“In every country of Europe, and the same in America, there is at present something which makes an abuse of this name: a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of spirits, who desire almost the opposite of what our intentions and instincts prompt.... Briefly and regrettably, they belong to the _levellers_, these wrongly named free spirits--as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and its modern ideas: all of them men without solitude, without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage nor honorable conduct ought to be denied; only, they are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost _all_ human misery and failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto existed--a notion which happily inverts the truth entirely! What they would fain attain with all their strength, is the universal, green-meadow happiness of the herd, together with security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of life for everyone.” The word liberal is commonly associated with that extension of democracy which the crowd thinks is progress. If you favor this progress, you are said to be a liberal. If you doubt that it is progress you are thought to oppose progress as such and so are a conservative. If the progress of democracy were accompanied by a corresponding advance of culture and gain in wisdom and broadmindedness, this use of the term liberal would be appropriate.