merciful were it, could you, by mild persuasion, or by the
severest tyranny so-called, check him in his mad path, and turn him
into a wiser one! All painful tyranny, in that case again, were but
mild 'surgery;' the pain of it cheap, as health and life, instead of
galvanism and fixed-idea, are cheap at any price.

Sure enough, of all paths a man could strike into, there _is_, at any
given moment, a _best path_ for every man; a thing which, here and
now, it were of all things _wisest_ for him to do;--which could he be
but led or driven to do, he were then doing 'like a man,' as we phrase
it; all men and gods agreeing with him, the whole Universe virtually
exclaiming Well-done to him! His success, in such case, were complete;
his felicity a maximum. This path, to find this path and walk in it,
is the one thing needful for him. Whatsoever forwards him in that, let
it come to him even in the shape of blows and spurnings, is liberty:
whatsoever hinders him, were it wardmotes, open-vestries, pollbooths,
tremendous cheers, rivers of heavy-wet, is slavery.

The notion that a man's liberty consists in giving his vote at
election-hustings, and saying, "Behold, now I too have my
twenty-thousandth part of a Talker in our National Palaver; will not
all the gods be good to me?"--is one of the pleasantest! Nature
nevertheless is kind at present; and puts it into the heads of many,
almost of all. The liberty especially which has to purchase itself by
social isolation, and each man standing separate from the other,
having 'no business with him' but a cash-account: this is such a
liberty as the Earth seldom saw;--as the Earth will not long put up
with, recommend it how you may. This liberty turns out, before it have
long continued in action, with all men flinging up their caps round
it, to be, for the Working Millions a liberty to die by want of food;
for the Idle Thousands and Units, alas, a still more fatal liberty to
live in want of work; to have no earnest duty to do in this
God's-World any more. What becomes of a man in such predicament?
Earth's Laws are silent; and Heaven's speak in a voice which is not
heard. No work, and the ineradicable need of work, give rise to new
very wondrous life-philosophies, new very wondrous life-practices!
Dilettantism, Pococurantism, Beau-Brummelism, with perhaps an
occasional, half-mad, protesting burst of Byronism, establish
themselves: at the end of a certain period,--if you go back to 'the
Dead