Second Meeting: 21st April, 1910.

The President, Mr. W. F. Durward, in the chair.

The Hon. Dr. Findlay, K.C., gave a lecture on “Legal Liberty.”

The lecturer described the evolution of government in England, and the various influences at work, attributing the theories ultimately adopted to the French dreamer Rousseau's philosophy of government as embodied in “Le Contrat Social,” published in 1762, that were adopted in the French Revolution, and have replaced the teachings of John Stuart-Mill in England.

The lecturer summarized his conclusions thus: There is in Anglo-Saxon nations an excessive impatience of State interference, due partly to the struggle by which freedom has in the past been wrested from Government. That in their attitude towards the powers of the State the people of our nation are apt to ignore the fact that it is only from these powers and under their protection alone that they derive their rights and liberties. For many centuries man has been trying to find some scientific boundary between the rights of the individual and those of the State; and the theories of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Adam Smith resulted in the doctrines of natural liberty which limit the State's functions to those of keeping order and protecting rights, while they extend the area of individual freedom to the widest extent possible without injury to the rights of others. This led to a fanatical individualism, under which the condition of the English labourer was worse than at any previous period of English history. The school of natural liberty still largely dominates orthodox economic thought. It is based upon the cosmic process, the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, and is opposed to the moral or ethical process of human betterment. Thought and experience has shown that in modern nations the system of natural liberty is not a policy of true social progress; that, on the contrary, such progress can be attained only by limiting greatly individual liberty and by eliminating the struggle for a bare existence. That the true policy of progress in modern nations is not the mere protection by the State of legal rights, but provision by the State of the conditions which are essentials to the welfare of the people. That for the improvement of those coerced, and for the provision of the conditions of general welfare, the State may, in defiance of the tenets of individualism, properly curtail individual liberty. That, as the solidarity of a nation increases and society becomes increasingly organized, the closer relation and interdependence of the units of population necessitate a restricted area of individual freedom. That conceptions of the area of personal freedom have changed with changes in our national aims, and a policy of “Want and Vice and their Reduction” is slowly supplanting the cardinal policy “Wealth and its Production.” That the trend of the freest democracies is towards a State paternalism. That the national character and temper of our nation may be trusted to prevent any serious limitation of the area of liberty really essential to a self-respecting vigorous manhood.

At the close of the lecture the chairman spoke eulogistically upon it, and so did Mr. E. D. Hoben, who moved a vote of thanks on behalf of the Society, and Mr. D. Buick, M.P., who seconded it.