The struggle to control and guide any of our passions, or if need be to cause them to atrophy from disuse, must be directed chiefly to current assumptions, types of thought, social standards, and customary classifications. This is one reason why the world cannot be saved by rescuing individuals one by one from their evil ways. While we are rebuilding one individual in this way, social precedents are stamping themselves upon ten children. It follows that the reconstructive work of religion and of education must be done chiefly by discrediting currently accepted precedents and causing a rethinking of the alternatives. XXIV FREE MEN FEAR THEIR FREEDOM. WHY? Our fathers gave their all that we might be free, but we are abashed by the bequest that they have left us. We are abashed, not by the moral grandeur, the holiness, of our inheritance, nor by the height of the obligations with which it endows us, but by apprehension that the inside of it may not be as fair as the outside. We decorate ourselves with the name and the glory of free men; they grace our historic records and our festal occasions; but in our daily conduct we accept the functions of free men with reservations. We are “judicious,” as we call it. The paradox of liking and disliking freedom at the same time is not a superficial one; it is deep in our nature; it is an apparently inevitable seesaw in our motives. There is in our endowment something so grand that ordinary men accept any privation in preference to comfortable slavery. So majestic is the mind of man when it is aroused that no pain that our fellows can inflict counterbalances the value of uncoerced thinking and speaking. We know that this freedom, with all the risks and burdens that it entails, is fundamental to every great thing that humanity has done in the modern period. Milton’s _Areopagitica_ and the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States are flags upon the mountain peaks of history. Nevertheless, the meaning of every achieved enfranchisement is in practice toned down by the enfranchised themselves, and in consequence even our old and taken-for-granted liberties have continually to be rewon.