It is true that English society is like a menagerie, or rather like one of those collections of different animals, all in one cage, seen at the circus. Every one of these animals is trained to regard the rights of the rest. Diversity is in itself a good. A college of Jesuits is a protection to liberty if it is set down in Denver. The Jesuits are not money-mad. It is an education for a Denver child to see a new kind of man. You will conclude, as some philosophers are now concluding, that to have free government you must encourage institutions--and you will be wrong. The fundamental reason why you are wrong is that these beneficent institutions are what is left of the activity of people who believed in them for their own sake. You can no more imitate one of them, or catch the power of one of them, than you can set up a king here to repel an invasion. You yourself believe in individualism. Go straight for that, and leave it to erect its bulwarks in what form it may. A multiplication of institutions then serves two contradictory purposes. It limits the individual, creates black spots of prejudice and unreason in him; but on the other hand it encourages a free development of the individual outside of those spots. It creates types, and types are mutually protective. This is only another way of saying that free government results from a segregation of the government into provinces, which cannot all be captured, at one time, by one force. The highly intelligent and artificial separation of our government into the branches of Executive, Legislative, and Judicial was in a sense an attempt to get free government by the erection of independent institutions. But these were never strong enough to create types (we have hardly the type of judge among us); and certainly no attachment to any part, but the sacredness of the entire system, has preserved it. It was the sentiment attaching to the single idea of a central government. It is to institutions that the consent to be governed is given. The consent is always a highly complex affair. It implies a civilization. It is qualified, limited, infinitely diversified, and is in every case regulated by historic fact. For instance, under a limited monarchy, it is a consent to be governed by a particular dynasty after special ceremonies, tempered by some priesthood, subject to such and such customs,--each and all existing in the imagination of the subject. For government is entirely a matter of the imagination, and it is inconceivable that it should ever be anything else. The English have spent two centuries in impressing the imagination of India with the vision of English power. A violation by the government, no matter how strong, of the popular imagination, an assumption of power in a field not yet subdued, always brings on riots. The Persians resented furiously the creation of a tobacco monopoly. The Sultan had to rescind it. The Americans threw the tea into the harbor.