They have been knocked about and dragooned by their own rulers and, be it said and emphasized, they have received certain compensations and gained certain advantages, if nothing else an orderliness, safety, and care for the people by the state unequalled elsewhere in the world. But there is no gainsaying, on the other hand, that they have lost the fruits that are plucked by the nations of more individualistic training. They have clean streets, cheap music and drama, and a veritable mesh of national education with interstices so small that no one can escape, and they are coddled in every direction; but they have no stuff for colonizers, and they have been not infrequently wofully lacking in stalwart statesmen, and leaders. To deprive the worker of his choice of expenditure, by taking all but a pittance of it in taxation, is a dangerous deprivation of moral exercise. To be able to choose for oneself is a vitally necessary appliance in the moral gymnasium, even if here and there one chooses wrong. It is a curious trend of thought of the day, which proposes to cure social evils always by weakening, rather than by strengthening the individual. Socialism is merely a moral form of putting a sharper bit in humanity's mouth; when of course the highest aim, the optimistic view, is to train people to go as fast and straight and far as possible, with the least possible hampering of their natural powers by legislation. "Some men are by nature free, others slaves," writes Aristotle, but whether this axiom can be accepted fully or not, it is undoubtedly true that you can first dragoon and then coddle a whole people, into a lack of independence and a shrinking from the responsibilities of freedom.