With that knowledge we begin to realise the difficulties of their statesmen. A careful computation shows us that in England, where indeed the lavish promises had been most picturesque, and where the tough idea of personal liberty took longest to kill, it required just four years of severe disciplinary measures and dry bread to reduce the masses generally to a pale, obedient, and constructive spirit. At first they would not work unless they wanted to, and then only at their own price. They pointed, when answering their masters, to the fact that the best-fed people never worked at all, and lived in the best houses. They refused to cancel the official contracts made with them, even when ordered to do so by the police. They behaved indeed, those ex-soldiers, as though it had been _their_ war. Such a state of mind we in these days really find impossible to elucidate. It is rather like trying to read the spots on a giraffe. It is as inscrutable as the once general opinion that the community has a right to decide upon its own affairs. Today we have reached that point in the evolution of society when uniformity is known to be more desirable, because more comfortable than liberty; and uniformity is impossible without compulsion. A man with a free and contentious mind is a danger to the community, for he destroys its ease. He compels his fellows to active thought, if only to refute him. This is a dissipation of energy, and a local weakening of the structure of the State. It is historically true that a few men with ranging and questioning minds have sometimes injected so strong an original virus of thought that the community has been changed in form and nature. It was the mistake of the earlier nations to give little attention to these troublesome and subversive fellows, who always thought more of the truth than they did even of the inviolability of the High Priests of the State. They preferred to die rather than surrender the out-dated rights of man. Therefore they had to die. The rights of man cannot be allowed to stand in the way of a nation's perfect uniformity. It was many centuries before man realized that the only freedom worth having is freedom from the necessity for individual thought. Perfectly unembarrassed freedom, freedom in which the mind may be empty and sunny, and assured happily of not the slightest interruption from any unsanctioned unofficial idea, became possible to a community only after the sanitary measures were devised which sufficed against unexpected epidemics of speculative thinking.