For we must remember that in these matters we have to concern ourselves with short-term values and not long-term values. We do not legislate for some conceivable Utopia to be born in some unimaginable time, but for the kind of world we know ourselves, for lives like our own lives. The freedom we ask we have to make. Every postponement we accept, every failure before which we are dumb, only consolidates the forces that are hostile to freedom. They themselves realize this well enough. They have, in the past, fought every step on every road to freedom because they have seen that the accumulation of small concessions will, in the end, be their defeat. Everywhere they have been guilty of definite error, or wrong, they have denied the error or wrong, lest it upset faith in their own right to power. Not the least powerful to silence, you will recollect, which persuaded even those who thought Sacco and Vanzetti innocent was their fear that proof of that innocence might disturb popular faith in the Massachusetts Courts. The same was true in the Dreyfus case. The same, on a lesser plane, was true of Mr Winston Churchill when he sought to deceive the House of Commons over the treatment of Lady Constance Lytton in prison.[44] Those in power will always deny freedom if, thereby, they can conceal wrong. And any successful denial only makes its repetition easier. Had California released Mooney in 1916, when the world knew he was innocent, it would have been easier for Massachusetts to have acted justly ten years later. The will to freedom, like the will to power, is a habit, and it perishes of atrophy.