efficiency people and the professional humanitarians are, like all reformers and agitators, abnormally vocal; and on the other hand the lovers of the old-fashioned principle of liberty are abnormally silent, so far as any public manifestation is concerned. In the foregoing I have admitted, I think, as great a decline in the current prestige of the idea of liberty as would be claimed by the most enthusiastic efficiency man or the most ardent humanitarian. I now wish to insist upon the other side of the matter. Persons who are always ready to be carried away with the current--and their name is legion--constantly make the mistake of imagining that the latest thing is the last. They are the first to throw aside old and venerable notions as outworn; they look with condescending pity upon those who are so dull as not to recognize the infinite potency of change; and yet, curiously enough, they never think of the possibility of a change which may reverse the current of to-day just as the current of to-day has reversed that of yesterday. The tree of liberty is less flourishing to-day than it was fifty or a hundred years ago; its leaves are not so green, and it is not so much the object of universal admiration and affection. But its roots are deep down in the soil; and it supplies a need of mankind too fundamental, feeds an aspiration too closely linked with all that elevates and enriches human nature, to permit of its being permanently neglected or allowed to fall into decay. And even at this very time, as I have indicated above, the mass of the people and I mean great as well as small, cultured and wealthy as well as ignorant and poor retain their instinctive attachment to the idea of liberty. It is chiefly in a small, but extremely prominent and influential, body of over-sophisticated people--specialists of one kind or another--that the principle of liberty has fallen into the disrepute to which I have referred. The prime reason why the Prohibition law is so light-heartedly violated by all sorts and conditions of men, why it is held in contempt by hundreds of thousands of our best and most respected citizens, is that the law is a gross outrage upon personal liberty. Many, indeed, would commit the violation as a mere matter of self-indulgence; but it is absurd to suppose that this would be done, as it is done, by thousands of persons of the highest type of character and citizenship. These people are sustained by the consciousness that, though their conduct may be open to criticism, it at least has the justification of being a revolt against a law--a law unrepealable by any ordinary process--that strikes at the foundations of liberty.