They realized, what all intelligent men must ere long apprehend, that too great stress has been laid on mere political activity. We have counted it as of controlling force in human affairs, the energy behind human activities, the cause, instead of the effect, the motive, instead of a mere expression of our complex life. They saw more deeply than politics, they recognized other and mightier influences at work, affecting the interests and the emotions of men. They knew that there is after all, an unconscious, subtle wisdom in the general neglect of politics by the masses of citizens, who intuitively know that other things are of more importance. They were but seeking to clear the way for the more fundamental expressions of human interest, human emotions, human fervors, human liberties. For of course it is not the city that makes the people free, but the people that make the city free; and the city cannot be free until the people have been freed from all their various bondages, free above all from themselves, from their own ignorances, littlenesses, superstitions, jealousies, envies, suspicions and fears. And it is not laws that can set them free, nor political parties, nor organizations, nor commissions, nor any sort of legalistic machinery. They must themselves set themselves free, and themselves indeed find out the way. Nor is that freedom to be defined; its chief value lies, as does that of any concept of truth, in the fact that it is largely impressionistic, subject to the alterations and corrections of that mysterious system of incessant change which is life itself. The value and even the permanence of many ideals and many truths--for truths are not always permanent, but are subject to the flux of life--lie in the fact that they are impressionistic. Reduced to formal lines and hardened into rigid detail they become something quite otherwise than that which they were at first or were intended to be.