We are in the difficulty that every step we take towards freedom is a step towards the equalization of privileges now held unequally. Those who hold them are not anxious to abandon what they entail; sometimes they can even persuade themselves that the well-being of society depends upon a refusal to surrender them. For them, therefore, the honest publication of facts, the making of free minds, are simply paths to disaster. Why should they surrender their weapons of defence? Why, the more, when many of them do not even suspect that they fight with poisoned weapons? To explain to a loyal Roman Catholic that he should tell his children that there is grave reason to deny the truth of all he believes is to invite him to shatter the foundation upon which he has built his life. To suggest to the average citizen who took part in the Great War that his school-books should abandon the legend that his particular state entered it with the whole-souled motive of serving justice would appear scandalous simply because he is honestly unconscious of any other motive. To urge even upon the public-spirited heir to a great estate the possible duty of acting upon the principle of Mill’s argument about the laws of inheritance is, at the best, an adventure in the lesser hope. There was good reason for the unpopularity of the Socratic temper in Athens. II I conclude, therefore, that whatever our mechanisms and institutions, liberty can hope to emerge and to be maintained in a society where men are, broadly speaking, equally interested in its emergency and its maintenance. I accept the insight Harrington had when he insisted that the distribution of economic power in a state will control the distribution of its political power. I think James Madison was right when he argued that property is the only durable source of faction. I think the perception of the early socialists entirely justified when they urged that a society divided into a small number of rich, and a large number of poor persons, will be a society of exploiters and exploited. I cannot believe that, in such an atmosphere, liberty will be a matter of serious concern to the possessors of power.