CHAPTER I. CARDINAL POINTS. IN any survey of the civilisation which we distinguish as Christian, the three features which most distinctly impress the mind are - the development of the individual, the constitution and influence of civic societies, and the action of the moral and spiritual forces which it is the mission of the Church to propagate. Our study is, in the main, that of the frictions between these constituents, in consequence of which wellbeing is hindered, and of the efforts to reduce such frictions and to promote the reciprocity of service that is essential to the building up of a community in truth and in justice. The unit in social life is the individual. He is more than a unit indeed; he is also a unity: a small world, but still a world, with the separateness in character, in aptitudes, in resources, which we denote by the term individuality. Hence the difficulty in adjusting his place and claim with the demands of the body politic, which is his environment. The battle of liberty has turned on the issue, What are his rights? What is his due? How can personal freedom be harmonised with social order? The century which has closed is remarkable for the earnestness with which this issue has been regarded, and for the efforts towards a more complete solution of it which have been made. In the background of all such endeavours is the question as to rights which may be called natural. The state of nature, on which towards the beginning of last century so much eloquence was expended, is little better than an imagination. The savage, free and independent, existed only when the savage was a solitary. When men formed into companies or tribes interferences with liberty began, and the equality of all was impossible. These interferences were the accompaniment of civilisation. If we go back to the early periods of civilised life we find the vast majority in thraldom: men were supervised and controlled at every step of their existence. Their 1 Brissot, Mably, Rousseau, maintained that the primitive condition of men was one of equality; that individuals had no exclusive rights of property; that the right of every person to the use of the earth was determined by his need. The Rights of the Individual. 5 right to live was conditioned on an obligation to serve. And in the history of Great Britain, even to a comparatively recent date, the area of freedom allowed to the unit was circumscribed by minute and often vexatious regulations.1 Society took the individual in hand, and allowed him only so much as it judged to be for the advantage of the governing classes or the supposed good of the State. Our conceptions have been widened. We now recognise that in human nature there is a charter of freedom for every one, and that every one born into citizenship is entitled to the opportunity of exercising and fulfilling his capacities, intellectual, moral, and volitional. None can be regarded as only instruments for the furtherance of ends in which they have themselves no direct share the object of all legislation, the trend of all social action, is in the direction of enlarging the spaces of personal energy, of placing tools, means of production, within the reach of all, and protecting all in the enjoyment of at least a portion of the fruits of their labour. And since the individual is a moral agent, with an ethical consciousness which witnesses to an eternally right and wrong, the aim of political endeavour has been to liberate the conscience from all that 1 E.g., Enactments as to games, prices, clothing, wages, covenants, &c. |