let us consider the more important question of truth. Is it true, as a fact, that as Government gains in strength, the individual loses in freedom and vice versa? Now Mr. Spencer would admit that the individual is more free under the modern than under the medieval State; but is this because the modern State is less powerful? The opposite is decidedly true. As Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen says: "The difference between a rough and a civilised society is not that force is used in the one case and persuasion in the other, but that force is (or ought to be) guided with greater care in the second case than in the first. President Lincoln attained his objects by the use of a degree of force which would have crushed Charlemagne and his paladins and peers like so many eggshells." 1 To take a quite clear test, contrast the savage or barbarian with the civilised "The modern English citizen who lives under the burden of the revised edition of the Statutes, not

man.

1 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 32 (Edit. 2). May an acknowledgment be made here, once for all, of the debt we owe to Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen's vigorous book?—a debt which may be freely acknowledged by those who dissent entirely from his conclusions. The purely legal mind cannot deal satisfactorily with the problems of history and politics; but the purely legal mind sees perfectly clearly within definite and easily recognisable limits.

to speak of innumerable municipal, railroad, sanitary, and other bye-laws, is, after all, an infinitely freer as well as nobler creature than the savage who is always under the despotism of physical want." Thus Professor Jevons. So too Spinoza: "Homo, qui ratione ducitur, magis in civitate, ubi ex communi decreto vivit, quam in solitudine, ubi sibi soli obtemperat, liber est." Bagehot, whom Mr. Spencer would probably regard as a better authority than Spinoza, and who has admirably shown in his Physics and Politics how biological conceptions may be applied to the study of human society without distorting the historical judgment, has insisted in his Economic Studies that the individual freedom, which the old school of English economists assume, "presupposes the pervading intervention of an effectual Government-the last triumph of civilisation, and one to which early times had nothing comparable." These sayings are not quoted to prove the point by a consensus of authorities, but only as striking ways in which a lesson of history has been expressed. Of course it is a lesson of history which Mr. Spencer does not

1 Professor Jevons, The State in Relation to Labour, pp. 14, 15.

2 The Postulates of English Political Economy, p. 48.

believe. It is not written in the folios of Descriptive Sociology.

Mr.

Mr. Spencer might, however, still answer: "I do allow Government in an advanced stage of society a sphere of activity; that, namely, of being negatively regulative." That sphere however is much less than what the facts of historical progress show. Spencer makes progress imply a "restriction and limitation of State functions." He finds fault with Austin for "assimilating civil authority to military," 1 by which he appears to mean that State authority ought now to be less than it was in the militant stage of society, in which stage he would certainly place the Middle Ages.

During the Middle Ages the conception of the nation was indistinct, and the power of the central authority was feeble; but was the individual proportionately free? Far from it; feudal barons and ecclesiastical and trading corporations were strong against him. Custom was omnipotent. Law had little force. The break up of feudalism is everywhere characterised by the rise of distinctly marked nations governed by absolute kings. In many respects there was loss, especially where the absolute power of the

1 The Man versus the State, p. 81.

monarch lasted a long time, as in France; but it was the absolutism of the Tudors which finally made the commons of England strong against the privileged orders of clergy and nobility, and it was the absolutism of Louis XI. and of Louis XIV. which finally caused the ruin of the old régime in France. The fact that absolutism in government and individualism in sentiment coincide, alike in the Roman empire and at the Reformation, would be quite inexplicable according to the theory of society which Mr. Spencer adopts when he is dealing with practical politics. To a really "organic" conception of society, the coincidence is a necessary one.

As has been already said, Mr. Spencer, neglecting the organic nature of society, assumes, in explaining its origin and growth, that he has the individual to start with. The physical individual, of course, is there; but not the individual whose rights and liberties Mr. Spencer is so anxious to protect against the aggression of governments. In primitive societies the person does not exist, or exists only potentially, or, as we might say, in spe. The person is the product of the State. Mr. Spencer is presumably acquainted with the writings of Sir Henry Maine. He has adopted the formula "from status to contract." Two of Maine's works are named in

the list of authorities at the end of Political Institutions; not however the Ancient Law, in which1 occur the words whose truth is confirmed by all we can learn about early society. "The unit of an ancient society was the family, of a modern society the individual." The doctrine is summed up (in the index) in the words: "Society in primitive times not a collection of individuals, but an aggregation of families." This remains true on the whole, even if we are to suppose, with McLennan and many other anthropologists, that a looser and vaguer form of common life universally preceded the patriarchal family. Primitive property was everywhere communal (whatever the community might be), not personal. Now the astonishing thing is this: a recognition of the fact that definite heterogeneous individuals-i.e. persons with definite rights-are only gradually developed out of the homogeneous undif ferentiated mass of primitive society would have fitted in admirably with Mr. Spencer's biological theory of progress and of the social organism. But, unfortunately, it does not fit in with his political superstition about the natural rights of the individual, which we shall presently have to consider. More

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