The second of the dangers referred to above--the inevitable restrictions on liberty consummated by parliamentary assemblies--is apparently less obvious, but is, nevertheless, very real.It is the result of the innumerable laws--having always a restrictive action--which parliaments consider themselves obliged to vote and to whose consequences, owing to their shortsightedness, they are in a great measure blind.
The danger must indeed be most inevitable, since even England itself, which assuredly offers the most popular type of the parliamentary regime, the type in which the representative is most independent of his elector, has been unable to escape it.
Herbert Spencer has shown, in a work already old, that the increase of apparent liberty must needs be followed by the decrease of real liberty.Returning to this contention in his recent book, "The Individual versus the State," he thus expresses himself with regard to the English Parliament:--"Legislation since this period has followed the course, I pointed out.Rapidly multiplying dictatorial measures have continually tended to restrict individual liberties, and this in two ways.
Regulations have been established every year in greater number, imposing a constraint on the citizen in matters in which his acts were formerly completely free, and forcing him to accomplish acts which he was formerly at liberty to accomplish or not to accomplish at will.At the same time heavier and heavier public, and especially local, burdens have still further restricted his liberty by diminishing the portion of his profits he can spend as he chooses, and by augmenting the portion which is taken from him to be spent according to the good pleasure of the public authorities."This progressive restriction of liberties shows itself in every country in a special shape which Herbert Spencer has not pointed out; it is that the passing of these innumerable series of legislative measures, all of them in a general way of a restrictive order, conduces necessarily to augment the number, the power, and the influence of the functionaries charged with their application.These functionaries tend in this way to become the veritable masters of civilised countries.Their power is all the greater owing to the fact that, amidst the incessant transfer of authority, the administrative caste is alone in being untouched by these changes, is alone in possessing irresponsibility, impersonality, and perpetuity.There is no more oppressive despotism than that which presents itself under this triple form.
This incessant creation of restrictive laws and regulations, surrounding the pettiest actions of existence with the most complicated formalities, inevitably has for its result the confining within narrower and narrower limits of the sphere in which the citizen may move freely.Victims of the delusion that equality and liberty are the better assured by the multiplication of laws, nations daily consent to put up with trammels increasingly burdensome.They do not accept this legislation with impunity.Accustomed to put up with every yoke, they soon end by desiring servitude, and lose all spontaneousness and energy.They are then no more than vain shadows, passive, unresisting and powerless automata.
Arrived at this point, the individual is bound to seek outside himself the forces he no longer finds within him.The functions of governments necessarily increase in proportion as the indifference and helplessness of the citizens grow.They it is who must necessarily exhibit the initiative, enterprising, and guiding spirit in which private persons are lacking.It falls on them to undertake everything, direct everything, and take everything under their protection.The State becomes an all-powerful god.Still experience shows that the power of such gods was never either very durable or very strong.
This progressive restriction of all liberties in the case of certain peoples, in spite of an outward license that gives them the illusion that these liberties are still in their possession, seems at least as much a consequence of their old age as of any particular system.It constitutes one of the precursory symptoms of that decadent phase which up to now no civilisation has escaped.
