are barren, and the multiplicity of single facts present nothing but confusion. The middle principles alone are solid, orderly, and fruitful;" and in another part of his immortal works he states that "civil knowledge is of all others the most immersed in matter and the hardliest reduced to axioms." We may safely add, "And expressed in definitions." It would be easy, indeed, and correct, as far as it would go, to say: Civil liberty is the idea of liberty, which is untrammeled action, applied to the sphere of politics; but although this definition. might be called "orderly," it would certainly neither be "solid" nor "fruitful," unless a long discussion should follow on what it means in reality and practice.

This does by no means, however, affect the importance of investigating the subject of civil liberty and of clearly presenting to our minds what we mean by it, and of what elements it consists. Disorders of great public inconvenience, even bloodshed and political crimes have often arisen from the fact that the two sacred words, Liberty and People, were freely and passionately used without a clear and definite meaning being attached to them. A people that loves liberty can do nothing better to promote the object of its love than deeply to study it, and in order to be able to do this, it is necessary to analyze it, and to know the threads which compose the valued

texture.

In a general way, it may here be stated as an explanationnot offered as a definition-that when the term Civil Liberty is used, there is now always meant a high degree of mutually guaranteed protection against interference with the interests and rights, held dear and important by large classes of civilized men or by all the members of a state, together with an effectual share in the making and administration of the laws as the best apparatus to secure that protection, and constituting the most dignified government of men who are conscious of their rights and of the destiny of humanity. We understand by civil liberty not only the absence of individual restraint, but liberty within the social system and political organ

But what are these

Who are civilized

ism-a combination of principles and laws which acknowledge, protect, and favor the dignity of man. guarantees, these interests and rights? men? In what does that share consist? that are conscious of their rights? What is the destiny of humanity? Who are the large classes?

Which are the men

I mean by civil liberty that liberty which plainly results from the application of the general idea of freedom to the civil state of man, that is, to his relations as a political being—a being obliged by his nature and destined by his Creator to live in society. Civil liberty is the result of man's twofold character, as an individual and social being, so soon as both are equally respected.

All men desire freedom of action. We have this desire, in some degree, even in common with the animal, where it manifests itself at least as a desire for freedom of motion. The fiercest despot desires liberty as much as the most ardent republican; indeed, the difficulty is that he desires it too muchselfishly, exclusively. He wants it for himself alone. He

1

1 I believe that this has never been shown with greater and more truculent naïveté, than by the present King of Dahomey in the letter he wrote to the Queen of England in 1852. Every case in which an idea, bad or good, is carried to a point of extreme consistency is worth being noted; I shall give, therefore, a part of it.

The British government had sent an agent to that king, with presents, and the direction to prevent him from further trade in slaves; and the king's answer contains the following passage:-

"The King of Dahomey presents his compliments to the Queen of England. The presents which she has sent him are very acceptable and are good to his face. When Governor Winiett visited the king, the king told him that he must consult his people before he could give a final answer about the slave-trade. He cannot see that he and his people can do without it. It is from the slave-trade that he derives his principal revenue. This he has 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

has not elevated himself to the idea of granting to his fellows the same liberty which he claims for himself, and of desiring to be limited in his own power of trenching on the same liberty of others. This 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 with other nations, is the greatest, unfortunately also the rarest, subject offered in all the breadth and length of history.

1

In the definitions of civil liberty which philosophers or pub

trade at any place near his domains lower down the coast than Wydah, 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.)

The claims of "undoubted sovereignty" and the "independent power” of kings, put forth by the Stuarts, by Louis XIV., and by all who looked upon kings, restricted in their power, as unworthy peers of the "real princes," must be classed under the same head with the aspirations of the principate of Dahomey, however they may differ in form.

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

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

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.'

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.