Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/603

 RrVtSWS 58I well-being, and to secure his well-being will cut off a leg as readily as a Jacobin would guillotine a class. Mr. Ritchie is not less successful in impugning certain abstractions which play a great part in Mill's book on Liberty. That none of our actions or feelings can be considered as purely self-regarding; that liberty in the negative sense of mere absence of restraint is a means rather than an end, that the action of the State may often .promote the freedom of the individual by counterpoising other forces to which he is subjected, and that the propriety of its action must be judged chiefly with reference to the circumstances of each particular case all these considerations are urged, not for the first time, but in a fresh and lively manner against the doctrine of government action or rather inaction as expounded by Mill. The positive tests of any contemplated action on the part of the State proposed at the end of this essay would probably be accepted by most reasonable persons, although they would doubtless apply them with very various results. In the fourth and last essay Mr. Ritchie defends the late Professor Green against the charge of philosophical reaction made in Pattison's autobiography. He shows that Green's political philosophy was quite as democratic as Mill's, and that Green's political opinions were consistent with his conception of society. As regard the positive content of these essays many who at least partially accept the writer's speculative premises, will not be able to agree with his practical tendency. That the individual is not logically prior to society, that society as we know it was not the creation of individuals such as we know, that the relation between the individual and the society is not simply exclusive, that what is given to the one is not taken from the other, that the proooess of society in some ways tends to strengthen government, and that a strong government is one of the conditions of liberty, all this may be admitted by many who do not share Mr. Ritchie's confidence in State action as the social panacea. Mr. Ritchie seems to us to forget that the State in the sense of the government is after all an inadequate representative of society. He seems to us to forget what after all is the cardinal fact of concrete politics; that all government has to be carried on by men, and that men, as Burns has observed, 'are unco' weak, and little to be trusted.' He seems to think that a popular government at all events may hold itself equal to any task. He says that the arguments against government action ' lose their force in proportion as govern- ment becomes more and more genuinely the government of the people by the people themselves' (p. 64). Government of the people by the people is a fine phrase, but it may mean no more than government by a chance majority or by the adventurers who manipulate that majority. Certainly our fast-growing experience of popular government does not tend to raise our opinion of its fitness to concentrate all powers and all duties in itself. Any one who considers the facts brought together in the first volume of M. Taine's new work, on the Modern ROgaine in