securing democratic ends. I have forced my owners to use me productively. I have made them stewards of the commonweal. Seventh, I have led society in its development to higher and higher planes. Out of my abundance they have been able to satisfy more and more of their material wants. The certainty with which I have endowed the satisfaction of the necessary material wants has enabled those who choose to give of their time, energy, and means to the immaterial things of life. Our culture, with its wide horizon and its varied content, is my handiwork. That civilization is not coarse and material and brutal is my doing. Eighth, I have prevented a passing sentimentalism from sacrificing these more permanent values to the passing fancy of the moment. I have, at the cost of much misunderstanding and malignant criticism, prevented the wealth that was needed for a richer life for the generations of the future from being wasted in satisfying the immediate wants of a few surplus individuals who promised no contribution to culture. I have preferred to have such wealth used in enlarging capital, thus making for bounty of goods, and in social experimentation whose end was to lead men to richer and fuller life. I have seen clearly that a deficiency of human life could easily be supplied within a generation, but that a deficiency in capital can never be made up; that cumulatively it becomes greater as the years pass; and that it must deny life to many yet unborn and rob others of comforts which otherwise would have made their lives less vain and hollow. Ninth, I have proved myself the custodian of peace and have laid the foundations of a world-wide Christian community. The system of vested interests with which I have surrounded labor and capital has done more for the cause of peace than all other agencies combined. For I have increased many fold the costs to all classes of engaging in war. The world-wide industrial system which I have wrought is more powerful than all armaments combined in protecting a state against the encroachments of another state and it contributes more to nation's understanding of nation than the whole world-wide system of diplomacy. My success has not been complete, but that merely makes my continued presence and activity all the more necessary. I would not detract one whit from the good intentions of my malefactors. I bear them no malice. My only plea is that I be judged according to my fruits. I am done. C. INDUSTRIAL LIBERTY 326. The Mediatory Character of Freedom" BY THOMAS HILL GREEN We shall probably all agree that freedom, rightly understood, is the greatest of blessings. But when we thus speak of freedom, we do not mean freedom from restraint or compulsion. We do not mean merely freedom to do as we like quite irrespective of what it is that we like. We do not mean a freedom that can be enjoyed by. one man at a cost of a loss of freedom to others. We mean rather a positive power of doing or enjoying something that is worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others. We mean by it a power which each man exercises through the help or security given him by his fellow-men, and which in turn he helps to secure for them. When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens to make the most and best of themselves. Thus, though there can be no freedom among men who act under compulsion, yet the mere removal of compulsion is in itself no contribution to true freedom. In one sense no man is so well able to do what he likes as the wandering savage. He has no master. There is no one to say him nay. Yet we do not count him really free, because the freedom of savagery is not strength, but weakness. The actual powers of the noblest savage do not compare with those of the humblest citizen of a law-abiding state. He is not the slave of man, but he is the slave of nature. Of compulsion by natural necessity he has plenty of experience, though of restraint by society none at all. Nor can he deliver himself from that compulsion except by submitting to this restraint. So to submit is the first step in true freedom, because the first step in the exercise of the faculties with which man is endowed. But we rightly refuse to recognize the highest development on the part of an exceptional individual or exceptional class, as an advance toward the true freedom of man, if it is founded on a refusal of the same opportunity to other men. The powers of the human mind have probably never attained such force and keenness as among the small groups of men who possessed civil privileges 'Adapted from the "Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract," Works, III, 370-373. Edited by R. L. Nettleship (1880). in the small republics of antiquity. But the civilization and freedom of the ancient world were short-lived because they were partial and exceptional. If the ideal of true freedom is the maximum of power for all the members of human society to make the best of themselves, we are right in ranking modern society, with all its confusion and ignorant license and waste of effort, above the most splendid of ancient republics. If I have given a true account of that freedom which forms the goal of social effort, we shall see that freedom of contract is valuable only as a means to an end. That end is what I call freedom in the positive sense, the liberation of the powers of all men equally for contributions to a common good. 327. Contract and Co-operation10 BY HENRY SIDGWICK Withdraw contract-suppose that no one can count upon anyone else fulfilling an engagement-and the members of a human community are atoms that cannot effectively combine; the complex co-operation and division of employments that are the essential characteristics of modern industry cannot be introduced among such beings. Suppose contracts freely made and effectively sanctioned, and the most elaborate social organization becomes possible, at least in a society of such human beings as the individualistic theory contemplates-gifted with mature reason and guided by enlightened self-interest. Of such beings it is plausible to say that, when once their respective relations to the surrounding material world have been determined so as to prevent mutual encroachment and secure to each the fruits of his industry, the remainder of their positive mutual rights and obligations ought to depend entirely on that coincidence of their free choices, which we call contract. The doctrine of contract I do not examine; I only refer to it to show the far-reaching importance of the notion of contract in the individualistic view of the organization of society. 328. Contract and Personal Responsibility11 BY ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY A statement of the history of modern freedom, and one that ought to command assent in the twentieth century, is that it represents a passage from a system of obligations imposed by the com 10 Adapted from The Elements of Politics, 78-79 (1887). 11Adapted from The Relations between Freedom and Responsibility in the Evolution of Democratic Government, 74-83. Copyright by Yale University Press (1903). munity to a system of self-imposed obligations. Duty, in the early stages of society, is enforced by lynch law. In the later stages it is enforced by the individual conscience. It is not that the obligations recognized are narrower or less exacting in the latter case than in the former. They tend to become wider and more exacting. But the method of enforcement allows the individual to get at things in his own way. We have passed from a system of status, where each man was born into a set of legal rules and duties imposed upon him for all time, to a system of contract, where each man's rights and duties are largely those which he has made for himself. This change has not enabled man to relieve himself of obligations to his fellowmen. It has allowed these obligations to take forms suited to the varied powers of the individual and the varied needs of society. We can trace at least some of the stages in this process of evolution. The system of caste, or status, is a survival of the old tribal organization, where law and morals were undistinguished; where social arrangements existed by the authority of the gods; and where any attempt to disturb them was an act of sacrilege. In course of time, however, there came about an alteration in the character of the legal penalties. Where one man had wronged another unintentionally, it became possible not only to inflict punishment, but to exact compensation. Instead of the fine which was exacted for an offense against public order, the community could compel the payment of damages to make good the loss to the person injured. Even where the wrong was intentional the idea of compensation. could enter into the penalty. When once the legal authorities grasped this possibility of using a civil remedy, instead of a criminal one, it became possible to allow to any man who could pay substantial damages a degree of personal liberty which was not possible under a system where every infraction of others' rights must be treated as a crime and visited by criminal penalties. From the development of civil damages it was but a short step to the system of contracts. The essential idea of a contract is that one or both parties agree to perform a certain service at a future time. The obligation which a man assumes in a contract is voluntary until he has made the agreement. After that society will compel him to pay damages for its breach, just as it would compel him to pay damages for the breach of any of the other rights of his fellow citizens. It is therefore, in its very essence, a combination of freedom and responsibility. It is a means which the community can adopt for getting work done by the voluntary assumption of obligations on the part of its members. These obligations they can be compelled to perform or to furnish compensation to the other party. Among the many brilliant contributions of the Roman lawyers to the progress of civilization, there was probably none so far-reaching as their development of the theory of contract. For, wherever this theory was applied, it taught people that the exercise of freedom involved the assumption of responsibility, and could safely be combined with it. The lesson was not easy to learn, and the Roman lawyers did not succeed in teaching it to the civilized world for all time. The irruption of the barbarians into Europe brought with it, under the feudal system, a nearly complete return to the old theory of a status. But with the close of the feudal period the ideas of the Roman law were taken up and widely expanded. The power of making a contract, under the old Roman law, had been practically limited to the few men who could furnish security for the performance of their obligations. It belonged chiefly to the minority of freemen who enjoyed the benefits of slavery. At the close of the Middle Ages, however, the reintroduction of the idea of contractual obligation as a basis for social order was accompanied by a system of emancipation which gave the laborer a certain amount of property right in the product of his toil. The substitution of industrial for military tenure put a much larger number of people in a position to furnish security. It enabled the people as a whole, instead of the privileged few, to enjoy the system of education in responsibility which marks the growth of contract law. For our modern law of contract is a most valuable system of moral education, operating alike upon lawyers and upon laymen, and enabling us to make progress both in our judicial ethics and in our general tone of public morality. The whole English commercial law of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its distinctions, sometimes fine drawn but always well drawn in matters like agency or warranty, competence or negligence, involves a systematic enforcement of responsibility under the forms of freedom. If we wish to see what this legal development has accomplished in the way of introducing responsibility, we have only to contrast our standards of practice and ethics in those lines where commercial law has been developing for centuries with those where its application is comparatively new. If I sell a cow on the basis of certain representations, which prove to be false, the law holds me to an implied contract of warranty, even if I have explicitly disclaimed any intention to warrant the animal. If I sell a railroad under similar circumstances the law offers the sufferer no corresponding remedy; and no small section of the public applauds the seller for the shrewdness which he has displayed in the transaction. If I use an individual position |