I know nothing more incompatible with the climate of mental freedom than the inference of such people. They lack altogether a respect for the dignity of human personality. They are utterly unable to see that people who live differently think differently and that in so various a civilization as ours absolute standards in these matters are out of place. It is difficult to overestimate the price we pay for their successes. Certainly no great art and no literature great in anything save indignation can be produced where they have sway. It is not for nothing that from the time of Calvin not a single work of ultimate literary significance was produced by a resident of Geneva. It is easy to understand why the grim excesses of Puritanism produced the luxuriant license of the Restoration. These would be, if they could, modern Inquisitors, without tolerance and without pity, thinking no means unjustified if only their end can be attained. They are the kind of people who drove Byron and Shelley into exile, and they remain unable to see upon whom that exile reflects. Their pride is inordinate; and human instincts are its chief victim. They are often ignorant, usually dangerous, and invariably active. Since the friends of liberty too often sleep, their unceasing vigilance not seldom meets with its reward. To me, at least, they commit the ultimate blasphemy since they seek to fashion man in their own image. I do sincerely plead that, especially in a democratic society, these are grave dangers to freedom, against which we cannot too stringently be upon our guard. Especially, I say, in a democratic society. For there, the proportion of men zealous in the service of freedom, is likely to be small unless great and dramatic issues are at stake. Tyranny flows easily from the accumulation of petty restrictions. It is important that each should have to prove its undeniable social necessity before it is admitted within the fabric of the law. No conduct should be inhibited unless it can be definitely shown that its practice in a reasonable way can have no other result than to stunt the development of personality. No opportunity should be offered for the exercise of power unless by its application men are released from trammels of which it is the necessary price of purchase. We ought not to accept the easy gospel that liberty must prove that it is not license. We ought rather to be critical of every proposal that asks for a surrender of liberty. Its enemies, we must remember, never admit that they are concerned to attack it; they always base their defence of their purpose upon other grounds. But I could not, for myself, serve principles which claimed to be just if their result was to make the temple of freedom a prison for the impulses of men. CHAPTER III LIBERTY AND SOCIAL POWER I