Although a high degree of freedom can exist only through a complex social order, it by no means follows that every complex social order is free. On the contrary, it has more often been true in the past that very large and intricately organized states, like the Roman Empire, were constructed on a comparatively mechanical or unfree principle. And in our own time a vast and complex empire, like Russia or China, may be less free than the simplest English-speaking colony. There are serious objections to identifying progress, as Herbert Spencer sometimes appears to do, with the mere differentiation and co-ordination of social functions. But the example of the United States, which is perhaps on the whole the most intricately differentiated and co-ordinated state that ever existed, shows that complexity is not inconsistent with freedom. To enter fully into this matter would require a more careful examination of the institutional aspect of life than I wish to undertake at present; but I hold that the possibility of organizing large and complex societies on a free principle depends upon the quickness and facility of communication, and so has come to exist only in recent times. The great states of earlier history were necessarily somewhat mechanical in structure. It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought it at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them. Thoreau in his hut remained as truly a member of society, as dependent for suggestion upon his books, his friends, and his personal memories, and upon verbal expression for his sense of self, as did Emerson in Concord or Lowell in Cambridge; and I imagine that if he had cared to discuss the matter he would have admitted that this was the case. Indeed, the idea of Thoreau as a recluse was not, I think, his own idea, but has been attached to him by superficial observers of his life. Although he was a dissenter from the state and the church of his time, his career would have been impossible without those institutions, without Harvard College, for instance, which was a joint product of the two. He worked out his personal development through congenial influences selected from the life of his time, very much as others do. He simply had peculiar tendencies which he developed in a peculiar way, especially by avoiding a gregarious mode of life unsuited to his temperament. He was free through the social order, not outside of it, and the same may be said of Edward Fitzgerald and other seclusive spirits. No doubt the commonplace life of the day is a sort of slavery for many sensitive minds that have not, like these, the resolution to escape from it into a calmer and broader atmosphere.