Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/241

224. The purpose of laws is not to encroach upon the freedom of the individual, but to constitute it, and support it. That country is most free whose laws are most comprehensive and systematic. Real freedom is unknown in a land where justice consists in the capricious sentences of caliph or sultan. Freedom is made possible for the individual by the system of laws which the state administers. The individual's freedom does not mean simply liberty to act in accordance with the whim of the moment. Bather it implies the willingness of the individual to realise his own ideals by acting in accordance with the laws which he as a citizen may have helped to pass, which he supports by his loyal obedience to them, and which, so far from infringing upon his liberty of action, alone make it possible. The state is not, as extreme individualism implies, an alien power external to the individual and constraining his obedience by force of compulsion: it is a community of which he is a member, having a common will with which his will may be at one. In being a member of his state, he implicitly acknowledges the justice of its laws, and if by his actions he incurs the penalties which these laws sanction, the sentence is in a very real sense imposed by himself. He acknowledges the justice of the laws, for they are not imposed by an external power, but by his own state.

Socialism is one of the vaguest words in the language, but in the form in which it is often preached it is the doctrine according to which all the means of producing wealth, land, factories, machinery, and so on, should be possessed by the state. The state, it is maintained, should delegate the use of these means of