In our view of freedom we have a right to survey all times and countries and from them form for our own social order an ideal condition, which shall offer to each individual all the encouragements to growth and culture that the world has ever or anywhere enjoyed. Any narrowness or lack of symmetry in life in general is reflected in the contraction or warping of personal development, and so constitutes a lack of freedom. The social order should not exaggerate one or a few aspects of human nature at the expense of others, but extend its invitations to all our higher tendencies. Thus the excessive preoccupation of the nineteenth century with material production and physical science may be regarded as a partial enslavement of the spiritual and æsthetic sides of humanity, from which we are now struggling to escape. The freedom of the future must, it would seem, call more and more for a various, rich, and tolerant environment, in which all sorts of persons may build themselves up by selective development. The day for any sort of dogmatism and coercive uniformity appears to be past, and it will be practicable to leave people more and more to control by a conscience reflecting the moral opinion of the group to which their inclination and capacity attach them. The substitution of higher forms of control for lower, the offering more alternatives and trusting the mind to make a right selection, involves, of course, an increased moral strain upon individuals. Now this increase of moral strain is not in all cases exactly proportioned to the ability to bear it well; and when it is not well borne the effect upon character is more or less destructive, so that something in the way of degeneracy results. Consequently every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom. This is very plainly to be seen at the present time, which is one, on the whole, of rapid increase of freedom. Family life and the condition of women and children have been growing freer and better, but along with this we have the increase of divorce and of spoiled children. Democracy in the state has its own peculiar evils, as we all know; and in the church the decay of dogmatism and unreasoning faith, a moral advance on the whole, has nevertheless caused a good many moral failures. In much the same way the enfranchisement of the negroes is believed to have caused an increase of insanity among them, and the growth of suicide in all countries seems to be due in part to the strain of a more complex society. It is not true, exactly, that freedom itself causes degeneracy, because if one is subjected to more strain than is good for him his real freedom is rather contracted than enlarged, but it should rather be said that any movement which has increase of freedom for its general effect can never be so regulated as to have only this effect, but is sure to act upon some in an opposite manner.