Usually when we speak of the past struggles of the people against tyranny, we have in our minds a picture of the great mass held down by the superior physical force of the tyrant. But such a picture is, of course, quite absurd. For the physical force which held down the people was that which they themselves supplied. The tyrant had no physical force save that with which his victims furnished him. In this struggle of 'People _v._ Tyrant,' obviously the weight of physical force was on the side of the people. This was as true of the slave States of antiquity as it is of the modern autocracies. Obviously the free minority--the five or ten or fifteen per cent.--of Rome or Egypt, or the governing orders of Prussia or Russia, did not impose their will upon the remainder by virtue of superior physical force, the sheer weight of numbers, of sinew and muscle. If the tyranny of the minority had depended upon its own physical power, it could not have lasted a day. The physical force which the minority used was the physical force of the majority. The people were oppressed by an instrument which they themselves furnished. In that picture, therefore, which we make of the mass of mankind struggling against the 'force' of tyranny, we must remember that the force against which they struggled was not in the last analysis physical force at all; it was their own weight from which they desired to be liberated. Do we realise all that this means? It means that tyranny has been imposed, as freedom has been won: through the Mind. The small minority imposes itself and can only impose itself by getting first at the mind of the majority--the people--in one form or another: by controlling it through keeping knowledge from it, as in so much of antiquity, or by controlling the knowledge itself, as in Germany. It is because the minds of the masses have failed them that they have been enslaved. Without that intellectual failure of the masses, tyranny could have found no force wherewith to impose its burdens. This confusion as to the relation of 'force' to the moral factor is of all confusions most worth while clearing up: and for that purpose we may descend to homely illustrations.