take them in, and make and learners go to sleep at their post as
them conform to the formula. Whenever soon as there is no enemy in the field.
The same thing holds true, generally
conduct is concerned, they look round
for Mr. A and B to direct them how far speaking, of all traditional doctrines—
those of prudence and knowledge of life
to go in obeying Christ
Now, we may be well assured that the as well as of morals or religion. All lan
case was not thus, but far otherwise, with guages and literatures are full of general
the early Christians. Had it been thus, observations on life, both as to what it is;
Christianity never would have expanded and how to conduct oneself in it—obser
from an obscure sect of the despised vations which everybody knows, which
Hebrews into the religion of the Roman everybody repeats, or hears with acquies
Empire. When their enemies said, “ See cence, which are received as truisms,
how these Christians love one another ” yet of which most people first truly learn
(a remark not likely to be made by any the meaning when experience, generally
body now), they assuredly had a much of a painful kind, has made it a reality
livelier feeling of the meaning of their to them. How often, when smarting
creed than they have ever had since. under some unforeseen misfortune or
And to this cause, probably, it is chiefly disappointment, does a person call to
�38
CA' LIBERTY
mind some proverb or common saying,
familiar to him all his life, the meaning
of which, if he had ever before felt it as
he does now, would have saved him from
the calamity. There are, indeed, reasons
for this other than the absence of discus
sion : there are many truths of which the
full meaning cannot be realised until
personal experience has brought it home.
But much more of the meaning even of
these would have been understood, and
what was understood would have been
far more deeply impressed on the mind,
if the man had been accustomed to hear
it argued pro and con. by people who did
understand it. The fatal tendency of
mankind to leave off thinking about a
thing when it is no longer doubtful is
the cause of half their errors. A co
temporary author has well spoken of “the
deep slumber of a decided opinion.”
But what! (it may be asked) Is the
absence of unanimity an indispensable
condition of true knowledge ? Is it
necessary that some part of mankind
should persist in error to enable any to
realise the truth? Does a belief cease to
be real and vital as soon as it is generally
received — and is a proposition never
thoroughly understood and felt unless
some doubt of it remains ? As soon as
mankind have unanimously accepted a
truth, does the truth perish within them?
The highest aim and best result of im
proved intelligence, it has hitherto been
thought, is to unite mankind more and
more in the acknowledgment of all im
portant truths; and does the intelligence
only last as long as it has not achieved
Its object? Do the fruits of conquest
perish by the very completeness of the
victory ?
I affirm no such thing. As mankind
improve the number of doctrines which
are no longer disputed or doubted will
be constantly on the increase; and the
well-being of mankind may almost be
measured by the number and gravity of
the truths which have reached the point
of being uncontested. The cessation,
on one question after another, of serious
controversy is one of the necessary inci
dents of the consolidation of opinion—-a
consolidation as salutary in the case of
true opinions as it is dangerous and
noxious when the opinions are erroneous.
But though this gradual narrowing of the
bounds of diversity of opinion is neces
sary in both senses of the term, being at
once inevitable and indispensable, we are
not therefore obliged to conclude that
all its consequences must be beneficial.
The loss of so important an aid to the
intelligent and living apprehension of a
truth as is afforded by the necessity of
explaining it to, or defending it against,
opponents, though not sufficient to out
weigh, is no trifling drawback from, the
benefitofits universal recognition. Where
this advantage can no longer be had, I
confess I should like to see the teachers
of mankind endeavouring to provide a
substitute for it—some contrivance for
making the difficulties of the question as
present to the learner’s consciousness as
if they were pressed upon him by a dis
sentient champion, eager for his conver
sion.
But, instead of seeking contrivances
for this purpose, they have lost those
they formerly had. The Socratic dia
lectics, so magnificently exemplified in
the dialogues of Plato, were a contrivance
of this description. They were essentially
a negative discussion of the great ques
tions of philosophy and life, directed with
consummate skill to the purpose of con
vincing anyone who had merely adopted
the commonplaces of received opinion,
that he did not understand the subject
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
—that he as yet attached no definite I
meaning to the doctrines he professed;
in order that, becoming aware of his igno
rance, he might be put in the way to
obtain a stable belief, resting on a clear
apprehension both of the meaning of
doctrines and of their evidence. The
school disputations of the Middle Ages
had a somewhat similar object. They
were intended to make sure that the pupil
understood his own opinion, and (by
necessary correlation) the opinion opposed
to it, and could enforce the grounds of
the one and confute those of the other.
These last-mentioned contests had indeed
the incurable defect that the premises
appealed to were taken from authority,
not from reason; and, as a discipline to
the mind, they were in every respect
inferior to the powerful dialectics which
formed the intellects of the “ Socratici
viri”; but the modern mind owes far
more to both than it is generally willing
to admit, and the present modes of
education contain nothing which in the
smallest degree supplies the place either
of the one or of the other. A person who
derives all his instruction from teachers
or books, even if he escape the besetting
temptation of contenting himself with
cram, is under no compulsion to hear
both sides; accordingly, it is far from a
frequent accomplishment, even among
thinkers, to know both sides; and the
weakest part of what everybody says in
defence of his opinion is what he intends
as a reply to antagonists. It is the fashion
of the present time to disparage negative
logic—that which points out weaknesses
in theory or errors in practice, without
establishing positive truths. Such nega
tive criticism would, indeed, be poor
enough as an ultimate result; but, as a
means to attaining any positive know
ledge or conviction worthy the name, it
39
cannot be valued too highly; and until
people are again systematically trained
to it there will be few great thinkers,
and a low general average of intellect, in
any but the mathematical and physical
departments of speculation. On any
other subject no one’s opinions deserve
the name of knowledge, except so far as
he has either had forced upon him by
others, or gone through of himself, the
same mental process which would have
been required of him in carrying on an
active controversy with opponents. That,
therefore, which, when absent, it is so
indispensable, but so difficult, to create,
how worse than absurd it is to forego
when spontaneously offering itself! If
there are any persons who contest a
received opinion, or who will do so if law
or opinion will let them, let us thank
them for it, open our minds to listen to
them, and rejoice that there is someone
to do for us what we otherwise ought, if
we have any regard for either the certainty
or the vitality of our convictions, to do
with much greater labour for ourselves.
It still remains to speak of one of the
principal causes which make diversity of
opinion advantageous, and will continue
to do so until mankind shall have entered
a stage of intellectual advancement which
at present seems at an incalculable dis
tance. We have hitherto considered
only two possibilities: that the received
opinion may be false, and some other
opinion, consequently, true; or that, the
received opinion being true, a conflict
with the opposite error is essential to a
clear apprehension and deep feeling of
its truth. But there is a commoner case
than either of these : when the conflicting
doctrines, instead of being one true and
the other false, share the truth between
them, and the nonconforming opinion
�4o
ON LIBERTY
is needed to supply the remainder of the
truth, of which the received doctrine
embodies only a part. Popular opinions,
on subjects not palpable to sense, are
often true, but seldom or never the whole
truth. They are a part of the truth—
sometimes a greater, sometimes a smaller
part, but exaggerated, distorted, and dis
joined from the truths by which they
ought to be accompanied and limited.
Heretical opinions, on the other hand,
are generally some of these suppressed
and neglected truths, bursting the bonds
which kept them down, and either seek
ing reconciliation with the truth contained
in the common opinion, or fronting it as
enemies, and setting themselves up, with
similar exclusiveness, as the whole truth.
The latter case is hitherto the most
frequent, as, in the human mind, one
sidedness has always been the rule and
many-sidedness the exception. Hence,
even in revolutions of opinion, one part
of the truth usually sets while the other
rises. Even progress, ’ which ought to
superadd, for the most part only substi
tutes, one partial and incomplete truth
for another; improvement consisting
chiefly in this, that the new fragment of
truth is more wanted, more adapted to
the needs of the time, than that which
it displaces. Such being the partial
character of prevailing opinions, even
when resting on a true foundation, every
opinion which embodies somewhat of
the portion of truth which the common
opinion omits ought to be considered
precious, with whatever amount of error
and confusion that truth may be blended.
No sober judge of human affairs will feel
bound to be indignant because those who
force on our notice truths which we should
otherwise have overlooked, overlook some
of those which we see. Rather, he will
think that, so long as popular truth is
one-sided, it is more desirable than
otherwise that unpopular truth should
have one-sided assertors too; such
being usually the most energetic and
the most likely to compel reluctant
attention to the fragment of wisdom
which they proclaim as if it were the
whole.
Thus in the eighteenth century, when
nearly all the instructed, and all those of
the uninstructed who were led by them,
were lost in admiration of what is called
civilisation, and of the marvels of modern
science, literature, and philosophy, and,
while greatly overrating the amount of
unlikeness between the men of modern
and those of ancient times, indulged the
belief that the whole of the difference was
in their own favour—with what a salutary
shock did the paradoxes of Rousseau
explode like bombshells in the midst,
dislocating the compact mass of one
sided opinion, and forcing its elements
to recombine in a better form and
with additional ingredients. Not that the
current opinions were on the whole farther
from the truth than Rousseau’s were; on
the contrary, they were nearer to it: they
contained more of positive truth, and
very much less of error. Nevertheless,
there lay in Rousseau’s doctrine, and has
floated down the stream of opinion along
with it, a considerable amount of exactly
those truths which the popular opinion
wanted; and these are the deposit which
was left behind when the flood subsided.
The superior worth of simplicity of life,
the enervating and demoralising effect of
the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial
society, are ideas which have never been
entirely absent from cultivated minds
since Rousseau wrote; and they will in
time produce their due effect, though at
present needing to be asserted as much
as ever, and to be asserted by deeds,
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
for words on this subject have nearly
exhausted their power.
In politics, again, it is almost a com
monplace, that a party of order or stability,
and a party of progress or reform, are both
necessary elements of a healthy state of
political life ; until the one or the other
shall have so enlarged its mental grasp
as to be a party equally of order and of
progress, knowing and distinguishing what
is fit to be preserved from what ought to
be swept away. Each of these modes
of thinking derives its utility from the
deficiencies of the other; but it is in a
great measure the opposition of the other
that keeps each within the limits of reason
and sanity. Unless opinions favourable
to democracy and to aristocracy, to
property and to equality, to co-operation
and to competition, to luxury and to
abstinence, to sociality and individuality,
to liberty and discipline, and all the other
standing antagonisms of practical life, are
expressed with equal freedom, and en
forced and defended with equal talent
and energy, there is no chance of both
elements obtaining their due : one scale
is sure to go up and the other down.
Truth, in the great practical concerns of
life, is so much a question of the recon
ciling and combining of opposites that
very few have minds sufficiently capacious
and impartial to make the adjustment
with an approach to correctness, and it
has to be made by the rough process of
a struggle between combatants fighting
under hostile banners. On any of the
great open questions just enumerated, if
either of the two opinions has a better
claim than the other, not merely to be
tolerated, but to be encouraged and
countenanced, it is the one which happens
at the particular time and place to be in a
minority. That is the opinion which, for
the time being, represents the neglected
41
interests, the side of human well-being
which is in danger of obtaining less than
its share. I am aware that there is not,
in this country, any intolerance of differ
ences of opinion on most of these topics.
They are adduced to show, by admitted
and multiplied examples, the universality
of the fact that only through diversity
of opinion is there, in the existing state
of human intellect, a chance of fair play
to all sides of the truth. When there are
persons to be found who form an excep
tion to the apparent unanimity of the
world on any subject, even if the world
is in the right, it is always probable that
dissentients have something worth hear
ing to say for themselves, and that truth
would lose something by their silence.
It may be objected, “ But some received
principles, especially on the highest and
most vital subjects, are more than half
truths. The Christian morality, for
instance, is the whole truth on that
subject, and if anyone teaches a morality
which varies from it, he is wholly in error.”
As this is of all cases the most important
in practice, none can be fitter to test the
general maxim. But before pronouncing
what Christian morality is or is not, it
would be desirable to decide what is
meant by Christian morality. If it means
the morality of the New Testament, I
wonder that anyone who derives his
knowledge of this from the book itself
can suppose that it was announced, or
intended, as a complete doctrine of
morals. The Gospel always refers to a
pre-existing morality, and confines its
precepts to the particulars in which that
morality was to be corrected, or super
seded by a wider and higher; expressing
itself, moreover, in terms most general,
often impossible to be interpreted literally,
and possessing rather the impressiveness
of poetry or eloquence than the precision
�42
ON LIBERTY
of legislation. To extract from it a body
of ethical doctrine has never been possible
without eking it out from the Old Testa
ment—that is, from a system elaborate
indeed, but in many respects barbarous,
and intended only for a barbarous people.
St. Paul, a declared enemy to this Judaical
mode of interpreting the doctrine and
filling up the scheme of his Master,
equally assumes a pre-existing morality—
namely, that of the Greeks and Romans;
and his advice to Christians is in a great
measure a system of accommodation to
that; even to the extent of giving an
apparent sanction to slavery. What is
called Christian, but should rather be
termed theological, morality was not the
work of Christ or the Apostles, but is of
much later origin, having been gradually
built up by the Catholic Church of the
first five centuries, and, though not
implicitly adopted by moderns and Pro
testants, has been much less modified
by them than might have been expected.
For the most part, indeed, they have
contented themselves with cutting off the
additions which had been made to it in
the Middle Ages, each sect supplying
the place by fresh additions, adapted to
its own character and tendencies. That
mankind owe a great debt to this morality,
and to its early teachers,, I should be the
last person to deny; but I do not scruple
to say of it that it is, in many important
points, incomplete and one-sided, and
that unless ideas and feelings, not
sanctioned by it, had contributed to the
formation of European life and character,
human affairs would have been in a
worse condition than they now are.
Christian morality (so called) has all the
characters of a reaction; it is, in great
part, a protest against Paganism. Its
ideal is negative rather than positive ;
passive rather than active; Innocence
----------------- :------ r ;
rather than Nobleness ; Abstinence trom
Evil rather than energetic Pursuit of
Good; in its precepts (as has been well
said) “thou shalt not” predominates
over “ thou shalt.” In its horror
of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has been gradually compro
mised away into one of legality. It
holds out the hope of heaven and the
threat of hell, as the appointed and ap
propriate motives to a virtuous life; in
this falling far below the best of the
ancients, and doing what lies in it to give
to human morality an essentially selfish
character, by disconnecting each man’s
feelings of duty from the interests of his
fellow-creatures, except so far as a selfinterested inducement is offered to him
for consulting them. It is essentially a
doctrine of passive obedience; it incul
cates submission to all authorities found
established; who indeed are not to be
actively obeyed when they command
what religion forbids, but who are not to
be resisted, far less rebelled against, for
any amount of wrong to ourselves. And
while, in the morality of the best Pagan
nations, duty to the State holds even a
disproportionate place, infringing on the
just liberty of the individual, in purely
Christian ethics that ground department
of duty is scarcely noticed or acknow
ledged. It is in the Koran, not the New
Testament, that we read the maxim—•
“ A ruler who appoints any man to an
office when there is in his dominions
another man better qualified for it, sins
against God and against the State.”
What little recognition the idea of obli
gation to the public obtains in modern
morality is derived from Greek and
Roman sources, not from Christian; as
even in the morality of private life what
ever exists of magnanimity, highmindedness, personal dignity, even the sense of
!
■
j
1
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
honour, is derived from the purely human,
not the religious, part of our education,
and never could have grown out of a
standard of ethics in which the only
worth, professedly recognised, is that of
obedience.
I am as far as anyone from pretending
that these defects are necessarily inherent
in the Christian ethics, in every manner
in which it can be conceived, or that the
many requisites of a complete moral
doctrine which it does not contain do
not admit of being reconciled with it.
Far less would I insinuate this of the
doctrines and precepts of Christ himself.
I believe that the sayings of Christ are
all that I can see any evidence of their
having been intended to be; that they
are irreconcilable with nothing which a
comprehensive morality requires; that
everything which is excellent in ethics
may be brought within them with no
greater violence to their language than
has been done to it by all who have
attempted to deduce from them any
practical system of conduct whatever.
But it is quite consistent with this to
believe that they contain, and were
meant to contain, only a part of the
truth; that many essential elements of the
highest morality are among the things
which are not provided for, nor intended
to be provided for, in the recorded
deliverances of the Founder of Chris
tianity, and which have been entirely
thrown aside in the system of ethics
erected on the basis of those deliverances
by the Christian Church.
And this
being so, I think it a great error to
persist in attempting to find in the Chris
tian doctrine that complete rule for our
guidance which its author intended it to
sanction and enforce, but only partially
to provide. I believe, too, that this
narrow theory is becoming a grave prac
43
tical evil, detracting greatly from the
moral training and instruction which so
many well-meaning persons are now at
length exerting themselves to promote.
I much fear that by attempting to form
the mind and feelings on an exclusively
religious type, and discarding those secu
lar standards (as for want of a better
name they may be called) which hereto
fore co-existed with and supplemented
the Christian ethics, receiving some of
its spirit, and infusing into it some of
theirs, there will result, and is even now
resulting, a low, abject, servile type of
character, which, submit itself as it may
to what it deems the Supreme Will, is
incapable of rising to or sympathising in>
the conception of Supreme Goodness.
I believe that other ethics than any
which can be evolved from exclusively
Christian sources must exist side by
side with Christian ethics to produce the
moral regeneration of mankind; and that
the Christian system is no exception to
the rule, that in an imperfect state of
the human mind the interests of truth
require a diversity of opinions. It is not
necessary that, in ceasing to ignore the
moral truths not contained in Chris
tianity, men should ignore any of those
which it does contain. Such prejudice,
or oversight, when it occurs, is altogether
an evil; but it it is one from which we
cannot hope to be always exempt, and
must be regarded as the price paid for
an inestimable good. The exclusive pre
tension made by a part of the truth to be
the whole must and ought to be pro
tested against; and if a reactionary im
pulse should make the protesters unjust
in their turn, this one-sidedness, like the
other, may be lamented, but must be
tolerated. If Christians would teach
infidels to be just to Christianity, they
should themselves be just to infidelity.
�44
ON LIBERTY
It can do truth no service to blink the
fact, known to all who have the most
ordinary acquaintance with literary history,
that a large portion of the noblest and
most valuable moral teaching has been
the work, not only of men who did not
know, but of men who knew and rejected,
the Christian faith.
I do not pretend that the most un
limited use of the freedom of enunciating
all possible opinions would put an end
to the evils of religious or philosophical
sectarianism. Every truth which men of
narrow capacity are in earnest about is
•sure to be asserted, inculcated, and in
many ways even acted on, as if no other
truth existed in the world, or at all
events none that could limit or qualify
the first. I acknowledge that the ten
dency of all opinions to become sectarian
?is not cured by the freest discussion,
but is often heightened and exacerbated
thereby; the truth which ought to have
been, but was not, seen being rejected
all the more violently because proclaimed
by persons regarded as opponents. But
it is not on the impassioned partisan, it
is on the calmer and more disinterested
bystander, that this collision of opinions
works its salutary effect. Not the violent
conflict between parts of the truth, but
the quiet suppression of half of it, is the
formidable evil; there is always hope
when people are forced to listen to both
sides; it is when they attend only to one
that errors harden into prejudices, and
truth itself ceases to have the effect of
truth by being exaggerated into false
hood. And since there are few mental
attributes more rare than that judicial
faculty which can sit in intelligent judg
ment between two sides of a question, of
which only one is represented by an
advocate before it, truth has no chance
but in proportion as every side of it,
every opinion which embodies any frac
tion of the truth, not only finds advo
cates, but is so advocated as to be
listened to.
We have now recognised the necessity
to the mental well-being of mankind (on
which all their other well-being depends)
of freedom of opinion, and freedom of
the expression of opinion, on four distinct
grounds, which we will now briefly re
capitulate.
First, if any opinion is compelled to
silence, that opinion may, for aught we
can certainly know, be true. To deny
this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion
be an error, it may, and very commonly
does, contain a portion of truth ; and
since the general or prevailing opinion
on any subject is rarely or never the
whole truth, it is only by the collision of
adverse opinions that the remainder of
the truth has any chance of being
supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion
be not only true, but the whole truth,
unless it is suffered to be, and actually
is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it
will, by most of those who receive it, be
held in the manner of a prejudice, with
little comprehension or feeling of its
rational grounds. And not only this,
but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine
itself, will be in danger of being lost, or
enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect
on the character and conduct: the
dogma becoming a mere formal pro
fession, inefficacious for good, but
cumbering the ground, and preventing
the growth of any real and heartfelt
conviction, from reason or personal
experience.
Before quitting the subject of freedom
of opinion, it is fit to take some notice
of those who say that the free expression
�OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
cf all opinions should be permitted, on
condition that the manner be temperate,
and do not pass the bounds of fair dis
cussion. Much might be said on the
impossibility of fixing where these sup
posed bounds are to be placed; for if
the test be offence to those whose
opinions are attacked, I think experience
testifies that this offence is given when
ever the attack is telling and powerful,
and that every opponent who pushes
them hard, and whom they find it difficult
to answer, appears to them, if he shows
any strong feeling on the subject, an
intemperate opponent. But this, though
an important consideration in a practical
point of view, merges in a more funda
mental objection.
Undoubtedly the
manner of asserting an opinion, even
though it be a true one, may be very
objectionable, and may justly incur
severe censure.
But the principal
offences of the kind are such as it is
mostly impossible, unless by accidental
self-betrayal, to bring home to con
viction. The gravest of them is, to
argue sophistically, to suppress facts or
arguments, to misstate the elements
of the case, or misrepresent the oppo
site opinion.
But all this, even to
the most aggravated degree, is so con
tinually done in perfect good faith by
persons who are not considered, and in
many other respects may not deserve
to be considered, ignorant or incom
petent, that it is rarely possible, on
adequate grounds, conscientiously to
stamp the misrepresentation as morally
culpable ; and still less could law pre-;
sume to interfere with this kind of con
troversial misconduct. With regard to
what is commonly meant by intemperate
discussion—namely, invective, sarcasm,
personality, and the like—the denuncia
tion of these weapons would deserve
45
more sympathy if it were ever proposed
to interdict them equally to both sides ;
but it is only desired to restrain the
employment of them against the pre
vailing opinion; against the unprevailing
they may not only be used without
general disapproval, but will be likely to
obtain for him who uses them the praise
of honest zeal and righteous indignation.
Yet whatever mischief arises from their
use is greatest when they are employed
against the comparatively defenceless;
and whatever unfair advantage can be
derived by any opinion from this mode
of asserting it accrues almost exclu
sively to received opinions. The worst
offence of this kind which can be com
mitted by a polemic is to stigmatise
those who hold the contrary opinion as
bad and immoral men. To calumny of
this sort those who hold any unpopular
opinion are peculiarly exposed, because
they are in general few and uninfluential,
and nobody but themselves feels much
interested in seeing justice done them ;
but this weapon is, from the nature of
the case, denied to those who attack a
prevailing opinion; they can neither use
it with safety to themselves, nor, if they
could, would it do anything but recoil on
their own cause. In general, opinions
contrary to those commonly received
can only obtain a hearing by studied
moderation of language, and the most
cautious avoidance of unnecessary
offence, from which they hardly ever
deviate even in a slight degree without
losing ground; while unmeasured vitu
peration employed on the side of the
prevailing opinion really does deter
people from professing contrary opinions,
and from listening to those who profess
them. For the interest, therefore, of
truth and justice, it is far more imporI tant to restrain this employment of
�46
ON LIBERTY
vituperative language than the other;
and, for example, if it were necessary to
choose, there would be much more need
to discourage offensive attacks on infi
delity than on religion. It is, however,
obvious that law and authority have no
business with restraining either, while
opinion ought, in every instance, to de
termine its verdict by the circumstances
of the individual case; condemning
every one, on which ever side of the argu
ment he places himself, in whose mode
of advocacy either want of candour, or
malignity, bigotry, or intolerance of feel
ing, manifest themselves ; but not infer
ring these vices from the side which a
person takes, though it be the contrary
side of the question to our own: and
giving merited honour to every one,
whatever opinion he may hold, who has
calmness to see and honesty to state
what his opponents and their opinions
really are, exaggerating nothing to their
discredit, keeping nothing back which
tells, or can be supposed to tell, in their
favour. This is the real morality of
public discussion : and if often violated,
I am happy to think that there are
many controversialists who to a great
extent observe it, and a still greater
number who conscientiously strive to
wards it.
Chapter III.
OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS
OF WELL-BEING
Such being the reasons which make it
imperative that human beings should be
free to form opinions, and to express
their opinions without reserve; and such
the baneful consequences to the intel
lectual, and through that to the moral,
nature of man, unless this liberty is either
conceded, or asserted in spite of prohibi
tion; let us next examine whether the
same reasons do not require that men
should be free to act upon their opinions
—to carry these out in their lives, with
out hindrance, either physical or moral,
from their fellow men, so long as it is at
their own risk and peril. This last pro
viso is, of course, indispensable. No one
pretends that actions should be as free
as opinions. On the contrary, even
opinions lose their immunity when the
circumstances in which they are ex
pressed are such as to constitute their
expression a positive instigation to some
mischievous act. An opinion that corn
dealers are starvers of the poor, or that
private property is robbery, ought to
be unmolested when simply circulated
through the press, but may justly incur
punishment when delivered orally to an
excited mob assembled before the house
of a corn-dealer, or when handed about
among the same mob in the form of a pla
card. Acts, of whatever kind, which, with
out justifiable cause, do harm to others,
may be, and in the more important cases
absolutely require to be, controlled by
the unfavourable sentiments, and, when
�OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING 47
needful, by the active interference of the indifference of persons in general to
mankind. The liberty of the individual the end itself. If it were felt that the
must be thus far limited; he must not free development of individuality is one of
make himself a nuisance to other people. the leading essentials of well-being; that
But if he refrains from molesting others it is not only a co-ordinate element with
in what concerns them, and merely acts all that is designated by the terms civili
according to his own inclination and judg sation, instruction, education, culture,
ment in things which concern himself, the but is itself a necessary part and con
same reasons which show that opinion dition of all those things; there would
should be free prove also that he should be no danger that liberty should be
be allowed, without molestation, to carry undervalued, and the adjustment of the
his opinions into practice at his own boundaries between it and social control
cost. That mankind are not infallible; would present no extraordinary difficulty.
But the evil is that individual spontaneity
that their truths, for the most part,
are only half-truths; that unity of is hardly recognised by the common
opinion, unless resulting from the modes of thinking, as having any intrinsic
fullest and freest comparison of op worth, or deserving any regard on its
posite opinions, is not desirable, and own account. The majority, being satis
fied with the ways of mankind as they
diversity not an evil, but a good
until mankind are much more capable now are (for it is they who make them
than at present of recognising all sides what they are), cannot comprehend why
of the truth, are principles applicable to those ways should not be good enough
men’s modes of action, not less than to for everybody: and what is more, spon
their opinions. As it is useful that while taneity forms no part of the ideal of the
mankind are imperfect there should be majority of moral and social reformers,
different opinions, so it is that there but is rather looked on with jealousy,
should be different experiments of living ; as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious
that free scope should be given to varieties obstruction to the general acceptance
of character, short of injury to others; of what these reformers, in their own
and that the worth of different modes of judgment, think would be best for man
life should be proved practically, when kind. Few persons, out of Germany,
anyone thinks fit to try them. It is even comprehend the meaning of the
desirable, in short, that in things which doctrine which Wilhelm von Humboldt,
do not primarily concern others, indi so eminent both as a savant and as a
politician, made the text of a treatise—
viduality should assert itself. Where,
that “ the end of man, or that which is
not the person’s own character, but the
traditions or customs of other people, prescribed by the eternal or immutable
are the rule of conduct, there is wanting dictates of reason, and not suggested by
one of the principal ingredients of human vague and transient desires, is the highest
happiness, and quite the chief ingredient and most harmonious development of
his powers to a complete and consistent
of individual and social progress.
that, therefore, the object
In maintaining this principle, the whole
greatest difficulty to be encountered “ towards which every human being
does not lie in the appreciation of means must ceaselessly direct his efforts, and on
towards an acknowledged end, but in which especially those who design to
�48
ON LIBERTY
influence their fellow-men must ever
keep their eyes, is the individuality of
power and development”; that for this
there are two requisites, “freedom, and
variety of situations”; and that from the
union of these arise “ individual vigour
and manifold diversity,” which combine
themselves in “ originality.”1
Little, however, as people are accus
tomed to a doctrine like that of Von
Humboldt, and surprising as it may
be to them to find so high a value
attached to individuality, the question,
one must nevertheless think, can only
be one of degree. No one’s idea of
excellence in conduct is that people
should do absolutely nothing but copy
one another. No one would assert that
people ought not to put into their mode
of life, and into the conduct of their
concerns, any impress whatever of their
own judgment, or of their own individual
character. On the other hand, it would
be absurd to pretend that people ought
to live as if nothing whatever had been
known in the world before they came
into it; as if experience had as yet
done nothing towards showing that
one mode of existence, or of conduct,
is preferable to another.
Nobody
denies that people should be so
taught and trained in youth as to
know and benefit by the ascertained
results of human experience. But it
is the privilege and proper condition of
a human being, arrived at the maturity
of his faculties, to use and interpret
experience in his own way. It is for
him to find out what part of recorded
experience is properly applicable to his
own circumstances and character. The
traditions and customs of other people
1 The Sphere and Duties of Government, from
the German of Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt,
np. II-13.
are, to a certain extent, evidence of what
their experience has taught them; pre
sumptive evidence, and as such, have
a claim to his deference: but, in the
first place, their experience may be too
narrow; or they may not have inter
preted it rightly. Secondly, their inter
pretation of experience may be correct,
but unsuitable to him. Customs are
made for customary circumstances and
customary characters ; and his circum
stances or his character may be un
customary. Thirdly, though the customs
be both good as customs, and suitable
to him, yet to conform to custom merely
as custom does not educate or develop
in him any of the qualities which are the
distinctive endowment of a human being.
The human faculties of perception,
judgment, discriminative feeling, mental
activity, and even moral preference, are
exercised only in making a choice. He
who does anything because it is the
custom makes no choice. He gains no
practice either in discerning or in desir
ing what is best. The mental and moral,
like the muscular powers, are improved
only by being used. The faculties are
called into no exercise by doing a thing
merely because others do it, no more
than by believing a thing only because
others believe it. If the grounds of an
opinion are not conclusive to the person’s
own reason, his reason cannot be
strengthened, but is likely to be
weakened, by his adopting it; and if the
inducements to an act are not such as
are consentaneous to his own feelings
and character (where affection, or the
rights of others, are not concerned), it is
so much done towards rendering his
feelings and character inert and torpid,
instead of active and energetic.
He who lets the world, or his own
portion of it, choose his plan of life for
�OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING 49
him has no need of any other faculty
than the ape-like one of imitation. He
who chooses his plan for himself employs
all his faculties. He must use observa
tion to see, reasoning and judgment to
foresee, activity to gather materials for
decision, discrimination to decide, and,
when he has decided, firmness and self
control to hold to his deliberate decision.
And these qualities he requires and
exercises exactly in proportion as the
part of his conduct which he determines
according to his own judgment and
feelings is a large one. It is possible
that he might be guided in some good
path, and kept out of harm’s way, without
any of these things. But what will be
his comparative worth as a human being ?
It really is of importance, not only what
men do, but also what manner of men
they are that do it. Among the works
of man which human life is rightly
employed in perfecting and beautifying,
the first in importance surely is man
himself. Supposing it were possible to
get houses built, corn grown, battles
fought, causes tried, and even churches
erected and prayers said, by machinery
—by automatons in human form—it
would be a considerable loss to exchange
for these automatons even the men and
women who at present inhabit the more
civilised parts of the world, and who
assuredly are but starved specimens of
what nature can and will produce.
Human nature is not a machine to be
built after a model, and set to do exactly
the work prescribed for it, but a tree,
which requires to grow and develop itself
on all sides, according to the tendency
of the inward forces which make it a
living thing.
It will probably be conceded that it is
desirable people should exercise their
understandings, and that an intelligent
following of custom, or even occasionally
an intelligent deviation from custom, is
better than a blind and simply mechanical
adhesion to it. To a certain extent it is
admitted that our understanding should
be our own; but there is not the same
willingness to admit that our desires and
impulses should be our own likewise ; or
that to possess impulses of our own, and
of any strength, is anything but a peril
and a snare. Yet desires and impulses
are as much a part of a perfect human
being as beliefs and restraints; and
strong impulses are only perilous when
not properly balanced ; when one set of
aims and inclinations is developed into
strength, while others, which ought to
co-exist with them, remain weak and
inactive. It is not because men’s desires
are strong that they act ill; it is because
their consciences are weak. There is
no natural connection between strong
impulse and a weak conscience. The
natural connection is the other way. To
say that one person’s desires and feelings
are stronger and more various than those
of another is merely to say that he has
more of the raw material of human
nature, and is therefore capable, perhaps
of more evil, but certainly of more good.
Strong impulses are but another name
for energy. Energy may be turned to
bad uses ; but more good may always
be made of an energetic nature than of
an indolent and impassive one. Those
who have most natural feeling are always
those whose cultivated feelings may be
made the strongest. The same strong
susceptibilities which make the personal
impulses vivid and powerful are also the
source from whence are generated the
most passionate love of virtue and the
sternest self-control. It is through the
cultivation of these that society both
does its duty and protects its interests:
E
�5°
ON LIBERTY
not by rejecting the stuff of which heroes
are made, because it knows not how to
make them. A person whose desires
and impulses are his own—are the
expressions of his own nature, as it has
been developed and modified by his
own culture—is said to have a character.
One whose desires and impulses are not
his own has no character, no more than
a steam-engine has a character. If, in
addition to being his own, his impulses
are strong, and are under the government
of a strong will, he has an energetic char
acter. Whoever thinks that individu
ality of desires and impulses should not
be encouraged to unfold itself must
maintain that society has no need of
strong natures—is not the better for
containing many persons who have much
character—and that a high general
average of energy is not desirable.
In some early states of society these
forces might be, and were, too much
ahead of the power which society then
possessed of disciplining and controlling
them. There has been a time when the
element of spontaneity and individuality
was in excess, and the social principle
had a hard struggle with it. The diffi
culty then was, to induce men of strong
bodies or minds to pay obedience to any
rules which required them to control
their impulses. To overcome this diffi
culty, law and discipline, like the Popes
struggling against the Emperors, asserted
a power over the whole man, claiming to
control all his life in order to control his
character—which society had not found
any other sufficient means of binding.
But society has now fairly got the better
of individuality; and the danger which
threatens human nature is not the ex
cess, but the deficiency, of personal
impulses and preferences. Things are
vastly changed, since the passions of
those who were strong by station or by
personal endowment were in a state of
habitual rebellion against laws and ordi
nances, and required to be rigorously
chained up to enable the persons within
their reach to enjoy any particle of secu
rity. In our times, from the highest
class of society down to the lowest,
every one lives as under the eye of a
hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only
in what concerns others, but in what con
cerns only themselves, the individual or
the family do not ask themselves—What
do I prefer ? or, What would suit my
character and disposition? or, What would
allow the best and highest in me to have
fair play, and enable it to grow and
thrive ? They ask themselves—What is
suitable to my position ? What is usually
done by persons of my station and
pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still),
What is usually done by persons of a
station and circumstances superior to
mine ? I do not mean that they choose
what is customary in preference to what
suits their own inclination. It does not
occur to them to have any inclination,
except for what is customary. Thus the
mind itself is bowed to the yoke; even
in what people do for pleasure confor
mity is the first thing thought of; they
like in crowds; they exercise choice
only among things commonly done;
peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of con
duct, are shunned equally with crimes;
until, by dint of not following their own
nature, they have no nature to follow ;
their human capacities are withered and
starved; they become incapable of any
strong wishes or native pleasures, and are
generally without either opinions or
feelings of home growth, or properly
their own. Now, is this, or is it
not, the desirable condition of human
nature?
�OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING 51
It is so, on the Calvinistic theory. consistent with that faith to believe that
According to that, the one great offence this Being gave all human faculties that
of man is self-will. All the good of they might be cultivated and unfolded,
not rooted out and consumed, and that
which humanity is capable is comprised
in obedience. You have no choice; he takes delight in every nearer approach
thus you must do, and no otherwise; made by his creatures to the ideal con
“ whatever is not a duty is a sin.” ception embodied in them, every increase
in any of their capabilities of comprehen
Human nature being radically corrupt,
there is no redemption for any one until sion, of action, or of enjoyment. There
human nature is killed within him. To is a different type of human excellence
one holding this theory of life, crushing from the Calvinistic : a conception of
out any of the human faculties, capaci humanity as having its nature bestowed
on it for other purposes than merely to
ties, and susceptibilities is no evil; man
needs no capacity but that of surrender be abnegated. “Pagan self-assertion”
ing himself to the will of God ; and if is one of the elements of human worth,
he uses any of his faculties for any other as well as “Christian self-denial.”1 There
purpose but to do that supposed will is a Greek ideal of self-development,
more effectually, he is better without which the Platonic and Christian ideal
them. This is the theory of Calvinism; of self-government blends with, but does
and it is held, in a mitigated form, by not supersede. It may be better to be a
many who do not consider themselves John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is
Calvinists; the mitigation consisting in better to be a Pericles than either; nor
giving a less ascetic interpretation to the would a Pericles, if we had one in these
alleged will of God; asserting it to be days, be without anything good which
his will that mankind should gratify belonged to John Knox.
It is not by wearing down into uni
some of their inclinations; of course, not
in the manner they themselves prefer, formity all that is individual in them
but in the way of obedience—that is, in selves, but by cultivating it, and calling
a way prescribed to them by authority; it forth, within the limits imposed by the
and, therefore, by the necessary condition rights and interests of others, that human
beings become a noble and beautiful
of the case, the same for all.
In some such insidious form there is object of contemplation; and as the
at present a strong tendency to this works partake the character of those
narrow theory of life, and to the who do them, by the same process human
pinched and hidebound type of human life also becomes rich, diversified, and
character which it patronises. Many animating, furnishing more abundant
persons, no doubt, sincerely think that aliment to high thoughts and elevating
human beings thus cramped and dwarfed feelings, and strengthening the tie which
are as their Maker designed them to be; binds every individual to the race, by
just as many have thought that trees are making the race infinitely better worth
a much finer thing when clipped into belonging to. In proportion to the
pollards, or cut out into figures of animals, development of his individuality, each
than as nature made them. But if it be person becomes more valuable to
any part of religion to believe that man
was made by a good Being, it is more
1 Sterling’s Essays.
�52
ON LIBERTY
himself, and is therefore capable of it is only the cultivation of individ
being more valuable to others. There uality which produces, or can produce,
is a greater fulness of life about his own well-developed human beings, I might
existence, and when there is more life in here close the argument: for what more
the units there is more in the mass which or better can be said of any condition of
is composed of them. As much com human affairs than that it brings human
pression as is necessary to prevent the beings themselves nearer to the best
stronger specimens of human nature thing they can be ? Or what worse can
from encroaching on the rights of others be said of any obstruction to good than
cannot be dispensed with; but for this that it prevents this ? Doubtless, how
there is ample compensation even in the ever, these considerations will not suffice
point of view of human development. to convince those who most need con
The means of development which the vincing; and it is necessary further to
individual loses by being prevented show that these developed human beings
from gratifying his inclinations to the are of some use to the undeveloped—
injury of others are chiefly obtained at to point out to those who do not desire
the expense of the development of other liberty, and would not avail themselves
people. And even to himself there is a of it, that they may be in some intelli
full equivalent in the better development gible manner rewarded for allowing other
of the social part of his nature, rendered people to make use of it without
possible by the restraint put upon the hindrance.
selfish part. To be held to rigid rules
In the first place, then, I would
of justice for the sake of others developes ■suggest that they might possibly learn
the feelings and capacities which have something from them. It will not be
the good of others for their object. But denied by anybody that originality is
to be restrained in things not affecting a valuable element in human affairs.
their good, by their mere displeasure, There is always need of persons not
developes nothing valuable, except such only to discover new truths, and point
force of character as may unfold itself in out when what were once truths are
resisting the restraint. If acquiesced in, true no longer, but also to commence
it dulls and blunts the whole nature. new practices, and set the example of
To give any fair play to the nature of more enlightened conduct, and better
each, it is essential that different persons taste and sense in human life. This
should be allowed to lead different lives. cannot well be gainsaid by anybody
In proportion as this latitude has been who does not believe that the world has
exercised in any age, has that age been already attained perfection in all its
noteworthy to posterity. Even despotism ways and practices. It is true that this
does not produce its worst effects, so long benefit is not capable of being rendered
as individuality exists under it; and by everybody alike: there are but few
whatever crushes individuality is despot persons, in comparison with the whole
ism, by whatever name it may be called, of mankind, whose experiments, if
and whether it professes to be enforcing adopted by others, would be likely to
the will of God or the injunctions of men. be any improvement on established
Having said that individuality is the practice. But these few are the salt of
same thing with development, and that the earth; without them human life
�OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING 53
would become a stagnant pool. Not
only is it they who introduce good things
which did not before exist; it is they who
keep the life in those which already exist.
If there were nothing new to be done,
would human intellect cease to be
necessary ? Would it be a reason why
those wrho do the old things should
forget wrhy they are done, and do them
like cattle, not like human beings?
There is only too great a tendency in
the best beliefs and practices to
degenerate into the mechanical; and
unless there were a succession of persons
whose ever-recurring originality prevents
the grounds of those beliefs and prac
tices from becoming merely traditional,
such dead matter would not resist the
smallest shock from anything really alive,
and there wrould be no reason why
civilisation should not die out, as in the
Byzantine Empire. Persons of genius,
it is true, are, and are always likely to
be, a small minority; but, in order to
have them, it is necessary to preserve
the soil in which they grow. Genius
can only breathe freely in an atmosphere
of freedom. Persons of genius are, ex
vi termini, more individual than any
other people—less capable, consequently,
of fitting themselves, without hurtful
compression, into any of the small
number of moulds which society pro
vides in order to save its members the
trouble of forming their own character.
If from timidity they consent to be
forced into one of these moulds, and to
let all that part of themselves which
cannot expand under the pressure remain
unexpanded, society will be little the
better for their genius. If they are of
a strong character, and break their
fetters, they become a mark for the
society which has not succeeded in
reducing them to commonplace, to point
out with solemn warning as “wild,”
“erratic,” and the like; much as if one
should complain of the Niagara river
for not flowing smoothly between its
banks like a Dutch canal.
I insist thus emphatically on the
importance of genius, and the necessity
of allowing it to unfold itself freely both
in thought and in practice, being well
aware that no one will deny the position
in theory, but knowing also that almost
everyone, in reality, is totally indifferent
to it. People think genius a fine thing
if it enables a man to write an exciting
poem, or paint a picture. But, in its
true sense, that of originality in thought
and action, though no one says that it is
not a thing to be admired, nearly all, at
heart, think that they can do very well
without it. Unhappily this is too natural
to be wrondered at. Originality is the
one thing which unoriginal minds cannot
feel the use of. They cannot see what
it is to do for them : how should they ?
If they could see what it would do for
them, it would not be originality. The
first service which originality has to
render them is that of opening their
eyes ; which, being once fully done, they
would have a chance of being themselves
original. Meanwhile, recollecting that
nothing wras ever yet done which some
one was not the first to do, and that all
good things which exist are the fruits of
originality, let them be modest enough
to believe that there is something still
left for it to accomplish, and assure
themselves that they are more in need
of originality the less they are conscious
of the want.
In sober truth, whatever homage may
be professed, or even paid, to real or
supposed mental superiority, the general
tendency of things throughout the world
is to render mediocrity the ascendant
�54
ON LIBERTY
power among mankind. In ancient
history, in the Middle Ages, and in a
diminishing degree through the long
transition from feudality to the present
time, the individual was a power in him
self; and if he had either great talents
or a high social position, he was a con
siderable power. At present individuals
are lost in the crowd. In politics it is
almost a triviality to say that public
opinion now rules the world. The only
power deserving the name is that of
masses, and of governments while they
make themselves the organ of the
tendencies and instincts of masses. This
is as true in the moral and social rela
tions of private life as in public tran
sactions. Those whose opinions go by
the name of public opinion are not
always the same sort of public; in
America they are the whole white
population; in England, chiefly the
middle class. But they are always a
mass—that is to say, collective medi
ocrity. And, what is a still greater
novelty, the mass do not now take their
opinions from dignitaries in Church or
State, from ostensible leaders, or from
books. Their thinking is done for
them by men much like themselves,
addressing them or speaking in their
name, on the spur of the moment,
through the newspapers. I am not com
plaining of all this. I do not assert
that anything better is compatible, as
a general rule, with the present low
state of the human mind. But that
does not hinder the government of
mediocrity from being mediocre govern
ment. No government by a democracy
or a numerous aristocracy, either in
its political acts or in the opinions,
qualities, and tone of mind which it
fosters, ever did or could rise above
mediocrity, except in so far as the
sovereign Many have let themselves be
guided (which, in their best times, they
always have done) by the counsels and
influence of a more highly gifted and
instructed One or Few. The initiation
of all wise or noble things comes, and
must come, from individuals; generally
at first from some one individual.
The honour and glory of the average
man is that he is capable of following
that initiative; that he can respond
internally to wise and noble things, and
be led to them with his eyes open.
I am not countenancing the sort of
“ hero-worship ” which applauds the
strong man of genius for forcibly seizing
on the government of the world and
making it do his bidding in spite of
itself. All he can claim is freedom to
point out the way. The power of com
pelling others into it is not only incon
sistent with the freedom and develop
ment of all the rest, but corrupting to
the strong man himself. It does seem,
however, that when the opinions of
masses of merely average men are
everywhere become or becoming the
dominant power, the counterpoise and
corrective to that tendency would be
the more and more pronounced indi
viduality of those who stand on the
higher eminences of thought. It is in
these circumstances most especially that
exceptional individuals, instead of being
deterred, should be encouraged in
acting differently from the mass. In
other times there was no advantage in
their doing so, unless they acted not
only differently, but better. In this
age the mere example of non-con
formity, the mere refusal to bend the
knee to custom, is itself a service.
Precisely because a tyranny of opinion
is such as to make eccentricity a
reproach, it is desirable, in order
�OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING 55
to break through that tyranny, that one model. But different persons also
people should be eccentric. Eccentricity require different conditions for their
has always abounded when and where spiritual development, and can no more
strength of character has abounded ; and exist healthily in the same moral than
the amount of eccentricity in a society all the variety of plants can in the same
has generally been proportional to the physical, atmosphere and climate. The
amount of genius, mental vigour, and same things which are helps to one
moral courage it contained. That so person towards the cultivation of his
few now dare to be eccentric marks the higher nature are hindrances to another.
The same mode of life is a healthy
chief danger of the time.
I have said that it is important to give excitement to one, keeping all his faculties
the freest scope possible to uncustomary of action and enjoyment in their best
things, in order that it may in time order, while to another it is a distracting
appear which of these are fit to be con burthen, which suspends or crushes all
verted into customs. But independence internal life. Such are the differences
of action and disregard of custom are among human beings in their sources of
not solely deserving of encouragement pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain,
for the chance they afford that better and the operation on them of different
modes of action, and customs more physical and moral agencies, that, unless
worthy of general adoption, may be there is a corresponding diversity in their
struck out; nor is it only persons of modes of life, they neither obtain their
decided mental superiority who have a fair share of happiness nor grow up to
just claim to carry on their lives in their the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature
own way. There is no reason that all of which their nature is capable. Why,
human existence should be constructed then, should tolerance, as far as the
on some one or some small number of public sentiment is concerned, extend
patterns. If a person possesses any only to tastes and modes of life which
tolerable amount of common sense and extort acquiescence by the multitude of
experience, his own mode of laying out their adherents ? Nowhere (except in
his existence is the best, not because it some monastic institutions) is diversity
is the best in itself, but because it is of taste entirely unrecognised; a person
his own mode. Human beings are not may, without blame, either like or dislike
like sheep; and even sheep are not rowing, or smoking, or music, or athletic
undistinguishably alike. A man cannot exercises, or chess, or cards, or study,
get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him because both those who like each of these
unless they are either made to his things and those who dislike them are
measure or he has a whole warehouseful too numerous to be put down. But the
to choose from; and is it easier to fit man, and still more the woman, who can
him with a life than with a coat, or are be accused either of doing “ what nobody
human beings more like one another in does,” or of not doing “ what everybody
their whole physical and spiritual con does,” is the subject of as much depre
formation than in the shape of their feet? ciatory remark as if he or she had com
If it were only that people have diver mitted some grave moral delinquency.
sities of taste, that is reason enough for Persons require to possess a title, or
not attempting to shape them all after some other badge of rank, or of the
�56
ON LIBERTY
consideration of people of rank, to be able
to indulge somewhat in the luxury of
doing as they like without detriment to
their estimation. To indulge somewhat,
I repeat; for whoever allow themselves
much of that indulgence incur the risk
of something worse than disparaging
speeches—they are in peril of a com
mission de lunatico, and of having their
property taken from them and given to
their relations.1
There is one characteristic of the
present direction of public opinion,
1 There is something both contemptible and
frightful in the sort of evidence on which, of late
years, any person can be judicially declared unfit
for the management of his affairs ; and after his
death his disposal of his property can be set
aside, if there is enough of it to pay the expenses
of litigation—which are charged on the property
itself. All the minute details of his daily life
are pried into, and whatever is found which,
seen through the medium of the perceiving and
describing faculties of the lowest of the low,
bears an appearance unlike absolute common
place, is laid before the jury as evidence of
insanity, and often with success; the jurors
being little, if at all, less vulgar and ignorant
than the witnesses; while the judges, with that
extraordinary want of knowledge of human
nature and life which continually astonishes us
in English lawyers, often help to mislead them.
These trials speak volumes as to the state of
feeling and opinion among the vulgar with regard
to human liberty. So far from setting any value
on individuality—so far from respecting the right
of each individual to act, in things indifferent, as
seems good to his own judgment and inclinations,
judges and juries cannot even conceive that a
person in a state of sanity can desire such
freedom. In former days, when it was proposed
to burn atheists, charitable people used to suggest
putting them in a madhouse instead : it would
be nothing surprising nowadays were we to see
this done, and the doers applauding themselves,
because, instead of persecuting for religion, they
had adopted so humane and Christian a mode
of treating these unfortunates, not without a
silent satisfaction at their having thereby obtained
their deserts.
peculiarly calculated to make it intole
rant of any marked demonstration of
individuality. The general average of
mankind are not only moderate in in
tellect, but also moderate in inclina
tions : they have no tastes or wishes
strong enough to incline them to do
anything unusual, and they consequently
do not understand those who have,
and class all such with the wild and
intemperate whom they are accustomed
to look down upon. Now, in addition
to this fact, which is general, we have
only to suppose that a strong move
ment has set in towards the improve
ment of morals, and it is evident what
we have to expect. In these days such
a movement has set in; much has
actually been effected in the way of
increased regularity of conduct, and
discouragement of excesses; and there
is a philanthropic spirit abroad, for
the exercise of wrhich there is no
more inviting field than the moral and
prudential improvement of our fellow
creatures.
These tendencies of the
times cause the public to be more dis
posed than at most former periods to
prescribe general rules of conduct, and
endeavour to make every one conform
to the approved standard. And that
standard, express or tacit, is to desire
nothing strongly. Its ideal of character
is to be without any marked character ;
to maim by compression, like a Chinese
lady’s foot, every part of human nature
which stands out prominently, and tends
to make the person markedly dissimilar
in outline to commonplace humanity.
As is usually the case with ideals
which exclude one-half of what is de
sirable, the present standard of appro
bation produces only an inferior imita
tion of the other half. Instead of great
energies guided by vigorous reason, and
�of Individuality, as one of the elements of well-being y
strong feelings strongly controlled by a
conscientious will, its result is weak feel
ings and weak energies, which therefore
can be kept in outward conformity to
rule without any strength either of will
or of reason. Already energetic char
acters on any large scale are becoming
merely traditional. There is now scarcely
any outlet for energy in this country
except business. The energy expended
in this may still be regarded as consider
able. What little is left from that
employment is expended on some hobby ;
which may be a useful, even a philan
thropic hobby, but is always some one
thing, and generally a thing of small
dimensions. The greatness of England
is now all collective : individually small,
we only appear capable of anything
great by our habit of combining; and
with this our moral and religious philan
thropists are perfectly contented. But
it was men of another stamp than this
that made England what it has been;
and men of another stamp will be needed
to prevent its decline.
The despotism of custom is every
where the standing hindrance to human
advancement, being in unceasing an
tagonism to that disposition to aim at
something better than customary, which
is called, according to circumstances,
the spirit of liberty, or that of progress
or improvement. The spirit of improve
ment is not always a spirit of liberty,
for it may aim at forcing improvements
on an unwilling people; and the spirit of
liberty, insofar as it resists such attempts,
may ally itself locally and temporarily
with the opponents of improvement;
but the only unfailing and permanent
source of improvement is liberty, since
by it there are as many possible indepen
dent centres of improvement as there are
individuals. The progressive principle,
however, in either shape, whether as the
love of liberty or of improvement, is
antagonistic to the sway of Custom,
involving at least emancipation from
that yoke; and the contest between the
two constitutes the chief interest of the
history of mankind. The greater part of
the world has, properly speaking, no
history, because the despotism of Custom
is complete. This is the case over the
whole East. Custom is there, in all
things, the final appeal; justice and right
mean conformity to custom; the argu
ment of custom no one, unless some
tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of
resisting. And we see the result. Those
nations must once have had originality ;
they did not start out of the ground
populous, lettered, and versed in many of
the arts of life; they made themselves
all this, and were then the greatest and
most powerful nations of the world.
What are they now ? The subjects or
dependents of tribes whose forefathers
wandered in the forests when theirs had
magnificent palacesand gorgeous temples,
but over whom custom exercised only a
divided rule with liberty and progress.
A people, it appears, may be progressive
for a certain length of time, and then
stop: when does it stop? When it
ceases to possess individuality. If a
similar change should befall the nations
of Europe, it will not be in exactly the
same shape: the despotism of custom
with which these nations are threatened
is not precisely stationariness. It pro
scribes singularity, but it does not
preclude change, provided all change
together. We have discarded the fixed
costumes of our forefathers: everyone
must still dress like other people, but the
fashion may change once or twice a year.
We thus take care that, when there is a
change, it shall be for change’s sake, and
�58
ON LIBERTY
not from any idea of beauty or con
venience; for the same idea of beauty
or convenience would not strike all the
world at the same moment, and be
simultaneously thrown aside by all at
another moment. But we are progressive
as well as changeable : we continually
make new inventions in mechanical
things, and keep them until they are
again superseded by better; we are eager
for improvement in politics, in education,
even in morals, though in this last our
idea of improvement chiefly consists in
persuading or forcing other people to be
as good as ourselves. It is not progress
that we object to ; on the contrary, we
flatter ourselves that we are the most
progressive people who ever lived. It
is individuality that we war against:
we should think we had done wonders
if we had made ourselves all alike;
forgetting that the unlikeness of one
person to another is generally the first
thing which draws the attention of
either to the imperfection of his own
type, and the superiority of another, or
the possibility, by combining the ad
vantages of both, of producing some
thing better than either. We have a
warning example in China—a nation
of much talent, and, in some respects,
even wisdom, owing to the rare good
fortune of having been provided at an
early period with a particularly good
set of customs, the work, in some
measure, of men to whom even the most
enlightened European must accord,
under certain limitations, the title of sages
and philosophers. They are remark
able, too, in the excellence of their
apparatus for impressing, as far as pos
sible, the best wisdom they possess
upon every mind in the community,
and securing that those who have ap
propriated most of it shall occupy the
posts of honour and power. Surely the
people who did this have discovered
the secret of human progressiveness,
and must have kept themselves steadily
at the head of the movement of the
world. On the contrary, they have
become stationary—have remained so
for thousands of years ; and if they are
ever to be farther improved, it must be
by foreigners. They have succeeded
beyond all hope in what English philan
thropists are so industriously working at
—in making a people all alike, all
governing their thoughts and conduct by
the same maxims and rules; and these
are the fruits. The modern regime of
public opinion is, in an unorganised
form, what the Chinese educational and
political systems are in an organised; and
unless individuality shall be able success
fully to assert itself against this yoke,
Europe, notwithstanding its noble ante
cedents and its professed Christianity,
will tend to become another China.
What is it that has hitherto preserved
Europe from this lot ? What has made
the European family of nations an im
proving, instead of a stationary, portion
of mankind ? Not any superior excellence
in them, which, when it exists, exists as
the effect, not as the cause; but their
remarkable diversity of character and
culture. Individuals, classes, nations,
have been extremely unlike one another;
they have struck out a great variety of
paths, each leading to something valu
able ; and although at every period
those who travelled in different paths
have been intolerant of one another,
and each would have thought it an ex
cellent thing if all the rest could have
been compelled to travel his road, their
attempts to thwart each other’s develop
ment have rarely had any permanent
success, and each has in time endured
�OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING 59
to receive the good which the others
have offered. Europe is, in my judg
ment, wholly indebted to this plurality
of paths for its progressive and manysided 'development.
But it already
begins to possess this benefit in a con
siderably less degree. It is decidedly
advancing towards the Chinese ideal of
making all people alike. M. de Toc
queville, in his last important work,
remarks how much more the French
men of the present day resemble one
another than did those even of the last
generation. The same remark might be
made of Englishmen in a far greater
degree. In a passage already quoted from
Wilhelm von Humboldt, he points out
two things as necessary conditions of
human development, because necessary
to render people unlike one another;
namely, freedom, and variety of situa
tions. The second of these two con
ditions is in this country every day
diminishing. The circumstances which
surround different classes and indivi
duals, and shape their characters, are
daily becoming more assimilated. For
merly, different ranks, different neigh
bourhoods, different trades and pro
fessions, lived in what might be called
different worlds; at present, to a great
degree in the same. Comparatively
speaking, they now read the same
things, listen to the same things, see
the same things, go to the same places,
have their hopes and fears directed
to the same objects, have the same
rights and liberties, and the same means
of asserting them. Great as are the
differences of position which remain,
they are nothing to those which have
ceased. And the assimilation is still
proceeding. All the political changes
of the age promote it, since they all
tend to raise the low and to lower
the high. Every extension of educa
tion promotes it, because education
brings people under common influences,
and gives them access to the general
stock of facts and sentiments. Improve
ment in the means of communication
promotes it, by bringing the inhabitants
of distant places into personal contact,
and keeping up a rapid flow of changes
of residence between one place and
another. The increase of commerce and
manufactures promotes it, by diffusing
more widely the advantages of easy
circumstances, and opening all objects
of ambition, even the highest, to general
competition, whereby the desire of rising
becomes no longer the character of a
particular class, but of all classes. A
more powerful agency than even all these,
in bringing about a general similarity
among mankind, is the complete estab
lishment, in this and other free coun
tries, of the ascendancy of public opinion
in the State. As the various social
eminences which enabled persons en
trenched on them to disregard the
opinion of the multitude gradually be
come levelled; as the very idea of
resisting the will of the public, when it
is positively known that they have a will,
disappears more and more from the
minds of practical politicians; there
ceases to be any social support for non
conformity—any substantive power in
society, which, itself opposed to the ascen
dancy of numbers, is interested in taking
under its protection opinions and tenden
cies at variance with those of the public.
The combination of all these causes
forms so great a mass of influences
hostile to individuality that it is not
easy to see how it can stand its ground.
It will do so with increasing difficulty,
unless the intelligent part of the public
can be made to feel its value—to see
�6o
ON LIBERTY
that it is good there should be differences,
even though not for the better; even
though, as it may appear to them, some
should be for the worse. If the claims
of individuality are ever to be asserted,
the time is now, while much is still
wanting to complete the enforced assimi
lation. It is only in the earlier stages
that any stand can be successfully made
against the encroachment. The demand
that all other people shall resemble our
selves grows by what it feeds on. If
resistance waits till life is reduced nearly
to one uniform type, all deviations from
that type will come to be considered
impious, immoral, even monstrous and
contrary to nature. Mankind speedily
become unable to conceive diversity,
when they have been for some time
unaccustomed to see it.
Chapter IV.
OF THE LIMITS TO THE AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY
OVER THE INDIVIDUAL
What, then, is the rightful limit to the
sovereignty of the individual over him
self? Where does the authority of
society begin ? How much of human
life should be assigned to individuality,
and how much to society ?
Each will receive its proper shape, if
each has that which more particularly
concerns it. To individuality should
belong the part of life in which it is
chiefly the individual that is interested;
to society, the part which chiefly interests
society.
Though society is not founded on a
contract, and though no good purpose is
answered by inventing a contract in order
to deduce social obligations from it, every
one who receives the protection of society
owes a return for the benefit, and the
fact of living in society renders it
indispensable that each should be bound
to observe a certain line of conduct towards
the rest. This conduct consists, first, in I
not injuring the interests of one another;
or rather certain interests, which, either
by express legal provision or by tacit
understanding, ought to be considered
as rights; and secondly, in each person’s
bearing his share (to be fixed on some
equitable principle) of the labours and
sacrifices incurred for defending the
society or its members from injury and
molestation. These conditions society
is justified in enforcing, at all costs to
those who endeavour to withhold fulfil
ment. Nor is this all that society may
do. The acts of an individual may be
hurtful to others, or wanting in due con
sideration for their welfare, without going
to the length of violating any of their
constituted rights. The offender may
then be justly punished by opinion,
though not by law. As soon as any part
of a person’s conduct affects prejudicially
the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether
�OF LIMITS TO AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL 61
the general welfare will or will not be
promoted by interfering with it becomes
open to discussion. But there is no
room for entertaining any such question
when a person’s conduct affects the
interests of no persons besides himself,
or needs not affect them unless they like
(all the persons concerned being of full
age and the ordinary amount of under
standing). In all such cases there should
be perfect freedom, legal and social, to
do the action and stand the conse
quences.
It would be a great misunderstanding
of this doctrine to suppose that it is one
of selfish indifference, which pretends
that human beings have no business
with each other’s conduct in life, and
that they should not concern themselves
about the well-doing or well-being of one
another, unless their own interest is
involved. Instead of any diminution,
there is need of a great increase of
disinterested exertion to promote the
good of others. But disinterested bene
volence can find other instruments to
persuade people to their good than
whips and scourges, either of the literal
or the metaphorical sort. I am the last
person to undervalue the self-regarding
virtues; they are only second in impor
tance, if even second, to the social. It
is equally the business of education to
cultivate both. But even education
works by conviction and persuasion as
well as by compulsion, and it is by the
former only that, when the period of
education is passed, the self-regarding
virtues should be inculcated. Human
beings owe to each other help to dis
tinguish the better from the worse, and
encouragement to choose the former
and avoid the latter. They should be for
ever stimulating each other to increased
exercise of their higher faculties, and
increased direction of their feelings and
aims towards wise instead of foolish,
elevating instead of degrading, objects
and contemplations. But neither one
person, nor any number of persons, is
warranted in saying to another human
creature of ripe years that he shall not
do with his life for his own benefit what
he chooses to do with it. He is the
person most interested in his own well
being : the interest which any other
person, except in cases of strong personal
attachment, can have in it, is trifling,
compared with that which he himself
has; the interest which society has in
him individually (except as to his conduct
to others) is fractional, and altogether
indirect: while with respect to his own
feelings and circumstances, the most
ordinary man or woman has means of
knowledge immeasurably surpassing those
that can be possessed by anyone else.
The interference of society to overrule
his judgment and purposes in what only
regards himself must be grounded on
general presumptions; which may be
altogether wrong, and, even if right, are
as likely as not to be misapplied to indi
vidual cases, by persons no better
acquainted with the circumstances of
such cases than those are who look at
them merely from without. In this
department, therefore, of human affairs
individuality has its proper field of
action. In the conduct of human
beings towards one another it is neces
sary that general rules should for the
most part be observed, in order that
people may know what they have to
expect; but in each person’s own con
cerns his individual spontaneity is
entitled to free exercise. Considera
tions to aid his judgment, exhortations
to strengthen his will, may be offered to
him, even obtruded on him, by others;
�62
ON LIBERTY
but he himself is the final judge. All
errors which he is likely to commit
against advice and warning are far
outweighed by the evil of allowing
others to constrain him to what they
deem his good.
I do not mean that the feelings with
which a person is regarded by others
ought not to be in any way affected
by his self-regarding qualities or defi
ciencies. This is neither possible nor
desirable. If he is eminent in any of
the qualities which conduce to his own
good, he is, so far, a proper object of
admiration. He is so much the nearer
to the ideal perfection of human nature.
If he is grossly deficient in those qualities,
a sentiment the opposite of admiration
will follow. There is a degree of folly,
and a degree of what may be called
(though the phrase is not unobjection
able) lowness or depravation of taste,
which, though it cannot justify doing
harm to the person who manifests it,
renders him necessarily and properly a
subject of distaste, or, in extreme cases,
even of contempt: a person could not
have the opposite qualities in due
strength without entertaining these
feelings. Though doing no wrong to
anyone, a person may so act as to
compel us to judge him, and feel to him,
as a fool, or as a being of an inferior
order: and since this judgment and
feeling are a fact which he would prefer
to avoid, it is doing him a service to
warn him of it beforehand, as of any
other disagreeable consequence to which
he exposes himself. It would be well,
indeed, if this good office were much
more freely rendered than the common
notions of politeness at present permit,
and if one person could honestly point
out to another that he thinks him in fault,
without being considered unmannerly
or presuming. We have a right also, in
various ways, to act upon our unfavour
able opinion of anyone, not to the
oppression of his individuality, but in
the exercise of ours. We are not bound,
for example, to seek his society: we have
a right to avoid it (though not to parade
the avoidance), for we have a right to
choose the society most acceptable to us.
We have a right, and it may be our duty,
to caution others against him, if we think
his example or conversation likely to
have a pernicious effect on those with
whom he associates. We may give others
a preference over him in optional good
offices, except those which tend to his
improvement. In these various modes
a person may suffer very severe penalties
at the hands of others, for faults which
directly concern only himself; but he
suffers these penalties only insofar as they
are the natural, and, as it were, the
spontaneous, consequences of the faults
themselves, not because they are
purposely inflicted on him for the sake
of punishment. A person who shows
rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit—who
cannot live within moderate means—
who cannot, restrain himself from hurtful
indulgences — who pursues animal
pleasures at the expense of those of
feeling and intellect—must expect to be
lowered in the opinion of others, and to
have a less share of their favourable
sentiments; but of this he has no right
to complain, unless he has merited their
favour by special excellence in his social
relations, and has thus established a title
to their good offices, which is not
affected by his demerits towards himself.
What I contend for is that the incon
veniences which are strictly inseparable
from the unfavourable judgment of others
are the only ones to which a person
should ever be subjected for that portion
�OF LIMITS TO AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL 63
of his conduct and character which
concerns his own good, but which does
not affect the interests of others in their
relations with him. Acts injurious to
others require a totally different treat
ment. Encroachment on their rights;
infliction on them of any loss or damage
not justified by his own rights; falsehood
or duplicity in dealing with them; unfair
or ungenerous use of advantages over
them: even selfish abstinence from
defending them against injury—these
are fit objects of moral reprobation,
and, in grave cases, of moral retribution
and punishment. And not only these
acts, but the dispositions which lead to
them, are properly immoral, and fit
subjects of disapprobation, which may
rise to abhorrence. Cruelty of dis
position ; malice and ill-nature; that
most anti-social and odious of all
passions, envy; dissimulation and in
sincerity; irascibility on insufficient cause,
and resentment disproportioned to the
provocation; the love of domineering
over others; the desire to engross more
than one’s share of advantages (the
TrXeove^ta of the Greeks); the pride
which derives gratification from the
abasement of others; the egotism which
thinks self and its concerns more impor
tant than everything else, and decides all
doubtful questions in its own favour—
these are moral vices, and constitute a
bad and odious moral character : unlike
the self-regarding faults previously men
tioned, which are not properly immorali
ties, and, to whatever pitch they may be
carried, do not constitute wickedness.
They may be proofs of any amount of
folly, or want of personal dignity and
self-respect; but they are only a subject
of moral reprobation when they involve
a breach of duty to others, for whose
sake the individual is bound to have care
for himself. What are called duties to
ourselves are not socially obligatory,
unless circumstances render them at
the same time duties to others. The
term duty to oneself, when it means
anything more than prudence, means
self-respect or self-development; and
for none of these is anyone accountable
to his fellow-creatures, because for none
of them is it for the good of mankind
that he be held accountable to them.
The distinction between the loss of
consideration which a person may
rightly incur by defect of prudence or
of personal dignity, and the reproba
tion which is due to him for an offence
against the rights of others, is not a
merely nominal distinction. It makes
a vast difference both in our feelings
and in our conduct towards him, whether
he displeases us in things in which we
think we have a right to control him or
in things in which we know that we have
not. If he displeases us, we may express
our distaste, and we may stand aloof
from a person as well as from a thing
that displeases us; but we shall not,
therefore, feel called on to make his life
uncomfortable. We shall reflect that he
already bears, or will bear, the whole
penalty of his error; if he spoils his life
by mismanagement, we shall not, for
that reason, desire to spoil it still further :
instead of wishing to punish him, we
shall rather endeavour to alleviate his
punishment, by showing him how he
may avoid or cure the evils his conduct
tends to bring upon him. He may be
to us an object of pity, perhaps of
dislike, but not of anger or resentment;
we shall not treat him like an enemy of
society: the worst we shall think our
selves justified in doing is leaving him to
himself, if we do not interfere benevo
lently by showing interest or concern for
a
�64
ON LIBERTY
him. It is far otherwise if he has in
fringed the rules necessary for the
protection of his fellow-creatures, in
dividually or collectively.
The evil
consequences of his acts do not then fall
on himself, but on others; and society,
as the protector of all its members, must
retaliate on him; must inflict pain on
him for the express purpose of punish
ment, and must take care that it be
sufficiently severe. In the one case, he
is an offender at our bar, and we are
called on not only to sit in judgment on
him, but, in one shape or another, to
execute our own sentence; in the other
case, it is not our part to inflict any
suffering on him, except what may inci
dentally follow from our using the same
liberty in the regulation of our own
affairs which we allow to him in his.
The distinction here pointed out
between the part of a person’s life which
concerns only himself and that which
concerns others many persons will
refuse to admit. How (it may be asked)
can any part of the conduct of a member
of society be a matter of indifference to
the other members? No person is an
entirely isolated being; it is impossible
for a person to do anything seriously
or permanently hurtful to himself, with
out mischief reaching at least to his near
connections, and often far beyond them.
If he injures his property, he does harm
to those who directly or indirectly
derived support from it, and usually
diminishes, by a greater or less amount,
the general resources of the community.
If he deteriorates his bodily or mental
faculties, he not only brings evil upon all
who depended on him for any portion
of their happiness, but disqualifies him
self for rendering the services which he
owes to his fellow-creatures generally;
perhaps becomes a burthen on their
affection or benevolence; and, if such Iddff
conduct were very frequent, hardly any Lrir
offence that is committed would detract'fiori
more from the general sum of good. |.b’w
Finally, if by his vices or follies a person Lhcra
does no direct harm to others, he is,
nevertheless (it may be said), injurious ;>ire
by his example—and ought to be com ■■mi
pelled to control himself, for the sake of . to'■:Lthose whom the sight or knowledge of ‘Id?
his conduct might corrupt or mislead.
And even (it will be added) if the
consequences of misconduct could be
confined to the vicious or thoughtless
individual, ought society to abandon to
their own guidance those who are mani
festly unfit for it ? If protection against
themselves is confessedly due to children
and persons under age, is not society
equally bound to afford it to persons of
mature years who are equally incapable
of self-government? If gambling, or
drunkenness, or incontinence, or idle
ness, or uncleanliness, are as injurious
to happiness, and as great a hindrance
to improvement, as many or most of the
acts prohibited by law, why (it may be
asked) should not law, so far as is con
sistent with practicability and social
convenience, endeavour to repress these
also? And as a supplement to the
unavoidable imperfections of law, ought
b
not opinion at least to organise a
powerful police against these vices, and
visit rigidly with social penalties those
who are known to practise them ? There
is no question here (it may be said) about
restricting individuality, or impeding the
trial of new and original experiments in
living. The only things it is sought to
prevent are things which have been tried
and condemned from the beginning of
the world until now; things which experi
ence has shown not to be useful or
suitable to any person’s individuality.
�OF LIMITS TO AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL 65
There must be some length of time and
amount of experience after which a
moral or prudential truth may be
regarded as established; and it is merely
desired to prevent generation after
generation from falling over the same
precipice which has been fatal to their
predecessors.
I fully admit that the mischief which
a person does to himself may seriously
affect, both through their sympathies
and their interests, those nearly con
nected with him, and, in a minor degree,
society at large. When, by conduct of
this sort, a person is led to violate a
distinct and assignable obligation to
any other person or persons, the case
is taken out of the self-regarding class,
and becomes amenable to moral disap
probation in the proper sense of the
term. If, for example, a man, through
intemperance or extravagance, becomes
unable to pay his debts, or, having
undertaken the moral responsibility of a
family, becomes from the same cause
incapable of supporting or educating
them, he is deservedly reprobated, and
might be justly punished; but it is for
the breach of duty to his family or
creditors, not for the extravagance. If
the resources which ought to have been
devoted to them had been diverted
from them for the most prudent invest
ment, the moral culpability would have
been the same. George Barnwell
murdered his uncle to get money for
his mistress; but if he had done it to
set himself up in business, he would
equally have been hanged. Again, in
the frequent case of a man who causes
grief to his family by addiction to bad
habits, he deserves reproach for his
unkindness or ingratitude; but so he
may for cultivating habits not in them
selves vicious, if they are painful to
those with whom he passes his life, or
who from personal ties are dependent
on him for their comfort. Whoever fails
in the consideration generally due to the
interests and feelings of others, not
being compelled by some more impera
tive duty, or justified by allowable self
preference, is a subject of moral disap
probation for that failure, but not for the
cause of it, nor for the errors, merely
personal to himself, which may have
remotely led to it. In like manner,
when a person disables himself, by
conduct purely self-regarding, from the
performance of some definite duty
incumbent on him to the public, he is
guilty of a social offence. No person
ought to be punished simply for being
drunk; but a soldier or a policeman
should be punished for being drunk on
duty. Whenever, in short, there is a
definite damage, or a definite risk of
damage, either to an individual or to
the public, the case is taken out of the
province of liberty, and placed in that
of morality or law.
But with regard to the merely con
tingent, or, as it may be called, con
structive injury which a person causes
to society, by conduct which neither
violates any specific duty to the public
nor occasions perceptible hurt to any
assignable individual except himself,
the inconvenience is one which society
can afford to bear, for the sake of the
greater good of human freedom. If
grown persons are to be punished for
not taking proper care of themselves, I
would rather it were for their own sake,
than under pretence of preventing them
from impairing their capacity of render
ing to society benefits which society does
not pretend it has a right to exact. But
I cannot consent to argue the point as if
society had no means of bringing its
F
�66
ON LIBERTY
weaker members up to its ordinary
standard of rational conduct, except
waiting till they do something irrational,
and then punishing them, legally or
morally, for it. Society has had absolute
power over them during all the early
portion of their existence: it has had the
whole period of childhood and nonage
in which to try whether it could make
them capable of rational conduct in life.
The existing generation is master both of
the training and the entire circumstances
of the generation to come; it cannot
indeed make them perfectly wise and
good, because it is itself so lamentably
deficient in goodness and wisdom; and
its best efforts are not always, in individual
cases, its most successful ones; but it is
perfectly well able to make the rising
generation, as a whole, as good as, and a
little better than, itself. If society lets
any considerable number of its members
grow up mere children, incapable of
being acted on by rational consideration
of distant motives, society has itself to
blame for the consequences. Armed
not only with all the powers of education,
but with the ascendancy which the
authority of a received opinion always
exercises over the minds who are least
fitted to judge for themselves; and aided
by the natural penalties which cannot be
prevented from falling on those who incur
the distaste or the contempt of those who
know them ; let not society pretend that
it needs, besides all this, the power to
issue commands and enforce obedience
in the personal concerns of individuals,
in which, on all principles of justice and
policy, the decision Qught to rest with
those who are to abide the consequences.
Nor is there anything which tends more
to discredit and frustrate the better means
of influencing conduct than a resort to
the worse. If there be among those
whom it is attempted to coerce into
prudence or temperance any of the
material of which vigorous and inde
pendent characters are made, they will
infallibly rebel against the yoke. No
such person will ever feel that others
have a right to control him in his con
cerns, such as they have to prevent him
from injuring them in theirs; and it
easily comes to be considered a mark
of spirit and courage to fly in the face
of such usurped authority, and do with
ostentation the exact opposite of what it
enjoins; as in the fashion of grossness
which succeeded, in the time of Charles
II., to the fanatical moral intolerance of
the Puritans. With respect to what is
said of the necessity of protecting society
from the bad example set to others by
the vicious or the self-indulgent, it is
true that bad example may have a perni
cious effect, especially the example of
doing wrong to others with impunity to
the wrong-doer. But we are now speak
ing of conduct which, while it does no
wrong to others, is supposed to do great
harm to the agent himself; and I do
not see how those who believe this can
think otherwise than that the example,
on the whole, must be more salutary
than hurtful, since, if it displays the mis
conduct, it displays also the painful or
degrading consequences which, if the
conduct is justly censured, must be sup
posed to be in all or most cases attendant
on it.
But the strongest of all the arguments
against the interference of the public
with purely personal conduct is that,
when it does interfere, the odds are that
it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong
place. On questions of social morality, of
duty to others, the opinion of the public
—that is, of an overruling majority—•
though often wrong, is likely to be still
�OF LIMITS TO AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL
oftener right; because on such questions
they are only required to judge of their
own interests ; of the manner in which
some mode of conduct, if allowed to be
practised, would affect themselves. But
the opinion of a similar majority, imposed
as a law on the minority, on questions of
self-regarding conduct, is quite as likely
to be wrong as right; for in these cases
public opinion means, at the best, some
people’s opinion of what is good or bad
for other people ; while very often it does
not even mean that; the public, with the
most perfect indifference, passing over
the pleasure or convenience of those
whose conduct they censure, and con
sidering only their own preference.
There are many who consider as an
injury to themselves any conduct which
they have a distaste for, and resent it as
an outrage to their feelings; as a religious
bigot, when charged with disregarding
the religious feelings of others, has been
known to retort that they disregard his
feelings, by persisting in their abominable
worship or creed. But there is no parity
between the feeling of a person for his
own opinion and the feeling of another
who is offended at his holding it; no
more than between the desire of a thief
to take a purse and the desire of the
right owner to keep it. And a person’s
taste is as much his own peculiar concern
as his opinion or his purse. It is easy
for anyone to imagine an ideal public,
which leaves the freedom and choice of
individuals in all uncertain matters
undisturbed, and only requires them to
abstain from modes of conduct which
universal experience has condemned.
But where has there been seen a public
which set any such limit to its censorship?
or when does the public trouble itself
about universal experience ? In its inter
ferences with personal conduct it is
67
seldom thinking of anything but the
enormity of acting or feeling differently
from itself; and this standard of judg
ment, thinly disguised, is held up to
mankind as the dictate of religion and
philosophy by nine-tenths of all moralists
and speculative writers. These teach
that things are right because they are
right; because we feel them to be so.
They tell us to search in our own minds
and hearts for laws of conduct binding
on ourselves and on all others. What
can the poor public do but apply these
instructions, and make their own personal
feelings of good and evil, if they are
tolerably unanimous in them, obligatory
on all the world ?
The evil here pointed out is not one
which exists only in theory; and it may,
perhaps, be expected that I should
specify the instances in which the public
of this age and country improperly
invests its own preferences with the
character of moral laws. I am not
writing an essay on the aberrations of
existing moral feeling. That is too
weighty a subject to be discussed paren
thetically, and by way of illustration.
Yet examples are necessary, to show that
the principle I maintain is of serious and
practical moment, and that I am not
endeavouring to erect a barrier against
imaginary evils. And it is not difficult
to show, by abundant instances, that to
extend the bounds of what may be called
moral police, until it encroaches on the
most unquestionably legitimate liberty
of the individual, is one of the most
universal of all human propensities.
As a first instance, consider the anti
pathies which men cherish on no better
grounds than that persons whose religious
opinions are different from theirs do not
practise their religious observances,
especially their religious abstinences. To
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ON LIBERTY
cite a rather trivial example, nothing in the
creed or practice of Christians does more
to envenom the hatred of Mohamme
dans against them than the fact of their
eating pork. There are few acts which
Christians and Europeans regard with
more unaffected disgust than Mussulmans
regard this particular mode of satisfying
hunger. It is, in the first place, an
offence against their religion; but this
circumstance by no means explains
either the degree or the kind of their
repugnance; for wine also is forbidden
by their religion, and to partake of it
is by all Mussulmans accounted wrong,
but not disgusting. Their aversion to
the flesh of the “ unclean beast ” is, on
the contrary, of that peculiar character
resembling an instinctive antipathy which
the idea of uncleanness, when once it
thoroughly sinks into the feelings, seems
always to excite even in those whose
personal habits are anything but scrupu
lously cleanly, and of which the senti
ment of religious impurity, so intense in
the Hindoos, is a remarkable example.
Suppose, now, that in a people of whom
the majority were Mussulmans, that
majority should insist upon not per
mitting pork to be eaten within the
limits of the country. This would be
nothing new in Mohammedan countries.1
Would it be a legitimate exercise of the
moral authority of public opinion? and
if not, why not ? The practice is really
1 The case of the Bombay Parsees is a curious
instance in point. When this industrious and
enterprising tribe, the descendants of the Persian
fire-worshippers, flying from their native country
before the Caliphs, arrived in Western India,
they were admitted to toleration by the Hindoo
sovereigns, on condition of not eating beef.
When those regions afterwards fell under the
dominion of Mohammedan conquerors, the Parsees
obtained from them a continuance of indulgence,
on condition of refraining from pork. What was
revolting to such a public. They also
sincerely think that it is forbidden and
abhorred by the Deity. Neither could
the prohibition be censured as religious
persecution. It might be religious in its
origin ; but it would not be persecution
for religion, since nobody’s religion makes
it a duty to eat pork. The only tenable
ground of condemnation would be that
with the personal tastes and self-regarding
concerns of individuals the public has
no business to interfere.
To come somewhat nearer home : the
majority of Spaniards consider it a gross
impiety, offensive in the highest degree
to the Supreme Being, to worship him
in any other manner than the Roman
Catholic; and no other public worship
is lawful on Spanish soil. The people of
all Southern Europe look upon a married
clergy as not only irreligious, but un
chaste, indecent, gross, disgusting. What
do Protestants think of these perfectly
sincere feelings, and of the attempt to
enforce them against non-Catholics ?
Yet, if mankind are justified in inter
fering with each other’s liberty in things
which do not concern the interests of
others, on what principle is it possible
consistently to exclude these cases? or
who can blame people for desiring to
suppress what they regard as a scandal
in the sight of God and man? No
stronger case can be shown for prohibit
ing anything which is regarded as a
personal immorality than is made out
for suppressing these practices in the
eyes of those who regard them as im
pieties ; and unless we are willing to
at first obedience to authority became a second
nature, and the Parsees to this day abstain both
from beef and pork. Though not required by
their religion, the double abstinence has had
time to grow into a custom of their tribe—and
custom in the East is a religion.
�OF LIMITS TO AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL Gg
adopt the logic of persecutors, and to say
that we may persecute others because we
are right, and that they must not persecute
us because they are wrong, we must
beware of admitting a principle of which
we should resent as a gross injustice the
application to ourselves.
The preceding instances may be ob
jected to, although unreasonably, as
drawn from contingencies impossible
among us : opinion, in this country, not
being likely to enforce abstinence from
meats, or to interfere with people for
worshipping, and for either marrying or
not marrying, according to their creed or
inclination. The next example, however,
shall be taken from an interference with
liberty which we have by no means
passed all danger of. Wherever the
Puritans have been sufficiently powerful,
as in New England, and in Great Britain
at the time of the Commonwealth, they
have endeavoured, with considerable
success, to put down all public, and
nearly all private, amusements: especially
music, dancing, public games, or other
assemblages for purposes of diversion,
and the theatre. There are still in this
country large bodies of persons by whose
notions of morality and religion these
recreations are condemned; and those
persons belonging chiefly to the middle
class, who are the ascendant power in
the present social and political condition
of the kingdom, it is by no means im
possible that persons of these sentiments
may at some time or other command a
majority in Parliament. How will the
remaining portion of the community like
to have the amusements that shall be
permitted to them regulated by the reli
gious and moral sentiments of the stricter
Calvinists and Methodists? Would they
not, with considerable peremptoriness,
desire these intrusively pious members of
society to mind their own business ?
This is precisely what should be said to
every Government and every public who
have the pretension that no person shall
enjoy any pleasure which they think
wrong. But if the principle of the pre
tension be admitted, no one can reason
ably object to its being acted on in the
sense of the majority, or other prepon
derating power in the country; and all
persons must be ready to conform to the
idea of a Christian commonwealth, as
understood by the early settlers in New
England, if a religious profession similar
to theirs should ever succeed in regaining
its lost ground, as religions supposed to be
declining have so often been known to do.
To imagine another contingency, per
haps more likely to be realised than the
one last mentioned. There is confessedly
a strong tendency in the modern world
towards a democratic constitution of
society, accompanied or not by popular
political institutions. It is affirmed that
in the country where this tendency ismost completely realised—where both
society and the Government are most
democratic—the United States—the feel
ing of the majority, to whom any appear
ance of a more showy or costly style of
living than they can hope to rival is dis
agreeable, operates as a tolerably effectual
sumptuary law, and that in many parts
of the Union it is really difficult for a
person possessing a very large income
to find any mode of spending it which
will not incur popular disapprobation.
Though such statements as these are
doubtless much exaggerated as a repre
sentation of existing facts, the state of
things they describe is not only a con
ceivable and possible, but a probable,
result of democratic feeling, combined
with the notion that the public has a
right to a veto on the manner in which
�7°
ON LIBERTY
individuals shall spend their incomes.
We have only further to suppose a con
siderable diffusion of Socialist opinions,
and it may become infamous in the eyes
of the majority to possess more property
than some very small amount, or any
income not earned by manual labour.
Opinions similar in principle to these
already prevail widely among the artisan
class, and weigh oppressively on those
who are amenable to the opinion chiefly
of that class—namely, its own members.
It is known that the bad workmen, who
form the majority of the operatives in
many branches of industry, are decidedly
of opinion that bad workmen ought to
receive the same wages as good, and that
no one ought to be allowed, through
piecework or otherwise, to earn by supe
rior skill or industry more than others
■ can without it. And they employ a
moral police which occasionally becomes
. a physical one, to deter skilful workmen
from receiving, and employers from
giving, a larger remuneration for a more
useful service. If the public have any
jurisdiction over private concerns, I
cannot see that these people are in fault,
or that any individual’s particular public
can be blamed for asserting the same
authority over his individual conduct
which the general public asserts over
people in general.
But, without dwelling upon suppositi
tious cases, there are, in our own day,
gross usurpations upon the liberty of
private life actually practised, and still
greater ones threatened with some expec
tation of success, and opinions pro
pounded which assert an unlimited right
in the public not only to prohibit by law
everything which it thinks wrong, but, in
order to get at what it thinks wrong, to
prohibit a number of things which it
admits to be innocent.
Under the name of preventing in
temperance, the people of one English
colony, and of nearly half the United
States, have been interdicted by law from
making any use whatever of fermented
drinks, except for medical purposes : for
prohibition of their sale is in fact, as it is
intended to be, prohibition of their use.
And though the impracticability of
executing the law has caused its repeal
in several of the States which had
adopted it, including the one from which
it derives its name, an attempt has not
withstanding been commenced, and is
prosecuted with considerable zeal by
many of the professed philanthropists, to
agitate for a similar law in this country.
The association, or “Alliance” as it
terms itself, which has been formed for
this purpose, has acquired some notoriety
through the publicity given to a corres
pondence between its secretary and one
of the very few English public men who
hold that a politician’s opinions ought to
be founded on principles. Lord Stanley’s
share in this correspondence is cal
culated to strengthen the hopes already
built on him by those who know how
rare such qualities as are manifested in
some of his public appearances un
happily are among those who figure in
political life. The organ of the Alliance,
who would “ deeply deplore the recog
nition of any principle which could be
wrested to justify bigotry and persecu
tion,” undertakes to point out the “broad
and impassable barrier ” which divides
such principles from those of the associa
tion. “All matters relating to thought,
opinion, conscience, appear to me,” he
says, “to be without the sphere of legis
lation ; all pertaining to social act, habit,
relation, subject only to a discretionary
power vested in the State itself, and not
in the individual, to be within it.” No
�OF LIMITS TO AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL 71
mention is made of a third class, different
from either of these—viz., acts and habits
which are not social, but individual;
although it is to this class, surely, that
the act of drinking fermented liquors
belongs.
Selling fermented liquors,
however, is trading, and trading is a
social act. But the infringement com
plained of is not on the liberty of the
seller, but on that of the buyer and
consumer; since the State might just
as well forbid him to drink wine as
purposely make it impossible for him
to obtain it. The secretary, however,
says : “ I claim, as a citizen, a right to
legislate whenever my social rights are
invaded by the social act of another.”
And now for the definition of these
“ social rights.” “ If anything invades
my social rights, certainly the traffic
in strong drink does. It destroys my
primary right of security, by constantly
creating and stimulating social disorder.
It invades my right of equality, by
deriving a profit from the creation of a
misery I am taxed to support. It
impedes my right to free moral and
intellectual development, by surrounding
my path with dangers, and by weakening
and demoralising society, from which I
have a right to claim mutual aid and
intercourse.” A theory of ‘‘ social rights ”
the like of which probably never before
found its way into distinct language:
being nothing short of this—that it is
the absolute social right of every indi
vidual that every other individual shall
act in every respect exactly as he ought;
that, whosoever fails thereof in the
smallest particular, violates my social
right, and entitles me to demand from
the legislature the removal of the griev
ance. So monstrous a principle is far
more dangerous than any single inter
ference with liberty; there is no violation
of liberty which it would not justify ;
it acknowledges no right to any freedom
whatever, except perhaps to that of
holding opinions in secret, without ever
disclosing them: for, the moment an
opinion which I consider noxious passes
anyone’s lips, it invades all the “social
rights ” attributed to me by the Alliance.
The doctrine ascribes to all mankind a
vested interest in each other’s moral,
intellectual, and even physical perfection,
to be defined by each claimant according
to his own standard.
Another important example of ille
gitimate interference with the rightful
liberty of the individual, not simply
threatened, but long since carried into
triumphant effect, is Sabbatarian legisla
tion. Without doubt, abstinence on
one day in the week, so far as the
exigencies of life permit, from the usual
daily occupation, though in no respect
religiously binding on any except Jews,
is a highly beneficial custom. And
inasmuch as this custom cannot be ob
served without a general consent to that
effect among the industrious classes,
therefore, in so far as some persons by
working may impose the same neces
sity on others, it may be allowable and
right that the law should guarantee to
each the observance by others of the
custom, by suspending the greater opera
tions of industry on a particular day.
But this justification, grounded on the
direct interest which others have in each
individual’s observance of the practice,
does not apply to the self-chosen occupa
tions in which a person may think fit to
employ his leisure; nor does it hold good
in the smallest degree for legal restric
tions on amusements. It is true that the
amusement of some is the day’s work of
others; but the pleasure, not to say the
useful recreation, of many is worth the
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ON LIBERTY
labour of a few, provided the occupa
tion is freely chosen and can be freely
resigned. The operatives are perfectly
right in thinking that, if all worked on
Sunday, seven days’ work would have to
be given for six days’ wages; but so long
as the great mass of employments are
suspended, the small number who for the
enjoyment of others must still work obtain
a proportional increase of earnings; and
they are not obliged to follow those
occupations if they prefer leisure to
emolument.
If a further remedy is
sought, it might be found in the estab
lishment by custom of a holiday on
some other day of the week for those
particular classes of persons. The only
ground, therefore, on which restrictions
on Sunday amusements can be defended
must be that they are religiously wrong—
a motive of legislation which can never be
too earnestly protested against. Deorum
injuria Diis cura. It remains to be
proved that society or any of its officers
holds a commission from on high to
avenge any supposed offence to Omni
potence which is not also a wrong to
our fellow-creatures. The notion that it
is one man’s duty that another should
be religious was the foundation of all
the religious persecutions ever perpe
trated, and, if admitted, would fully
justify them. Though the feeling which
breaks out in the repeated attempts to
stop railway travelling on Sunday, in the
resistance to the opening of museums,
and the like, has not the cruelty of the
old persecutors, the state of mind indi
cated by it is fundamentally the same.
It is a determination not to tolerate
others in doing what is permitted by
their religion, because it is not permitted
by the persecutor’s religion. It is a
belief that God not only abominates
the act of the misbeliever, but will
not hold us guiltless if we leave him
unmolested.
I cannot refrain from adding to these
examples of the little account commonly
made of human liberty the language of
downright persecution which breaks out
from the press of this country whenever
it feels called on to notice the remarkable
phenomenon of Mormonism. Much
might be said on the unexpected and
instructive fact that an alleged new
revelation, and a religion founded on it,
the product of palpable imposture, not
even supported by the prestige of extra
ordinary qualities in its founder, is be
lieved by hundreds of thousands, and has
been made the foundation of a society,
in the age of newspapers, railways, and
the electric telegraph. What here con
cerns us is that this religion, like other
and better religions, has its martyrs; that
its prophet and founder was for his
teaching put to death by a mob; that
others of its adherents lost their lives by
the same lawless violence; that they
were forcibly expelled in a body from
the country in which they first grew up ;
while, now that they have been chased
into a solitary recess in the midst of a
desert, many in this country openly
declare that it would be right (only that
it is not convenient) to send an expedi
tion against them, and compel them by
force to conform to the opinions of other
people. The article of the Mormonite
doctrine which is the chief provocative
to the antipathy which thus breaks
through the ordinary restraints of reli
gious tolerance is its sanction of poly
gamy; which, though permitted to
Mohammedans, and Hindoos, and
Chinese, seems to excite unquenchable
animosity when practised by persons
who speak English, and profess to be
a kind of Christians. No one has a
�OF LIMITS TO AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL 73
deeper disapprobation than I have of
this Mormon institution; both for other
reasons and because, far-from being in
any way countenanced by the principle
of liberty, it is a direct infraction of
that principle, being a mere riveting
of the chains of one half of the com
munity, and an emancipation of the
other from reciprocity of obligation
towards them. Still, it must be
remembered that this relation is as
much voluntary on the part of the
women concerned in it, and who may be
deemed the sufferers by it, as is the
case with any other form of the marriage
institution; and, however surprising this
fact may appear, it has its explanation
in the common ideas and customs of
the world, which, teaching women to
think marriage the one thing needful,
make it intelligible that many a woman
should prefer being one of several wives
to not being a wife at all. Other
countries are not asked to recognise
such unions, or release any portion of
their inhabitants from their own laws
on the score of Mormonite opinions.
But when the dissentients have con
ceded to the hostile sentiments of others
far more than could justly be demanded ;
when they have left the countries to
which their doctrines were unacceptable,
and established themselves in a remote
corner of the earth which they have
been the first to render habitable to
human beings; it is difficult to see on
what principles but those of tyranny
they can be prevented from living
there under what laws they please,
provided they commit no aggression
on other nations, and allow perfect
freedom of departure to those who are
dissatisfied with their ways. A recent
writer, in some respects of considerable
merit, proposes (to use his own words)
not a crusade, but a civilisade, against
this polygamous community, to put an
end to what seems to him a retrograde
step in civilisation. It also appears so
to me, but I am not aware that any
community has a right to force another
to be civilised. So long as the sufferers
by the bad law do not invoke assistance
from other communities, I cannot admit
that persons entirely unconnected with
them ought to step in and require that
a condition of things with which all who
are directly interested appear to be satis
fied should be put an end to because it
is a scandal to persons some thousands
of miles distant, who have no part or
concern in it. Let them send mission
aries, if they please, to preach against it;
and let them, by any fair means (of
which silencing the teachers is not one),
oppose the progress of similar doctrines
among their own people. If civilisation
has got the better of barbarism when
barbarism had the world to itself, it is
too much to profess to be afraid lest
barbarism, after having been fairly got
under, should revive and conquer civili
sation. A civilisation that can thus
succumb to its vanquished enemy must
first have become so degenerate that
neither its appointed priests and teachers
nor anybody else has the capacity, or
will take the trouble, to stand up for it.
If this be so, the sooner such a civilisa
tion receives notice to quit the better.
It can only go on from bad to worse,
until destroyed and regenerated (like
the Western Empire) by energetic bar
barians.
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ON LIBERTY
Chapter V.
APPLICATIONS
The principles asserted in these pages
must be more generally admitted as the
basis for discussion of details, before a
consistent application of them to all the
various departments of government and
morals can be attempted with any pros
pect of advantage. The few observations
I propose to make on questions of detail
are designed to illustrate the principles,
rather than to follow them out to their
consequences. I offer, not so much
applications, as specimens of application;
which may serve to bring into greater
clearness the meaning and limits of the
two maxims which together form the
entire doctrine of this Essay, and to
assist the judgment in holding the
balance between them, in the cases
where it appears doubtful which of them
is applicable to the case.
The maxims are, first, that the indi
vidual is not accountable to society for
his actions, in so far as these concern
the interests of no person but himself.
Advice, instruction, persuasion, and
avoidance by other people, if thought
necessary by them for their own good,
are the only measures by which society
can justifiably express its dislike or dis
approbation of his conduct. Secondly,
that, for such actions as are prejudicial to
the interests of others, the individual is
accountable, and may be subjected either
to social or to legal punishment, if society
is of opinion that the one or the other is
requisite for its protection.
In the first place, it must by no means
be supposed, because damage, or proba
bility of damage, to the interests of others
can alone justify the interference of
society, that therefore it always does
justify such interference. In many cases
an individual, in pursuing a legitimate
object, necessarily, and therefore legiti
mately, causes pain or loss to others, or
intercepts a good which they had a
reasonable hope of obtaining. Such oppo
sitions of interest between individuals
often arise from bad social institutions,
but are unavoidable while those institu
tions last; and some would be unavoid
able under any institutions. Whoever
succeeds in an overcrowded profession,
or in a competitive examination; whoever
is preferred to another in any contest for
an object which both desire, reaps benefit
from the loss of others, from their wasted
exertion and their disappointment. But
it is, by common admission, better for the
general interest of mankind that persons
should pursue their objects undeterred
by this sort of consequences. In other
words, society admits no right, either
legal or moral, in the disappointed com
petitors, to immunity from this kind of
suffering; and feels called on to interfere
only when means of success have been
employed which it is contrary to the
general interest to permit—namely, fraud
or treachery, and force.
Again, trade is a social act. Whoever
undertakes to sell any description of
goods to the public does what affects
the interest of other persons, and of
society in general; and thus his conduct,
in principle, comes within the jurisdiction
�APPLICATIONS
of society : accordingly, it was once held
to be the duty of governments, in all cases
which were considered of importance, to
fix prices and regulate the processes of
manufacture. But it is now recognised,
though not till after a long struggle, that
both the cheapness and the good quality
of commodities are most effectually pro
vided for by leaving the producers and
sellers perfectly free, under the sole check
of equal freedom to the buyers for sup
plying themselves elsewhere. This is the
so-called doctrine of Free Trade, which
rests on grounds different from, though
equally solid with, the principle of indi
vidual liberty asserted in this Essay.
Restrictions on trade, or on production
for purposes of trade, are indeed re
straints ; and all restraint, qua restraint,
is an evil: but the restraints in question
affect only that part of conduct which
society is competent to restrain, and are
wrong solely because they do not really
produce the results which it is desired to,
produce by them. As the principle of
individual liberty is not involved in the
doctrine of Free Trade, so neither is it in
most of the questions which arise respect
ing the limits of that doctrine; as, for
example, what amount of public control
is admissible for the prevention of fraud
by adulteration; how far sanitary pre
cautions, or arrangements to protect
workpeople employed in dangerous occu
pations, should be enforced on employers.
Such questions involve considerations of
liberty, only in so far as leaving people to
themselves is always better, caterisparibus,
than controlling them; but that they
may be legitimately controlled for these
ends is in principle undeniable. On the
other hand, there are questions relating
to interference with trade which are
essentially questions of liberty ; such as
the Maine Law, already touched upon ;
75
the prohibition of the importation of
opium into China; the restriction of the
sale of poisons ; all cases, in short, where
the object of the interference is to make
it impossible or difficult to obtain a
particular commodity. These interfer
ences are objectionable, not as infringe
ments on the liberty of the producer or
seller, but on that of the buyer.
One of these examples, that of the
sale of poisons, opens a new question;
the proper limits of what may be called
the functions of police ; how far liberty
may legitimately be invaded for the
prevention of crime, or of accident. It
is one of the undisputed functions of
government to take precautions against
crime before it has been committed, as
well as to detect and punish it afterwards.
The preventive function of government,.
however, is far more liable to be abused,
to the prejudice of liberty, than the
punitory function; for there is hardly
any part of the legitimate freedom of
action of a human being which would
not admit of being represented, and
fairly too, as increasing the facilities
for some form or other of delinquency.
Nevertheless, if a public authority, or
even a private person, sees anyone
evidently preparing to commit a crime,
they are not bound to look on inactive
until the crime is committed, but may
interfere to prevent it. If poisons were
never bought or used for any purpose
except the commission of murder, it would
be right to prohibit their manufacture and
sale. They may, however, be wanted
not only for innocent but for useful
purposes, and restrictions cannot be
imposed in the one case without operat
ing in the other. Again, it is a proper
office of public authority to guard against
accidents. If either a public officer or
any one else saw a person attempting to
�76
ON LIBERTY
cross a bridge which had been ascertained
to be unsafe, and there were no time to
warn him of his danger, they might seize
him and turn him back, without any real
infringement of his liberty; for liberty
consists in doing what one desires, and
he does not desire to fall into the river.
Nevertheless, when there is not a cer
tainty, but only a danger of mischief, no
one but the person himself can judge of
the sufficiency of the motive which may
prompt him to incur the risk: in this
case, therefore (unless he is a child, or
delirious, or in some state of excitement
or absorption incompatible with the full
use of the reflecting faculty), he ought,
.1 conceive, to be only warned of the
danger, not forcibly prevented from
exposing himself to it. Similar con
siderations, applied to such a question
as the sale of poisons, may enable us to
decide which among the possible modes
of regulation are or are not contrary to
principle. Such a precaution, for ex
ample, as that of labelling the drug with
some word expressive of its dangerous
character may be enforced without
violation of liberty: the buyer cannot
wish not to know that the thing he
possesses has poisonous qualities. But
to require in all cases the certificate of
a medical practitioner would make it
sometimes impossible, always expensive,
to obtain the article for legitimate uses.
The only mode apparent to me, in which
difficulties may be thrown in the way
of crime committed through this means,
without any infringement, worth taking
into account, upon the liberty of those
who desire the poisonous substance for
other purposes, consists in providing
what, in the apt language of Bentham,
is called “preappointed evidence.” This
provision is familiar to every one in
the case of contracts. It is usual and i
right that the law, when a contract is
entered into, should require, as the con
dition of its enforcing performance, that
certain formalities should be observed,
such as signatures, attestation of wit
nesses, and the like, in order that in case
of subsequent dispute there may be evi
dence to prove that the contract was really
entered into, and that there was nothing
in the circumstances to render it legally
invalid : the effect being to throw great
obstacles in the way of fictitious con
tracts, or contracts made in circumstances
which, if known, would destroy their
validity. Precautions of a similar nature
might be enforced in the sale of articles
adapted to be instruments of crime. The
seller, for example, might be required to
enter in a register the exact time of the
transaction, the name and address of the
buyer, the precise quality and quantity
sold; to ask the purpose for which it
was wanted, and record the answer he
received. When there was no medical
prescription, the presence of some third
persoh might be required, to bring home
the fact to the purchaser, in case there
should afterwards be reason to believe
that the article had been applied to
criminal purposes. Such regulations
would in general be no material impedi
ment to obtaining the article, but a very
considerable one to making an improper
use of it without detection.
The right inherent in society, to ward
off crimes against itself by antecedent
precautions, suggests the obvious limita
tions to the maxim, that purely self
regarding misconduct cannot properly
be meddled with in the way of preven
tion or punishment. Drunkenness, for
example, in ordinary cases is not a fit
subject for legislative interference; but I
should deem it perfectly legitimate that
a person who had once been convicted
�APPLICA PIONS
of any act of violence to others under
the influence of drink should be placed
under a special legal restriction, personal
to himself; that, if he were afterwards
found drunk, he should be liable to a
penalty, and that, if when in that state he
committed another offence, the punish
ment to which he would be liable for
that other offence should be increased in
severity. The making himself drunk, in
a person whom drunkenness excites to
do harm to others, is a crime against
others. So, again, idleness, except in a
person receiving support from the public,
or except when it constitutes a breach
of contract, cannot without tyranny be
made a subject of legal punishment; but
if, either from idleness or from any other
avoidable cause, a man fails to perform
his legal duties to others, as, for instance,
to support his children, it is no tyranny
to force him to fulfil that obligation by
compulsory labour if no other means are
available.
Again, there are many acts which,
being directly injurious only to the agents
themselves, ought not to be legally inter
dicted, but which, if done publicly, are a
violation of good manners, and, coming
thus within the category of . offences
against others, may rightly be prohibited.
Of this kind are offences against decency;
on which it is unnecessary to dwell, the
rather as they are only connected
indirectly with our subject, the objection
to publicity being equally strong in the
case of many actions not in themselves
condemnable, nor supposed to be so.
There is another question to which an
answer must be found, consistent with
the principles which have been laid down.
In cases of personal conduct supposed
to be blameable, but which respect for
liberty precludes society from preventing
or punishing, because the evil directly '
77
resulting falls wholly on the agent; what
the agent is free to do, ought other
persons to be equally free to counsel or
instigate ? This question is not free
from difficulty. The case of a person
who solicits another to do an act is not
strictly a case of self-regarding conduct.
To give advice or offer inducements to
anyone is a social act, and may, therefore,
like actions in general which affect others,
be supposed amenable to social control.
But a little reflection corrects the first
impression, by showing that, if the case
is not strictly within the definition of
individual liberty, yet the reasons on
which the principle of individual liberty
is grounded are applicable to it. If
people must be allowed, in whatever
concerns only themselves, to act as
seems best to themselves, at their own
peril, they must equally be free to con
sult with one another about what is fit
to be so done; to exchange opinions,
and give and receive suggestions. What
ever it is permitted to do, it must be
permitted to advise to do. The question
is doubtful only when the instigator
derives a personal benefit from his
advice; when he makes it his occupation,
for subsistence or pecuniary gain, to
promote what society and the State con
sider to be an evil. Then, indeed, a
new element of complication is intro
duced ; namely, the existence of classes
of persons with an interest opposed to
what is considered as the public weal,
and whose mode of living is grounded
on the counteraction of it. Ought this
to be interfered with, or not ? Fornica
tion, for example, must be tolerated, and
so must gambling; but should a person
be free to be a pimp, or to keep a
gambling-house ? The case is one of
those which lie on the exact boundary
line between two principles, and it is not
�78
ON LIBERTY
at once apparent to which of the two it
properly belongs. There are arguments
on both sides. On the side of toleration
it may be said that the fact of following
anything as an occupation, and living or
profiting by the practice of it, cannot
make that criminal which would other
wise be admissible; that the act should
•either be consistently permitted or con
sistently prohibited; that, if the principles
■which we have hitherto defended are
true, society has no business, as society,
to decide anything to be wrong which
concerns only the individual; that it
cannot go beyond dissuasion, and that
one person should be as free to persuade
as another to dissuade. In opposition
to this it may be contended that, although
the public, or the State, are not warranted
in authoritatively deciding, for purposes
of repression or punishment, that such
•or such conduct affecting only the in
terests of the individual is good or bad,
they are fully justified in assuming, if
they regard it as bad, that its being so
or not is at least a disputable question :
That, this being supposed, they cannot
be acting wrongly in endeavouring to
exclude the influence of solicitations
which are not disinterested, of instigators
who cannot possibly be impartial—who
have a direct personal interest on one
side, and that side the one which
the State believes to be wrong, and
who confessedly promote it for personal
objects only. There can surely, it may
be urged, be nothing lost, no sacrifice of
good, by so ordering matters that persons
shall make their election, either wisely
or foolishly, on their own prompting, as
free as possible from the arts of persons
who stimulate their inclinations for inte
rested purposes of their own. Thus (it
may be said), though the statutes respect
ing unlawful games are utterly indefen
sible—though all persons should be free
to gamble in their own or each other’s
houses, or in any place of meeting
established by their own subscriptions,
and open only to the members and their
visitors — yet public gambling-houses
should not be permitted. It is true that
the prohibition is never effectual, and
that, whatever amount of tyrannical
power may be given to the police,
gambling-houses can always be main
tained under other pretences ; but they
may be compelled to conduct their
operations with a certain degree of
secrecy and mystery, so that nobody
knows anything about them but those
who seek them; and more than this
society ought not to aim at. There is
considerable force in these arguments.
I will not venture to decide whether
they are sufficient to justify the moral
anomaly of punishing the accessory,
when the principal is (and must be)
allowed to go free; of fining or imprison
ing the procurer, but not the fornicator
—the gambling-house keeper, but not
the gambler. Still less ought the
common operations of buying and selling
to be interfered with on analogous
grounds. Almost every article which is
bought and sold may be used in excess,
and the sellers have a pecuniary interest
in encouraging that excess ; but no argu
ment can be founded on this, in favour,
for instance, of the Maine Law ; because
the class of dealers in strong drinks,
though interested in their abuse, are
indispensably required for the sake of
their legitimate use. The interest, how
ever, of these dealers in promoting
intemperance is a real evil, and justifies
the State in imposing restrictions and
requiring guarantees which, but for that
justification, would be infringements of
legitimate liberty.
�APPLICA TIONS
A further question is, whether the
State, while it permits, should neverthe
less indirectly discourage conduct which
it deems contrary to the best interests of
the agent; whether, for example, it
should take measures to render the
means of drunkenness more costly, or
add to the difficulty of procuring them
by limiting the number of the places of
sale. On this, as on most other practical
questions, many distinctions require to
be made. To tax stimulants for the sole
purpose of making them more difficult
to be obtained is a measure differing
only in degree from their entire prohi
bition, and would be justifiable only if
that were justifiable. Every increase of
cost is a prohibition to those whose
means do not come up to the augmented
price; and to those who do, it is a
penalty laid on them for gratifying a
particular taste. Their choice of plea
sures, and their mode of expending their
income, after satisfying their legal and
moral obligations to the State and to
individuals, are their own concern, and
must rest with their own judgment.
These considerations may seem at first
sight to condemn the selection of
stimulants as special subjects of taxation
for purposes of revenue. But it must
be remembered that taxation for fiscal
purposes is absolutely inevitable; that
in most countries it is necessary that a
considerable part of. that taxation should
be indirect; that the State, therefore,
cannot help imposing penalties, which
to some persons may be prohibitory, on
the use of some articles of consumption.
It is hence the duty of the State to con
sider, in the imposition of taxes, what
commodities the consumers can best
spare; and, b fortiori, to select in
preference those of which it deems the
use, beyond a very moderate quantity,
79
to be positively injurious. Taxation,
therefore, of stimulants, up to the point
which produces the largest amount of
revenue (supposing that the State needs
all the revenue which it yields), is not
only admissible, but to be approved of.
The question of making the sale of
these commodities a more or less exclusive
privilege must be answered differently
according to the purposes to which the
restriction is intended to be subservient.
All places of public resort require the
restraint of a police, and places of this
kind peculiarly, because offences against
society are especially apt to originate
there. It is, therefore, fit to confine the
power of selling these commodities (at
least, for consumption on the spot) to
persons of known or vouched-for respect
ability of conduct; to make such regula
tions respecting hours of opening and
closing as may be requisite for public
surveillance, and to withdraw the licence
if breaches of the peace repeatedly take
place through the connivance or inca
pacity of the keeper of the house, or if
it becomes a rendezvous for concocting
and preparing offences against the law.
Any further restriction I do not conceive
to be, in principle, justifiable. The
limitation in number, for instance, of
beer and spirit houses, for the express
purpose of rendering them more difficult
of access, and diminishing the occasions
of temptation, not only exposes all to an
inconvenience because there are some
by whom the facility would be abused,
but is suited only to a state of society in
which the labouring classes are avowedly
treated as children or savages, and placed
under an education of restraint, to fit
them for future admission to the privi
leges of freedom. This is not the
principle on which the labouring classes
are professedly governed in any free
�8o
ON LIBERTY
country; and no person who sets due
value on freedom will give his adhesion
to their being so governed, unless after
all efforts have been exhausted to educate
them for freedom and govern them as
freemen, and it has been definitively
proved that they can only be governed
as children. The bare statement of the
alternative shows the absurdity of sup
posing that such efforts have been made
in each case which needs be considered
here. It is only because the institutions
of this country are a mass of inconsis
tencies that things find admittance into
our practice which belong to the system
of despotic, or what is called paternal,
government, while the general freedom
of our institutions precludes the exercise
of the amount of control necessary to
render the restraint of any real efficacy
as a moral education.
It was pointed out in an early part of
this Essay that the liberty of the indi
vidual, in things wherein the individual
is alone concerned, implies a correspond
ing liberty in any number of individuals
to regulate by mutual agreement such
things as regard them jointly, and regard
no persons but themselves. This ques
tion permits no difficulty, so long as the
will of all the persons implicated remains
unaltered; but, since that will may
change, it is often necessary, even in
things in which they alone are concerned,
that they should enter into engagements
with one another; and, when they do, it
is fit, as a general rule, that those engage
ments should be kept. Yet, in the laws,
probably of every country, this general
rule has some exceptions. Not only
persons are not held to engagements
which violate the rights of third parties,
but it is sometimes considered a sufficient
reason for releasing them from an engage
ment that it is injurious to themselves.
In this and most other civilised countries,
for example, an engagement by which a
person should sell himself, or allow him
self to be sold, as a slave, would be null
and void—neither enforced by law nor
by opinion. The ground for thus limit
ing his power of voluntarily disposing of
his own lot in life is apparent, and is
very clearly seen in this extreme case.
The reason for not interfering, unless for
the sake of others, with a person’s volun
tary acts is consideration for his liberty.
His voluntary choice is evidence that
what he so chooses is desirable, or at the
least endurable, to him, and his good is
on the whole best provided for by allow
ing him to take his own means of pur
suing it. But by selling himself for a
slave he abdicates his liberty; he fore
goes any future use of it beyond that
single act. He therefore defeats, in his
own case, the very purpose which is the
justification of allowing him to dispose
of himself. He is no longer free, but is
thenceforth in a position which has no
longer the presumption in its favour
that would be afforded by his voluntarily
remaining in it. The principle of free
dom cannot require that he should be
free not to be free. It is not freedom
to be allowed to alienate his freedom.
These reasons, the force of which is so
conspicuous in this peculiar case, are
evidently of far wider application; yet a
limit is everywhere set to them by the
necessities of life, which continually
require, not indeed that we should resign
our freedom, but that wye should consent
to this and the other limitation of it.
The principle, how’ever, which demands
uncontrolled freedom of action in all
that concerns only the agents themselves,
requires that those who have become
bound to one another, in things which
concern no third party, should be able
�APPLICATIONS
to release one another from the engage
ment ; and even without such voluntary
release there are, perhaps, no contracts
or engagements, except those that relate
to money or money’s worth, of which
one can venture to say that there ought
to be no liberty whatever of retractation.
Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt, in the
excellent essay from which I have already
quoted, states it as his conviction that
engagements which involve personal re
lations or services should never be
legally binding beyond a limited duration
of time; and that the most important of
these engagements, marriage, having the
peculiarity that its objects are frustrated
unless the feelings of both the parties
are in harmony with it, should require
nothing more than the declared will of
either party to dissolve it. This subject
is too important and too complicated to
be discussed in a parenthesis, and I touch
on it only so far as is necessary for pur
poses of illustration. If the conciseness
and generality of Baron Humboldt’s dis
sertation had not obliged him, in this
instance, to content himself with enun
ciating his conclusion without discussing
the premises, he would doubtless have
recognised that the question cannot be
decided on grounds so simple as those
to which he confines himself. When a
person, either by express promise or by
conduct, has encouraged another to rely
upon his continuing to act in a certain way
—to build expectations and calculations,
and stake any part of his plan of life upon
that supposition—a new series of moral
obligations arises on his part towards
that person, which may possibly be over
ruled, but cannot be ignored. And
again, if the relation between two con
tracting parties has been followed by
consequences to others ; if it has placed
third parties in any peculiar position, or,
81
as in the case of marriage, has even
called third parties into existence, obli
gations arise on the part of both the
contracting parties towards those third
persons, the fulfilment of which, or at
all events the mode of fulfilment, must
be greatly affected by the continuance
or disruption of the relation between
the original parties to the contract. It
does not follow, nor can I admit, that
these obligations extend to requiring the
fulfilment of the contract at all costs
to the happiness of the reluctant party;
but they are a necessary element in the
question; and even if, as Von Humboldt
maintains, they ought to make no dif
ference in the legal freedom of the
parties to release themselves from the
engagement (and I also hold that they
ought not to make much difference),
they necessarily make a great difference
in the moral freedom. A person is
bound to take all these circumstances
I into account before resolving on a step
which may affect such important inte
rests of others; and if he does not allow
proper weight to those interests, he is
morally responsible for the wrong. I
have made these obvious remarks for
the better illustration of the general
principle of liberty, and not because
they are at all needed on the particular
question, which, on the contrary, is
usually discussed as if the interest of
children was everything, and that of
grown persons nothing.
I have already observed that, owing to
the absence of any recognised general
principles, liberty is often granted where
it should be withheld, as well as withheld
where it should be granted ; and one of
the cases in which, in the modern Euro
pean world, the sentiment of liberty is
the strongest, is a case where, in my view,
it is altogether misplaced. A person
G
�82
ON LIBERTY
should be free to do as he likes in his
own concerns; but he ought not to be
free to do as he likes in acting for
another, under the pretext that the affairs
of the other are his own affairs. The
State, while it respects the liberty of each
in what specially regards^imself, is bound
to maintain a vigilant control over his
exercise of any power which it allows him
to possess over others. This obligation
is almost entirely disregarded in the case
of the family relations—a case, in its
direct influence on human happiness,
more important than all others taken
together. The almost despotic power of
husbands over wives needs not be
enlarged upon here, because nothing
more is needed for the complete removal
of the evil than that wives should have
the same rights, and should receive the
protection of the law in the same manner,
as all other persons; and because, on this
subject, the defenders of established in
justice do not avail themselves of the
plea of liberty, but stand forth openly as
the champions of power. It is in the
case of children that misapplied notions
of liberty are a real obstacle to the fulfil
ment by the State of its duties. One
would almost think that a man’s children
were supposed to be literally, and not
metaphorically, a part of himself, so
jealous is opinion of the smallest inter
ference of law with his absolute and
exclusive controlover them—morejealous
than of almost any interference with his
own freedom of action : so much less do
the generality of mankind value liberty
than power. Consider, for example, the
case of education. Is it not almost a
self-evident axiom that the State should
require and compel the education, up to
a certain standard, of every human being
who is born its citizen? Yet who is
there that is not afraid to recognise
and assert this truth ? Hardly anyone,
indeed, will deny that it is one of the
most sacred duties of the parents (or, as
law and usage now stand, the father),
after summoning a human being into the
world, to give to that being an education
fitting him to perform his part well in life
towards others and towards himself. But
while this is unanimously declared to be
the father’s duty, scarcely anybody, in
this country, will bear to hear of obliging
him to perform it. Instead of his being
required to make any exertion or sacri
fice for securing education to his child, it
is left to his choice to accept it or not
when it is provided gratis 1 It still
remains unrecognised that to bring a
child into existence without a fair pros
pect of being able, not only to provide
food for its body, but instruction and
training for its mind, is a moral crime,
both against the unfortunate offspring
and against society; and that, if the
parent does not fulfil this obligation, the
State ought to see it fulfilled, at the
charge, as far as possible, of the parent.
Were the duty of enforcing universal
education once admitted, there would be
an end to the difficulties about what the
State should teach, and how it should
teach, which now convert the subject
into a mere battle-field for sects and
parties, causing the time and labour
which should have been spent in educat
ing to be wasted in quarrelling about
education. If the Government would
make up its mind to require for every
child a good education, it might save
itself the trouble of providing one. It
might leave to parents to obtain the
education where and how they pleased,
and content itself with helping to pay
the school fees of the poorer classes of
children, and defraying the entire school
expenses of those who have no one else
�APPLICA TIONS
to pay for them. The objections which
arc urged with reason against State edu
cation do not apply to the enforcement
of education by the State, but to the
State’s taking upon itself to direct that
education: which is a totally different
thing. That the whole or any large part
of the education of the people should be
in State hands I go as far as any one in
deprecating. All that has been said of
the importance of individuality of cha
racter, and diversity in opinions and
modes of conduct, involves, as of the
same unspeakable importance, diversity
of education. A general State education
is a mere contrivance for moulding people
to be exactly like one another; and as
the mould in which it casts them is 'that
which pleases the predominant power
in the Government, whether this be a
monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy,
or the majority of the existing generation:
in proportion as it is efficient and success
ful, it establishes a despotism over the
mind, leading by natural tendency to
one over the body. An education estab
lished and controlled by the State should
only exist, if it exist at all, as one among
many competing experiments, carried on
for the purpose of example and stimulus,
to keep the others up to a certain
standard of excellence. Unless, indeed,
when society in general is in so backward
a state that it could not or would not
provide for itself any proper institutions
of education, unless the Government
undertook the task: then, indeed, the
Government may, as the less of two great
evils, take upon itself the business of
schools and universities, as it may that
of joint-stock companies, when private
enterprise, in a shape fitted for under
taking great works of industry, does not
exist in the country. But in general, if
the country contains a sufficient number
83
of persons qualified to provide education
under Government auspices, the same
persons would be able and willing to
give an equally good education on the
voluntary principle, under the assurance
of remuneration afforded by a law render
ing education compulsory, combined
with State aid to those unable to defray
the expense.
The instrument for enforcing the law
could be no other than public examina
tions, extending to all children, and begin
ning at an early age. An age might be
fixed at which every child must be exa
mined, to ascertain if he (or she) is able to
read. If a child proves unable, the father,
unless he has some sufficient ground of
excuse, might be subjected to a moderate
fine, to be worked out, if necessary, by
his labour, and the child might be put
to school at his expense. Once in every
year the examination should be renewed,
with a gradually extending range of
subjects, so as to make the universal
acquisition, and, what is more, retention, of
a certain minimum of general knowledge
virtually compulsory. Beyond that mini
mum there should be voluntary examina
tions on all subjects, at which all who
come up to a certain standard of pro
ficiency might claim a certificate. To
prevent the State from exercising, through
these arrangements, animproper influence
over opinion, the knowledge required
for passing an examination (beyond the
merely instrumental parts of knowledge,
such as languages and their use) should,
even in the higher classes of examina
tions, be confined to facts and positive
science exclusively. The examinations
on religion, politics, or other disputed
topics should not turn on the truth or
falsehood of opinions, but on the matter
of fact that such and such an opinion is
held, on such grounds, by such authors,
�84
ON LIBERTY
or schools, or Churches. Under this
system the rising generation would be
no worse off in regard to all disputed
truths than they are at present; they
would be brought up either Churchmen
or Dissenters, as they now are, the State
merely taking care that they should be
instructed Churchmen or instructed.
Dissenters. There would be nothing to
hinder them from being taught religion,
if their parents chose, at the same
schools where they were taught other
things. All attempts by the State to
bias the conclusions of its citizens on
disputed subjects are evil; but it may
very properly offer to ascertain and certify
that a person possesses the knowledge,
requisite to make his conclusions, on
any given subject worth attending to.
A student of philosophy would be the
better for being able to stand an exami
nation both in Locke and in Kant,
whichever of the two he takes up with,
or even if with neither; and there is no
reasonable objection to examining an
Atheist in the evidences of Christianity,
provided he is not required to profess
a belief in them. The examinations,
however, in the higher branches of
knowledge should, I conceive, be entirely
voluntary.
It would be giving too
dangerous a power to Governments were
they allowed to exclude any one from
professions, even from the profession of
teacher, for alleged deficiency of qualifi
cations ; and I think, with Wilhelm von
Humboldt, that degrees, or other public
certificates of scientific or professional
acquirements, should be given to all
who present themselves for examination,
and stand the test; but that such certifi
cates should confer no advantage over
competitors, other than the weight which
may be attached to their testimony by
public opinion.
It is not in the matter of education
only that misplaced notions of liberty
prevent moral obligations on the part of
parents from being recognised, and legal
obligations from being imposed, where
there are the strongest grounds for the
former always, and in many cases for the
latter also. The fact itself, of causing
the existence of a human being, is one
of the most responsible actions in the
range of human life. To undertake this
responsibility—to bestow a life which
may be either a curse or a blessing—
unless the being on whom it is to be
bestowed will have at least the ordinary
chances of a desirable existence, is a
crime against that being. And in a
country either over-peopled, or threatened
with being so, to produce children,
beyond a very small number, with the
effect of reducing the reward of labour
by their competition, is a serious offence
against all who live by the remuneration
of their labour. The laws which, in
many countries on the Continent, forbid
marriage unless the parties can show
that they have the means of support
ing a family do not exceed the legiti
mate powers of the State; and whether
such laws be expedient or not (a ques
tion mainly dependent on local circum
stances and feelings), they are not ob
jectionable as violations of liberty. Such
laws are interferences of the State to
prohibit a mischievous act—an act in
jurious to others, which ought to be
a subject of reprobation and social
stigma, even when it is not deemed expe
dient to superadd legal punishment. Yet
the current ideas of liberty, which bend
so easily to real infringements of the
freedom of the individual in things which
concern only himself, would repel the
attempt to put any restraint upon his
inclinations when the consequence of
�APPLICA TIONS
their indulgence is a life or lives of
wretchedness and depravity to the off
spring, with manifold evils to those suffi
ciently within reach to be in any way
affected by their actions. When we
compare the strange respect of mankind
for liberty with their strange want of
respect for it, we might imagine that a man
had an indispensable right to do harm to
others, and no right at all to please him
self without giving pain to any one.
I have reserved for the last place a
large class of questions respecting the
limits of Government interference, which,
though closely connected with the subject
of this Essay, do not, in strictness, belong
to it. These are cases in which the
reasons against interference do not turn
upon the principle of liberty: the question
is not about restraining the actions of
individuals, but about helping them : it
is asked whether the Government should
do, or cause to be done, something for
their benefit, instead of leaving it to be
done by themselves, individually or in
voluntary combination.
The objections to Government inter
ference, when it is not such as to involve
infringement of liberty, may be of three
kinds.
The first is, when the thing to be done
is likely to be better done by individuals
than by the Government. Speaking
generally, there is no one so fit to conduct
any business, or to determine how or by
whom it shall be conducted, as those
who are personally interested in it. This
principle condemns the interferences,
once so common, of the Legislature, or
the officers of Government, with the
ordinary processes of industry. But this
part of the subject has been sufficiently
enlarged upon by political economists,
and is not particularly related to the
principles of this Essay.
85
The second objection is more nearly
allied to our subject. In many cases,
though individuals may not do the par
ticular thing so well, on the average, as
the officers of Government, it is neverthe
less desirable that it should be done by
them, rather than by the Government, as
a means to their own mental education
—a mode of strengthening their active
faculties, exercising their judgment, and
giving them a familiar knowledge of the
subjects with which they are thus left to
deal. This is a principal, though not the
sole, recommendation of jury trial (in
cases not political); of free and popular
local and municipal institutions ; of the
conduct of industrial and philanthropic
enterprises by voluntary associations.
These are not questions of liberty, and
are connected with that subject only by
remote tendencies ; but they are ques
tions of development. It belongs to a
different occasion from the present to
dwell on these things as parts of national
education; as being, in truth, the peculiar
training of a citizen, the practical part
of the political education of a free
people, taking them out of the narrow
circle of personal and family selfishness,
and accustoming them to the compre
hension of joint interests, the manage
ment of joint concerns—habituating
them to act from public or semi-public
motives, and guide their conduct by aims
which unite instead of isolating them
from one another. Without these habits
and powers, a free constitution can
neither be worked nor preserved ; as is
exemplified by the too often transitory
nature of political freedom in countries
where it does not rest upon a sufficient
basis of local liberties. The manage
ment of purely local business by the
localities, and of the great enterprises of
industry by the union of those who
�86
ON LIBERTY
voluntarily supply the pecuniary means,
is further recommended by all the advan
tages which have been set forth in this
Essay as belonging to individuality of
development and diversity of modes of
action. Government operations tend to
be everywhere alike. With individuals
and voluntary associations, on the con
trary, there are varied experiments, and
endless diversity of experience. What
the State can usefully do is to make itself
a central depository, and active circulator
and diffuser, of the experience resulting
from many trials. Its business is to
enable each experimentalist to benefit
by the experiments of others, instead of
tolerating no experiments but its own.
The third and most cogent reason for
restricting the interference of Govern
ment is the great evil of adding unneces
sarily to its power. Every function super
added to those already exercised by the
Government causes its influence over
hopes and fears to be more widely
diffused, and converts, more and more,
the active and ambitious part of the
public into hangers-on of the Govern
ment, or of some party which aims at
becoming the Government. If the roads,
the railways, the banks, the insurance
offices, the great joint-stock companies,
the universities, and the public charities,
wrere all of them branches of the Govern
ment ; if, in addition, the municipal
corporations and local boards, with all
that now devolves on them, became
departments of the central administra
tion; if the employes of all these different
enterprises were appointed and paid by
the Government, and looked to the
Government for every rise in life; not
all the freedom of the press and popular
constitution of the Legislature would
make this or any other country free other
wise than in name. And the evil would
be greater the more efficiently and scien
tifically the administrative machinery
was constructed—the more skilful the
arrangements for obtaining the best
qualified hands and heads with which to
work it. In England it has of late been
proposed that all the members of the
civil service of government should be
selected by competitive examination, to
obtain for those employments the most
intelligent and instructed persons pro
curable ; and much has been said and
written for and against this proposal.
One of the arguments most insisted on
by its opponents is that the occupation
of a permanent official servant of the
State does not hold out sufficient pros
pects of emolument and importance to
attract the highest talents, which will
always be able to find a more inviting
career in the professions, or in the service
of companies and other public bodies.
One would not have been surprised if
this argument had been used by the
friends of the proposition, as an answer
to its principal difficulty. Coming from
the opponents, it is strange enough. What
is urged as an objection is the safetyvalve of the proposed system. If, indeed,
all the high talent of the country could
be drawn into the service of the Govern
ment, a proposal tending to bring about
that result might well inspire uneasiness.
If every part of the business of society
which required organised concert, or
large and comprehensive views, were in
the hands of the Government, and if
Government offices were universally filled
by the ablest men, all the enlarged
culture and practised intelligence in the
country, except the purely speculative,
would be concentrated in a numerous
bureaucracy, to whom alone the rest of
the community would look for all things :
the multitude for direction and dictation
�APPLICA TIONS
in all they had to do; the able and aspir
ing for personal advancement. To be
admitted into the ranks of this bureau
cracy, and, when admitted, to rise therein,
would be the sole objects of ambition.
Under this regime, not only is the outside
public ill-qualified, for want of practical
experience, to criticise or check the mode
of operation of the bureaucracy, but even
if the accidents of despotic or the natural
working of popular institutions occasion
ally raise to the summit a ruler or rulers
of reforming inclinations, no reform can
be effected which is contrary to the
interest of the bureaucracy. Such is
the melancholy condition of the Russian
Empire, as shown in the accounts of those
who have had sufficient opportunity of
observation. The Czar himself is power
less against the bureaucratic body; he
can send any one of them to Siberia,
but he cannot govern without them, or
against their will. On every decree of
his they have a tacit veto, by merely
refraining from carrying it into effect.
In countries of more advanced civilisa
tion and of a more insurrectionary spirit,
the public, accustomed to expect every
thing to be done for them by the State,
or at least to do nothing for themselves
without asking from the State not only
leave to do it, but even how it is to be
done, naturally hold the State respon
sible for all evil which befalls them, and
when the evil exceeds their amount of
patience, they rise against the Govern
ment, and make what is called a revolu
tion ; whereupon somebody else, with or
without legitimate authority from the
nation, vaults into the seat, issues his
orders to the bureaucracy, and every
thing goes on much as it did before, the
bureaucracy being unchanged, and no
body else being capable of taking their
place.
87
A very different spectacle is exhibited
among a people accustomed to transact
their own business. In France, a large
part of the people having been engaged
in military service, many of whom have
held at least the rank of non-commis
sioned officers, there are in every popular
insurrection several persons competent
to take the lead, and improvise some
tolerable plan of action. What the
French are in military affairs, the
Americans are in every kind of civil
business : let them be left without a
Government, every body of Americans
is able to improvise one, and to carry on
that or any other public business with a
sufficient amount of intelligence, order,
and decision. This is what every free
people ought to be ; and a people capable
of this is certain to be free ; it will never
let itself be enslaved by any man or body
of men because these are able to seize
and pull the reins of the central adminis
tration. No bureaucracy can hope to
make such a people as this do or undergo
anything that they do not like. But
where everything is done through the
bureaucracy, nothing to which the bureau
cracy is really adverse can be done at all.
The constitution of such countries is
an organisation of the experience and
practical ability of the nation into a
disciplined body for the purpose of
governing the rest; and the more perfect
that organisation is in itself, the more
successful in drawing to itself and
educating for itself the persons of greatest
capacity from all ranks of the community,
the more complete is the bondage of all,
the members of the bureaucracy included.
For the governors areas much the slaves
of their organisation and discipline as
the governed are of the governors. A
Chinese mandarin is as much the tool
and creature of a despotism as the
�ON LIBERTY
humblest cultivator.
An individual
Jesuit is to the utmost degree of abase
ment the slave of his order, though the
order itself exists for the collective power
and importance of its members.
It is not, also, to be forgotten that
the absorption of all the principal ability
of the country into the governing body
is fatal, sooner or later, to the mental
activity and progressiveness of the body
itself. Banded together as they are—
working a system which, like all systems,
necessarily proceeds in a great measure
by fixed rules—the official body are
under the constant temptation of sinking
into indolent routine, or, if they now and
then desert the mill-horse round, of
rushing into some half-examined crudity
which has struck the fancy of some lead
ing member of the corps : and the sole
check to these closely-allied, though
seemingly opposite, tendencies, the only
stimulus which can keep the ability of
the body itself up to a high standard, is
liability to the watchful criticism of equal
ability outside the body. It is indis
pensable, therefore, that the means should
exist, independently of the Government,
of forming such ability, and furnishing
it with the opportunities and experience
necessary for a correct judgment of great
practical affairs. If we would possess
permanently a skilful and efficient body
of functionaries—above all, a body able
to originate and willing to adopt im
provements ; if we would not have our
bureaucracy degenerate into a pedantocracy, this body must not engross all
the occupation’s which form and cultivate
the faculties required for the government
of mankind.
To determine the point at which evils,
so formidable to human freedom and
advancement, begin, or rather at which
they begin to predominate over the
benefits attending the collective applica
tion of the force of society, under its
recognised chiefs, for the removal of the
obstacles which stand in the way of its
well-being; to secure as much of the
advantages of centralised power and
intelligence as can be had without turn
ing into governmental channels too great
a proportion of the general activity—is
one of the most difficult and complicated
questions in the art of government. It
is, in a great measure, a question of
detail, in which many and various con
siderations must be kept in view, and no
absolute rule can be laid down. But I
believe that the practical principle in
which safety resides, the ideal to be kept
in view, the standard by which to test
all arrangements intended for overcoming
the difficulty, may be conveyed in these
words: the greatest dissemination of
power consistent with efficiency; but
the greatest possible centralisation of
information, and diffusion of it from the
centre. Thus, in municipal administra
tion, there would be, as in the New
England States, a very minute division
among separate officers, chosen by the
localities, of all business which is not
better left to the persons directly inte
rested ; but, besides this, there would be,
in each department of local affairs, a
central superintendence, forming a
branch of the general government. The
organ of this superintendence would
concentrate, as in a focus, the variety ot
information and experience derived from
the conduct of that branch of public
business in all the localities, from every
thing analogous which is done in foreign
countries, and from the general principles
of political science. This central organ
should have a right to know all that is
done, and its special duty should be
that of making the knowledge acquired
�APPLICA TIONS
in one place available for others.
Emancipated from the petty prejudices
and narrow views of a locality by its
elevated position and comprehensive
sphere of observation, its advice would
naturally carry much authority; but its
actual power, as a permanent institution,
should, I conceive, be limited to com
pelling the local officers to obey the laws
laid down for their guidance. In all
things not provided for by general rules
those officers should be left to their own
judgment, under responsibility to their
constituents. For the violation of rules
they should be responsible to law, and
the rules themselves should be laid down
by the Legislature; the central admin
istrative authority only watching over
their execution, and, if they were not
properly carried into effect, appealing,
according to the nature of the case, to
the tribunals to enforce the law, or to
the constituencies to dismiss the func
tionaries who had not executed it
according to its spirit. Such, in its
general conception, is the central super
intendence which the Poor Law Board
is intended to exercise over the admin
istrators of the Poor Rate throughout
the country. Whatever powers the
Board exercises beyond this limit were
right and necessary in that peculiar
case, for the cure of rooted habits of
maladministration in matters deeply
affecting not the localities merely, but
the whole community; since no locality
has a moral right to make itself, by
mismanagement, a nest of pauperism,
necessarily overflowing into other loca
lities, and impairing the moral and
physical condition of the whole labour
ing community. The powers of ad
89
ministrative coercion and subordinate
legislation possessed by the Poor Law
Board (but which, owing to the state of
opinion on the subject, are very scantily
exercised by them), though perfectly
justifiable in a case of first-rate national
interest, would be wholly out of place in
the superintendence of interests purely
local. But a central organ of informa
tion and instruction for all the localities
would be equally valuable in all depart
ments of administration. A Government
cannot have too much of the kind of
activity which does not impede, but aids
and stimulates, individual exertion and
development. The mischief begins when,
instead of calling forth the activity and
powers of individuals and bodies, it
substitutes its own activity for theirs;
when, instead of informing, advising, and,
upon occasion, denouncing, it makes
them work in fetters, or bids them stand
aside and does their work instead of them.
The worth of a State, in the long run, is
the worth of the individuals composing
it; and a State which postpones the
interests of their mental expansion and
elevation, to a little more of administrative
skill, or of that semblance of it which
practice gives, in the details of business ;
a State which dwarfs its men, in order
that they may be more docile instru
ments in its hands even for beneficial
purposes—will find that with small men
no great thing can reallybe accomplished ;
and that the perfection of machinery to
which it has sacrificed everything will in
the end avail it nothing, for want of the
vital power which, in order that the
machine might work more smoothly, it
has preferred to banish.
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Rationalism may be defined as the whenever this appears to be the case,
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tions or authority.
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It is to be observed that most Pro social nature and needs; (2) on the
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are rationalists in their attitude towards and human grounds of moral law. The
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Dublin Core
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
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Pamphlet
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On liberty
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Mill, John Stuart [1806-1873]
Columbine, William Brailsford
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 89. [7] p. : ill. (front. port.) ; 22 cm.
Series title: R.P.A. Cheap Reprints
Series number: No. 18
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Includes biographical sketch of Mill. Printed in double columns. Issued for the Rationalist Press Association, Limited. Publisher's advertisements on unnumbered pages at the end, and continued inside and on back cover. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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Watts & Co.
Date
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1903
Identifier
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RA883
RA1822
N486
Subject
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Philosophy
Utilitarianism
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (On liberty), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Liberty
NSS