ABSTRACT

3..``` As yet there is no law in the land. The legislator has not yet entered upon his office. As yet he has neither commanded nor prohibited any act. As yet all acts therefore are free: all persons as against the law are at liberty. Restraint, constraint, compulsion, coercion, duty, obligation, those species I mean of each which issue from the law are things unknown. As against the law all persons possess as great a measure of this great blessing of liberty as it is possible for persons to possess: and in a greater measure than it is possible for men to possess it in any other state of things. This is the first day of the political creation (creation of the political world): the state is without form and void. As yet then you and I and everyone are at liberty. Understand always, as against the law: for as against one another this may be far from being the case. Legal restraint, legal constraint and so forth are indeed unknown: but legal protection is unknown also. You and your neighbour, suppose, have quarrelled: he has bound you hand and foot (or has fastened you to a tree): in this case you are certainly not at liberty as against him: on the contrary he has deprived you of your liberty: and it is on account of what you have been made [to] suffer by the operation which deprives you of it that the legislator steps in and takes an active part in your behalf. Since the legislator then takes an active part, how is it that he must demean himself? He must either command or prohibit, for there is nothing else that he can do: he therefore cuts off on the one side or the other a portion of the subject's liberty. Liberty then is of two or even more sorts, according to the number of quarters from whence coercion, which it is the absence of, may come: liberty as against the law, and liberty as against those who first in consideration of the effect of their conduct upon the happiness of society, and afterwards in consideration of the course taken against them by the law, may be styled wrongdoers. These two sorts of liberty are directly opposed to one another: and in as far as it is in favour of an individual, that the law exercises its authority over another, the generation of the one sort is, as far as it extends, the destruction of the other. In the same proportion in which 2 and by the same cause by which, the one is increased, the other is diminished.