Industrial Liberty (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1900 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IX PATERNAL GOVERNMENT In order accurately to understand political liberty as a right to which every citizen is equally entitled, we must consider it separately from any assumed equality of those faculties which are called the mental, the moral, and the social. It is often assumed that these are faculties to which, in some indefinite way, each citizen has the same right to equality as that right by which he holds his political freedom. I think it may be shown not only that political equality does not imply any equality of these faculties in different individuals, but that, on the contrary, it does imply the necessity of a distinct recognition and furtherance of their inequality.1 It may also be shown that meddling with these faculties in the endeavor to reduce them to uniformity is one of the chief characteristics of paternal government, and that such endeavor arises from confusion concerning their true relation to political liberty. It is from this circumstance that it becomes necessary to place the diverse faculties in a category by themselves in order that they may be discriminated from political equality. It may be shown, as a corollary arising from this diversity of human faculty, that a paternal government cannot be a free government, and that a free government cannot be a paternal one; and further, that whatever pretensions to beneficence there may be in the paternal idea, when we come to examine it with reference to the sum of its consequences, it will be found to be essentially an immoral government. 1 It must be owned that even the Declaration of Independence is somewhat uncertain upon this point, in setting forth, as it does, that " all mc'n are created equal." It would certainly have been more definite and would have saved a great deal o...