[1] “You will admit,” it was once said, “that compulsory religion is better than no religion.” “I fail to see the distinction” was the reply.
[2] Among true students _bona fides_ is presupposed. The range opened to sophistry by a principle of this kind, which commends positive action with a negative bearing for a positive end, is, of course, immeasurable. Practically, I believe that _bona fides_ is about the first and last necessity for the application of political ideas.
[3] Perhaps I may adduce an instance of real interest. It has been argued that ship-masters should be induced by a premium to ship boys as apprentices to the trade of seamanship, and that training for this trade should be fostered by local authorities like any other form of technical education. The argument which really told in the discussion, consisted of statistics which seemed to prove a wide-spread eagerness on the part of boys and their parents that they should enter a maritime life, and the existence of a hindrance simply in the absence of adequate training for a few years during boyhood.
It is the same principle in other words which Green lays down when he says in effect [1] that only such acts (or omissions) should be enforced by the public power as it is better should take place { 194} from any motive whatever than not take place at all. When, that is, we enforce an act (or omission) by law, we should be prepared to say, “granting that this act, which might conceivably have come to be done from a sense of duty, now may come to be done for the most part from a fear of punishment, or from a mechanical tendency to submit to external rules (attended by the practical inconveniences of insensibility, half-heartedness, and evasion which attach to acts so enforced), still so much depends, for the higher life of the people, upon the external conditions at stake, that we think it worth while to enforce the act (or omission) though our eyes are fully open to the risk of extended automatism.”
[1] _Principles of Political Obligation_, p. 38.
Here we may have to meet our own arguments against Mill. “You said it was a contradiction,” we shall be told, “to admit coercion as a means to liberty. But here you are advocating coercion as a means to something as incompatible with it, in so far as it is operative, as our ‘liberty,’ viz., a certain state of mind and will. If the area of coercion is necessarily subtracted from the area of liberty, as you argued above, is not the area of coercion necessarily subtracted from that to be occupied by the desired growth of will and character?”