Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/779

Rh "then occur to me that the Venetians had a right to expect from a free state what they unconsciously and yet really expected—security from want and from the fear of want." Had such a notion been suggested to him, he adds, he would have laughed it to scorn.

Mr. Howells has lived to recognize that citizenship in a free country does not always make a man free. It is here that he agrees with Mr. Spencer. Political liberty, he says, "appears something final, absolute, a good in itself; but it is never a good in itself, and is never final; it is a means to something good." According to Mr. Spencer (Justice, Chapter XXII), the man's real rights are the right to live, or, as he more comprehensively expresses it, to "physical integrity," the right to freedom of movement, the right to receive and enjoy what he has earned, the right of free exchange, free contract and free industry, and, finally, the right of free belief, free worship, and free speech. Apart from these, any claims a man may have must, Mr. Spencer says, be of a different kind and "can not be classed as rights." As regards the franchise, all we can properly say of it is that it "gives the citizens in general powers of checking trespasses upon their rights"—powers, he adds, "which they may or may not use to good purpose." That they are not always used to good purpose is evidenced by the fact that, in more than one country where universal suffrage exists, real rights are trampled on. Our own country, we regret to say, is used by the author of the Synthetic Philosophy as an example. "Universal suffrage," he observes, "does not prevent the corruptions of municipal governments, which impose heavy taxes and do very inefficient work; does not prevent citizens from being coerced in their private lives by dictating what they shall not drink; does not prevent an enormous majority of consumers from being heavily taxed by a protective tariff for the benefit of a small minority of manufacturers and artisans; nay, does not even effectually preserve men from violent deaths, but in sundry States allows of frequent murders, checked only by law officers who are themselves liable to be shot in the performance of their duties."

When Mr. Howells, therefore, made the discovery that political liberty might not mean liberty in any very wide sense, he discovered a truth, and one of serious import; but when he went on and attached to the idea of liberty certain advantages which individual success in the carrying on of life alone can give, he went, in our opinion, very far astray, and formulated a doctrine essentially dangerous to the well-being of society. We really wonder how so broad and serious a thinker can bring himself to write as he does in the article to which we have referred. He says: "If the Venetians had agreed with Italy when they were united to it that thenceforward all should be guaranteed the means of livelihood, they would really have all freed themselves. If the French Revolution had established these conditions, the first republic would still be one and indivisible." The nature of liberty, then, according to Mr. Howells, is not alike for all men: to some it means the right to claim a livelihood from others, and to those others it means the obligation to provide the first with a livelihood. It would be interesting to see a document drawn up which should establish liberty in this sense of the word; and after it was drawn up it would be interesting to witness its execution. The visages of the guaranteed parties would, no doubt, betoken a