wants it for himself alone. He has not elevated himself

to that idea of granting to his fellows the same liberty which he claims for himself, and of desiring to be limited in his own power to trench on the same liberty of others. It is one of the greatest ideas to which man can rise. In this mutual grant and check lies the essence of civil liberty, as we shall presently see more fully, and in it lies its dignity. It is a grave error to suppose that the best government is absolutism, with a wise and noble despot at the head of the state. As to consequences, it is even worse than absolutism with a tyrant at its head. The tyrant may lead to reflection and resistance; the wisdom and brilliancy, however, of the government of a great despot or dictator, deceives and unfits the people for a better civil state. This is at least true with reference to all tribes not utterly lost in despotism as the Asiatics are. The periods succeeding those of great and brilliant despots have always been calamitous." The noblest human work-nobler even than literature and science,is broad civil liberty, well secured and wisely handled. The highest ethical and social production of which man, with his inseparable moral, jural, æsthetic, and religious attributes is capable, is the comprehensive and minutely organic self-government of a free people; and a people truly free at home, and dealing in fairness and justice

explained in a long palaver to Mr. Cruikshank. He begs the queen of England to put a stop to the slave-trade everywhere else, and allow him to continue it."

In another passage he says:

"The king begs the queen to make a law that no ships be allowed to trade at any place near his dominions lower down the coast than Whydah, as by means of trading vessels the people are getting rich and resisting his authority. He hopes the queen will send him some good tower guns and blunderbusses and plenty of them, to enable him to make war," (which means razzias, in order to carry off captives for the barracu, or slave market.)

I have dwelt on this subject at length in my Political Ethics.

with other nations, is the greatest, unfortunately also the rarest, subject offered in all the breadth and length of history.

In the definitions of civil liberty, which philosophers or publicists have, nevertheless, endeavoured to give, they seem to have fallen into one or more of the following errors. Some have confounded liberty, the status of the freeman, as opposed to slavery, with civil liberty. But every one is aware, that while we speak of freemen in Asia, meaning only non-slaves, we would be very unwilling to speak of civil liberty in that part of the globe. The ancients knew this distinction perfectly well. There were the Spartans, constituting the ruling body of citizens, and enjoying what they would have called, in modern language, civil liberty, a full share of the government of the polity; there were helots, and there were Lacedæmonian people, who were subject, indeed, to the sovereign body of the Spartans, but not slaves. They were freemen, compared to the helots; but subjects, as distinguished from the Spartans. This subject is very plain, but the confusion has not only frequently misled in times past, but is actually going on to this day in many countries.

Others have fallen into the error of substituting a different word for liberty, and believed that they had thus defined it; while others, again, have confounded the means by which liberty is secured by some, with liberty itself. Some, again, have been led, unawares, to define something wholly different from civil liberty, while imagining that they were giving the generics and specifics of the subject.

The Roman lawyers say that liberty is the power (authority) of doing that which is not forbidden by the law. That the supremacy of the law and exclusion of

arbitrary interference is a necessary element of all liberty, every one will readily admit; but if no additional characteristics be given, we have, indeed, no more than a definition of the status of a non-slave. It does not state whence the laws ought to come, or what spirit ought to pervade them. The same lawyers say: Whatever may please the ruler has the force of law. They might have said with equal correctness: Freeman is he who is directly subject to the emperor; slave, he who is subject to the emperor through an individual master. It settles nothing as to what we call liberty, as little as the other dictum of the civil law, which divides all men into freemen and slaves. The meaning of freeman, in this case, is nothing more than non-slave; while our word freeman, when we use it in connexion with civil liberty, means not merely a negation of slavery, but the enjoyment of positive and high civil privileges and rights.5

It is remarkable that an English writer of the last century, Dr. Price, makes the same simple division of slavery and liberty, although it leads him to very different results. According to him, liberty is self-determination or self-government, and every interruption of self-determination is slavery. This is so extravagant, that it is hardly worth our while to dwell on it. Civil liberty is liberty in a state of society, that is, in a state of union with equals, consequently limitation of self-determination is one of the necessary characteristics of civil liberty. If this author did not mean that the terms he employed should be taken strictly, it would have been better to use such terms as might have been taken strictly.

Quod principi placuerit legis habet vigorem.-L. i. lib. i. tit. 4, Dig. Summa divisio de jure personarum hæc est, quod omnes homines aut liberi sunt aut servi.-Inst. i. 3.

6 Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, &c., by Richard Price, D.D., 3d ed. Lond. 1776.

Cicero says: Liberty is the power of living as thou willest." This does not apply to civil liberty. If it was meant for political liberty, it would have been necessary to add: "So far as the same liberty of others does not limit your own living as you choose." But we always live in society, so that this definition can have a value only as a most general one, to serve as a starting-point, in order to explain liberty if applied to different spheres. Whether this was the probable intention of a practical Roman, I need not decide.

Libertas came to signify in the course of time, and in republican Rome, simply republican government-abolition of royalty.

The Greeks likewise gave the meaning of a distinct form of government to their word for liberty. Eleutheria, they said, is that polity in which all are in turn rulers and ruled. It is plain that there is an inkling of what we now call self-government in this adaptation of the word, but it does not designate liberty as we understand it. For it may happen, and, indeed, it has happened repeatedly, that although the rulers and ruled change, those that are rulers are arbitrary and oppressive whenever their turn arrives; and no political state of things is more efficient in preparing the people to pass over into despotism, by a sudden turn, than this alternation of arbitrary rule. If this definition really defined civil liberty, it would have been enjoyed in a high degree by those communities in the middle ages, in which constant changes of factions, and persecutions of the weaker parties were taking place. Athens, when she had sunk so low that the lot decided the appointment to all important offices, would, at that very period, have been freest, while, in fact, her government had become plain 7 Quid est libertas? Potestas vivendi ut velis.-Cic. Parad. 5, 1, 34.

democratic absolutism,-one of the very worst of all governments, if, indeed, the term government can be properly used of that state of things which exhibits Athens after the times of Alexander, not like a bleeding and fallen hero, but rather like a dead body, on which birds and vermin make merry.

Not wholly dissimilar to this definition, is the one we find in the French Political Dictionary, a work published in 1848 by leading republicans, as this term was understood in France. It says, under the word liberty: "Liberty is equality, equality is liberty." If both were the same, it would be surprising that there should be two distinct words. Why were both terms used in the famous device, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," if the first two are synonymous? yet an epigrammatic brevity was evidently desired. Napoleon distinguished between the two very pointedly, when he said to Las Caseas, that he gave to the Frenchmen all the circumstances allowed, namely, equality, and that his son, had he succeeded him, would have added liberty. The dictum of Napoleon is mentioned here merely to show that he saw the difference between the two terms. Equality of itself, without many other elements, has no intrinsic connexion with liberty. All may be equally degraded, equally slavish, or equally tyrannical. Equality is one of the pervading features of Eastern despotism. A Turkish barber may be made vizier, far more easily than an American hairdresser can be made a commissioner of roads in the United States; but there is not on that account more liberty in Turkey. Diversity is the law of life; absolute equality is that of stagnation and death.

8

A German author of a meritorious work begins it with

8 More has been said on this subject in Political Ethics, and we shall return to it at a later period.