what is still more important, the jurist’s conception of society has its root in the relation between sovereign and subject, between lawmaker and those whom law restrains.  Exertion of power on one hand, and compliance on the other—­this is his type of the conditions of the social union.  The fertility and advance of discussion on social issues depends on the substitution of the evolutional for the legal conception.  The lawyer’s type of proposition is absolute.  It is also, for various reasons which need not be given here, inspired by involuntary reference to the lower, rather than to the more highly developed, social states.  In the lower states law, penalties, coercion, compulsion, the strong hand, a sternly repressive public opinion, were the conditions on which the community was united and held together.  But the line of thought which these analogies suggest, becomes less and less generally appropriate in social discussion, in proportion as the community becomes more complex, more various in resource, more special in its organisation, in a word, more elaborately civilised.  The evolutionist’s idea of society concedes to law its historic place and its actual part.  But then this idea leads directly to a way of looking at society, which makes the replacement of law by liberty a condition of reaching the higher stages of social development.

The doctrine of liberty belongs to the subject of this chapter, because it is only another way of expressing the want of connection between earnestness in realising our opinions, and anything like coercion in their favour.  If it were true that aversion from compromise, in carrying out our ideas, implied the rightfulness of using all the means in our power to hinder others from carrying out ideas hostile to them, then we should have been preaching in a spirit unfavourable to the principle of liberty.  Our main text has been that men should refuse to sacrifice their opinions and ways of living (in the self-regarding sphere) out of regard to the status quo, or the prejudices of others.  And this, as a matter of course, excludes the right of forcing or wishing any one else to make such a sacrifice to us.  Well, the first foundation-stone for the doctrine of liberty is to be sought in the conception of society as a growing and developing organism.  This is its true base, apart from the numerous minor expediencies which may be adduced to complete the structure of the argument.  It is fundamentally advantageous that in societies which have reached our degree of complex and intricate organisation, unfettered liberty should be conceded to ideas and, within the self-regarding sphere, to conduct also.  The reasons for this are of some such kind as the following.  New ideas and new ’experiments in living’ would not arise, if there were not a certain inadequateness in existing ideas and ways of living.  They may not point to the right mode of meeting inadequateness, but they do point to the existence and consciousness of it.  They originate