The democratic idea is the corollary of the doctrine of the equal intrinsic worth of every individual soul. The modern democratic movement has started from a recognition of this principle; and the principle is meaningless unless it implies the prescriptive right of the individual to self-determination. Lord Acton’s definition of liberty is inadequate because he approaches it from the standpoint of one who was in a permanent religious minority in his own country, and in a permanent intellectual minority in his church. Liberty is surely the assurance that a man may have full opportunity to live out his own life and to grow to the full stature of his manhood, to be true to himself through everything. This requires the recognition of real personal independence and a definite minimum of obligatory uniformity. In another connection, Acton insists that “liberty is not a means to a higher political end; it is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private life.” It is so frequently assumed that the function of government is the establishment and preservation of order that it is well to remember that it is a comparatively easy thing to secure some kind of order. The real difficulty is to establish and to secure liberty. We are far too ready to assume that liberty is capable of looking after itself and that the fragile plant which needs our solicitude is social order. But liberty stands in jeopardy every hour, not less in a democracy than in an autocracy. And in so far as a democracy, which was born of the craving for liberty fails to preserve and to extend liberty, it proves itself bankrupt. And just as democracy is only made safe from corruption and subordination to undemocratic ends by repeated solemn affirmation of its moral and spiritual foundations, so it is only made safe from declining into absolutism and tyranny by constant return upon its metaphysical centre—the sanctity of the individual. In the modern world, the multitude is not in danger; our chief pre-occupation must be to save the individual from being swamped by the multitude. We are apt not to see the trees for the wood; we must be for ever reminding ourselves that the wood is made up of the trees. Democracy that tends to authority and uniformity is foreordained to decay; the democracy of life is one of freedom and infinite variety. Democracy has yet to solve the problem of setting the individual free without opening the door to individualism and anarchy. II