The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction to the Third Edition.
• On Civil Liberty and Self-government.
• Chapter I.: Introductory.
• Chapter II.: Definitions of Liberty.
• Chapter III.: The Meaning of Civil Liberty.
• Chapter IV.: Ancient and Modern Liberty.—Ancient, Medieval, and Modern States.
• Chapter V.: Anglican Liberty.
• Chapter VI.: National Independence—Personal Liberty.
• Chapter VII.: Bail.—Penal Trial.
• Chapter VIII.: High Treason.
• Chapter IX.: Communion.—Locomotion, Emigration.
• Chapter X.: Liberty of Conscience.—Property:—Supremacy of the Law.
• Chapter XI.: Quartering Soldiers.—The Army.
• Chapter XII.: Petition.—Association.
• Chapter XIII.: Publicity.
• Chapter XIV.: Supremacy of the Law.—Taxation.—Division of Power.
• Chapter XV.: Responsible Ministers.—Courts Declaring Laws Unconstitutional.—Representative Government.
• Chapter XVI.: Representative Government, Continued.—Basis of Property.—Direct and Indirect Elections.
• Chapter XVII.: Parliamentary Law and Usage.—The Speaker.—Two Houses.—The Veto.
• Chapter XVIII.: Independence of the Judiciary.—The Law Jus, Common Law.
• Chapter XIX.: Independence of Jus, Self-development of Law, Continued.—Accusatorial and Inquisitorial Trials.—Independence of the Judge.
• Chapter XX.: Independence of Jus, Continued.—Trial By Jury.—The Advocate.
• Chapter XXI.: Self—Government.
• Chapter XXII.: American Liberty.
• Chapter XXIII.: In What Civil Liberty Consists, Proved By Contraries.
• Chapter XXIV.: Gallican Liberty.—Spreading of Liberty.
• Chapter XXV.: The Institution.—Its Definition.—Its Power For Good and Evil.
• Chapter XXVI.: The Institution, Continued.—Institutional Liberty.—Institutional Local Self-government.
• Chapter XXVII.: Effects and Uses of Institutional Self-government.
• Chapter XXVIII.: Dangers and Inconveniences of Institutional Self-government.
• Chapter XXIX.: Advantages of Institutional Government, Farther Considered.
• Chapter XXX.: Institutional Government the Only Government Which Prevents the Growth of Too Much Power.—Liberty, Wealth, and Longevity of States.
• Chapter XXXI.: Insecurity Op Uninstitutional Governments.—Unorganized Inarticulated Popular Power.
• Chapter XXXII.: Imperatorial Sovereignty.
• Chapter XXXIII.: Imperatorial Sovereignty, Continued.—Its Origin and Character Examined.
• Chapter XXXIV.: Centralization.—Influence Of Capital Cities.
• Chapter XXXV.: Vox Populi Vox Dei.
• Appendix.
• Appendix I.: A Paper On Elections, Election Statistics, and General Votes of Yes Or No.
• Appendix II.: A Paper On the Abuse of the Pardoning Power.
• Appendix III.: A Paper On Subjects Connected With the Inquisitorial Trial and the Laws of Evidence.
• Appendix IV.: Magna Charta of King John, Fifteenth Day of June, In the Seventeenth Year of the King's Reign, A.d. 1215.
• Appendix V.: The Petition of Right. 1
• Appendix VI.: An Act For the Better Securing the Liberty of the Subject, and For Prevention of Imprisonments Beyond the Seas, Commonly Called “the Habeas Corpus Act.” 1
• Appendix VII.: Bill of Rights, Passed 1 William and Mary, Sess. 2, Ch. 2, 1689.
• Appendix VIII.: A Declaration By the Representatives of the United States of America In Congress Assembled.
• Appendix IX.: Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union Between the States.
• Appendix X.: Constitution of the United States of America.
• Appendix XI.: The French Constitution, Adopted and Proclaimed On the Twenty-fourth of June 1793. the First Republican Constitution
• Declarations of the Rights of Man and of Citizens.
• Constitution of the Twenty-fourth of June, 1793.
• Appendix XII.: French Charter of Louis XVIII. And That Adopted In the Year 1830.
• Appendix XIII.: Constitution of the French Republic. Adopted November, 1848.
• Appendix XIV.: The Present Constitution of France.
• Appendix XV.: Report of the French Senatorial Committee On the Petitions to Change the Republic Into an Empire, In November, 1852, 1 and the Senatus-consultum Adopted In Conformity With It.
• Appendix XVI.: Letter of the French Minister of the Interior, Mr. De Morny, Addressed to the Prefects of the Deparments In the Year 1852.

chapter xi.

quartering soldiers.—the army.

12.Governments, if not very closely hedged in, have it in their power to worry citizens into submission by many indirect methods. One of these, frequently resorted to since the introduction of standing armies, is, that soldiers are billeted with the disaffected citizens. An insolent soldiery, supported by the executive, find a thousand ways of annoying, insulting, and ruining the family with whom they are quartered. It has been deemed necessary, therefore, specially to prohibit the quartering of soldiers with citizens, as an important guarantee of civil liberty. The English Bill of Rights, “declaring the rights and liberties of the subject,” of 1688, enumerates in the preamble, as one of the proofs that James II. “did endeavor to subvert and extirpate”… “the laws and liberties of this kingdom,” his “raising and keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, without consent of parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to law.”1 It is in England, therefore, a high offence to quarter soldiers without consent of parliament; and the Constitution of the United States ordains that “no soldier shall in time of peace be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law. “The framers of the constitution, it will be observed, were very exact in drawing up this paragraph.

Persons not versed in the history of civil liberty and of progressive absolutism might be surprised at this singling out of quartering soldiers in documents of such elevated character and condensed national demands as the Bill of Rights and the American Constitution are; but the “dragonnades” of Lours XIV. in France, of James II. in Scotland, and those of more recent and present date in certain countries, furnish sufficient justification for this specific guarantee.

13. The preceding safeguard, although justly pointed out separately, is still only part of the general one that the forces must be strictly submitted to the law. The navy cannot be, in its nature, so formidable an instrument in the hands of the executive as the army. It cannot be brought to bear upon the people; it is not centralized in its character, and it cannot surround the ruler. There are many other reasons why the navy, the floating bulwarks of a nation, has always shown an inherent affinity with the popular element, and why free nations only can have efficient navies or merchant fleets.1

It is far different with the land forces. Ever since standing armies have been established, it has been necessary, in various ways, to prevent the army from becoming independent of the legislature. There is no liberty, for one who is bred in the Anglican school, where there is not a perfect submission of the army to the legislature of the people. We hold it to be necessary, therefore, to make but brief appropriations for the army. The King of England cannot raise an army, or any part of it, without act of parliament;2 the army-estimates are passed for one year only; so that, were parliament to refuse appropriations, after a twelvemonth the army would be dissolved. The mutiny-bill, by which power is given to the king to hold courts-martial for certain offences in the army, is likewise passed for a year only; so that, without repassing it, the crown would have no power even to keep up military discipline.

The Constitution of the United States makes the president, indeed, commander-in-chief, but he cannot enlist a man, or pay a dollar for his support, without the previous appropriation by congress, to which the constitution gives “power to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces,” and to which it denies the authority of making any appropriation for the support of the national forces for a longer term than two years.

The importance of this dependence of the army upon the civil power has been felt by all parties. While the people are bent on submitting the army to the legislature, the governments, which in the late European struggles were anxious to grant as little liberty as possible, always endeavored to exclude the army from the obligation of taking the constitutional oath. Constitutional oaths, like other political oaths, are indeed no firm guarantee in times of civil disturbance; but where circumstances are such that people must start in the career of freedom with an enacted constitution, it is natural and necessary that the army should take the oath of fidelity to the fundamental law, like any other persons employed in public service, especially where the oath of allegiance to the monarch continues. The oath, when taken, we have already admitted, does not furnish any great security; but in this, as in so many other cases, the negative assumes a very great and distinct importance, although the positive may be destitute of any direct weight. The refusal of this oath shows distinctly that the executive does not intend frankly to enter on the path of civil freedom. This was lately the case in Prussia, when it was the endeavor of the people to establish constitutional liberty.

The Declaration of Independence says: “He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislatures. “It is enumerated as a radical grievance, plain and palpable to every Anglican mind. Immediately after, the Declaration significantly adds: “He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power. “This “affected” is striking. The attempt of doing it, though the term “affected” indicates the want of success, is counted as a grievance sufficient to warrant, among others, an extinction of allegiance. Of the twenty-seven grievances enumerated in the Declaration as justification for a revolution, three relate to the army.1

Dr. Samuel Johnson, not biased, as the reader well knows, in favor of popular liberties, nevertheless showed that he was bred in England, when he speaks of “the greatest of political evils—the necessity of ruling by immediate force.”2 There is, however, a greater evil still—the ruling by immediate force when it is not necessary or against the people.

Standing armies are not only dangerous to civil liberty because directly depending upon the executive. They have the additional evil effect that they infuse into the whole nation—especially when they are national armies, so that the old soldiers return continually to the people—a spirit directly opposite to that which ought to be the general spirit of a free people devoted to self-government. A nation of freemen stands in need of a pervading spirit of obedience to the laws; an army teaches and must teach a spirit of prompt obedience to orders. Habits of disobedience and of contempt for the citizen are produced, and a view of government is induced which is contrary to liberty, self-reliance, self-government. Command ought to rule in an army; self-development of law and self-sustaining order ought to pervade a free people. A German king, in one of his throne speeches, when a liberal spirit had already manifested itself in that country, said: “The will of one must ultimately rule in the government, even as it is in the camp.” This shows exactly what we mean. The entire state, with its jural and civic character, is compared to a camp, and ruinous inferences are drawn from the comparison.

The officers of a large army are in the habit of contemptuously speaking of the “babbling lawyers.” Les légistes have always been spoken of by the French officers in the same tone as “those lawyers” were talked of by Stafford and Laud. Where the people worship the army, an opinion is engendered as if really courage in battle were the highest phase of humanity; and the army, in turn, more than aught else, leads to the worship of one man—so detrimental to liberty. All debate is in common times odious to the soldiers. They habitually ridicule parliamentary debates of long duration. Act, act, is their cry, which in that case means: Command and obey are the two poles round which public life ought to turn. A man who has been a soldier himself, and has seen the inspiring and rallying effect which a distinctive uniform may have in battle—the desire not to disgrace the coat—is not likely to fall in with the sweeping denunciations of the uniform, now frequently uttered by the “peace-men;” but it is true that the uniform, if constantly worn, and if the army is large, as on the continent of Europe, greatly aids in separating the army from the people, and in increasing that alienating esprit de corps which ought not to exist where the people value their liberty. Modern despotism carefully fosters this spirit of separation, because it relies mainly on the standing army. The insolence of the officers of Napoleon I. rose to a frightful degree, even in France itself; and many startling events have lately occurred in that country, showing how far Napoleon III. indulges his officers in insulting and maltreating the citizen.1 No security whatever arises from the fact that the army is “democratic” in its character. On the contrary, the danger is only the greater, because it makes the army apparently a part of the people; the people themselves look to it for one of the careers in which they may expect promotion, (not quite unlike the church in the middle ages,) while, in spite of all this, the army becomes a secluded caste, essentially opposed to the aspirations of the people. No better illustration is afforded in history, of this important fact, than by the present state of things in France.

Nor is the case better when the army is the ruling body, and its officers belong exclusively to the country nobility, n a country where every son of a nobleman is likewise noble, and a large, poor nobility is the consequence. A numerous and poor nobility is one of the most injurious and ruinous things in a state. It leads infallibly to that spirit which tries to make up by arrogance what it does not possess in wealth or substance, which considers the state as an institution made for the provision of the poor noblemen, and disregards the true and the high interests of the nation—a state of things which revealed itself, for Prussia, in the terrible disaster at Jena, in 1806, and which has received in that and other German countries, of late, the distinct appellation of Junkerthum.

Standing armies, therefore, wherever necessary—and they are necessary at present, as well as far preferable to the medieval militia—ought to be as small as possible, and completely dependent on the legislature for their existence. Such standing armies as we see in the different countries of the European continent are wholly incompatible with civil liberty, by their spirit, number, and cost.

A perfect dependence of the forces, however, requires more than short appropriations, and limited authority of the executive over them. It is further necessary—because they are under strict discipline, and therefore under a strong influence of the executive—that these forces, and especially the army”, be not allowed to become deliberative bodies, and that they be not allowed to vote as military bodies. Wherever these guarantees have been disregarded, liberty has fallen. These are rules of importance at all times, but especially in countries where, unfortunately, very large standing armies exist. In France, the army consists of half a million, yet universal suffrage gave it the right to vote, and the army as well as the navy did vote to justify the second of December, as well as to make Louis Napoleon Bonaparte emperor. This may be in harmony with French “equality;” it may be democratic, if this term be taken in the sense in which it is wholly unconnected with liberty; all that we—people with whom liberty is more than a theory, or something aesthetically longed for, and who learn liberty as the artisan learns his craft, by handling it—all that we know is, that it is not liberty; that it is directly destructive of it.1

It was formerly the belief that standing armies were incompatible with liberty, and a very small one was granted to the King of England with much reluctance; but in France we see a gigantic standing army, itself incompatible with liberty, for which in addition the right of voting is claimed.

The Bill of Rights, and our own Declaration of Independence, show how large a place the army occupied in the minds of the patriotic citizens and statesmen who drew up those historic documents, the reasons they had to mention it repeatedly, and to erect fences against it.

Military bodies ought not to be allowed even the right of petitioning, as bodies. History fully proves the danger, that must be guarded against.2 English history, as well as that of other nations, furnishes us with instructive instances.

A wise medium is necessary; for an army without thorough unity is useless; indeed, worse than useless. It produces a thousand evils without any good; while it must always be considered as a distinct postulate of Civil Liberty, that a well-organized army is of itself a subject of great danger. To make an efficient army, in modern times, harmonize with all the demands of substantial civil liberty is doubtless one of the problems of our race and age, and one most difficult to solve—forming, perhaps, with the problem of carrying out a high degree of individual liberty in large and densely-peopled cities, the two most difficult problems of high, patriotic, and substantial statesmanship.

14. Akin to the last-mentioned guarantee is that which secures to every citizen the right of possessing and bearing arms. Our constitution says: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed upon;” and the Bill of Rights secured this right to every Protestant. It extends now to every English subject. It will hardly be necessary to add, that laws prohibiting secret weapons, or those which necessarily endanger the lives of the citizens, are no infringement of liberty; on the contrary, liberty resting necessarily on law, and a lawful, that is peaceful, state of the citizens, liberty itself requires the suppression of a return to force and violence among the citizens—a fact by no means sufficiently weighed in recent times in America.

Whenever attempts at establishing liberty have lately been made on the continent of Europe, a general military organization of the people, or “national guards,” has been deemed necessary; but we cannot point them out as characteristics of Anglican liberty.

[1.][See the Petition of Right in Appendix V., and Forster's Life of Sir John Eliot, for earlier complaints about this old outrage.]

[1.][The individual nature of the seaman is developed by many of his duties, while armies act chiefly as bodies and are directly under command.]

[2.]The guards of Charles II. were declared anti-constitutional, and the army of James II. was one of the evidences by which he was presumed to have abdicated; that is, in other words, one of his breaches of the fundamental law of the land. A new sanction was given to this principle in the sixth article of the Bill of Rights which runs thus: “A standing army, without the consent of parliament, is against law.”

[1.]A remarkable debate took place in the British commons in April, 1856, when Mr. Cowan brought under the notice of the house the billeting system pursued in Scotland, according to which “militia and troops of the line are billeted upon private houses in Scotland.” “It is an intolerable grievance.” Redress was obtained.

[2.]Considerations on the Corn Laws, by Dr. Samuel Johnson.

[1.]I write at the beginning of 1859.

[1.]The French soldiers vote at present, whenever universal suffrage is appealed to—not with the citizens, but for themselves, and the way in which this military voting generally takes place is very remarkable.

[2.]I do not feel authorized to say that the Anglicans consider it an elementary guarantee of liberty not to be subjected to the obligation of serving in the army, but certain it is that, as matters now stand and as our feelings now are, we should not consider it compatible with individual liberty—indeed, it would be considered as intolerable oppression—if we were forced to spend part of our lives in the standing army. It would not be tolerated. The feeling would be as strong against the French system of conscription, which drafts by lot a certain number of young men for the army, and permits those who have been drafted to furnish substitutes, as against the Prussian system, which obliges every one, from the highest to the lowest, to serve a certain time in the standing army, with the exception only of a few “mediatized princes.” The Anglicans, therefore, may be said to be at present unequivocally in favor of enlisted standing armies, where standing armies are necessary.