sovereignty of the individual, _i.e._ liberty of the press, liberty of speech, liberty to travel, free-trade, liberty of research, and liberty in the relations of the sexes. From their standpoint the only possible vindication of a law which restricts the liberty of the individual is that the provisional compulsory order of things is merely the speediest means of arriving at a more perfect order of things with more complete liberty--for liberty is the ideal of individualism. The thinkers of this school regard the interference of the state in matters of the affections as unwarranted; they maintain that the legal tie which keeps two beings of opposite sexes united is _either superfluous_--when it is their own wish to remain united, _or revolting_--when it is not their wish. They hold that society acts most criminally towards a married couple, one of whom detests the other, if it obliges them to remain together and bring children into being, the fruit of the desire of the one and the loathing of the other. They consider it revolting that society should compel a woman against her will to bear a child to a drunkard, a child which from its birth possesses its father's depraved instincts and lusts. And they consider it equally terrible that a man's whole life should be sacrificed to a connection which reduces him to despair. They take as much thought of the children yet unborn as Bonald does of those already in existence. They do not, like him, see in the fact that it is possible for a woman to become a mother against her will a proof of the imperfection of woman, but a proof of the uncivilised condition of society. Clearly perceiving the interdependence of all the different provinces of human life, they maintain it to be most improbable that one alone of these provinces should be, by means of tradition, absolutely rightly ordered, seeing that the ordering of all the others has been found to be altogether wrong and has consequently been completely changed in the course of the last hundred years. Such is the line of argument most frequently employed by writers of this school.[5] In this case, as in many others, it is doubtful if pure liberalism points out the right way of arriving at the desired end. The principle is stated here simply as being the direct opposite of that of authority. What is undoubtedly desirable, in this as in every other case, is absolute liberty of investigation. If a thinker in a Catholic country expresses his opinion freely on the subject of the mass, or any other of the prescribed rites and practices of the church, he is, as a rule, dubbed a scorner of religion in general, if not an atheist. For the orthodox Catholic believes that "religion" consists in, or at least can only exist in combination with, certain ecclesiastical traditions and customs with which in his consciousness it has always been associated. It never occurs to him that the assailant of these customs may have a far nobler and purer