in the social capability of growth.  Society can only develop itself on condition that all such novelties (within the limit laid down, for good and valid reasons, at self regarding conduct) are allowed to present themselves.  First, because neither the legislature nor any one else can ever know for certain what novelties will prove of enduring value.  Second, because even if we did know for certain that given novelties were pathological growths and not normal developments, and that they never would be of any value, still the repression necessary to extirpate them would involve too serious a risk both of keeping back social growth at some other point, and of giving the direction of that growth an irreparable warp.  And let us repeat once more, in proportion as a community grows more complex in its classes, divisions, and subdivisions, more intricate in its productive, commercial, or material arrangements, so does this risk very obviously wax more grave.

In the sense in which we are speaking of it, liberty is not a positive force, any more than the smoothness of a railroad is a positive force.[33] It is a condition.  As a force, there is a sense in which it is true to call liberty a negation.  As a condition, though it may still be a negation, yet it may be indispensable for the production of certain positive results.  The vacuity of an exhausted receiver is not a force, but it is the indispensable condition of certain positive operations.  Liberty as a force may be as impotent as its opponents allege.  This does not affect its value as a preliminary or accompanying condition.  The absence of a strait-waistcoat is a negation; but it is a useful condition for the activity of sane men.  No doubt there must be a definite limit to this absence of external interference with conduct, and that limit will be fixed at various points by different thinkers.  We are now only urging that it cannot be wisely fixed for the more complex societies by any one who has not grasped this fundamental preconception, that liberty, or the absence of coercion, or the leaving people to think, speak, and act as they please, is in itself a good thing.  It is the object of a favourable presumption.  The burden of proving it inexpedient always lies, and wholly lies, on those who wish to abridge it by coercion, whether direct or indirect.

One reason why this truth is so reluctantly admitted, is men’s irrational want of faith in the self-protective quality of a highly developed and healthy community.  The timid compromiser on the one hand, and the advocate of coercive restriction on the other, are equally the victims of a superfluous apprehension.  The one fears to use his liberty for the same reason that makes the other fearful of permitting liberty.  This common reason is the want of a sensible confidence that, in a free western community, which has reached our stage of development, religious, moral, and social novelties—­provided they are tainted by no element of compulsion or interference with the just