Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901; Liberalism -- Great Britain
Of all associations within the State, the miniature community of the
Family is the most universal and of the strongest independent vitality.
The authoritarian state was reflected in the authoritarian family, in
which the husband was within wide limits absolute lord of the person and
property of wife and children. The movement of liberation consists (1)
in rendering the wife a fully responsible individual, capable of holding
property, suing and being sued, conducting business on her own account,
and enjoying full personal protection against her husband; (2) in
establishing marriage as far as the law is concerned on a purely
contractual basis, and leaving the sacramental aspect of marriage to the
ordinances of the religion professed by the parties; (3) in securing the
physical, mental, and moral care of the children, partly by imposing
definite responsibilities on the parents and punishing them for neglect,
partly by elaborating a public system of education and of hygiene. The
first two movements are sufficiently typical cases of the
interdependence of liberty and equality. The third is more often
conceived as a Socialistic than a Liberal tendency, and, in point of
fact, the State control of education gives rise to some searching
questions of principle, which have not yet been fully solved. If, in
general, education is a duty which the State has a right to enforce,
there is a countervailing right of choice as to the lines of education
which it would be ill to ignore, and the mode of adjustment has not yet
been adequately determined either in theory or in practice. I would,
however, strongly maintain that the general conception of the State as
Over-parent is quite as truly Liberal as Socialistic. It is the basis of
the rights of the child, of his protection against parental neglect, of
the equality of opportunity which he may claim as a future citizen, of
his training to fill his place as a grown-up person in the social
system. Liberty once more involves control and restraint.
7. _Local, Racial, and National Liberty._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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