IXINDIVIDUAL LIBERTY
In other books I have shown how individual liberty originated with the Stoic philosophy and was developed under the Christian religion and through the feudal system of medieval Europe. It was fostered by Humanism; it was idealized by Puritans like Milton in the seventeenth century and by the English writers and philosophers of the eighteenth century. It was still further expanded by men like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century. From 1880 onwards, the Collectivist Germanophil tendencies which Mr. Belloc hasgrouped together under the general description of “The Servile State,” has led to a contempt for human liberty due to the multiplication of propertyless wage-earners living in huge cities and divorced from the property-loving existence of the yeoman and peasant. This development goes back to the industrial revolution. Democracy values equality more than liberty, and the Great War destroyed many individual privileges which have not yet been restored. Modern Puritanism similarly reinforces the effort to impose on the Community a rigidly standardized existence with no outlet for individual preferences in architecture or food or drink. Every hour must be of the same pattern and everyone must do everything at the same time.
The increasing Americanization of Great Britain may well breed despair in anyone who wishes to see the ideals of the aristocrat, the humanist, and the peasant preserved by law. It may be that the last refuge of liberty will be found in the Catholic Church, which was the only religious body with sufficient courage to resist Prohibition in the United States, and that the Common Law of England, inspired throughout by traditions of freedom, will be gradually extinguished by a multitude of pettifogging Statutes, each destroying piecemeal some little vestige of a period when a man could call his soul his own.
There is, perhaps, only one reassuring sign of the times, which is that the lawyers both here and across the Atlantic have as yet shown no dispositionto repudiate the traditions of English jurisprudence and efforts to increase the right of search in private houses (as in the case of the Wireless Bill) have been stubbornly resisted in Parliament on this side of the Atlantic.
We stand, perhaps, at the parting of the ways and it is difficult to discern whether the old alliance of law and liberty will endure; but it is to be hoped that the ordinary citizen will take to heart the obvious truth that if liberty cannot exist without law, law equally depends on liberty based on responsibility, for any law which weakens or destroys liberty breeds anarchy. Recent history has confirmed this platitude both in Russia and in the United States of America, so perhapswe may hope for the best while not abating any vigilance. There are, however, most disquieting signs in Great Britain of gross tyranny exerted by our new bureaucracy against taxpayers and by the police against young men and women—verging on blackmail in certain cases. The Victorian ideal of liberty is dead and no other ideal has yet come to life. “Quis custodiet custodes?”
Transcriber’s Notes:Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.