Another reason for the association of freedom with truth is that the former is a training in the sense of social cause and effect; the free play of human forces being a constant demonstration of the power of reality as against sham. The more men experiment intelligently with life, the more they come to believe in definite causation and the less in trickery. Freedom means continuous experiment, a constant testing of the individual and of all kinds of social ideas and arrangements. It tends, then, to a social realism; “Her open eyes desire the truth.” The best people I know are pervaded by the feeling that life is so real that it is not worth while to make believe. “Knights of the unshielded heart,” they desire nothing so much as to escape from all pretense and prudery and confront things as they really are—confident that they are not irremediably bad. I read in a current newspaper that “brutal, unvarnished, careless frankness is the pose of the new type of girl. She has not been developed in a school of evasion. To pretend you gave a hundred dollars for a gown when you really gave fifty for it, is a sorry jest for her and a waste of time.... If she owns to the new gown she tells you its cost, the name of the inexpensive dressmaker who made it, and just where she economized in its price.” There is a tribute to truth in the very cynicism and shamelessness with which flagitious politicians and financiers declare and defend their practices. Like Napoleon or Macchiavelli they have at least cast off superstition and are dealing with reality, though they apprehend it only in a low and partial aspect. If they lie, they do so deliberately, scientifically, with a view to producing a certain effect upon people whom they regard as fools. It only needs that this rational spirit should ally itself with higher sentiment and deeper insight in order that it should become a source of virtue. I will not here inquire minutely how far or in what sense honesty is the best policy, but it is safe to say that the more life is organized upon a basis of freedom and justice the more truth there is in the proverb. When the general state of things is anarchical, as in the time of Macchiavelli, rationalism may lead to the cynical use of falsehood as the tool suited to the material; nor is it deniable that this is often the case at the present day. But modern democracy aims to organize justice, and in so far as it succeeds it creates a medium in which truth tends to survive and falsehood to perish. We all wish to live in such a medium: there is nothing more grateful than the conviction that the order of things is sincere, is founded on reality of some sort; and in a good measure the American, for instance, does have this conviction. It makes democracy a soft couch for the soul: one can let himself go and does not have to make believe; pretence is no part of the system; be your real self and you will find your right place.