Auberon Herbert: “A man can only learn when he is free to act.”
The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays The employer may be indirectly forced to accept the workman's offer, or the workman may be indirectly forced to accept the employer's offer; but before either does so, it is necessary that they should consent, as far as their own selves are concerned, to the act that is in question. And this distinction is of the most vital kind, since the world can and will get rid of direct compulsion; but it can never of indirect compulsion.
Taxation and Anarchism: A Discussion between the Hon. Auberon Herbert and J.H. Levy What I contend for is that no force-system should over-ride the consent of a man who has not aggressed against the person or the property of his neighbour. I say that a man’s consent as regards his own actions is the most sacred thing in the world, and the one foundation on which all human relations must be built.
The Voluntaryist Creed and A Plea for Voluntaryism I began my lecture at Oxford by expressing my sense of the debt that we owed to Mr. Spencer for his splendid attempt to show us the great meanings that underlie all things — the order, the intelligibility, the coherence, that exist in this world of ours. I confessed that, on some great points of his philosophy, I differed from his teaching, parting, so to speak, at right angles from him; but that difference did not alter my view of how much he had helped us in the clear bold way in which he had traced the great principles running through the like and unlike things of our world; and in which with so skilful a hand he had grouped the facts round those principles, that he always followed — might I say — with the keen instinct of a hound that follows the scent of the prey in front of him.
State Education: a Help or Hindrance? National education is a measure carried out in the supposed interest of the workmen and the lower middle class, and it is they especially — the men in whose behalf the institution exists — whom I wish to persuade that the inherent evils of the system more than counterbalance the conveniences belonging to it.
The Principles of Voluntaryism and Free Life We voluntaryists believe that no true progress can be made until we frankly recognize the great truth that every individual, who lives within the sphere of his own rights, as a self-owner, and has not himself first aggressed upon others by employing force or fraud in his dealings with them [and thus deprived himself of his own rights of self-ownership by aggressing upon these same rights of others], is the only one true owner of his own faculties, and his own property.
