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

' THEORY OF DEMOCRACY 8oi
normally value liberty only when it is denied to them;
but its denial is a denial of all that makes life worth living,
so that the spirit of the prisoner cries out for liberty, and
again for liberty, as the lungs of the man who is choking
cry out for air; for liberty is the air of the spirit.
It is, indeed, only when they lose their humanity that
men cease to mourn the loss of liberty. But if men and
women are not free to think as they please, they do indeed
lose their title to humanity; for it is by our power of
thinking that we are chiefly distinguished from the beasts.
If they are not free to speak as they please, men become
gramophone records for speaking the thoughts of others.
If they are not free to act as they please, they become
automata doing the will of others.
The man who may at any moment be arrested without
warrant, imprisoned without trial and left to languish in
prison at the pleasure of the government, lives under the
shadow of a fear which takes all the sweetness from his life.
For the
security,
indispensable background of the good life is
and there is no security where liberty depends
upon the fiat of unchecked authority.
Nor fa it an answer to say that the welfare of the State
demands the suppression of certain individual freedoms:
the freedom, for example, to criticize the government.
from the
For the welfare of the State is nothing apart
good of the citizens who it. compose It is no doubt true
that a State whose citizens are compelled to go right is
more efficient than one whose citizens are free to go wrong.
But what then? To sacrifice freedom in the interests of
efficiency, is to sacrifice what confers upon human beings
their humanity. It is no doubt easy to govern a flock of
sheep; but there is no credit in the governing, and, if the
sheep were born as men, no virtue in the sheep.
D. The Principle of Equality
The principle of equality includes a number of different
conceptions. No democrat is so foolish as to suppose that all
men'are equal, though some have maintained that they are
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