Thus freedom is relative to the particular persons and states who are to enjoy it, some individuals within any society, and some societies as wholes, being capable of a higher sort of response than others. In the family, it implies the substitution, so far as practicable, of familiarity and moral suasion for distance and the rod; in government the growth of public opinion and education as compared with autocracy and the military and police functions; in the church, the decline of dogma, form, the fear of hell and hypnotic conversion, relatively to intelligence, sympathy, and good works. But any relaxation of lower forms of discipline which is not supplied by higher, which tends, on the whole, to confusion rather than reorganization, is not in the way of real freedom. The question what this is is always one that is relative to the actual situation, never one that can be absolutely or abstractly answered. Freedom can be increased only in connection with the increase of sympathy, intelligence, and self-control in individuals. The social order is antithetical to freedom only in so far as it is a bad one. Freedom can exist only in and through a social order, and must be increased by all the healthy growth of the latter. It is only in a large and complex social system that any advanced degree of it is possible, because nothing else can supply the multifarious opportunities by means of which all sorts of persons can work out a congenial development through the choice of influences. In so far as we have freedom in the United States at the present time, in what does it consist? Evidently, it seems to me, in the access to a great number and variety of influences by whose progressive selection and assimilation a child may become, within vague limits set by the general state of our society, the best that he is naturally fitted to become. It consists, to begin with infancy, in a good family life, in intelligent nurture and training, adapted to the special traits of character which every child manifests from the first week of life. Then it involves good schooling, admitting the child through books and teachers to a rich selection from the accumulated influences of the best minds of the past. Free technical and professional education, so far as it exists, contributes to it, also the facility of travel, bringing him in contact with significant persons from all over the world; public libraries, magazines, good newspapers, and so on. Whatever enlarges his field of selection without permanently confusing him adds to his liberty. In fact, institutions—government, churches, industries, and the like—have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.