When attacks on liberty are political or economic, it is their motive rather than their nature that changes. A political pattern has the same hold upon its votaries as a religion; the enthusiasts of Moscow and of Rome differ only in the object of their worship. An economic system defends itself in just the same way: the devotees of Marxism in its extreme form have never doubted their right to impose their outlook upon the recalcitrant, even at the cost of blood. In a constitutional state like America the suppression of liberty is called the inhibition of license; in a dictatorship like Moscow it is termed resistance to the admission of incorrect “bourgeois” notions. Always the effort is to insist upon an artificial unity the maintenance of which is necessary to the desires of those who hold power. Suppression, doubtless, eases the way of authority, for scepticism is always painful, and to arrive at a conclusion after careful testing of evidence always involves the possibility that authority may have to admit that its conclusions are mistaken. Yet it may still be maintained with some confidence that the only adequate answer to a principle which claims social recognition is the rational proof that it is untrue. It may even be argued that the world would be a happier world if this were the general theory underlying the activities of society. Civilization is strewn with the wrecks of systems which men at one time held for true; systems, also, in the name of which liberty was denied and pain needlessly inflicted. A scrutiny of history, moreover, makes it plain that the right to liberty will always be challenged where its consequence is the equalization of some privilege which is not generally shared by men. The more consciously, therefore, we can seek that equalization as a desirable object of social effort, the more likely we are to make attacks upon liberty more rare, the evil results of such attack less frequent. No man’s love of justice is strong enough to survive the right to inflict punishment in the name of the creed he professes; and the simplest way to retain his sense of justice is to take away the interest which persuades him of the duty to punish. Scepticism, it may be, is a dissolvent of enthusiasm; but enthusiasm has always been the enemy of freedom. The atmosphere we require, if we are to attain happiness for the multitude, is one in which we have everything to gain by the statement of experience and nothing to lose by the investigation of its convictions. That atmosphere is the condition of liberty and its quality is light rather than heat. For light permits of argument, and we cannot argue with men who are in a passion. Nothing is so likely to engender passion as the perception that they are called to sacrifice a privilege. The way, therefore, of freedom is to arrange the pattern of social institutions so that there are no privileges to sacrifice.