ds, as they cannot be altogether ignored, must be
reduced at all hazards to the lowest level.

I doubt whether any of the principles for which Mill pleaded so warmly and
strenuously in his Essay "On Liberty" would at the present day be
challenged or resisted, even by the most illiberal of philosophers, or the
most conservative of politicians. Mill's demands sound very humble to
_our_ ears. They amount to no more than this, "that the individual is not
accountable to society for his actions so far as they concern the
interests of no person but himself, and that he may be subjected to social
or legal punishments for such actions only as are prejudicial to the
interests of others."

Is there any one here present who doubts the justice of that principle, or
who would wish to reduce the freedom of the individual to a smaller
measure? Whatever social tyranny may have existed twenty years ago, when
it wrung that fiery protest from the lips of John Stuart Mill, can we
imagine a state of society, not totally Utopian, in which the individual
man need be less ashamed of his social fetters, in which he could more
freely utter all his honest convictions, more boldly propound all his
theories, more fearlessly agitate for their speedy realization; in which,
in fact, each man can be so entirely himself as the society of England,
such as it now is, such as generations of hard-thinking and hard-working
Englishmen have made it, and left it as the most sacred inheritance to
their sons and daughters?

Look through the whole of history, not excepting the brightest days of
republican freedom at Athens and Rome, and you will not find one single
period in which the measure of liberty accorded to each individual was
larger than it is at present, at least in England. And if you wish to
realize the full blessings of the time in which we live, compare Mill's
plea for Liberty with another written not much more than two hundred years
ago, and by a thinker not inferior either in power or boldness to Mill
himself. According to Hobbes, the only freedom which an individual in his
ideal state has a right to claim is what he calls "freedom of thought,"
and that freedom of thought consists in our being able to think what we
like--so long as we keep it to ourselves. Surely, such freedom of thought
existed even in the days of the Inquisition, and we should never call
thought free, if it had to be kept a prisoner in solitary and silent
confinement. By freedom