LIBERTY AND TYRANNY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 307, 28 December 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

LIBERTY AND TYRANNY.

ESSAY ON POLITICAL FREEDOM. It is a sad sign of the times that essays on freedom are so much in vogue. Mr. Francis W. Hirst, in his new book "Liberty and Tyranny" (Duckworth) publishes- the latest variation on this theme. Fifty years- ago it was considered that the last word on the theory had been tittered when John Stuart Mill had published his famous "Essay on Liberty." From the publication of that essay up to the commencement of the Great War the whole civilised world seemed to be inclining to a general acceptance of the principles enunciated by Mill. Since the war, however, this. tendency has been reversed. Great nations, under the influence of defeat or depression, have deliberately voted away their freedom, and have given themselves over to the tender mercies of dictatorships based upon force and maintained by terror.

This establishment of dictatorships in so many of the world's governments has rendered it increasingly necessary for thinkers and writers to go over the old ground again, and for students to examine again the premises upon which such declarations of right as Milton's "Areopagitica" and Mill's "Essay" were based, and this is the task which Mr. Hirst sets himself in his new book. The argument of the book is divided into two parts. The first part is devoted chiefly to a historical review of political liberty in England, commencing from Magna Charta; in the second Mr. Hirst examines again the theoretical basis of freedom of thought and discussion, and takes his readers over the essays of Milton and Mill, thence passing to America to survey the history of freedom of thought there.

Altogether this is a thoughtful essay, setting out carefully and clearly the historical development of the subject, and instancing many modern applications. Some of Mr. Hirst's remarks .are sufficiently thought-provoking; but it is a fair criticism of the essay to say that it lacks something in logical coherence. One reads it with interest —even with admiration —but when it is put down no very definitely coherent train of thought is left in the mind of the reader. Perhaps Mill's essay spoils one for anything else on the same subject; but on the other hand Mr. Leonard Woolf's "Quack, Quack," reviewed only a few weeks ago in this'column, left one with rather more to think about.