national existence-depends on national character infinitely more than on any external causes. And national character is the outcome of the individual character; of the characters of the men and the women composing the nation. Assuredly the State should do all that it properly can to maintain and heighten the morality of its subjects. "All that it properly can." It is not the office of the State directly to make men moral. That is impossible. Morality is of the will. It is not a matter of compulsion. "The quality of mercy is not strained." And the same is true of every ethical quality. A power of choice is a condition of virtue. I do not doubt that Milton's masterly argument on this topic in the Areopagitica is familiar to most of my readers. But I may be permitted to cite a pregnant passage of it.

Impunity and remissness for certain are the bane of a commonwealth and here the great art lies-to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. If every action which is good or evil in man at ripe years were to be under pittance, prescription, and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent? Were I

the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil-doing. For God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person, more than the restraint of ten vicious.

We may say, then, that the function of the State as to morality, is, first to maintain the conditions

necessary for freedom of individual choice, and secondly to encourage the helps and restrain the hindrances to right choice, so far as it can without infringement of that freedom. This is the general principle, although there are cases they are most rare-in which the State may go beyond it, for the protection of its own supreme rights.

Let me illustrate this principle by three concrete examples. The first two are suggested by the words of Milton: sobriety and continence. There can be no question that the prevalence of the habit of drunkenness in any country is a great national scandal and a great national mischief. I suppose it will be universally admitted to be the right and duty of the State to limit the places and hours at which, and the person to whom, intoxicating liquors may be sold by retail. And the reason, as Mill has well pointed out, is, that the interest of the sellers of such liquors "in promoting intemperance is a real evil, and justifies the State in imposing restrictions and requiring guarantees, which, but for that justification, would be infringements of legitimate liberty." But that justification cannot be urged for the legislation demanded by the advocates of what is called "Local Option." Its essence is this: that if the greater number of the inhabitants of a district so choose, they should be able to forbid the sale of intoxicating liquors therein, and to enforce teetotal

1 On Liberty, p. 180.

ism upon all who are not rich enough to keep a supply of alcoholic drinks in their own houses. It is difficult to imagine any more flagrant violation of the most elementary liberties of the subject. If such tyranny were attempted by an autocratic ruler -the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of Russia, for example—all the world would recognise this. But how does tyranny lose its tyrannousness because it is perpetrated, not by one man, but by a number of men? The arguments in defence of it put forward by its most zealous advocates, as accurately set forth by Mill, are, that the traffic in strong drink interferes with a man's social rights; that it destroys his primary right of security, by constantly creating and stimulating social disorder; that it invades his right of equality by deriving a profit from the creation of a misery which he is taxed to support 1; that it impedes his right to free moral and intellectual development by surrounding his path with dangers, and by weakening and demoralising society, from which he has a right to claim mutual aid and intercourse. Upon which Mill admirably observes, "A theory of social rights, the like of which, probably, never before found its way into distinct language-being nothing short of this—that it is the absolute social right of every individual that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought; that

'I give this as I find it, but I confess I do not know what it means. The right of equality before the law is the only right of equality that I understand.

whosoever fails thereof, in the smallest particular, violates my social right, and entitles me to demand from the Legislature the removal of the grievance. There is no violation of liberty which so monstrous a principle would not justify." I add that reformed public-houses, such as under the Gothenburg system, or under the high-licence system of certain American States, or under a government monopoly, as by the recent great reform in Russia, are by no means in this condemnation. They are legitimate and laudable attempts to fulfil, according to national circumstances, an important function of the State.

But the question is

Next as to continence. part of a larger subject-the sexual relations of men and women. It is a subject in which the State is most deeply interested. Civil society springs from the family. And the family rests upon the chastity of women. It is a true saying that the ethical man is formed at the knees of his mother. The kind of men the country turns out-and that is what the greatness of a country depends uponwill ever be determined by the kind of women a country breeds. The moral tone of a country is decided by women. And their goodness or badness -as our very language witnesses-depends chiefly upon their purity. All feminine virtues are rooted in this one virtue of chastity. Renan's saying is

1 On Liberty, p. 161.

true to the letter: La force d'une nation, c'est la pudeur de ses femmes.

What, then, is the function of the State in respect of sexual morality? Let us consider its function first with regard to the licit union of the sexes in marriage, and next with regard to their illicit union out of marriage.

There are those-Advanced Thinkers they call themselves-who hold that any interference of the State with marriage, except in certain cases for the enforcement of abortion, or for the punishment of the non-fulfilment of that new duty, is altogether unwarrantable, as an invasion of what they consider individual rights. We are assured by one of the ablest of them that "our present marriage customs and our present marriage law are destined to suffer great changes"; that "it seems not improbable that, when woman is truly educated and equally developed with man, she will hold that the highest relation of man and woman is akin to that of Lewes and George Eliot," "not a union for the birth of children, but the closest form of friendship between man and woman "; that "in the society of the future a birth will have [that is, will require] social sanction"; and that "in times of over-population, it might even be needful to punish positively, as well as negatively, both father and mother" guilty of allowing "a birth beyond the sanctioned number": but that for "a non-childbearing woman" "the sex