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CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V
WHAT, then, is the rightful
limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the
authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to
individuality, and how much to society? Each will receive its proper
share, if each has that which more particularly concerns it. To
individuality should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the
individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly
interests society. Though society is not founded on
a contract, and though no good purpose is answered by inventing a
contract in order to deduce social obligations from it, every one who
receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit, and
the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each should
be bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest. This
conduct consists, first, in not injuring the interests of one another;
or rather certain interests, which, either by express legal provision or
by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights; and secondly,
in each person's bearing his share (to be fixed on some equitable
principle) of the labors and sacrifices incurred for defending the
society or its members from injury and molestation. These conditions
society is justified in enforcing, at all costs to those who endeavor to
withhold fulfilment. Nor is this all that society may do. The acts of an
individual may be hurtful to others, or wanting in due consideration for
their welfare, without going the length of violating any of their
constituted rights. The offender may then be justly punished by opinion,
though not by law. As soon as any part of a person's conduct affects
prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it,
and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be
promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion. But there
is no room for entertaining any such question when a person's conduct
affects the interests of no persons besides himself, or needs not affect
them unless they like (all the persons concerned being of full age, and
the ordinary amount of understanding). In all such cases there should be
perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the
consequences. It would be a great
misunderstanding of this doctrine, to suppose that it is one of selfish
indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with
each other's conduct in life, and that they should not concern
themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one another, unless
their own interest is involved. Instead of any diminution, there is need
of a great increase of disinterested exertion to promote the good of
others. But disinterested benevolence can find other instruments to
persuade people to their good, than whips and scourges, either of the
literal or the metaphorical sort. I am the last person to undervalue the
self-regarding virtues; they are only second in importance, if even
second, to the social. It is equally the business of education to
cultivate both. But even education works by conviction and persuasion as
well as by compulsion, and it is by the former only that, when the
period of education is past, the self-regarding virtues should be
inculcated. Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the
better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the former and avoid
the latter. They should be forever stimulating each other to increased
exercise of their higher faculties, and increased direction of their
feelings and aims towards wise instead of foolish, elevating instead of
degrading, objects and contemplations. But neither one person, nor any
number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of
ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what
he chooses to do with it. He is the person most interested in his own
well-being, the interest which any other person, except in cases of
strong personal attachment, can have in it, is trifling, compared with
that which he himself has; the interest which society has in him
individually (except as to his conduct to others) is fractional, and
altogether indirect: while, with respect to his own feelings and
circumstances, the most ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge
immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else. The
interference of society to overrule his judgment and purposes in what
only regards himself, must be grounded on general presumptions; which
may be altogether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be
misapplied to individual cases, by persons no better acquainted with the
circumstances of such cases than those are who look at them merely from
without. In this department, therefore, of human affairs, Individuality
has its proper field of action. In the conduct of human beings towards
one another, it is necessary that general rules should for the most part
be observed, in order that people may know what they have to expect; but
in each person's own concerns, his individual spontaneity is entitled to
free exercise. Considerations to aid his judgment, exhortations to
strengthen his will, may be offered to him, even obtruded on him, by
others; but he, himself, is the final judge. All errors which he is
likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the
evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good. I do not mean that the feelings
with which a person is regarded by others, ought not to be in any way
affected by his self-regarding qualities or deficiencies. This is
neither possible nor desirable. If he is eminent in any of the qualities
which conduce to his own good, he is, so far, a proper object of
admiration. He is so much the nearer to the ideal perfection of human
nature. If he is grossly deficient in those qualities, a sentiment the
opposite of admiration will follow. There is a degree of folly, and a
degree of what may be called (though the phrase is not unobjectionable)
lowness or depravation of taste, which, though it cannot justify doing
harm to the person who manifests it, renders him necessarily and
properly a subject of distaste, or, in extreme cases, even of contempt:
a person could not have the opposite qualities in due strength without
entertaining these feelings. Though doing no wrong to any one, a person
may so act as to compel us to judge him, and feel to him, as a fool, or
as a being of an inferior order: and since this judgment and feeling are
a fact which he would prefer to avoid, it is doing him a service to warn
him of it beforehand, as of any other disagreeable consequence to which
he exposes himself. It would be well, indeed, if this good office were
much more freely rendered than the common notions of politeness at
present permit, and if one person could honestly point out to another
that he thinks him in fault, without being considered unmannerly or
presuming. We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our
unfavorable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his
individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for
example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to
parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most
acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution
others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to
have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give
others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those
which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may
suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which
directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so
far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous
consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely
inflicted on him for the sake of punishment. A person who shows
rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit--who cannot live within moderate
means--who cannot restrain himself from hurtful indulgences--who pursues
animal pleasures at the expense of those of feeling and intellect--must
expect to be lowered in the opinion of others, and to have a less share
of their favorable sentiments, but of this he has no right to complain,
unless he has merited their favor by special excellence in his social
relations, and has thus established a title to their good offices, which
is not affected by his demerits towards himself. What I contend for is, that the
inconveniences which are strictly inseparable from the unfavorable
judgment of others, are the only ones to which a person should ever be
subjected for that portion of his conduct and character which concerns
his own good, but which does not affect the interests of others in their
relations with him. Acts injurious to others require a totally different
treatment. Encroachment on their rights; infliction on them of any loss
or damage not justified by his own rights; falsehood or duplicity in
dealing with them; unfair or ungenerous use of advantages over them;
even selfish abstinence from defending them against injury--these are
fit objects of moral reprobation, and, in grave cases, of moral
retribution and punishment. And not only these acts, but the
dispositions which lead to them, are properly immoral, and fit subjects
of disapprobation which may rise to abhorrence. Cruelty of disposition;
malice and ill-nature; that most anti-social and odious of all passions,
envy; dissimulation and insincerity, irascibility on insufficient cause,
and resentment disproportioned to the provocation; the love of
domineering over others; the desire to engross more than one's share of
advantages (the pleonexia of
the Greeks); the pride which derives gratification from the abasement of
others; the egotism which thinks self and its concerns more important
than everything else, and decides all doubtful questions in his own
favor;--these are moral vices, and constitute a bad and odious moral
character: unlike the self-regarding faults previously mentioned, which
are not properly immoralities, and to whatever pitch they may be
carried, do not constitute wickedness. They may be proofs of any amount
of folly, or want of personal dignity and self-respect; but they are
only a subject of moral reprobation when they involve a breach of duty
to others, for whose sake the individual is bound to have care for
himself. What are called duties to ourselves are not socially
obligatory, unless circumstances render them at the same time duties to
others. The term duty to oneself, when it means anything more than
prudence, means self-respect or self-development; and for none of these
is any one accountable to his fellow-creatures, because for none of them
is it for the good of mankind that he be held accountable to them. The distinction between the loss
of consideration which a person may rightly incur by defect of prudence
or of personal dignity, and the reprobation which is due to him for an
offence against the rights of others, is not a merely nominal
distinction. It makes a vast difference both in our feelings and in our
conduct towards him, whether he displeases us in things in which we
think we have a right to control him, or in things in which we know that
we have not. If he displeases us, we may express our distaste, and we
may stand aloof from a person as well as from a thing that displeases
us; but we shall not therefore feel called on to make his life
uncomfortable. We shall reflect that he already bears, or will bear, the
whole penalty of his error; if he spoils his life by mismanagement, we
shall not, for that reason, desire to spoil it still further: instead of
wishing to punish him, we shall rather endeavor to alleviate his
punishment, by showing him how he may avoid or cure the evils his
conduct tends to bring upon him. He may be to us an object of pity,
perhaps of dislike, but not of anger or resentment; we shall not treat
him like an enemy of society: the worst we shall think ourselves
justified in doing is leaving him to himself, If we do not interfere
benevolently by showing interest or concern for him. It is far otherwise
if he has infringed the rules necessary for the protection of his
fellow-creatures, individually or collectively. The evil consequences of
his acts do not then fall on himself, but on others; and society, as the
protector of all its members, must retaliate on him; must inflict pain
on him for the express purpose of punishment, and must take care that it
be sufficiently severe. In the one case, he is an offender at our bar,
and we are called on not only to sit in judgment on him, but, in one
shape or another, to execute our own sentence: in the other case, it is
not our part to inflict any suffering on him, except what may
incidentally follow from our using the same liberty in the regulation of
our own affairs, which we allow to him in his. The distinction here pointed out
between the part of a person's life which concerns only himself, and
that which concerns others, many persons will refuse to admit. How (it
may be asked) can any part of the conduct of a member of society be a
matter of indifference to the other members? No person is an entirely
isolated being; it is impossible for a person to do anything seriously
or permanently hurtful to himself, without mischief reaching at least to
his near connections, and often far beyond them. If he injures his
property, he does harm to those who directly or indirectly derived
support from it, and usually diminishes, by a greater or less amount,
the general resources of the community. If he deteriorates his bodily or
mental faculties, he not only brings evil upon all who depended on him
for any portion of their happiness, but disqualifies himself for
rendering the services which he owes to his fellow-creatures generally;
perhaps becomes a burden on their affection or benevolence; and if such
conduct were very frequent, hardly any offence that is committed would
detract more from the general sum of good. Finally, if by his vices or
follies a person does no direct harm to others, he is nevertheless (it
may be said) injurious by his example; and ought to be compelled to
control himself, for the sake of those whom the sight or knowledge of
his conduct might corrupt or mislead. And even (it will be added) if
the consequences of misconduct could be confined to the vicious or
thoughtless individual, ought society to abandon to their own guidance
those who are manifestly unfit for it? If protection against themselves
is confessedly due to children and persons under age, is not society
equally bound to afford it to persons of mature years who are equally
incapable of self-government? If gambling, or drunkenness, or
incontinence, or idleness, or uncleanliness, are as injurious to
happiness, and as great a hindrance to improvement, as many or most of
the acts prohibited by law, why (it may be asked) should not law, so far
as is consistent with practicability and social convenience, endeavor to
repress these also? And as a supplement to the unavoidable imperfections
of law, ought not opinion at least to organize a powerful police against
these vices, and visit rigidly with social penalties those who are known
to practise them? There is no question here (it may be said) about
restricting individuality, or impeding the trial of new and original
experiments in living. The only things it is sought to prevent are
things which have been tried and condemned from the beginning of the
world until now; things which experience has shown not to be useful or
suitable to any person's individuality. There must be some length of
time and amount of experience, after which a moral or prudential truth
may be regarded as established, and it is merely desired to prevent
generation after generation from falling over the same precipice which
has been fatal to their predecessors. I fully admit that the mischief
which a person does to himself, may seriously affect, both through their
sympathies and their interests, those nearly connected with him, and in
a minor degree, society at large. When, by conduct of this sort, a
person is led to violate a distinct and assignable obligation to any
other person or persons, the case is taken out of the self-regarding
class, and becomes amenable to moral disapprobation in the proper sense
of the term. If, for example, a man, through intemperance or
extravagance, becomes unable to pay his debts, or, having undertaken the
moral responsibility of a family, becomes from the same cause incapable
of supporting or educating them, he is deservedly reprobated, and might
be justly punished; but it is for the breach of duty to his family or
creditors, not for the extravagance. If the resources which ought to
have been devoted to them, had been diverted from them for the most
prudent investment, the moral culpability would have been the same.
George Barnwell murdered his uncle to get money for his mistress, but if
he had done it to set himself up in business, he would equally have been
hanged. Again, in the frequent case of a man who causes grief to his
family by addiction to bad habits, he deserves reproach for his
unkindness or ingratitude; but so he may for cultivating habits not in
themselves vicious, if they are painful to those with whom he passes his
life, or who from personal ties are dependent on him for their comfort.
Whoever fails in the consideration generally due to the interests and
feelings of others, not being compelled by some more imperative duty, or
justified by allowable self-preference, is a subject of moral
disapprobation for that failure, but not for the cause of it, nor for
the errors, merely personal to himself, which may have remotely led to
it. In like manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely
self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on
him to the public, he is guilty of a social offence. No person ought to
be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should
be punished for being drunk on duty. Whenever, in short, there is a
definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual
or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty, and
placed in that of morality or law. But with regard to the merely
contingent or, as it may be called, constructive injury which a person
causes to society, by conduct which neither violates any specific duty
to the public, nor occasions perceptible hurt to any assignable
individual except himself; the inconvenience is one which society can
afford to bear, for the sake of the greater good of human freedom. If
grown persons are to be punished for not taking proper care of
themselves, I would rather it were for their own sake, than under
pretence of preventing them from impairing their capacity of rendering
to society benefits which society does not pretend it has a right to
exact. But I cannot consent to argue the point as if society had no
means of bringing its weaker members up to its ordinary standard of
rational conduct, except waiting till they do something irrational, and
then punishing them, legally or morally, for it. Society has had
absolute power over them during all the early portion of their
existence: it has had the whole period of childhood and nonage in which
to try whether it could make them capable of rational conduct in life.
The existing generation is master both of the training and the entire
circumstances of the generation to come; it cannot indeed make them
perfectly wise and good, because it is itself so lamentably deficient in
goodness and wisdom; and its best efforts are not always, in individual
cases, its most successful ones; but it is perfectly well able to make
the rising generation, as a whole, as good as, and a little better than,
itself. If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up
mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of
distant motives, society has itself to blame for the consequences. Armed
not only with all the powers of education, but with the ascendency which
the authority of a received opinion always exercises over the minds who
are least fitted to judge for themselves; and aided by the natural
penalties which cannot be prevented from falling on those who incur the
distaste or the contempt of those who know them; let not society pretend
that it needs, besides all this, the power to issue commands and enforce
obedience in the personal concerns of individuals, in which, on all
principles of justice and policy, the decision ought to rest with those
who are to abide the consequences. Nor is there anything which tends
more to discredit and frustrate the better means of influencing conduct,
than a resort to the worse. If there be among those whom it is attempted
to coerce into prudence or temperance, any of the material of which
vigorous and independent characters are made, they will infallibly rebel
against the yoke. No such person will ever feel that others have a right
to control him in his concerns, such as they have to prevent him from
injuring them in theirs; and it easily comes to be considered a mark of
spirit and courage to fly in the face of such usurped authority, and do
with ostentation the exact opposite of what it enjoins; as in the
fashion of grossness which succeeded, in the time of Charles II., to the
fanatical moral intolerance of the Puritans. With respect to what is
said of the necessity of protecting society from the bad example set to
others by the vicious or the self-indulgent; it is true that bad example
may have a pernicious effect, especially the example of doing wrong to
others with impunity to the wrong-doer. But we are now speaking of
conduct which, while it does no wrong to others, is supposed to do great
harm to the agent himself: and I do not see how those who believe this,
can think otherwise than that the example, on the whole, must be more
salutary than hurtful, since, if it displays the misconduct, it displays
also the painful or degrading consequences which, if the conduct is
justly censured, must be supposed to be in all or most cases attendant
on it. But the strongest of all the
arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal
conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes
wrongly, and in the wrong place. On questions of social morality, of
duty to others, the opinion of the public, that is, of an overruling
majority, though often wrong, is likely to be still oftener right;
because on such questions they are only required to judge of their own
interests; of the manner in which some mode of conduct, if allowed to be
practised, would affect themselves. But the opinion of a similar
majority, imposed as a law on the minority, on questions of
self-regarding conduct, is quite as likely to be wrong as right; for in
these cases public opinion means, at the best, some people's opinion of
what is good or bad for other people; while very often it does not even
mean that; the public, with the most perfect indifference, passing over
the pleasure or convenience of those whose conduct they censure, and
considering only their own preference. There are many who consider as an
injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and
resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot, when
charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been
known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their
abominable worship or creed. But there is no parity between the feeling
of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is
offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief
to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it. And a
person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his
purse. It is easy for any one to imagine an ideal public, which leaves
the freedom and choice of individuals in all uncertain matters
undisturbed, and only requires them to abstain from modes of conduct
which universal experience has condemned. But where has there been seen
a public which set any such limit to its censorship? or when does the
public trouble itself about universal experience. In its interferences
with personal conduct it is seldom thinking of anything but the enormity
of acting or feeling differently from itself; and this standard of
judgment, thinly disguised, is held up to mankind as the dictate of
religion and philosophy, by nine tenths of all moralists and speculative
writers. These teach that things are right because they are right;
because we feel them to be so. They tell us to search in our own minds
and hearts for laws of conduct binding on ourselves and on all others.
What can the poor public do but apply these instructions, and make their
own personal feelings of good and evil, if they are tolerably unanimous
in them, obligatory on all the world? The evil here pointed out is not
one which exists only in theory; and it may perhaps be expected that I
should specify the instances in which the public of this age and country
improperly invests its own preferences with the character of moral laws.
I am not writing an essay on the aberrations of existing moral feeling.
That is too weighty a subject to be discussed parenthetically, and by
way of illustration. Yet examples are necessary, to show that the
principle I maintain is of serious and practical moment, and that I am
not endeavoring to erect a barrier against imaginary evils. And it is
not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds
of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most
unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most
universal of all human propensities. As a first instance, consider
the antipathies which men cherish on no better grounds than that persons
whose religious opinions are different from theirs, do not practise
their religious observances, especially their religious abstinences. To
cite a rather trivial example, nothing in the creed or practice of
Christians does more to envenom the hatred of Mahomedans against them,
than the fact of their eating pork. There are few acts which Christians
and Europeans regard with more unaffected disgust, than Mussulmans
regard this particular mode of satisfying hunger. It is, in the first
place, an offence against their religion; but this circumstance by no
means explains either the degree or the kind of their repugnance; for
wine also is forbidden by their religion, and to partake of it is by all
Mussulmans accounted wrong, but not disgusting. Their aversion to the
flesh of the "unclean beast" is, on the contrary, of that
peculiar character, resembling an instinctive antipathy, which the idea
of uncleanness, when once it thoroughly sinks into the feelings, seems
always to excite even in those whose personal habits are anything but
scrupulously cleanly and of which the sentiment of religious impurity,
so intense in the Hindoos, is a remarkable example. Suppose now that in
a people, of whom the majority were Mussulmans, that majority should
insist upon not permitting pork to be eaten within the limits of the
country. This would be nothing new in Mahomedan countries.[1] Would it
be a legitimate exercise of the moral authority of public opinion? and
if not, why not? The practice is really revolting to such a public. They
also sincerely think that it is forbidden and abhorred by the Deity.
Neither could the prohibition be censured as religious persecution. It
might be religious in its origin, but it would not be persecution for
religion, since nobody's religion makes it a duty to eat pork. The only
tenable ground of condemnation would be, that with the personal tastes
and self-regarding concerns of individuals the public has no business to
interfere. To come somewhat nearer home:
the majority of Spaniards consider it a gross impiety, offensive in the
highest degree to the Supreme Being, to worship him in any other manner
than the Roman Catholic; and no other public worship is lawful on
Spanish soil. The people of all Southern Europe look upon a married
clergy as not only irreligious, but unchaste, indecent, gross,
disgusting. What do Protestants think of these perfectly sincere
feelings, and of the attempt to enforce them against non-Catholics? Yet,
if mankind are justified in interfering with each other's liberty in
things which do not concern the interests of others, on what principle
is it possible consistently to exclude these cases? or who can blame
people for desiring to suppress what they regard as a scandal in the
sight of God and man? No stronger case can be shown
for prohibiting anything which is regarded as a personal immorality,
than is made out for suppressing these practices in the eyes of those
who regard them as impieties; and unless we are willing to adopt the
logic of persecutors, and to say that we may persecute others because we
are right, and that they must not persecute us because they are wrong,
we must beware of admitting a principle of which we should resent as a
gross injustice the application to ourselves. The preceding instances may be
objected to, although unreasonably, as drawn from contingencies
impossible among us: opinion, in this country, not being likely to
enforce abstinence from meats, or to interfere with people for
worshipping, and for either marrying or not marrying, according to their
creed or inclination. The next example, however, shall be taken from an
interference with liberty which we have by no means passed all danger
of. Wherever the Puritans have been sufficiently powerful, as in New
England, and in Great Britain at the time of the Commonwealth, they have
endeavored, with considerable success, to put down all public, and
nearly all private, amusements: especially music, dancing, public games,
or other assemblages for purposes of diversion, and the theatre. There
are still in this country large bodies of persons by whose notions of
morality and religion these recreations are condemned; and those persons
belonging chiefly to the middle class, who are the ascendant power in
the present social and political condition of the kingdom, it is by no
means impossible that persons of these sentiments may at some time or
other command a majority in Parliament. How will the remaining portion
of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to
them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter
Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable
peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to
mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every
government and every public, who have the pretension that no person
shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong. But if the principle of
the pretension be admitted, no one can reasonably object to its being
acted on in the sense of the majority, or other preponderating power in
the country; and all persons must be ready to conform to the idea of a
Christian commonwealth, as understood by the early settlers in New
England, if a religious profession similar to theirs should ever succeed
in regaining its lost ground, as religions supposed to be declining have
so often been known to do. To imagine another contingency,
perhaps more likely to be realized than the one last mentioned. There is
confessedly a strong tendency in the modern world towards a democratic
constitution of society, accompanied or not by popular political
institutions. It is affirmed that in the country where this tendency is
most completely realized--where both society and the government are most
democratic--the United States--the feeling of the majority, to whom any
appearance of a more showy or costly style of living than they can hope
to rival is disagreeable, operates as a tolerably effectual sumptuary
law, and that in many parts of the Union it is really difficult for a
person possessing a very large income, to find any mode of spending it,
which will not incur popular disapprobation. Though such statements as
these are doubtless much exaggerated as a representation of existing
facts, the state of things they describe is not only a conceivable and
possible, but a probable result of democratic feeling, combined with the
notion that the public has a right to a veto on the manner in which
individuals shall spend their incomes. We have only further to suppose a
considerable diffusion of Socialist opinions, and it may become infamous
in the eyes of the majority to possess more property than some very
small amount, or any income not earned by manual labor. Opinions similar
in principle to these, already prevail widely among the artisan class,
and weigh oppressively on those who are amenable to the opinion chiefly
of that class, namely, its own members. It is known that the bad workmen
who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry,
are decidedly of opinion that bad workmen ought to receive the same
wages as good, and that no one ought to be allowed, through piecework or
otherwise, to earn by superior skill or industry more than others can
without it. And they employ a moral police, which occasionally becomes a
physical one, to deter skilful workmen from receiving, and employers
from giving, a larger remuneration for a more useful service. If the
public have any jurisdiction over private concerns, I cannot see that
these people are in fault, or that any individual's particular public
can be blamed for asserting the same authority over his individual
conduct, which the general public asserts over people in general. But, without dwelling upon
supposititious cases, there are, in our own day, gross usurpations upon
the liberty of private life actually practised, and still greater ones
threatened with some expectation of success, and opinions proposed which
assert an unlimited right in the public not only to prohibit by law
everything which it thinks wrong, but in order to get at what it thinks
wrong, to prohibit any number of things which it admits to be innocent. Under the name of preventing
intemperance the people of one English colony, and of nearly half the
United States, have been interdicted by law from making any use whatever
of fermented drinks, except for medical purposes: for prohibition of
their sale is in fact, as it is intended to be, prohibition of their
use. And though the impracticability of executing the law has caused its
repeal in several of the States which had adopted it, including the one
from which it derives its name, an attempt has notwithstanding been
commenced, and is prosecuted with considerable zeal by many of the
professed philanthropists, to agitate for a similar law in this country.
The association, or "Alliance" as it terms itself, which has
been formed for this purpose, has acquired some notoriety through the
publicity given to a correspondence between its Secretary and one of the
very few English public men who hold that a politician's opinions ought
to be founded on principles. Lord Stanley's share in this correspondence
is calculated to strengthen the hopes already built on him, by those who
know how rare such qualities as are manifested in some of his public
appearances, unhappily are among those who figure in political life. The
organ of the Alliance, who would "deeply deplore the recognition of
any principle which could be wrested to justify bigotry and
persecution," undertakes to point out the "broad and
impassable barrier" which divides such principles from those of the
association. "All matters relating to thought, opinion, conscience,
appear to me," he says, "to be without the sphere of
legislation; all pertaining to social act, habit, relation, subject only
to a discretionary power vested in the State itself, and not in the
individual, to be within it." No mention is made of a third class,
different from either of these, viz., acts and habits which are not
social, but individual; although it is to this class, surely, that the
act of drinking fermented liquors belongs. Selling fermented liquors,
however, is trading, and trading is a social act. But the infringement
complained of is not on the liberty of the seller, but on that of the
buyer and consumer; since the State might just as well forbid him to
drink wine, as purposely make it impossible for him to obtain it. The
Secretary, however, says, "I claim, as a citizen, a right to
legislate whenever my social rights are invaded by the social act of
another." And now for the definition of these "social
rights." "If anything invades my social rights, certainly the
traffic in strong drink does. It destroys my primary right of security,
by constantly creating and stimulating social disorder. It invades my
right of equality, by deriving a profit from the creation of a misery, I
am taxed to support. It impedes my right to free moral and intellectual
development, by surrounding my path with dangers, and by weakening and
demoralizing society, from which I have a right to claim mutual aid and
intercourse." A theory of "social rights," the like of
which probably never before found its way into distinct language--being
nothing short of this--that it is the absolute social right of every
individual, that every other individual shall act in every respect
exactly as he ought; that whosoever fails thereof in the smallest
particular, violates my social right, and entitles me to demand from the
legislature the removal of the grievance. So monstrous a principle is
far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is
no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no
right to any freedom whatever, except perhaps to that of holding
opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them; for the moment an
opinion which I consider noxious, passes any one's lips, it invades all
the "social rights" attributed to me by the Alliance. The
doctrine ascribes to all mankind a vested interest in each other's
moral, intellectual, and even physical perfection, to be defined by each
claimant according to his own standard. Another important example of
illegitimate interference with the rightful liberty of the individual,
not simply threatened, but long since carried into triumphant effect, is
Sabbatarian legislation. Without doubt, abstinence on one day in the
week, so far as the exigencies of life permit, from the usual daily
occupation, though in no respect religiously binding on any except Jews,
is a highly beneficial custom. And inasmuch as this custom cannot be
observed without a general consent to that effect among the industrious
classes, therefore, in so far as some persons by working may impose the
same necessity on others, it may be allowable and right that the law
should guarantee to each, the observance by others of the custom, by
suspending the greater operations of industry on a particular day. But
this justification, grounded on the direct interest which others have in
each individual's observance of the practice, does not apply to the
self-chosen occupations in which a person may think fit to employ his
leisure; nor does it hold good, in the smallest degree, for legal
restrictions on amusements. It is true that the amusement of some is the
day's work of others; but the pleasure, not to say the useful
recreation, of many, is worth the labor of a few, provided the
occupation is freely chosen, and can be freely resigned. The operatives
are perfectly right in thinking that if all worked on Sunday, seven
days' work would have to be given for six days' wages: but so long as
the great mass of employments are suspended, the small number who for
the enjoyment of others must still work, obtain a proportional increase
of earnings; and they are not obliged to follow those occupations, if
they prefer leisure to emolument. If a further remedy is sought, it
might be found in the establishment by custom of a holiday on some other
day of the week for those particular classes of persons. The only
ground, therefore, on which restrictions on Sunday amusements can be
defended, must be that they are religiously wrong; a motive of
legislation which never can be too earnestly protested against. "Deorum
injuriae Diis curae." It remains to be proved that society or
any of its officers holds a commission from on high to avenge any
supposed offence to Omnipotence, which is not also a wrong to our
fellow-creatures. The notion that it is one man's duty that another
should be religious, was the foundation of all the religious
persecutions ever perpetrated, and if admitted, would fully justify
them. Though the feeling which breaks out in the repeated attempts to
stop railway travelling on Sunday, in the resistance to the opening of
Museums, and the like, has not the cruelty of the old persecutors, the
state of mind indicated by it is fundamentally the same. It IS a
determination not to tolerate others in doing what is permitted by their
religion, because it is not permitted by the persecutor's religion. It
is a belief that God not only abominates the act of the misbeliever, but
will not hold us guiltless if we leave him unmolested. I cannot refrain from adding to
these examples of the little account commonly made of human liberty, the
language of downright persecution which breaks out from the press of
this country, whenever it feels called on to notice the remarkable
phenomenon of Mormonism. Much might be said on the unexpected and
instructive fact, that an alleged new revelation, and a religion,
founded on it, the product of palpable imposture, not even supported by
the prestige of extraordinary qualities in its founder, is believed by
hundreds of thousands, and has been made the foundation of a society, in
the age of newspapers, railways, and the electric telegraph. What here
concerns us is, that this religion, like other and better religions, has
its martyrs; that its prophet and founder was, for his teaching, put to
death by a mob; that others of its adherents lost their lives by the
same lawless violence; that they were forcibly expelled, in a body, from
the country in which they first grew up; while, now that they have been
chased into a solitary recess in the midst of a desert, many in this
country openly declare that it would be right (only that it is not
convenient) to send an expedition against them, and compel them by force
to conform to the opinions of other people. The article of the Mormonite
doctrine which is the chief provocative to the antipathy which thus
breaks through the ordinary restraints of religious tolerance, is its
sanction of polygamy; which, though permitted to Mahomedans, and
Hindoos, and Chinese, seems to excite unquenchable animosity when
practised by persons who speak English, and profess to be a kind of
Christians. No one has a deeper disapprobation than I have of this
Mormon institution; both for other reasons, and because, far from being
in any way countenanced by the principle of liberty, it is a direct
infraction of that principle, being a mere riveting of the chains of one
half of the community, and an emancipation of the other from reciprocity
of obligation towards them. Still, it must be remembered that this
relation is as much voluntary on the part of the women concerned in it,
and who may be deemed the sufferers by it, as is the case with any other
form of the marriage institution; and however surprising this fact may
appear, it has its explanation in the common ideas and customs of the
world, which teaching women to think marriage the one thing needful,
make it intelligible that many a woman should prefer being one of
several wives, to not being a wife at all. Other countries are not asked
to recognize such unions, or release any portion of their inhabitants
from their own laws on the score of Mormonite opinions. But when the
dissentients have conceded to the hostile sentiments of others, far more
than could justly be demanded; when they have left the countries to
which their doctrines were unacceptable, and established themselves in a
remote corner of the earth, which they have been the first to render
habitable to human beings; it is difficult to see on what principles but
those of tyranny they can be prevented from living there under what laws
they please, provided they commit no aggression on other nations, and
allow perfect freedom of departure to those who are dissatisfied with
their ways. A recent writer, in some respects of considerable merit,
proposes (to use his own words,) not a crusade, but a civilizade,
against this polygamous community, to put an end to what seems to him a
retrograde step in civilization. It also appears so to me, but I am not
aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.
So long as the sufferers by the bad law do not invoke assistance from
other communities, I cannot admit that persons entirely unconnected with
them ought to step in and require that a condition of things with which
all who are directly interested appear to be satisfied, should be put an
end to because it is a scandal to persons some thousands of miles
distant, who have no part or concern in it. Let them send missionaries,
if they please, to preach against it; and let them, by any fair means,
(of which silencing the teachers is not one,) oppose the progress of
similar doctrines among their own people. If civilization has got the
better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too
much to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly
got under, should revive and conquer civilization. A civilization that
can thus succumb to its vanquished enemy must first have become so
degenerate, that neither its appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody
else, has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand up for it. If
this be so, the sooner such a civilization receives notice to quit, the
better. It can only go on from bad to worse, until destroyed and
regenerated (like the Western Empire) by energetic barbarians. [1] The
case of the Bombay Parsees is a curious instance in point. When this
industrious and enterprising tribe, the descendants of the Persian
fire-worshippers, flying from their native country before the Caliphs,
arrived in Western India, they were admitted to toleration by the Hindoo
sovereigns, on condition of not eating beef. When those regions
afterwards fell under the dominion of Mahomedan conquerors, the Parsees
obtained from them a continuance of indulgence, on condition of
refraining from pork. What was at first obedience to authority became a
second nature, and the Parsees to this day abstain both from beef and
pork. Though not required by their religion, the double abstinence has
had time to grow into a custom of their tribe; and custom, in the East,
is a religion.
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