[30]. Lord Acton, The History of Liberty.
This is not a plea for the conscientious objector but for democracy. Newman said that if the Pope spoke against conscience, “he would commit a suicidal act. He would be cutting the ground from under his feet.” The authority of the Pope is not shaken because he concedes to conscience the liberty of dissent; rather it is confirmed. Even more so do the stability and growth of democracy depend upon its recognition of the inviolability of the individual conscience; for democracy cannot live except its roots be deep struck in the moral nature of man. The ultimate battleground of democracy is in men’s hearts; and its appeal must at last ever be to men’s consciences. But the appeal to conscience has no meaning unless conscience be free; and when democracy constrains men’s consciences it is writing off its own spiritual charter. Even in time of war it is safer for democracy to let a hundred shirkers go scot-free rather than run the risk of penalising an honest conscience. For by its affirmation of the sovereignty of conscience it reinforces the consciences of all its members and wins the deeper loyalty of those who are constrained to dissent from its policy on particular issues.
IV
The growth of the democratic ideal is bound up with the acceptance of the freedom of the mind in all its consequences—even at the risk of some disorder; and the difficulty which political democracy is apt even in normal times to find in conforming to this view is due to the fact that it has not yet perceived the logic of its own first principles. This in its turn is at least to some extent to be accounted for by the survival in democracies of mediæval conceptions of authority. We do not need to take into account those doctrines of authority which are begotten of the divine right of kings and are now clearly at their last gasp. The divine right of kings is, however, assumed to have fallen upon democratic governments; and though they may not exercise authority for the same ends as an autocrat of the old style, yet they conceive of it as operating in the same way. Theoretically, authority in democracies is exercised in the interests of social justice; but we still suppose that the discipline of social justice must be imposed upon men from without.
Apparently the assumption underlying the authoritarian position is that human nature is incurably anarchic, that it is its instinctive tendency to be wayward and disruptive, and that there is no remedy for this state of things except that of putting it in a cage, of surrounding it with a fine mesh of arrests, checks and restraints. This view may owe something of its modern strength to the theological doctrine of the total depravity of human nature—a dogma no longer held by sane people. We know that if we do hold a doctrine of original sin it must be held together with the no less true doctrine of original goodness. But the authoritarian is theologically orthodox; man to him is a born rebel, a natural anarchist; he holds that he is organically antisocial; and there is therefore nothing to do with him but to treat him like a wild animal and put him behind bars. It is of course possible to subdue anarchy in this way, and to produce some kind of order—for a time. But it should be observed that what happens is that liberty is not so much disciplined as denied; and as it appears to be the inherent, and incurable tendency of authority to feed upon itself and to grow fat, the natural consequence is the progressive destruction of liberty. The historical reaction from the excess of authority is a violent revulsion to wild and bloody anarchy; and over against authority, the only hope of liberty is to divide and to keep it divided.
As a matter of fact in democratic communities, there is a curious discrepancy between theory and practice; and—somewhat unusually—our practice is better than our theory. The mediæval doctrine of authority still haunts our political and social thinking; but there are few people in a democratic community who behave themselves only when and because there is a policeman about. The whole structure of law (of which the policeman is the symbol) rests upon the proposition that it is possible to define and to enforce those moral obligations which are essential to the cohesion and the order of the community, those things which members of a society must do or abstain from doing if the society is to hold together at all. Law does not do more than state the lowest common terms of social duty. It does not cover “the whole duty of man.” The maximum of legal obligation is the minimum of moral obligation. That is why the law does not touch ordinary folk—except, of course, in formal adjustments of affairs of business or property. In the region of personal conduct, law is for decent folk in normal times a pure irrelevancy. We not only keep the law but we to some degree transcend it, and we do so without thinking about it. The policeman has no terrors for us because we do not approach his frontiers; and he has terrors only for the wilful social misfit whose native anarchy is still untamed. Law, that is, imposes the discipline of social justice only upon the exceptional case, the individual who is contemptuous or negligent of his social duty. Upon the great majority of people it is imposed from within—sometimes indeed by the fear of public opinion, but chiefly by a more or less effective social sense. We are free from the law not because we take care not to break it, but because a higher principle has lifted us outside and beyond its bounds. Our righteousness truly exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees, that is, of the legal mind; and that is because a higher principle of righteousness is at work within us. This higher principle of righteousness is of course no other than our own independent and energised sense of social obligation. The degree to which it is effectual may and does vary in different persons; but it is not to be questioned that democracy exists because of the increasing efficiency of the inward sense of social obligation in its members. Its further development is contingent upon the measure in which this inner constraint supersedes coercive machinery as the organ of social justice.
It is, of course, better for men to live under law than in anarchy. What we have to understand concerning law and its machinery is that it is a stage in the evolution of social order and in our education into true freedom. At the same time it must not be forgotten that the law itself may become a real hindrance to this process. Just because law is a definition of obligation, it tends to be regarded as fixing the outmost limits of social duty; and whatsoever we do beyond these limits ranks as work of supererogation. That is bad enough; but worse may happen. One may suppose that outside these limits, any kind of conduct is admissible; and law, despite its intention, may therefore arrest the growth of the social sense. The social sense, that is, is expected to operate up to frontier line defined by the law; beyond that point, it is not called upon to act. We require to introduce into men’s minds a different conception of law from that popularly current. It is the office of the law to make itself superfluous; and its administration requires not a superstitious veneration of its majesty or a pedantic respect for its letter, but humanity and common sense. The law is overmuch conceived as our gaoler; properly understood, it is, as St. Paul said of the Mosaic Law, our “schoolmaster.” But so long as we talk about “vindicating” the law more than reclaiming the offender—as the legal mind is apt to do—so long will men tend to regard the law not as a stepping-stone to higher things, but as an irksome restraint; and while we indulge in tall talk about the majesty of the law, we make law-abidingness “the law and the prophets,” and jeopardise our chance of effecting that increasing enfranchisement of the social sense in which alone is the hope of the democratic ideal.
The further development of the democratic principle and the achievement of a genuine freedom would appear to be contingent upon the growth of the interior discipline of social justice with a consequent diminution in the influence of exterior legal sanctions. If society is to be regarded as in any sense truly organic, and if consequently its vitality is to be measured by its capacity for variation, it is plain that it must be released from the tendency to uniformity which is entailed in a “reign of law.” Augustine’s definition of liberty is pertinent here—Love God and do as you please, and translated out of the idiom of religion into that of sociology (which is like unto it) the rule runs: Love your neighbour and do as you please. Authoritarianism makes inevitably for regimentation; and while it may in this way repress the waywardness of individualism, it does so at the expense of that precious thing, individuality. The task of democracy is that of destroying individualism and of cultivating individuality. Liberty is the condition in which a man may be true to himself through everything, and may live out the logic of his own distinctive spiritual endowments. But because personality is essentially social, a man cannot be true to himself until he is in a true sense delivered from himself. An effectual social discipline is a necessary condition of a real liberty. It is not a check upon liberty but its indispensable concomitant. Without it, liberty overshoots its bolt and destroys itself.
But this relation is a mutual one. Not only does a social conscience safeguard and discipline liberty; but its own mating with liberty works for its liberation. We have seen how the influence of legalistic preconceptions tends to arrest the growth of the social conscience; how the school of law may become the prison of legalism. The social conscience is something more than a moral critic or invigilator; it has the quality of a creative energy; and once it is “free from the law,” it is for ever trying to outdo itself. It is indeed only an adventurous social conscience of this kind that will avail to overcome those distinctions of class which constitute the immemorial and multiform schism of our race. We have to work not only for the socialisation of liberty but also for the liberation of our social instincts; and this is to be done by an equal mating of liberty and the social conscience. This is, in the main, the office of the teacher and the preacher, but meantime a great deal is to be done by a systematic effort to multiply and develop those social contacts which already exist either actually or potentially.
The final reason for this mating is not merely to make room for dissent in the community. That, indeed, is only an incidental thing which serves to test the quality and extent of the community’s freedom. Freedom is necessary because it is the only condition under which creative self-expression becomes really possible. The human spirit must have independence and initiative if it is to be its whole self. It was not made for regimentation; it was made for a distinctive life of its own. But its very constitution tells us that if it is to attain to a fruitful freedom, it must achieve something besides freedom. The motto of a democracy resolute to live out the full implicates of its first principles must not be freedom alone, but freedom and fellowship.