affair of laws and institutions
which bring rights and duties into equilibrium. It is not at all an
affair of selecting the proper class to rule.

The notion of a free state is entirely modern. It has been developed
with the development of the middle class, and with the growth of a
commercial and industrial civilization. Horror at human slavery is not
a century old as a common sentiment in a civilized state. The idea of
the "free man," as we understand it, is the product of a revolt against
mediaeval and feudal ideas; and our notion of equality, when it is true
and practical, can be explained only by that revolt. It was in England
that the modern idea found birth. It has been strengthened by the
industrial and commercial development of that country. It has been
inherited by all the English-speaking nations, who have made liberty
real because they have inherited it, not as a notion, but as a body of
institutions. It has been borrowed and imitated by the military and
police state of the European continent so fast as they have felt the
influence of the expanding industrial civilization; but they have
realized it only imperfectly, because they have no body of local
institutions or traditions, and it remains for them as yet too much a
matter of "declarations" and pronunciamentos.

The notion of civil liberty which we have inherited is that of _a
status created for the individual by laws and institutions, the effect
of which is that each man is guaranteed the use of all his own powers
exclusively for his own welfare_. It is not at all a matter of
elections, or universal suffrage, or democracy. All institutions are to
be tested by the degree to which they guarantee liberty. It is not to
be admitted for a moment that liberty is a means to social ends, and
that it may be impaired for major considerations. Any one who so argues
has lost the bearing and relation of all the facts and factors in a
free state. A human being has a life to live, a career to run. He is a
centre of powers to work, and of capacities to suffer. What his powers
may be--whether they can carry him far or not; what his chances may be,
whether wide or restricted; what his fortune may be, whether to suffer
much or little--are questions of his personal destiny which he must
work out and endure as he can; but for all that concerns the bearing
of the society and its institutions upon that man, and upon the sum of
happiness to which he can attain during his life on