GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

800 ETHICS AND POLITICS! THE MODERNS
him how we please, and that we should equally be entitled
to worship no Cod at all; that we should be able, if wronged,
to invoke the law in bur defence against the highest in the
land; that no official of the State, no representative of the
law, should be allowed unjustly to oppress us with impunity ;
that we may not be accused, or our persons detained, save
for offences determined by
the law of the land and in
accordance with the procedure which the law prescribes,
and that, should we be so accused, we may not be held in
custody without being brought to trial; that the law should
be one which we ourselves through our elected representa-
tives in Parliament have a voice in determining, and that,
if we dislike it, and can persuade a sufficient number of
our fellow citizens to our way of thinking, we should be
able to change it these things and others like them taken
together are the content of what is known as political
liberty. Having enumerated them it is difficult to deny
oneself the pleasure of asking those who make light of
liberty as a thing of no account, regarding it as a superfluity,
or even seeing in it a dangerous distraction from the
pursuit of economic justice, what there is in the content
I have described that militates against the economic
changes they desire. The answer is, I submit, not easy to
find. There is, indeed, good ground for thinking that,
as I have suggested on a previous page, 1 the possession
of political liberty, so far from being a bar to economic
equality, is a necessary condition of its realization.
It contributes to the current belittlement of liberty
that its enjoyment is a negative rather than a positive good.
When we have it, we do not realize that we have it: we
realize it and realize that it is a good only when we are
deprived erf it. In this sense liberty is like health or air.
We normally value health only when we have lost it, or,
having lost it, have just regained it, when the memory of
illness is still vividly with us. Similarly with air; we value
it only if it is taken from us, when we value it so much that
we proceed to die unless it is restored to us. So men
1 See pp. 782*784 above.