Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/522

504 takes in those, perhaps, who have studied the political-writings of Herbert Spencer, and have translated his sturdy and wholesome demands for the largest possible individual liberty to require a perpetually negative attitude on the part of the Government.

It is difficult to say which class, if left to itself, would make America the more unendurable.

It is this question of our ideal of government which is involved in the proposed nationalization of university extension, and not a mere question of past or probable experience.

This opens one of the most profound problems in our American political life, and one which may be stated indeed but scarcely discussed within such brief limits as the present. Yet feeling that the issue under discussion has its solution in the solution of this larger question, I can not refrain from calling attention to the very doubtful character of the liberty which is to be enjoyed under a régime of social and governmental negations. Writers of the sentimental school of political economy—a school which oddly enough includes many prosaic labor agitators of the present day—fairly gloat over their picture of the ideal liberty enjoyed by man in his pre-social existence. But there are many who can feel no enthusiasm for this impossible picture. Place a naked man on an island in the Pacific, and, however generous Nature may be, however free he may be from the tyrannies of modern society, it would be the worst mockery to speak of him as enjoying liberty, for liberty, as a man of any imagination must perceive, presupposes not only the absence of restrictions upon individual action, but also the presence of certain conditions which will make those desired actions possible. In a word, liberty is a positive and not a negative condition. Again I venture upon the use of Italics to emphasize what seems to me a most important truth. When we contemplate the narrowing and annoying restrictions which the holders of the ideal of a paternal government would impose upon American life—the eternal thou shalts and thou shalt nots of prohibitionists and dictators of all classes—the temptation is to swing to the opposite extreme of the pendulum, and declare that absolute non-interference on the part of Government is the only safeguard. When, further, one reads Herbert Spencer's admirable volume on Justice—admirable, that is to say, excepting his unfortunate utterances on the status of woman in the state—one is, at first, confirmed in this negative retreat. The sole function of Government is to insure the greatest possible individual liberty consistent with the liberty of all. This is the conclusion which one of the most profound thinkers of the century reaches at the end of a long and thought-crowded life. And one could ask for no better definition. But how is this conclusion to be applied? That is the question. There is a