it has been undertaken without any practical opposition: and, in fact, a considerable amount of interference of this kind is, however, now judged necessary by our own and other civilised Governments. I may give as instances restrictions on the manufacture and carriage of explosive substances and rules against importing cattle from countries where the disease is rife.1 It is not certain that any given cargo of suspected cattle or carelessly carried explosives would do any harm but most prudent persons see that the risk is too great to run. And I do not think it can be doubted, on utilitarian principles, that this kind of interference may be necessary to an extent that cannot be exactly defined: it is merely a question of the degree of risk.

Sometimes the burden thus imposed on private persons is so slight in comparison with the evils guarded against, that no one would hesitate to impose it, if experience shows it to be at all efficacious for the attainment of the end in view. This is the case when Government, besides diffusing information and warning, imposes on others the duty of furnishing it; to remove or reduce the risk of mischief through violence, negligence, or fraud, -as when it orders that poisons when sold should be designated as such, and that the name and address of persons to whom they are sold should be preserved; or to facilitate the attainment of redress in case of wrong-as when it requires printers' and publishers' names to be affixed to publications. Instances of the same kind are the prescription of standard weights and measures, as a precaution against fraud, and the compulsory registration of mortgages and bills of sale.

Where the restraints or burdens imposed by such interference are more serious, the annoyance and cost entailed by it, on the community or on individuals, must of course be carefully weighed against the evils which experience shows it to be capable of preventing: and under the head of cost must be included any economic loss caused by the enforced substitution of a more expensive for a cheaper process of attaining any industrial end. But I do not think 1 I give these as clearly not what I go on to call "paternal."

that any general rules can be laid down for determining the limits of such interference: all we can say is that a milder degree of interference, if effective, is generally to be preferred.

The possible gradations in intensity of interference will of course vary according to circumstances; but I may give one or two illustrations of them.1 I may begin by referring to the much-discussed case of restrictions on freedom of speech or writing, so far as such restrictions are designed to protect the rights of private persons. There are obvious and great advantages to be gained by leaving men as much liberty as possible to argue that certain established rights, or certain modes of exercising these rights, are injurious to the community and ought to be suppressed: since it is through judicious criticism of this kind that improvements in legislation and administration in law are chiefly to be expected, while in other cases-where a change in legal rights is inexpedient-such criticism may be useful in rousing public sentiment to supplement the inevitable deficiencies of law and if judicious criticism is to be allowed and even encouraged, injudicious criticism must be tolerated to some extent, even though it has a certain tendency to cause violations of law. Hence, even when this dangerous tendency is so marked as to render some repression of free criticism less mischievous than complete toleration, it is generally expedient to confine this repression to the more inflammatory modes of publishing opinions hostile to established rights: for instance, to allow such opinions to be published in books, when they could not be tolerated in speeches or placards.3 Other dangerous practices such as excessive drinking of alcohol-may be tolerated in private but repressed in public. Or, again,

1 Other kinds of gradation will be noticed later. See p. 132.

2 Restrictions on freedom of discussion, imposed in the special interest of government, will be considered in a later chapter.

...

* "An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery . . . may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard."-J. S. Mill, On Liberty, ch. iii.

restrictions may be imposed not on the persons who do the acts liable to be followed by mischievous consequences, but on the traders who, for private gain, supply facilities for such acts, as when the publican is forbidden to sell alcohol to a person who is clearly intoxicated, or is known by him to be a habitual drunkard. This last kind of interference is, indeed, no less intense than that for which it is a substitute; but, owing to its limited range, it is practically less vexatious.

§ 3. Here, however, it has to be observed that in dealing with these and similar concrete examples of what may be characterised as "indirectly individualistic interference," we see that it is very difficult to distinguish it in practice. from the kind that I have called "paternal." Abstractly considered, the question (1) "How far Government may legitimately go in preventing acts or omissions that are not directly or necessarily harmful, on the ground that there is risk of their causing mischief indirectly to persons, other than the agent, who have not consented to run the risk," is quite distinct from the question "How far Government. ought to interfere to prevent mischief caused to an individual by himself or with his own consent." But in concrete cases the two questions are almost always mixed up, since, where a man's acts or neglects tend to harm himself so seriously as to suggest a need of governmental interference to prevent the mischief, they tend also to harm others. An illustration of this may be found in the sanitary regulations. enforced by our own legislation. When a man is forced to co-operate with his fellow-citizens in a common system of drainage and water-supply, when he is prevented from using a house unfit for human habitation, or from overcrowding any part of a house, it may be said that coercion is applied to him in his own interest: and no doubt it is designed that he should derive benefit from the coercion; still its main justification lies in the need of protecting children and other adults who might suffer if his house became a focus of disease. Similarly, few individualists are so extreme as to deny that the tendency of drunkenness to cause breaches of the peace is a legitimate ground for

some interference with the trade of selling alcohol: and the most thoroughgoing abolitionist urges restriction more as indirectly individualistic than as paternal-i.e. more on the ground of the proved tendency of alcoholic excess to make a man beat his wife and starve his children, than on the ground of its tendency to injure the drunkard himself.

So again, where an individual would evidently cause danger to the physical wellbeing or the property of others by not taking precautions to protect his own person or property from certain external sources of mischief,-as in the case of protection of land from floods, or of men or useful animals from infectious diseases, it is not, I conceive, an undue extension of the individualistic principle to make him responsible, after warning, for the injury that his neglect may cause to others: and if so, when this injury is likely to be, in kind or amount, such as he could not adequately compensate, it is a reasonable extension of the principle to compel him to co-operate with others in a general system of precautions. And though the benefit of such compulsion may be primarily received by himself, since the decisive ground for adopting it is the prevention of mischief to others, it is not properly to be regarded as "paternal" interference, in the special sense in which I have adopted this term. Similar reasoning is applicable to the provision of means for reducing mischief caused by accident or neglect, when such mischief is liable to spread as in the case of fires in towns.1

Other interferences that seem prima facie "paternal" in their aims are partially defensible, from an individualistic point of view, on a different ground. For instance, when our Government endeavours to prevent its subjects from employing improperly qualified physicians, apothecaries, and pilots; or from buying meat known to be diseased; or from taking part in dangerous industrial processes-as (e.g.)

1 Even so decided an advocate of Laisser Faire as M. Paul LeroyBeaulieu considers that the "pompiers volontaires qui l'on voit encore a Londres" perform a function that had better be organised by government. Revue des deux Mondes, 1888, iv. p. 931.

mining and navigation—without due precautions, it may be said that it aims merely at protecting its subjects from evils incurred through ignorance of which other persons take advantage; and that this is a legitimate extension of the protection against deception, which individualists have always regarded as being within the limits of their fundamental rule. And a similar view may also be taken of another important class of cases in which the mischief sought to be prevented is pecuniary loss. Thus, it may be said that the prohibition of "truck" (that is, of the payment of wages otherwise than in money) is "indirectly individualistic" and not "paternal;" since its design is merely to secure to labourers the amount of real wages that is by contract fairly due to them, by preventing the diminution of such real wages through the supply of goods of inferior quality, at a price above their market value.

-

The truth is as the discussion of the conditions of valid contracts showed us that it is a task of much delicacy to define the individualistic principle, in relation to deception, with the exactness required for practical application. When it is affirmed that an "individual should be left to take care of his own interests," some proviso is always understood with regard to his protection against imposture: but the precise nature of the proviso is left somewhat obscure; and it may be plausibly extended to prohibit any man from knowingly profiting by the ignorance of another. And if we go as far as this, it may be plausibly urged that it is desirable, when possible, to go further, and prevent A from profiting by the manifest ignorance of B, even when it is shared by A; especially considering the great difficulty of ascertaining whether or not an impostor is self-deceived. But when we have come to this point, the line between individualistic and paternal interference will have practically vanished. And even the rule that no one may knowingly profit by the ignorance of another, if consistently applied to commercial dealings, would carry us far beyond what any individualist has ventured practically to recommend; and-if it could ever be effectually carried out-would seriously impair the

K