icts between law and conscience are capable of being brought within
very narrow limits, though their complete reconciliation will always
remain a problem until men are generally agreed as to the fundamental
conditions of the social harmony.

It may be asked, on the other hand, whether in insisting on the free
development of personality we have not understated the duty of society
to its members. We all admit a collective responsibility for children.
Are there not grown-up people who stand just as much in need of care?
What of the idiot, the imbecile, the feeble-minded or the drunkard? What
does rational self-determination mean for these classes? They may injure
no one but themselves except by the contagion of bad example. But have
we no duty towards them, having in view their own good alone and leaving
every other consideration aside? Have we not the right to take the
feeble-minded under our care and to keep the drunkard from drink, purely
for their own good and apart from every ulterior consideration? And, if
so, must we not extend the whole sphere of permissible coercion, and
admit that a man may for his own sake and with no ulterior object, be
compelled to do what we think right and avoid what we think wrong?

The reply is that the argument is weak just where it seeks to
generalize. We are compelled to put the insane under restraint for
social reasons apart from their own benefit. But their own benefit
would be a fully sufficient reason if no other existed. To them, by
their misfortune, liberty, as we understand the term, has no
application, because they are incapable of rational choice and therefore
of the kind of growth for the sake of which freedom is valuable. The
same thing is true of the feeble-minded, and if they are not yet treated
on the same principle it is merely because the recognition of their type
as a type is relatively modern. But the same thing is also in its degree
true of the drunkard, so far as he is the victim of an impulse which he
has allowed to grow beyond his own control; and the question whether he
should be regarded as a fit object for tutelage or not is to be decided
in each case by asking whether such capacity of self-control as he
retains would be impaired or repaired by a period of tutelar restraint.
There is nothing in all this to touch the essential of liberty which is
the value of the power of self-governance where it exists. All that is
proved is that where it does not exist it is ri