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56 L. Q. Rev. 61 (1940)
Liberty and Equality

handle is hein.journals/lqr56 and id is 71 raw text is: LIBERTY AND EQUALITY. N a recently published collection of essays called 'Why am I a Democrat?' Mr. Ronald Cartland says: 'What we must settle at once is whether we rate freedom 2 above equality.' 'Equality involves subjugation and repression.' I select this statement only as a candid and contemporary expres- sion of a doctrine that has always seemed to me both paradoxical and muddled. Left to myself I should have thought that liberty and equality involved one another; indeed I should have found it hard to separate them. Mr. Cartland himself seems not quite free from confusion here for, between the two remarks which I have just quoted, he says: 'Toleration and equal justice are possible only in a democracy', where toleration, I suppose, means freedom of speech,-equal freedom,-and democracy means political equality; equal justice, I suppose, is simply justice, for unequal justice would be injustice. So it is implied that freedom should be equal, and that it and justice are only possible with equal political power. What then is the equality with which freedom is supposed to be incompatible? To answer this question I think we must go back to the history of the doctrine. For it is no new one. Burke paid tribute to liberty, which he thought was conferred and safeguarded by the British Constitution of his day, but to that constitution he thought democracy or political equality was abhorrent. With the enlargement of the franchise during the nineteenth century it began to be assumed, at first by revolu- tionaries, later by Whigs, young Tories and Tory Democrats, finally by almost all public speakers, not only that we desired liberty but that what conferred and safeguarded it was democracy, that is political equality, which they identified with the British Constitution as revised. Consequently Burke on their view had been wrong. But in the spirit of Burke it was still declared, for instance by both Gladstone and Disraeli,' that this freedom was incompatible with some other equality. Edited by R. Acland (Lawrence and Wishart). 2I use the words liberty and freedom in the same sense. M. Arnold (Mixed Essays, Equality) cites a speech of Lord Beaconsfield to Glasgow students about 1856 and quotes Mr. Gladstone as 'in his copious and

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