The Chartered Libertine / Gilbert Keith Chesterton

I find myself in agreement with Mr. Robert Lynd for his most just remark

in connection with the Malatesta case, that the police are becoming a

peril to society. I have no attraction to that sort of atheist asceticism

to which the purer types of Anarchism tend; but both an atheist and an

ascetic are better men than a spy; and it is ignominious to see one's

country thus losing her special point of honour about asylum and liberty.

It will be quite a new departure if we begin to protect and whitewash

foreign policemen. I always understood it was only English policemen who

were absolutely spotless. A good many of us, however, have begun to feel

with Mr. Lynd, and on all sides authorities and officials are being

questioned. But there is one most graphic and extraordinary fact, which

it did not lie in Mr. Lynd's way to touch upon, but which somebody really

must seize and emphasise. It is this: that at the very time when we are

all beginning to doubt these authorities, we are letting laws pass to

increase their most capricious powers. All our commissions, petitions,

and letters to the papers are asking whether these authorities can give an

account of their stewardship. And at the same moment all our laws are

decreeing that they shall not give any account of their stewardship, but

shall become yet more irresponsible stewards. Bills like the

Feeble-Minded Bill and the Inebriate Bill (very appropriate names for

them) actually arm with scorpions the hand that has chastised the

Malatestas and Maleckas with whips. The inspector, the doctor, the police

sergeant, the well-paid person who writes certificates and "passes" this,

that, or the other; this sort of man is being trusted with more authority,

apparently because he is being doubted with more reason. In one room we

are asking why the Government and the great experts between them cannot

sail a ship. In another room we are deciding that the Government and

experts shall be allowed, without trial or discussion, to immure any one's

body, damn any one's soul, and dispose of unborn generations with the

levity of a pagan god. We are putting the official on the throne while he

is still in the dock.

The mere meaning of words is now strangely forgotten and falsified; as

when people talk of an author's "message," without thinking whom it is

from; and I have noted in these connections the strange misuse of another

word. It is the excellent mediaeval word "charter." I remember the Act

that sought to save gutter-boys from cigarettes was called "The Children's

Charter." Similarly the Act which seeks to lock up as lunatics people who

are not lunatics was actually called a "charter" of the feeble-minded.

Now this terminology is insanely wrong, even if the Bills are right. Even

were they right in theory they would be applied only to the poor, like

many better rules about education and cruelty. A woman was lately

punished for cruelty because her children were not washed when it was

proved that she had no water. From that it will be an easy step in

Advanced Thought to punishing a man for wine-bibbing when it is proved

that he had no wine. Rifts in right reason widen down the ages. And

when we have begun by shutting up a confessedly kind person for cruelty,

we may yet come to shutting up Mr. Tom Mann for feeblemindedness.

But even if such laws do good to children or idiots, it is wrong to use

the word "charter." A charter does not mean a thing that does good to

people. It means a thing that grants people more rights and liberties.

It may be a good thing for gutter-boys to be deprived of their cigarettes:

it might be a good thing for aldermen to be deprived of their cigars.

But I think the Goldsmiths' Company would be very much surprised if the

King granted them a new charter (in place of their mediaeval charter), and

it only meant that policemen might pull the cigars out of their mouths.

It may be a good thing that all drunkards should be locked up: and many

acute statesmen (King John, for instance) would certainly have thought it

a good thing if all aristocrats could be locked up. But even that

somewhat cynical prince would scarcely have granted to the barons a thing

called "the Great Charter" and then locked them all up on the strength of

it. If he had, this interpretation of the word "charter" would have

struck the barons with considerable surprise. I doubt if their narrow

mediaeval minds could have taken it in.

The roots of the real England are in the early Middle Ages, and no

Englishman will ever understand his own language (or even his own

conscience) till he understands them. And he will never understand them

till he understands this word "charter." I will attempt in a moment to

state in older, more suitable terms, what a charter was. In modern,

practical, and political terms, it is quite easy to state what a charter

was. A charter was the thing that the railway workers wanted last

Christmas and did not get; and apparently will never get. It is called in

the current jargon "recognition"; the acknowledgment in so many words by

society of the immunities or freedoms of a certain set of men. If there

had been railways in the Middle Ages there would probably have been a

railwaymen's guild; and it would have had a charter from the King,

defining their rights. A charter is the expression of an idea still true

and then almost universal: that authority is necessary for nothing so much

as for the granting of liberties. Like everything mediaeval, it ramified

back to a root in religion; and was a sort of small copy of the Christian

idea of man's creation. Man was free, not because there was no God, but

because it needed a God to set him free. By authority he was free. By

authority the craftsmen of the guilds were free. Many other great

philosophers took and take the other view: the Lucretian pagans, the

Moslem fatalists, the modern monists and determinists, all roughly confine

themselves to saying that God gave man a law. The mediaeval Christian

insisted that God gave man a charter. Modern feeling may not sympathise

with its list of liberties, which included the liberty to be damned; but

that has nothing to do with the fact that it was a gift of liberties and

not of laws. This was mirrored, however dimly, in the whole system.

There was a great deal of gross inequality; and in other aspects absolute

equality was taken for granted. But the point is that equality and

inequality were ranks--or rights. There were not only things one was

forbidden to do; but things one was forbidden to forbid. A man was not

only definitely responsible, but definitely irresponsible. The holidays

of his soul were immovable feasts. All a charter really meant lingers

alive in that poetic phrase that calls the wind a "chartered" libertine.

Lie awake at night and hear the wind blowing; hear it knock at every man's

door and shout down every man's chimney. Feel how it takes liberties with

everything, having taken primary liberty for itself; feel that the wind is

always a vagabond and sometimes almost a housebreaker. But remember that

in the days when free men had charters, they held that the wind itself was

wild by authority; and was only free because it had a father.