Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tration. France had become egalitarian and centralised. The pressure of its parts must not overwhelm certain principles that safeguard the fullness of life. These principles are rights in the possession of which the individual will find protection against absorption.30 These rights will be general in character; Jacques Bonhomme has been made the center of the French state by the Revolution. They will be private rights in the sense that they attach to individual personality. But they will be general in that unlike the rights of the ancien regime they will not be exceptional in character. They will replace the old privileges that the flood-tide of 1789 had borne away upon its eddies. They will be a centre of inviolability and thus a limitation upon power. Therein he finds of course, the main source of their virtue. III. NECESSARY FREEDOMS Broadly speaking, the liberties which lie at the base of his system were four in number. Liberty of the press he would perhaps have regarded as most fundamental. It was, for him, not merely a condition of political liberty, but, even more, its very foundation.31 That it might result in abuse he would certainly not have denied any more than he would have refused to punish the violation of the right to publication.32 The problem for him was to find the conditions under which the right could be most wisely exercised. It was wrong to dispair of a solution. It was wrong because the result of so desperate a conclusion must result either in an anarchy or in despotism.33 But it was only by means of the press that the ideas of the mass of men might become known. Such knowledge clearly must set limits to the exercise of power. It is a safeguard; for it is from popular silence that, above all, the idea of despotism draws its richest nourishment. Power,…