We humans are choice-making animals. The freedom to make choices is both a blessing and a curse. Depending on age, temperament, information, and alternatives, some people experience the opportunity for choice as exhilarating, others as tormenting. Traditionally, it was one of the functions of religion to relieve people of choices. Today, psychiatry and the therapeutic state perform the same job.

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969)—the great twentieth-century German psychiatrist-turned-philosopher—understood this. But he identified only one part of this drama, the patient’s: “Generally formulated, we may say that these people [“neurotics”] are determined that events for which they are accountable and in which they are understandably concerned shall be taken as mere happenings, for which they are entirely irresponsible.” Psychiatrists were, and are, happy to play the other part, authenticating the person’s false self-definition as mental patient—medical object, not moral actor.

Lord Acton

There is important religious precedent for the authoritative declaration of falsehood as truth. In 1870, under the leadership of the legendary Pope Pius IX—Pio Nono, the longest-reigning and one of the most colorful popes in history—the Vatican declared the dogma of papal infallibility. This was anathema to Lord Acton (1834–1902), the most respected Catholic layman in Europe in his time. Alienated from the Church, Acton did not leave it; and, probably because he had not been ordained, he was not excommunicated. It was in the context of this moral conflict that, in 1887, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, Acton made his famous pronouncement:

Most people who quote Lord Acton’s famous dictum today are unaware it refers to papal power and was made by a devout Catholic. In 1882 Acton, now alienated from his great teacher and lifelong friend, Father Johann Ignaz von Döllinger, who was excommunicated for opposing the infallibility doctrine, writes him:

Acton regarded the claim of papal infallibility as evidence of intolerable religious arrogance and power. I regard psychiatric infallibility—the unfalsifiability and irrefutability of psychiatric diagnoses backed by mental-health laws—as evidence of intolerable psychiatric arrogance and power.

Acton thought “he witnessed the triumph of error in history.” Indeed, he had. Today, we witness a similar—but more ominous—triumph of error in medicine-psychiatry. In addition to persuading the public and the government that human problems are medical diseases, psychiatrists have succeeded in abolishing the concepts of responsibility, guilt, and innocence, and in replacing punishment with the irrefutable and ineradicable stigmata of psychiatric “diagnoses” and “treatments.” “Modern psychiatry,” I wrote in 1970, “dehumanize[s] man by denying . . . the existence, or even the possibility, of personal responsibility, central to the concept of man as moral agent.” It accomplishes that evil by treating responsibility, following Ambrose Bierce, as “a detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbor.” In our day, it is not merely customary but, in matters that really count, mandatory to unload responsibility on Mental Illness (“he snapped,” “had a breakdown,” “battled his demons,” “was on drugs,” “went off prescribed medication,” and so forth).

In Acton’s day the separation of church and state was an established political practice in many countries. Hence, the Church’s moral failures and self-arrogated powers affected only persons who chose to be its adherents. Our predicament is more serious. We live at a time when the alliance of medicine-psychiatry and the state is taken for granted—viewed as an unalterable social fact and undoubted moral and social good. Everyone, regardless of personal choice, is affected, directly or indirectly, by the powers of the therapeutic state.

Psychiatry and the State

Given its limited legal-political powers, the Vatican could not have tried to purge the world of its critics, much less intimidate them into becoming its crypto-supporters. In contrast, in our day the alliance of psychiatry and the state has enabled pharmacracy to do just that. Its so-called critics—who call themselves “antipsychiatrists,” “critical psychiatrists,” “ethical psychiatrists,” and so on—oppose one or another psychiatric “diagnosis” or “treatment,” rarely even psychiatric coercion. But they all support the view that the misbehavior of individuals afflicted with/suffering from so-called mental illnesses ought not be regulated by the same rules as are the misbehaviors of individuals not so denominated: They recoil from defending an ethic based on personal responsibility for public actions (as distinct from private actions, called “thoughts”) and of every individual’s inalienable right to his or her life and death, lest they appear uncompassionate and, perish the thought, unscientific and illiberal (in the modern, statist sense of “liberal”). Thus they endorse—explicitly or by the assent of silence—psychiatry’s war on responsibility, epitomized by the wars on drugs, mental illness, and suicide and by the insanity defense.

“Truth,” said Thomas Jefferson, “will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known and seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. . . . It is error alone which needs the support of government.” Jefferson was right in applying this principle to religion: modern states should not (and for the most part do not) lend their coercive powers to the support of the clerical lies of priests. Nor should they lend their coercive powers to the support of the clinical lies of psychiatrists. As long as they do, serious persons ought not to take psychiatry seriously—except as a threat to reason, responsibility, and liberty.

It’s understandable that the under-informed general public associates states’ rights with slavery, Jim Crow, Bull Connor’s police dogs, and “segregation forever.” But classical liberals ought to take a longer view. “States’ rights” merely stands for the propositions that (1) the Constitution should be interpreted strictly with regard to the narrow set of enumerated powers granted the federal government; and (2) that the states can nullify or obstruct federal actions that violate the Constitution. As such, the doctrine has a long and honorable pedigree among advocates of limited government. States’ rights, in the view of classical liberals like Lord Acton, was no mere excuse for states to violate the rights of their citizens. Rather, the independence of the states in the period before the Civil War served as an effective check on federal aggrandizement. As Acton put it, “Centralization finds a natural barrier in the several State governments.”

Modern libertarians tend to have a different perspective, believing that strong federal oversight is indispensable to securing liberty. For example, John McLaughry, head of the libertarian Ethan Allen Institute, says the doctrine of states’ rights is little more than “a hoary legacy from the days of human slavery.” This view rests on a tendentious version of history, one quite at odds with Lord Acton’s, to the effect that in the nineteenth century, state governments were a more serious danger to individual freedom than the federal government. (That perspective is perhaps best encapsulated in Bolick’s Grassroots Tyranny [1993]. See also the Civil War history offered in “Reviving the Privileges or Immunities Clause” by Kimberly C. Shankman and Roger Pilon; Cato Policy Analysis No. 326, at http://www.cato.org.)

The true story is more complicated, and, from a libertarian perspective, far more favorable to the states than the federal government. During the nineteenth century, the people, through the agency of their respective states, repeatedly and effectively resisted federal tyranny. A brief historical survey will make that clear. It will also, I hope, suggest some reasons why modern libertarians should rethink their hostility to states’ rights.

The “Reign of Witches” and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions

The nation was still in its infancy, and the Bill of Rights not a decade old, when the Federalist party flagrantly violated the First Amendment with the Sedition Act. The Act criminalized uttering or publishing anything of a “false, scandalous, and malicious nature” with the intent to bring the government or its officers “into contempt and disrepute.” Anyone found guilty could be fined up to $2,000 and imprisoned for two years. The Federalists promptly put it to use in a crackdown aimed at their political enemies.

One Luther Baldwin was convicted of violating the act for little more than the rough expression of admirable libertarian sentiment. Stumbling into a Newark, New Jersey, saloon, during a parade for President John Adams, Baldwin asked what all the ruckus was. A cannon salute for President Adams, he was told. Baldwin exclaimed that it was all the same to him if the cannon was shot up Adams’s rear end. Other convictions were less amusing. David Brown of Dedham, Massachusetts, was sent to jail for 18 months for refusing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase’s order to name associates who shared Brown’s Jeffersonian views. Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont, an Irish-born republican radical, was imprisoned for criticizing President Adams’s alleged “continual grasp for power.” While in jail, Lyons was overwhelmingly re-elected to his seat.

Vice President Thomas Jefferson saw the Federalists’ tyrannical rule as a “reign of witches.” He and James Madison determined to oppose the Alien and Sedition Acts through the agency of the state governments of Virginia and Kentucky. As historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick put it in their book The Age of Federalism, “the protest was taken up in a formal way by no less a power than the constituted legislatures of two states against an act of the national government.” Acting in secret, Jefferson drafted the Kentucky Resolutions, Madison, the Virginia ones. Each articulated the “compact” theory of the Union: that the states are equal partners in the federal union, each with the power to interpret the Constitution and thwart federal abuses thereof.

The Virginia Resolutions warned that “a spirit has in sundry instances, been manifested by the Federal Government… to consolidate the States by degrees, into one sovereignty, the obvious tendency and inevitable consequence of which would be, to transform the present republican system of the United States, into an absolute, or at best a mixed monarchy.” The states, declared the Resolutions, “have the right and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.” Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions urged the other states to join Kentucky “in declaring [the Alien and Sedition] acts void and of no force.”

With Jefferson’s accession to the presidency, the “reign of witches” passed, as Jefferson ended prosecutions under the Acts. But the compact theory of the Union lived on, to be invoked again in the service of individual rights.

Nullifying the Tariff of Abominations

During the nullification “crisis” of 1828-33, the power of the states was again employed to counter federal abuses. In For Good and Evil.’ The Impact of Taxes on the Course of History, Charles Adams describes the disproportionate burden that the federal tariff imposed on the Southern states: “The South exported about three quarters of its goods and in turn used the money to buy European goods, which carried the high import tax.” Most of the revenue was spent on internal improvements and other federal projects in the North.

Understandably, the South chafed at the burdens imposed by the tax system. Some of her most prominent political leaders argued that the Constitution granted no power to tax for the purpose of protecting industry, as opposed to raising revenue. With the tariff of 1828, the “Tariff of Abominations,” the battle was joined. The South Carolina legislature denounced the tariff, which brought duties to their highest pre-Civil War level, as “unconstitutional, oppressive, and unjust.”

Playing Jefferson’s role of 30 years before, Vice President John C. Calhoun secretly wrote South Carolina’s Exposition and Protest, in which he outlined the doctrine of nullification. According to Calhoun, state conventions, the same bodies that had ratified the Constitution, could nullify federal legislation that they considered to be in violation of that document. The federal government thereupon could only enforce the law if it secured a new constitutional amendment through the approval of three-fourths of the states.

Calhoun intended the doctrine as a moderate middle position short of the extreme remedy of secession. But soon, a military clash seemed imminent, as President Andrew Jackson denounced nullification and privately swore to hang Calhoun. In the end, though, South Carolina’s defiance forced a partial climb-down by the feds. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky helped usher through a bill securing a 20 percent reduction in the tariff.

Disputes over the unjust federal revenue system would play a central role in bringing about the Civil War (contrary to most contemporary accounts, which emphasize slavery to the exclusion of almost everything else). The centrality of the tariff issue is revealed in Lincoln’s First Inaugural, in which he disclaimed any intention to interfere with slavery, but was adamant about collecting federal revenue via the tariff. Republican corporate statism and Northern manufacturing depend ed on the Union and a high tariff. As a troubled editorialist in the March 18, 1861, Boston Transcript put it: “The difference is so great between the tariff of the Union and that of the Confederated States, that the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than at New York …. [The government] would be false to all its obligations, if this state of things were not provided against.”

Personal Liberty Laws

Ironically, the controversy over fugitive slaves would find Southerners clamoring for a strong federal role and cursing the doctrine of nullification. In his Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, historian James M. McPherson notes a tension in Southern appeals to states’ rights before 1860: “On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress.” The South’s deviation from principle on this point stemmed in part from economic motives: the federal government’s assistance in recovering escaped slaves made the peculiar institution more secure. But those Northerners who opposed slavery fought back with a states’-rights-based resistance to the tyrannical and unjust fugitive slave laws.

The federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 authorized slave owners and their agents to cross state lines and recapture fugitive slaves by force, bringing them before local magistrates to prove ownership. Under the law, the deck was stacked against the purported fugitive, who lacked the protection of habeas corpus and jury trial, and had no right to testify in his own behalf. Small wonder, then, that Southern bounty hunters were less than meticulous in ensuring they’d captured the right person.

Most of the Northern states responded with “personal liberty laws,” providing the fugitive with the procedural protections denied him by the federal statute, and in several cases subjecting slave hunters to kidnapping charges. In Vermont, for example, all fugitives were declared free, and anyone who attempted to capture one could be subject to 20 years imprisonment or a fine of $10,000.

Not even the Supreme Court could deter the North from the path of resistance. When the Court overturned a kidnapping conviction under Pennsylvania’s personal liberty statute, and voided the statute itself, Pennsylvania merely enacted another. Massachusetts was equally open in its defiance of federal authority. Its legislature passed a law providing-that: “No judge of any court of record in this Commonwealth.., shall take cognizance or grant a certificate in cases that may arise under the third section” of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. (Northern defiance of Supreme Court decisions on the slave issue would continue when the Court issued its infamous 1857 opinion in Dred Scott. The Maine legislature, for example, was one of several Northern states to declare that Dred Scott was “not binding, in law or in conscience, upon the government or citizens of the United States.” (Shades of George Wallace!)

To appease an increasingly indignant South, Congress in 1850 passed an even harsher fugitive slave statute. Under that law, proceedings were to be held before (newly created) federal “commissioners,” who would only receive half as much for setting the captive free as they would for ruling in favor of his purported owner. All expenses associated with seizing and transporting the captive would be paid by the federal government.

Northern states found the fugitive slave law of 1850 harder to nullify, since it cut state courts out of the process. Still, abolitionists and their “vigilance committees” mounted vigorous resistance to the bounty hunters by force of arms. In 1851, the federal government felt it necessary to make a show of force in response to that resistance. To assist in the recapture of Thomas Sims, a 17-year-old escaped slave working in Boston as a waiter, the reds provided sufficient firepower to ensure that no band of abolitionist vigilantes could free him. When the federal commissioner ruled for Sims’s owner, 300 armed federal deputies and soldiers led Sims and his captor from the courthouse to the navy yard, where 250 more federal troops waited to put them on a ship heading South.

Every year, in high school history classes throughout the country, Americans learn a story intended to illustrate the beneficence of the federal government: in 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus vowed to prevent the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School; President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect black schoolchildren from white Southern mobs. Students might get a more balanced picture of the federal role in race relations if teachers juxtaposed the story of Little Rock’s Central High with the story of Thomas Sims.

Libertarian Centralism

The above examples should not be taken to indicate that the states are natural defenders of liberty, organic extensions of the “People” that can be trusted to protect individual rights. Anyone familiar with zoning laws should know better than to embrace such a romantic notion. Instead, this historical survey suggests that the feds are unlikely to be better guardians of individual liberty than the states, and that divided sovereignty can serve as a check against federal oppression.

These examples also undermine the standard account of antebellum federalism, which amounts to public-school history: statist parables designed to make us feel grateful for the presence of our Federal Protector. If the issue were merely historical accuracy, there would be little reason to quibble. But this history is invoked, even by prominent libertarian legal analysts, to justify a particular political program. These scholars, who might be called “libertarian centralists,” view the federal government as an indispensable partner in the struggle to protect individual rights. To that end, the libertarian centralists have advanced a number of policy proposals that should give classical liberals pause—among them: Congress should be free to comprehensively redesign state and municipal codes using the enforcement powers of the Fourteenth Amendment; using the same powers, Congress can legislate directly on matters affecting liberty, with statutes such as the Church Arson Protection Act; and the Supreme Court should depart from constitutional text and engage in moral theorizing when exercising the power of judicial review. Each of these proposals represents a rather dramatic increase in federal authority over the states. The idea that such increased authority will be used to protect liberty rather than to abuse it, represents, like a second marriage, the triumph of hope over experience.

For example, Bolick, in June 7, 1995, testimony before the House Small Business Committee’s subcommittee on regulation and paperwork, said that “Congress has the power to enforce the 14th Amendment through appropriate legislation. It should use this power to enact an Economic Liberty Act. The provisions are simple: any federal or state law that restrains entry into a business or occupation must be narrowly tailored to a legitimate public health, safety, or public welfare objective.’‘ This appears unobjectionable until one contemplates what that plenary power would mean in the hands of welfare statists.

Another example comes from Roger Pilon, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. In a June 18, 1996, Washington Post op-ed, Pilon wrote, regarding the federal Church Arson Prevention Act, “There is, however, a proper basis for Congress to act in the case at hand. It is the 14th Amendment… [I]f state measures prove inadequate and there is evidence available to Congress that federal intervention is necessary, there is ample authority under the 14th Amendment for Congress to act.”

And in a 1988 Cornell Law Review article titled “Reconceiving the Ninth Amendment,” Boston University law professor Randy Barnett wrote that “Given that the Fourteenth Amendment extends the protection of constitutional rights to acts of state governments, the Ninth Amendment stands ready to respond to a crabbed construction that limits the scope of this protection to the enumerated rights.” Again, although it sounds benign, this view is unjustifiably confident that the federal government won’t use the power to enforce unenumerated “positive welfare rights” on the states.

Patrick Henry, arguing against ratification of the Constitution, admonished Virginians to “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it, but downright force: Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.” The states did not voluntarily “give up” that force in 1861-65; it was wrested from them by federal aggression. Before the Civil War, individuals were protected from centralized coercion by multiple, divided sovereignties, competing in their interpretations of the national charter, and backing their respective interpretations with force. After that war, individuals were confronted with a powerful unitary state, one that justified its aggression—domestic and foreign with appeals to “liberty.”

Libertarian centralists assure us that we can restore true liberty by gaining influence over that state and making its institutions work for us. The history of American federalism suggests a different solution. If there is a libertarian future, it lies in dividing sovereignty in nullification and secession: opposing Power with Liberty at every turn; hammering every fault line in an attempt to crack the edifice; dividing and diminishing Power, in the hope that individuals will be better able to overcome it or, failing that, escape it. Any other route is a diversion, and a potentially dangerous one at that.

Just for fun, see if you can match the following unforgettable quotations with their authors. The quotations are representative views of many of the greatest thinkers in the history of liberty:

A. Lord Acton

B. Benjamin Franklin

C. Milton Friedman

D. Legendre and Jacques C.M. Vincent de Gournay

E. F. A. Hayek

F. Henry Hazlitt

G. Thomas Jefferson

H. John Locke

I. Ludwig von Mises

J. Albert Jay Nock

K. P.J. O’Rourke

L. James Otis

M. Thomas Paine

N. Ayn Rand

O. Leonard E. Read

P. Murray N. Rothbard

Q. Adam Smith

R. Thomas Sowell

S. Mark Twain

T. Mary Wollstonecraft

1. Whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience. . . .

2. Laissez faire, laissez passer.

3. Taxation without representation is tyranny.

4. Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

5. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

6. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws of nature.

7. The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

8. God helps them that helps themselves.

9. It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. . . . They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.

10. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

11. Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

12. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

13. The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

14. Capitalism is the only system that can be defended and validated by reason.

15. In the political democracy only the votes cast for the majority candidate or the majority plan are effective in shaping the course of affairs. The votes polled by the minority do not directly influence policies. But on the market no vote is cast in vain. Every penny spent has the power to work upon the production processes. The publishers cater not only to the majority by publishing detective stories, but also to the minority reading lyrical poetry and philosophical tracts. The bakeries bake bread not only for healthy people, but also for the sick on special diets. . . . The rich cast more votes than the poorer citizens. But this inequality is itself the outcome of a previous voting process. To be rich, in a market economy, is the outcome of success in filling best the demands of the consumers.

16. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

17. So-called ‘social justice’ should never be confused with humanitarianism. From a humanitarian viewpoint, it is infinitely more important to have a prosperous economy, in which the great masses of the people are beyond the reach of hunger and malnutrition, and beyond the reach of poverty-related diseases, than to stifle a relative handful of specially skilled or talented people who might be envied.

18. Anything that’s peaceful.

19. Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It’s not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights—the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery—hay and a barn for human cattle. There’s only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

20. For the libertarian, the main task of the present epoch is to cast off his needless and debilitating pessimism, to set his sights on long-run victory and to set about the road to its attainment . . . proceed in the spirit of radical long-run optimism.

1. (H.) English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) in Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689).

2. (D.) The phrase laissez-faire has been attributed to the seventeenth-century French businessman Legendre and popularized by Jacques C.M. Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759).

3. (L.) Attributed to Boston attorney James Otis (1725-1783) in 1763.

4. (M.) Thomas Paine (1737-1809) in Common Sense (1776).

5. (G.) Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in a letter to William Stevens Smith, November 13, 1787.

6. (T.) Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

7. (J.) Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945), in Our Enemy, the State (1935).

8. (B.) Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), in his 1736 Poor Richard’s Almanac.

9. (Q.) Adam Smith (1723-1790), in The Wealth of Nations (1776).

10. (A.) Lord Acton (1834-1902), in his letter to Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887.

11. (S.) Mark Twain (1835-1910), in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894).

12. (C.) Milton Friedman (1912- ), in many talks since the 1960s.

13. (E.) F.A. Hayek (1899-1992), in The Road to Serfdom (1944).

14. (N.) Ayn Rand (1905-1982), in her March 1964 Playboy interview.

15. (I.) Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), in Human Action (1949).

16. (F.) Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), in Economics in One Lesson (1946).

17. (R.) Thomas Sowell (1930- ), in Is Reality Optional? and Other Essays (1993).

18. (O.) Leonard E. Read (1898-1983), Anything That’s Peaceful (1964).

19. (K.) P.J. O’Rourke (1947- ), in Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (1995).

20. (P.) Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty, in Left and Right (1965).

This brief quiz underscores the exhilarating sophistication and spirit of liberty.

Few recognized the dangers of political power as clearly as Lord Acton. He understood that rulers put their own interests above all and will do just about anything to stay in power. They routinely lie. They smear their competitors. They seize private assets. They destroy property. Sometimes they assassinate people, even mark multitudes for slaughter. In his essays and lectures, Acton defied the collectivist trend of his time to declare that political power was a source of evil, not redemption. He called socialism “the worst enemy freedom has ever had to encounter.”

Acton sometimes rose to commanding eloquence when he affirmed that individual liberty is the moral standard by which governments must be judged. He believed “that liberty occupies the final summit . . . it is almost, if not altogether, the sign, and the prize, and the motive in the onward and upward advance of the race. . . . A people adverse to the institution of private property is without the first element of freedom. . . . Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.”

Although Acton increasingly stood alone, he was admired for his extraordinary knowledge of history. He transmitted to the English-speaking world the rigor of studying history as much as possible from original sources, pioneered by nineteenth-century German scholars. His estate at Cannes (France) had more than 3,000 books and manuscripts; his estate at Tegernsee (Bavaria), some 4,000; and Aldenham (Shropshire, England), almost 60,000. He marked thousands of passages he considered important. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Munich (1873), honorary Doctor of Laws from Cambridge University (1889) and honorary Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford University (1890)—yet he never earned an academic degree in his life, not even a high school diploma.

To be sure, Acton had some big blind spots. Science didn’t interest him. Although he expressed concern for the poor, he spurned as materialistic the Manchester Liberals who cared about raising living standards. He knew little about economic history which tells how ordinary people fared. He imbibed the cliché that free markets enabled the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer, when in fact free markets—such as the Industrial Revolution of his time—saved millions from starvation.

What was Acton like? Published photographs generally show him with a long beard. He had piercing blue eyes and a high forehead. “He was of middle height and as he grew older he developed a full figure,” added biographer David Matthew. “He was renowned as a conversationalist, but his talk was on the German model, full of facts and references . . . he enjoyed walking, traversing the lower slopes of the Bavarian mountains or wandering on the lip of the Alpes Maritimes, where they fall towards the sea.”

Acton conveyed tremendous passion. “There was a magnetic quality in the tones of his voice,” recalled one student who heard his Cambridge lectures. “Never before had a young man come into the presence of such intensity of conviction as was shown by every word Lord Acton spoke. It took possession of the whole being, and seemed to enfold it in its own burning flame. And the fires below on which it fed were, at least for those present, immeasurable. More than all else, it was perhaps this conviction that gave to Lord Acton’s Lectures their amazing force and vivacity. He pronounced each sentence as if he were feeling it, poising it lightly, and uttering it with measured deliberation. His feeling passed to the audience, which sat enthralled.”

Family Background

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton was born January 10, 1834, in Naples. His mother Marie Pelline de Dalberg was from a Bavarian Catholic family with roots in the French aristocracy. His father Ferdinand Richard Edward Acton was an English aristocrat. Acton’s father died when he was three years old, and by the time he was six his mother had remarried Lord Leveson, later to become the second Earl of Granville, an influential English Whig who served as foreign minister in the Liberal cabinets of John Russell and William Ewart Gladstone.

Acton was mainly educated as a Catholic—Saint Nicholas (France), St. Mary’s, Oscott (England), the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), where he studied two years, and the University of Munich (Bavaria), where he went after being refused admission to Cambridge and Oxford because of his Catholicism.

Johann Ignaz von Dollinger, among Europe’s most distinguished historians, was Acton’s most important teacher. Soon after Acton arrived in Munich in June of 1850, he began his apprenticeship to become a historian. “I breakfast at 8,” he wrote his stepfather, “then two hours of German—an hour of Plutarch and an hour of Tacitus. This proportion was recommended by the professor. We dine a little before 2—I see him then for the first time in the day. At 3 my German master comes. From 4 till 7 I am out—I read modern history for an hour—having had an hour’s ancient history just before dinner. I have some tea at 8 and study English literature and composition till 10—when the curtain falls.”

Acton and Dollinger traveled in Austria, England, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, visiting libraries and bookstores. They analyzed manuscripts and met with poets, historians, scientists, and statesmen.

Acton’s blind spots were apparent from his observations about the United States which he visited with his stepfather in June 1853. Ever the aristocrat, he was turned off by rude manners and by the emphasis on practical things. He missed the colossal energy of American commerce as he wrote off New York—“the city cannot be seen for it is very flat and quite surrounded by shipping.”

At the same time, though, this American trip afforded some rare human glimpses into a 19-year-old who had skipped from youth to adulthood. “The ices,” he recorded in his diary, “are skillfully made, not too sweet, in order not to excite thirst, and they give you as much as two London ices for less money. . . . In the evening we played at prisoner’s base in a field close to the [Niagara] Falls. Here I lost my hat.“

When Acton began to study with Dollinger, he had been captivated by Thomas Babington Macaulay, the eloquent Whig historian who championed liberty and human progress. Acton described himself as “a raw English schoolboy, primed to the brim with Whig politics.” But Dollinger cured Acton of Macaulay, and the young man became a fan of the Edmund Burke who early on opposed the French Revolution. While with Dollinger, Acton attended lectures by the great German historian Leopold von Ranke who stressed that the role of an historian was to explain the past, not to judge it.

An Early Conservatism

Those familiar with Acton’s famous blasts against tyranny will be startled at his early conservatism. For instance, unlike Manchester Liberals such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, but along with most Englishmen, Acton sided with the South during the American Civil War. “It is as impossible to sympathize on religious grounds with the categorical prohibition of slavery as, on political grounds, with the opinions of the abolitionists,” he wrote in his essay “The Political Causes of the American Revolution” (1861). Five years later, in a lecture about the Civil War, Acton remarked that slavery “has been a mighty instrument not for evil only, but for good in the providential order of the world . . . by awakening the spirit of sacrifice on the one hand, and the spirit of charity on the other.” Acton told a friend: “I broke my heart over the surrender of Lee.”

In “The Protestant Theory of Persecution” (1862), he refused to condemn persecution across the board. He seemed to defend Catholic rulers who claimed persecution was the only way of keeping society together. He suggested Protestants like John Calvin were worse because they persecuted people just to suppress dissident views. In private, Acton was more outspoken: “To say that persecution is wrong, nakedly, seems to me first of all untrue. . . .”

Yet Dollinger and Acton became outspoken critics of Catholic intolerance. Their contemporary targets were the Ultramontanes who sought to suppress intellectual freedom. Dollinger and Acton took issue with Vatican policy, especially after Pope Pius IX issued his notorious Syllabus of Errors (1864), which condemned alleged heresies of classical liberalism, including the scandalous idea that “The Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism and recent civilization.”

Acton contributed to a succession of Catholic journals whose mission was to help liberalize the Church: the bimonthly Rambler (1858-1862), quarterly Home and Foreign Review (1862-1864), and weekly Chronicle (1867-1868). These efforts were defeated in 1870 when the Vatican Council declared that the Pope was an infallible authority on Church dogma. Because Dollinger was a priest, his refusal to submit resulted in excommunication. Acton, a layman, wasn’t required to officially acknowledge the Vatican Council decrees, and he remained within the Church.

It was during this period that Acton wrote one of his most prophetic essays, “Nationality” (1862), which offered an early warning about totalitarianism: “Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety or the power of a country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realisation the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.”

Meanwhile, in 1865, Acton at 31 had married a cousin, Countess Marie Anna Ludomilla Euphrosyne Arco-Valley. She was the 24-year-old daughter of Count Johann Maximilian Arco-Valley. The Count had introduced Dollinger to Acton, so he and the young Countess had known each other ever since he began his studies in Bavaria. She seems to have shared his interests in religion and history. They had six children, four of whom survived into adulthood. At meals, Acton spoke German with his wife, Italian with his mother-in-law, French with his sister-in-law, English with his children, and perhaps another European language with a visitor.

Religion was always on Acton’s mind, and he became much more of a hardliner than Dollinger, declaring that historians must denounce evil. In February 1879, he split with Dollinger after the professor had retreated to the view that a historian’s role was only to explain events, even if this meant remaining silent about terrible crimes. Acton insisted that evil actions, like murder, were always evil. “The papacy contrived murder and massacred on the largest and also on the most cruel and inhuman scale,” he wrote, referring to the Inquisition. “They were not only wholesale assassins, but they made the principle of assassination a law of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation.”

Acton lamented that “I am absolutely alone in my essential ethical position.” He confided to his friend Charlotte Blennerhasset: “Let me try as briefly as possible and without argument to tell you what is in fact a very simple, obvious, and not interesting story. It is the story of a man who started in life believing himself a sincere Catholic and a sincere Liberal; who therefore renounced everything in Catholicism which was not compatible with liberty, and everything in Politics which was not compatible with Catholicity. . . . Therefore I was among those who think less of what is than what ought to be, who sacrifice the real to the ideal, interest to duty, authority to morality.”

Acton faced not only intellectual shocks but hard times during the 1870s. Much of his livelihood came from his inherited agricultural land, but farm income plunged amidst the prolonged agricultural depression of this period. He sold a number of properties in 1883. He sublet his Aldenham estate. He sought a respectable salaried position.

Acton and Gladstone

Thanks to his stepfather, Acton had served as a Member of Parliament for a half-dozen years starting in 1859, and there he met Gladstone, who was to become Prime Minister three times. In 1869, three years after Acton lost a bid for re-election, Gladstone named Acton a baron, and he sat in the House of Lords, but during all the years he was in Parliament, he never participated in a debate. He quietly supported Gladstone, whom he viewed as a great moral leader. They shared a passion for discussing history and religion.

In critical reviews, Acton faulted Anglican priest Mandell Creighton, author of History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation, for not condemning the medieval Papacy—promoter of the Inquisition. But Acton and Creighton had a cordial correspondence which led to Acton’s most unforgettable lines, written on April 5, 1887: “I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Acton, the devout Catholic, shifted his views so far that he reproached his friend Gladstone, who had written an unqualified defense of Christianity against attacks by popular novelists. Acton noted that unbelievers deserved credit for combating “that appalling edifice of intolerance, tyranny, cruelty” which the Christian Church had become.

What to do with his prodigious learning? Acton pursued one book idea after the other, only to drop it. He did research for a history of the Popes, a history of books banned by the Catholic Church, a history of England’s King James II and a history of the U.S. Constitution. He contemplated some kind of universal history, the theme of which would be human liberty. This became his dream for a history of liberty.

Author James Bryce recalled, Acton “spoke like a man inspired, seeming as if, from some mountain summit high in the air, he saw beneath him the far winding path of human progress from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time. The eloquence was splendid, but greater than the eloquence was the penetrating vision which discerned through all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now creating, now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded institutions, and had given to the human spirit its ceaselessly-changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of sunlight.”

The History of Freedom

Acton covered part of his beloved theme in two lectures, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity” (1877) and “The History of Freedom in Christianity” (1877), as well as his lengthy review of Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe (1878). He traced liberty’s origins to the ancient Hebrew doctrine of a “higher law” which applies to everyone, even rulers. He explained how, uniquely in the West, competing religions created opportunities for individuals to break free. He told how democracy emerged from commercial towns. He talked about the radical doctrine that individuals may rebel when rulers usurp illegitimate power. He chronicled epic struggles against tyrants.

These essays abound with memorable observations. For example: “[Liberty] is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization. . . . In every age its progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food. . . . At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous. . . . The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. . . .”

Why did liberty become more secure in America than almost anywhere else? “Liberty,” wrote Acton to Gladstone’s daughter Mary, “depends on the division of power. Democracy tends to the unity of power . . . federalism is the one possible check upon concentration and centralism.”

Acton, unfortunately, lacked the singleminded focus for a big project. His voluminous papers don’t even include an outline for a history of liberty. He never started it. All he left were some 500 black boxes and notebooks mainly filled with disorganized extracts from various works. Much of the material is about abstract ideas rather than historical events. Later historian E.L. Woodward remarked that Acton’s history of liberty was probably “the greatest book that never was written.”

In 1895, Cambridge historian John Seeley died, and it was Prime Minister Rosebery’s responsibility to name a new Regius Professor of Modern History. Although Acton hadn’t taught a class in his life, he was recommended because of his learning, his loyalty to the Liberal cause and his need for a salary. And so Acton, rejected when he tried to enter Cambridge as an undergraduate, got the prestigious appointment.

In his famous inaugural lecture, he insisted that politicians should be judged like ordinary people: “I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.”

“History,” he continued, “does teach that right and wrong are real distinctions. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.”

“The principles of true politics are those of morality enlarged; and I neither now do, nor ever will admit of any other.”

During his last years at Cambridge, Acton delivered only two series of lectures—on modern history and on the French Revolution—but colleagues viewed him with awe. Recalled historian George Macaulay Trevelyan:

His knowledge, his experience and his outlook were European of the Continent, though English Liberalism was an important part of his philosophy. He at once created a deep impression in our somewhat provincial society. Dons of all subjects crowded to his oracular lectures, which were sometimes puzzling but always impressive. He had the brow of Plato, and the bearing of a sage who was also a man of the great world. His ideas included many of our own, but were drawn from other sources and from wider experience. What he said was always interesting, but sometimes strange. I remember, for instance, his saying to me that States based on the unity of a single race, like modern Italy and Germany, would prove a danger to liberty; I did not see what he meant at the time, but I do now!

He accepted a Professorial Fellowship at Trinity, and at first lived in his rooms at Nevile’s Court. There he was to be found at all hours, accessible to any Cambridge historian from [Frederic] Maitland or [William] Cunningham to the humblest undergraduate, ready to help anyone from the profound stores of his knowledge. He sat at his desk, hidden away behind a labyrinth of tall shelves which he had put up to hold his history books, each volume with slips of paper sticking out from its pages to mark passages of importance.

He was very kind to me. I remember a walk we had together, and the place on the Madingley road where he told me never to believe people when they depreciated my great-uncle [Thomas Babington Macaulay], because for all his faults he was on the whole the greatest of all historians.

Since Acton came to recognize he would never write a history of liberty, he agreed to edit a series of books which would gather contributions from many respected authorities. Thus was born the Cambridge Modern History, a mundane series which squandered his last energies.

Acton suffered from high blood pressure, and in April 1901, after having edited the first two volumes, he had a paralytic stroke. He retired to his home in Tegernsee, Bavaria. A little over a year later, June 19, 1902, he died as a priest administered last rites. He was buried in a nearby churchyard.

The Acton Legacy

After Acton’s death, his 60,000-volume Aldenham library—his principal collection on liberty—was purchased by American steel entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie and given to John Morley, among the last English classical liberals. Morley, in turn, presented the books to Cambridge, so they would always be kept together.

During the next several years, Cambridge lecturers John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Lawrence gathered Acton’s most important works, and they appeared as Lectures on Modern History (1906), The History of Freedom and Other Essays (1907), Historical Essays and Studies (1908), and Lectures on the French Revolution (1910), followed by Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton (1917).

But he became a forgotten man as “Progressives,” New Dealers, socialists, Communists, fascists, Nazis, and other collectivists amassed monstrous political power which sacrificed liberty in the name of doing good. Then came the death toll—nearly 10 million dead from World War I, another 50 million dead from World War II, plus tens of millions people killed by Russia’s Stalin and China’s Mao, just to name the biggest butchers. Hundreds of millions more are subject to powerful states whose tax collectors take 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent and more of their hard-earned money.

Amidst collectivist carnage, some people began to remember Acton’s warnings about the evils of political power and his call to cherish human liberty. “It appears that we are privileged to understand him as his contemporaries never did,” observed historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. “He is of this age, more than of his. He is one of our great contemporaries.”

To question the “fairness” or other index of validity of the existing statistics growing out of voluntary economic transactions is to question whether those who spent their own money to buy what they wanted from other people have a right to do so. To say that a shoe shine boy earns “too little” or a surgeon “too much” is to say that third parties should have the right to preempt the decisions of those who elected to spend their money on shoe shines or surgery. To say that “society” should decide how much it values various goods and services is to say that individual decisions on these matters should be superseded by collective decisions made by political surrogates. But to say this openly would require some persuasive reasons why collective decisions are better than individual decisions and why third parties are better judges than those who are making their own trade-offs at their own expense.

—Thomas Sowell

The Vision of the Anointed

Harassing Business

The only viable definition of monopoly is a grant of privilege from the government. It therefore becomes quite clear that it is impossible for the government to decrease monopoly by passing punitive laws. The only way for the government to decrease monopoly . . . is to remove its own monopoly grants. The antitrust laws, therefore, do not in the least “diminish monopoly.” What they do accomplish is to impose a continual, capricious harassment of efficient business enterprise. The law in the United States is couched in vague, indefinable terms, permitting the Administration and the courts to omit defining in advance what is a “monopolistic” crime and what is not. Whereas Anglo-Saxon law has rested on a structure of clear definitions of crime, known in advance and discoverable by a jury after due legal process, the antitrust laws thrive on deliberate vagueness and ex post facto rulings. No businessman knows when he has committed a crime and when he has not, and he will never know until the government, perhaps after another shift in its own criteria of crime, swoops down upon him and prosecutes. The effects of these arbitrary rules and ex post facto findings of “crime” are manifold: business initiative is hampered, businessmen are fearful and subservient to the arbitrary rulings of government officials, and business is not permitted to be efficient in serving the consumer.

—Murray Rothbard, Power and Market

What Was Lost

I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolution of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. . . . Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake that was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.

—Letter from Lord Acton to Robert E. Lee, November 4, 1866

1995-96 Olive W. Garvey Fellowships

Since 1972, the Garvey Fellowship program has awarded financial fellowships to advance the higher education of outstanding young academics around the world through a competitive essay contest on the meaning and significance of economic and personal liberty. Olive W. Garvey Fellows have since become some of the finest of scholars, business leaders, and journalists, applying and advancing public knowledge and appreciation internationally for the ideas of individual liberty and personal responsibility.

The Independent Institute, the sponsor of the program, has announced the following recipients of the 1995-96 Olive W. Garvey Fellowships: First Prize, $2,500—Bryan Caplan (Department of Economics, Princeton University); Second Prize, $1,500—Jeffry W. Duffy (London School of Economics); and Third Prize, $1,000—Michael Huemer (Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University).

This year’s Olive W. Garvey Fellowships have been awarded to the authors of the top three essays on the topic, “The road to prosperity and human welfare: free markets or government controls?” Mr. Caplan’s first-prize essay, “Freedom and Happiness,” appears on pages 37-41 of this issue. Excerpts from the second- and third-prize winning essays start on page 42.

All entries were reviewed by a panel of three distinguished scholars: Gerald Gunderson (Professor of Economics, Trinity College), Daniel Klein (Professor of Economics, University of California, Irvine), and John Morehouse (Professor of Economics, Wake Forest University).

For further information on the Olive W. Garvey Fellowships program, please contact Ms. Theresa Navarro, Director of Program Services, The Independent Institute, 134 Ninety-Eighth Avenue, Oakland, CA 94603; Phone: (510) 632-1366; fax: (510) 568-6040; E-mail: independ@dnai.com.

The text consists of two short essays of equal length: “Freedom in Antiquity” and “Freedom in Christianity.” The absence of dates and names gives each part a timeless air, making the essays readable, particularly by young students who have little background to appreciate the drama Acton writes about. I have used the essays for a short course on “Christianity and Capitalist Civilization” and was pleasantly surprised that students found many stimulating passages. One student was struck by the illiberal statement attributed to Aristotle that the mark of the worst governments is that “they leave men free to live as they please” (p. 40). Another was struck by the political transformation said to have overcome Christianity around AD 500: “Christianity which in earlier times had addressed itself to the masses, and relied on the principle of liberty, now made its appeal to the rulers, and threw its mighty influence into the scale of authority” (p. 60).

The brevity and style of these essays pique one’s curiosity. There are many passages that cry out for further detailed examination. Of Athenian democracy Acton wrote: “Their history furnishes the classic example of the peril of Democracy under conditions singularly favorable. For the Athenians were not only brave and patriotic and capable of generous sacrifice, but they were the most religious of the Greeks” (p. 32). No references, no guides, no further evidence supports such a sweeping claim. But if one knows about Acton, here is a clear guide to Acton’s own beliefs. The religiosity of the Athenians was the foundation of their liberty, Acton believes. But how can he persuade those who wish for more than just his authority?

The connecting thread between antiquity and Christianity is the statement of natural law by the Stoics. By appealing to an authority superior to the state, by urging the prior constraint of natural law upon all civil law, the Stoics broke with the political tradition of the Greeks. Acton is struck by the fact that Antiquity had provided the noblest precepts yet these truths did not save them from ruin.

“Freedom in Christianity” begins by crediting the Teutonic and Germanic tribes with the final ingredient—participatory institutions—that finally led to the growth of political liberty. No details are provided and in subsequent pages the tribes are forgotten. Instead, what emerges is the importance of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the period between AD 500 and 1500. It was from the conflict between church and state in this period that political liberty eventually took root. Acton is careful to point out that both institutions sought absolute control and it is striking to note how leading spokesmen of both the Guelphs and the Ghilbellines spoke almost the same language in deriving power from the welfare of the people. “Looking back over 1,000 years . . . this is what we find—Representative government, which was unknown to the ancients, was almost universal” (p. 67). A conclusion that shocks the modern ear! Most of Acton’s remaining space is devoted to the demise of such political liberty under the influence of Machiavelli and the subsequent return to more “moral” politics with the writings of Grotius. Acton has kind words for the United States and believes it provides the best example of a country that has been able to combine liberty with progress.

What are the weak points of Acton’s presentation? There is very little about the importance of the Crusades, the Italian Mercantile Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, or the Industrial Revolution. Acton cautions his readers at the outset that he is concerned with ideas, not institutions, and chronicles instances when despotic acts were undertaken by liberal institutions. It allows him to continue with little emphasis on the social and economic conditions which permit and encourage a free society. This is all the more surprising since Acton notes among the enemies of liberty “the perpetual struggle for existence” which actually leaves men “eager to sell their birthright for a pottage” (p. 21). If hungry men are so eager to surrender their liberty, is not economic subsistence a precondition for sustaining a free society?

With all his eagerness to establish religion as a fundamental prerequisite for liberty, Acton fails to note that Christianity is concerned with saving souls. Liberty is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve this goal. He never quite considers the point that, under certain conditions, God’s work is furthered by accepting social evils such as slavery. Like most modern Christians who have discussed the rise of the West, Acton feels constrained to minimize the energy, intellectual force, and societal support provided by Christianity through the ages. Modern scholarship (e.g., Francis Oakley, The Medieval Experience) has provided us so many more reasons for appreciating the nurturing of Western civilization provided by Christianity. These lectures thus provide an eloquent minimalist argument for the Providential view of the growth of freedom. Acton’s essays are certainly worth reading but one must constantly keep in mind how unselfconsciously he is the product of the Victorian age.

Dr. Rashid is Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois.