licists have, nevertheless, endeavored 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 in 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 distinction 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 in certain communities, with liberty itself. Some, again, have been led, unawares, to define an idea 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 empe

1 Quod principi placuerit legis habet vigorem.-L. i. lib. i. tit. 4 Dig.

ror through an intermediate and 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 connection with civil liberty, means not merely a negation of slavery, but the enjoyment of positive and high civil privileges and rights.1

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 show its fallacy. Civil liberty is liberty in a state of society; that is, in a state of union with equals; consequently limitation of selfdetermination is one of the necessary characteristics of civil liberty.

Cicero says: Liberty is the power of living as thou willest.3 This does not apply to civil liberty. It would apply to savage insulation. 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. We have advanced beyond this idea. The most

1 Summa divisio de jure personarum haec est, quod omnes homines aut liberi sunt aut servi.-Inst. i. 3.

2 Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, etc., by Richard Price, D.D., 3d ed.; Lond. 1776.

3 Quid est libertas? Potestas vivendi ut velis.-Cic. Parad. 5, 1,

34.

sanguinary pages of history have taught us that a kingless government is not, on that account alone, a republic, if the term republic is intended to comprehend the idea of self-government in any degree. France had as absolute and as stringently concentrated a government under her so-called republics, as under any of her kings. To classify governments, with reference to liberty, into monarchies and republics, is an error in principle. An Englishman who lives under a monarchy, for such certainly his royal republic is called, enjoys an amount of self-government and individual liberty far greater than the Athenian ever possessed or is established in any republic of South America.

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 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 Cases, 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 connection 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 hair-dresser can be made a commissioner of roads, 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.2

A German author of a work of mark begins it with this sentence: "Liberty-or justice, for where there is justice there is liberty, and liberty is nothing else than justice—has by no means been enjoyed by the ancients in a higher degree

1 Since the publication of the first edition of this work, an article on "Mohametanism in Western Asia," has appeared in the "Edinburgh Review," October, 1853, in which the Eastern equality as an ingredient of despotism is illustrated by many striking instances from different spheres of life. The writer, who is plainly master of his subject, from personal knowledge, it would appear, agrees with us that liberty is based on individuality. Indeed, it may be said that in a great degree it consists in essential protection of individuality, of personal rights. The present Emperor of the French felt this when he wrote his chapter, De la Liberté individuelle en Angleterre. He was then an exile and could perceive liberty.

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

than by the moderns." Either the author means by justice something peculiar, which ought to be enjoyed by every one, and which is not generally understood by the term, in which case the whole sentence is nugatory, or it expresses a grave error, since it makes equivalents of two things which have received two different names, simply because they are distinct from one another. The two terms would not even be allowed to explain each other in a dictionary.

Liberty has not unfrequently been defined as consisting in the rule of the majority, or it has been said, Where the people rule there is liberty. The rule of the majority, of itself, indicates the power of a certain body; but power is not liberty. Suppose the majority bid you drink hemlock, is there liberty for you? Or suppose the majority give away liberty, and establish despotism? It has been done again and again: Napoleon III. claims his crown by right of election by the overwhelming majority of Frenchmen, and perpetuates his government by universal suffrage, as he says. Granting, for the sake of argument that there was what we call a bona fide election, and that there is now existing an efficient universal suffrage, there is no man living who would vindicate liberty for present France. Even the imperial government periodically proclaims that it cannot yet establish liberty, because France is distracted by factions, by "different nations," as an imperial dignitary lately expressed it in an official speech.

We might say with greater truth, that where the minority is protected, although the majority rule, there, probably, liberty exists. But in this latter case it is the protection, or in other words, rights beyond the reach of the majority which constitute liberty, not the power of the majority. There can be no doubt that the majority ruled in the French massacres of the Protestants; was there liberty in France on that account? All despotism, without a standing army, must be supported or acquiesced in by the majority. It could not stand

1 Descriptions of the Grecian Polities, by F. W. Tittman; Leipsig, 1822.