Chapter IV:  Individual Liberty and Public Control

I

Society cannot exist without law and order, and cannot advance except through the initiative of vigorous innovators.  Yet law and order are always hostile to innovations, and innovators are almost always, to some extent, anarchists.  Those whose minds are dominated by fear of a relapse towards barbarism will emphasize the importance of law and order, while those who are inspired by the hope of an advance towards civilization will usually be more conscious of the need of individual initiative.  Both temperaments are necessary, and wisdom lies in allowing each to operate freely where it is beneficent.  But those who are on the side of law and order, since they are reinforced by custom and the instinct for upholding the status quo, have no need of a reasoned defense.  It is the innovators who have difficulty in being allowed to exist and work.  Each generation believes that this difficulty is a thing of the past, but each generation is only tolerant of past innovations.  Those of its own day are met with the same persecution as though the principle of toleration had never been heard of.

“In early society,” says Westermarck, “customs are not only moral rules, but the only moral rules ever thought of.  The savage strictly complies with the Hegelian command that no man must have a private conscience.  The following statement, which refers to the Tinnevelly Shanars, may be quoted as a typical example:  ’Solitary individuals amongst them rarely adopt any new opinions, or any new course of procedure.  They follow the multitude to do evil, and they follow the multitude to do good.  They think in herds.’"[3]

[3] “The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,” 2d edition, Vol.  I, p. 119.

Those among ourselves who have never thought a thought or done a deed in the slightest degree different from the thoughts and deeds of our neighbors will congratulate themselves on the difference between us and the savage.  But those who have ever attempted any real innovation cannot help feeling that the people they know are not so very unlike the Tinnevelly Shanars.

Under the influence of socialism, even progressive opinion, in recent years, has been hostile to individual liberty.  Liberty is associated, in the minds of reformers, with laissez-faire, the Manchester School, and the exploitation of women and children which resulted from what was euphemistically called “free competition.”  All these things were evil, and required state interference; in fact, there is need of an immense increase of state action in regard to cognate evils which still exist.  In everything that concerns the economic life of the community, as regards both distribution and conditions of production, what is required is more public control, not less—­how much more, I do not profess to know.