has his rightful place, and that he may exercise
his rightful influence. If he is beaten, he is beaten in fair fight; if he
conquers, he has no one else to thank. No doubt, despotic Governments have
often exercised the most beneficial patronage in encouraging and rewarding
poets, artists, and men of science. But men of genius who have conquered
the love and admiration of a whole nation are greater than those who have
gained the favor of the most brilliant Courts; and we know how some of the
fairest reputations have been wrecked on the patronage which they had to
accept at the hands of powerful Ministers or ambitious Sovereigns.

But to return to Mill and his plea for Liberty. Though I can hardly
believe that, were he still among us, he would claim a larger measure of
freedom for the individual than is now accorded to every one of us in the
society in which we move, yet the chief cause on which he founded his plea
for Liberty, the chief evil which he thought could be remedied only if
society would allow more elbow-room to individual genius, exists in the
same degree as in his time--aye, even in a higher degree. The principle of
individuality has suffered more at present than perhaps at any former
period of history. The world is becoming more and more gregarious, and
what the French call our _nature moutonniere_, our tendency to leap where
the sheep in front of us has leapt, becomes more and more prevalent in
politics, in religion, in art, and even in science. M. de Tocqueville
expressed his surprise how much more Frenchmen of the present day resemble
one another than did those of the last generation. The same remark, adds
John Stuart Mill, might be made of England in a greater degree. "The
modern _regime_ of public opinion," he writes, "is in an unorganized form
what the Chinese educational and political systems are in an organized;
and unless individuality shall be able successfully to assert itself
against this yoke, Europe, notwithstanding its noble antecedents and its
professed Christianity, will tend to become another China."

I fully agree with Mill in recognizing the dangers of uniformity, but I
doubt whether what he calls the _regime_ of public opinion is alone, or
even chiefly, answerable for it. No doubt there are some people in whose
eyes uniformity seems an advantage rather than a disadvantage. If all were
equally strong, equally educated, equally honest, equally rich, equally
tall, or equally small, society