Het kan volgens hem overwogen worden om te interveniëren om vrijheid te ondersteunen, maar hij maakte een strikt onderscheid tussen steun van "interne vrijheid" en om vrije naties te verdedigen tegen een aanval door een despotische natie. Het eerste beschreef hij als "unwise": "If they have not sufficient love of liberty to be able to wrest it from merely domestic oppressors, the liberty which is bestowed upon them by other hands than their own, will have nothing real, nothing permanent".
Mill zou erg sceptisch en terughoudend zijn tegenover vele Amerikaanse retoriek om "democratie te exporteren" door elders een tiran te verwijderen. Hij beschouwde de zaak echter anders als een vrij land militair werd bedreigd door een ander land. "This meant that intervention to enforce non-intervention is always rightful, always moral, if not always prudent." Hij oordeelde dat helaas niet alle landen rijp waren voor vrijheid en dat in dat geval de chaos van een interventie meer menselijk lijden kon veroorzaken dan iets goeds brengen. "Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one."
Uitgebreid citaat:
With
respect to the question, whether one country is justified in
helping the people of another in a struggle against their
government for free institutions, the answer will be different,
according as the yoke which the people are attempting to throw off
is that of a purely native government, or of foreigners;
considering as one of foreigners, every government which maintains
itself by foreign support. When the contest is only with native
rulers, and with such native strength as those rulers can enlist
in their defence, the answer I should give to the question of the
legitimacy of intervention is, as a general rule, No. The reason is,
that there can seldom be anything approaching to assurance that
intervention, even if successful, would be for the good of the
people themselves. The only test possessing any real value, of a
people's having become fit for popular institutions, is that they,
or a sufficient portion of them to prevail in the contest, are
willing to brave labour and danger for their liberation. I know
all that may be said. I know it may be urged that the virtues of
freemen cannot be learned in the school of slavery, and that if
a people are not fit for freedom, to have any chance of becoming
so they must first be free. And this would be conclusive, if the
intervention recommended would really give them freedom. But the evil
is, that if they have not sufficient love of liberty to be
able to wrest it from merely domestic oppressors, the liberty
which is bestowed on them by other hands than their own, will
have nothing real, nothing permanent. No people ever was and remained
free, but because it was determined to be so; because neither its
rulers nor any other party in the nation could compel it to be
otherwise. If a people - especially one who freedom has not yet
become prescriptive - does not value it sufficiently to fight for
it, and maintain it against any force which can be mustered
within the country, even by those who have the command of the
public revenue, it is only a question of how few years or
months that people will be enslaved.
