most degraded pamphleteer in Paris dared do no more than hint a fault and hesitate dislike.  But this lady went to the scaffold with many and many of the young, the beautiful, the brave; and her sombre satire, “What things are done in thy name!” was remembered long afterwards when the despots and the invading alien had in turn placed their feet on the neck of devoted France.  “What things are done in thy name!” Yes; and we, in this modern world, might vary the saying a little and exclaim, “What things are said in thy name!”—­for we have indeed arrived at the era of liberty, and the gospel of Rousseau is being preached with fantastic variations by people who think that any speech which apes the forms of logic is reasonable and that any desire which is expressed in a sufficiently loud howl should be at once gratified.  We pride ourselves on our knowledge and our reasoning power; but to judicious observers it often seems that those who talk loudest have a very thin vein of knowledge, and no reasoning faculty that is not imitative.

By all means let us have “freedom,” but let us also consider our terms, and fix the meaning of the things that we say.  Perhaps I should write “the things that we think we say,” because so many of those who make themselves heard do not weigh words at all, and they imagine themselves to be uttering cogent truths when they are really giving us the babble of Bedlam.  If ladies and gentlemen who rant about freedom would try to emancipate themselves from the dominion of meaningless words, we should all fare better; but we find a large number of public personages using perfectly grammatical series of phrases without dreaming for a moment that their grave sentences are pure gibberish.  A few simple questions addressed in the Socratic manner to certain lights of thought might do much good.  For instance, we might say, “Do you ever speak of being free from good health, or free from a good character, or free from prosperity?” I fancy not; and yet copiously talkative individuals employ terms quite as hazy and silly as those which I have indicated.

We have gone very far in the direction of scientific discovery, and we have a large number of facts at our disposal; but some of us have quite forgotten that true liberty comes only from submitting to wise guidance.  Old Sandy Mackay, in Alton Locke, declared that he would never bow down to a bit of brains:  and this highly-independent attitude is copied by persons who fail to see that bowing to the bit of brains is the only mode of securing genuine freedom.  If our daring logicians would grant that every man should have liberty to lead his life as he chooses, so long as he hurts neither himself nor any other individual nor the State, then one might follow their argument; but a plain homespun proposal like that of mine is not enough for your advanced thinker.  In England he says, “Let us have deliverance from all restrictions;” in Russia he says, “Anarchy is the only cure for existing evils.”  For