thus of Liberty
had lived a high and pure life; all good souls were attracted to her;
and it seems strange that so sweet and pure and beautiful a creature
could have grown up in the vile France of the days before the
Revolution. She kept up the traditions of gentle and seemly courtesy
even at times when Sardanapalus Danton was perforce admitted to her
_salon_; and in an age of suspicion and vile scandal she kept a
stainless name, for even the 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 indivi