For liberalism had burned down the barn to roast the pig. The discovery of prejudice in all particular men gave the liberal a shock from which he never recovered. He was so utterly disconcerted by his own discovery of a necessary but perfectly obvious truth, that he took flight into generalities. The appeal to everybody’s conscience gave nobody a clue how to act; the voter, the politician, the laborer, the capitalist had to construct their own codes _ad hoc_, accompanied perhaps by an expansive liberal sentiment, but without intellectual guidance from liberal thought. In time, when liberalism had lost its accidental association with free trade and _laissez faire_, through their abandonment in practice, it sadly justified itself as a necessary and useful spirit, as a kind of genial spook worth having around the place. For when individual men, guided by no philosophy but their own temporary rationalizations, got themselves embroiled, the spook would appear and in a peroration straighten out the more arbitrary biases they displayed. Yet even in this disembodied state liberalism is important. It tends to awaken a milder spirit; it softens the hardness of action. But it does not dominate action, because it has eliminated the actor from its scheme of things. It cannot say: You do this and you do that, as all ruling philosophies must. It can only say: That isn’t fair, that’s selfish, that’s tyrannical. Liberalism has been, therefore, a defender of the under dog, and his liberator, but not his guide, when he is free. Top dog himself, he easily leaves his liberalism aside, and to liberals the sour reflection that they have forged a weapon of release but not a way of life. The liberals have misunderstood the nature of the public to which they appealed. The public in any situation is, in fact, merely those persons, indirectly concerned, who might align themselves in support of one of the actors. But the liberal took no such uninflated view of the public. He assumed that all mankind was within hearing, that all mankind when it heard would respond homogeneously because it had a single soul. His appeal to this cosmopolitan, universal, disinterested intuition in everybody was equivalent to an appeal to nobody. No such fallacy is to be found in the political philosophies which active men have lived by. They have all assumed, as a matter of course, that in the struggle against evil it was necessary to call upon some specific agent to do the work. Even when the thinker was out of temper with the human race, he had always hitherto made somebody the hero of his campaign. It was the peculiarity of liberalism among theories which have played a great part in the world that it attempted to eliminate the hero entirely.