centuries past the earth has been deluged with blood and the children of men have been scourged by miseries unspeakable, merely because powerful men and powerful bodies of men have not chosen to learn the meaning of the word “liberty.”  “How miserable you make the world for one another, O feeble race of men!” So said our own melancholy English cynic; and he had singularly good reason for his plaint.  Rapid generalization is nearly always mischievous; unless we learn to form correct and swift judgments on every faculty of life as it comes before us, we merely stumble from error to error.  No cut-and-dried maxim ever yet was fit to guide men through their mysterious existence; the formalist always ends by becoming a bungler, and the most highly-developed man, if he is content to be no more than a thinking-machine, is harmful to himself and harmful to the community which has the ill-luck to harbour him.  If we take cases from history, we ought to find it easy enough to distinguish between the men who sought liberty wisely and those who were restive and turbulent.  A wise man or a wise nation knows the kind of restraint which is good; the fool, with his feather-brained theories, never knows what is good for him—­he mistakes eternal justice for tyranny, he rebels against facts that are too solid for him—­and we know what kind of an end he meets.  Some peculiarly daring personages carry their spirit of resistance beyond the bounds of our poor little earth.  Only lately many of us read with a shock of surprise the passionate asseveration of a gifted woman who declared that it was a monstrous wrong and wickedness that ever she had been born.  Job said much the same thing in his delirium; but our great novelist put forth her complaint as the net outcome of all her thought and culture.  We only need to open an ordinary newspaper to find that the famous writer’s folly is shared by many weaker souls; and the effect on the mind of a shrewd and contented man is so startling that it resembles the emotion roused by grotesque wit.  The whole story of the ages tells us dismally what happens when unwise people choose to claim the measure of liberty which they think good; but somehow, though knowledge has come, wisdom lingers, and the grim old follies rear themselves rankly among us in the age of reason.

When we remember the Swiss mountaineers who took their deaths joyously in defence of their homes, when we read of the devoted brave one who received the sheaf of spears in his breast and broke the oppressor’s array, none of us can think of mere vulgar rebellion.  The Swiss were fighting to free themselves from wrongs untold; and we should hold them less than men if they had tamely submitted to be caged like poultry.  Again, we feel a thrill when we read the epitaph which says, “Gladly we would have rested had we won freedom.  We have lost, and very gladly rest.”  The very air of bravery, of steady self-abnegation seems to exhale from the sombre, triumphant words.