Are We Really Free.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIX, Issue 25, 21 December 1907, Page 30

Are We Really Free.

Among those idiotic statements that we make from once a month to once a jay—alas, with some of my acquaintance it is almost the latter! —without ever even really knowing what we mean, is the pet boast that “we arc really so free, you know.” Seeing that I have never enjoyed more than a week’s freedom, in any sense worth bearing the name, in any town in the world, including Auckland, I do not “know,” and the saving has, to my mind, precisely the value that attaches to most stereotyped forms of expression. “Freedom” is the best abused word in the dictionary—and that says a good deal. It seems to me to have as little to do with political conditions as piccalili or a music hall ballet. Indeed, much less, since piccalili can vary in price under a change of fiscal system, and a music hall ballet be suppressed by a government department; while I have never been able to convince myself that in true personal freedom we are affected by a change of ministry or the gift of a new vote. I don’t mean to say that the sniekersee might not deprive us of certain elementary rights; I mean that if people are fitted for the sniekersee they will curtail my freedom, whether or not they employ that particular instrument of persuasion. Besides, every town lias some sniekersee, if it only takes the form of prying eyes and a venomous tongue.

To claim ‘'freedom” is about as impudently self-confident as to claim the highest general virtue and intelligence. I am free where I can do every harmless act without the consciousness that that act is exciting amused comment from everylmdy in whose field of vision I may happen to be. I am not free when

I pass a string of loafers, who begin to eye me critically from a hundred ' yards before I reach- them, and continue to inspect me till I am as far on the other side of them. I am not free if I cannot carry a green umbrella or go without a collar without seeing a smirk on the face of a stranger, or a tendency to cut me on the part of an acquaintance. I am not free if my views are received intolerantly, or if other people’s views are rammed down my throat. I am not free if I am shouted at, sneered at, ill-fed, forced to listen to scandal and one-fingered piano-playing and neighbours’ dogs, and looked at askance because I’ve called, or because I ought to have. I am only free in a perfectly intelligent, sympathetic, and tolerant community, which may exist in the twenty-second century, but certainly does not exist now. At least I should feel certain that it did not, but for the assertion that there is such a Utopia, and that it is New Zealand. Political freedom is a good thing enough in its Way, but it is nothing to the ideal of social freedom, in which everybody would mind his own business, be able to listen to opposite opinions with a sympathetic tolerance, and view the most comfortable collar with the same favour as the most fashionable. At present a sensitive man with a humpedback or a fierce attack of gout has to endure not only physical suffering, but the mental torture of imagining that he is being measured and noted down by everybody who has not the grace to know when to stare and when to look somewhere else. Nobody means any’ harm, but the faet remains that while nobody is free, the word is an especial mockery to the suffering and the sensitive. But even leaving out the questions of morbid imaginings (in which the morbidness will be a handy excuse for the owner of the “stony British stare”), have yon not noticed the simple things that you really are not allowed to do? In the first place you must not walk up and down. People will let you pass once with only a passing curious glance; a second time and they scent a mystery; a third time and they think you are mad. Then yon are never allowed to speak to a lady, to run (mad again), to carry an umbrella on a treacherously fine day (this invariably amuses the young idea}; -to use a big word even to save yourself using twenty-five little ones, to be eivil to your friends’ enemies, to try to make a joke with a grave face, to see a fault in anything gopd, or allege anything good in what is bad, to hold a high position (without having held one I know how stern is the determination on the ousting of the holder), to be honestly critical, and to walk without a hat. All these dreadful crimes are met with as many varied and ingenious punishments. No; there will be no true freedom in the world until people learn that “mind your own business” is an injunction of serious ethics as well as a cheap snub. So long as they think It their duty to claim responsibility for all that I do as well as all that they do themselves, the word will be a mockery. If I choose to walk with a man in ragged clothes, for instance, there wonk*, ‘be four things to be remembered: (1) that it would not be my critic who was dressed in rage; (2) it would not be my critic who was walking with the man who was; (3) 1 should not hurt my critic if I chose to take walks with a Barbary ape or a muzzled crocodile, much less a fellow human being; and (4) 1 might reasonably prefer to walk down Queen-street with a swordswallower in fancy dress than with a personifies iion of snobbery in “topper” and frock-coat. And until I can walk with whom 1 like without unfriendly comment or the play upon me of prying eyes, am I truly to be called free? In a free country (due. as I have said, about the twenty-second century), sober man will be able to walk with drunkard without being charged with the sins of his companion; we shall be able, according to our own conscience (which still may be active) to wear any collar or none; we shall lie able to be vegetarians, fasting faddists, peace advocates or Chauvinists with no ridicule and the admission that it is our own business and nobody’s else. But what is the use of talking about such a Utopia now —unless indeed to excuse one’s grumbling and nail that absurd fiction about our freedom. But at the worst we might make a beginning —which we can hardly be said to have done yet. And the beginning will be in the application in a new spirit of the wise, if musty, and not quite polite i»junction, “Mind your own business.” “Pierrot," in “Auckland Star."