It impedes my right to free moral and intellectual development, by surrounding my path with dangers, and by weakening and demoralising society from which I have a right to claim mutual aid and intercourse.’ 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 whosoever fails thereof in the smallest particular, violates my social right, and entitles me to demand from the legislature the removal of the grievance. So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except, perhaps, to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them; for the moment, an opinion, which I consider noxious, passes any one’s lips, it invades all the ‘social rights’ attributed to me by the Alliance. The doctrine ascribes to all mankind a vested interest in each other’s moral, intellectual, and even physical perfection, to be defined by each claimant according to his own standard. Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from another point of view, and looking at the probable effects of restraint, makes the following remarkable observation:-- Obedience to his genius is a man’s only liberating influence. We wish to escape from subjection, and a sense of inferiority--and we make self-denying ordinances, we drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail: it is all in vain; only by obedience to his genius, only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise before a man, and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison.[241] And it was from deep conviction, and not as a flippant apophthegm, that Bishop Magee pronounced that he preferred to see England free, to England sober. Yet Mr. Augustus Sala, a man of ample observation and reflection, thought otherwise. He says:--