The equality will be denied, and, with it, the freedom to claim equality. Inevitably, also, the right to freedom will be maintained, and the two powers will, sooner or later, mass their forces for battle. I know no instance in history in which men in possession of power have voluntarily abdicated its privileges. They say that reason and justice prevail; but they mean their reason and their justice. They are prepared to coerce in the hope of success, and they are prepared to die fighting rather than to surrender. It is the result of such a way of life that the ideal of freedom is inapplicable to matters upon which there is urgent difference of opinion between the rulers and their subjects. It is impossible for reason to prevail if men are prepared to fight about the consequences of its victory. And if they are prepared to fight there is no room in the society for freedom since this is incompatible with habits of violence. Any society, in fact, the fruits of whose economic operations are unequally distributed will be compelled to deny freedom as the law of its being; and the same will be true of any society in process of forcible transition from one way of life to another. Cromwellian England, Revolutionary France, Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, each of these, of set purpose, made an end of the pretence that freedom was a justifiable object of desire. In each, it was proposed to maintain some particular form of social organization at any cost; to inquire into the cost might result in doubt of the value of the effort; and the value of that freedom which releases reason was therefore denied. A revolutionary state, of course, makes the position peculiarly clear. But it is not merely true of the revolutionary state.