In the foregoing chapter I have said that while absorption in the idea
of democracy has had a tendency to impair devotion to the idea of
liberty, yet that in democracy itself there is no inherent opposition
to liberty. The danger to individual liberty in a democracy is of the
same nature as the danger to individual liberty in a monarchy or an
oligarchy; whether power be held by one man, or by a thousand, or by a
majority out of a hundred million, it is equally possible for the
governing power on the one hand to respect, or on the other hand to
ignore, the right of individuals to the free play of their individual
powers, the exercise of their individual predilections, the leading of
their individual lives according to their own notions of what is right
or desirable. A monarch of enlightened and liberal mind will respect
that right, and limit his encroachments upon it to the minimum
required for the essential objects of reasonable government; so, too,
will a democracy if it is of like temper and intelligence. But it is
not so with Socialism. Numerous as are the varieties of Socialism,
they all agree in being inherently antagonistic to individualism. It
may be pleaded, in criticism of this assertion, that all government is
opposed to individualism; that the difference in this respect between
Socialism and other forms of civil organization is only one of degree;
that we make a surrender of individuality, as well as of liberty, when
we consent to live in any organized form of society. It is not worth
while to dispute the point; the difference may, if one chooses, be
regarded as only a difference of degree. But when a difference of
degree goes to such a point that what is minor, incidental,
exceptional in the one case, is paramount, essential, pervasive in the
other, the difference is, for all the purposes of thinking, equivalent
to a difference of kind. Socialism is in its very essence opposed to
individualism. It makes the collective welfare not an incidental
concern of each man's daily life, but his primary concern. The