On Liberty John Stuart Mill Batoche Books

On Liberty/91living is grounded on the counteraction of it. Ought this to be interferedwith, or not? Fornication, for example, must be tolerated, and so mustgambling; but should a person be free to be a pimp, or to keep a gambling-house?The case is one of those which lie on the exact boundaryline between two principles, and it is not at once apparent to which ofthe two it properly belongs.There are arguments on both sides. On the side of toleration it maybe said that the fact of following anything as an occupation, and livingor profiting by the practice of it, cannot make that criminal which wouldotherwise be admissible; that the act should either be consistently permittedor consistently prohibited; that if the principles which we havehitherto defended are true, society has no business, as society, to decideanything to be wrong which concerns only the individual; that it cannotgo beyond dissuasion, and that one person should be as free to persuadeas another to dissuade. In opposition to this it may be contended, thatalthough the public, or the State, are not warranted in authoritativelydeciding, for purposes of repression or punishment, that such or suchconduct affecting only the interests of the individual is good or bad, theyare fully justified in assuming, if they regard it as bad, that its being soor not is at least a disputable question: That, this being supposed, theycannot be acting wrongly in endeavouring to exclude the influence ofsolicitations which are not disinterested, of instigators who cannot possiblybe impartial—who have a direct personal interest on one side, andthat side the one which the State believes to be wrong, and who confessedlypromote it for personal objects only. There can surely, it may beurged, be nothing lost, no sacrifice of good, by so ordering matters thatpersons shall make their election, either wisely or foolishly, on their ownprompting, as free as possible from the arts of persons who stimulatetheir inclinations for interested purposes of their own. Thus (it may besaid) though the statutes respecting unlawful games are utterly indefensible—thoughall persons should be free to gamble in their own or eachother’s houses, or in any place of meeting established by their own subscriptions,and open only to the members and their visitors—yet publicgambling-houses should not be permitted. It is true that the prohibitionis never effectual, and that, whatever amount of tyrannical power maybe given to the police, gambling-houses can always be maintained underother pretences; but they may be compelled to conduct their operationswith a certain degree of secrecy and mystery, so that nobody knowsanything about them but those who seek them; and more than this soci-