ors. Such a degree confers no
material advantages;(18) it does not entitle its holder to any employment
in Church or State; it does not vouch even for his being a fit person to
be made an Archbishop or Prime Minister. All this is left to the later
struggle for life; and in that struggle it seems as if those who, after
having surveyed the vast field of human knowledge, have settled on a few
acres of their own and cultivated them as they were never cultivated
before, who have worked hard and have tasted the true joy and happiness of
hard work, who have gladly listened to others, but always depended on
themselves, were, after all, the men whom great nations delighted to
follow as their royal leaders in the onward march towards greater
enlightenment, greater happiness, and greater freedom.

To sum up, no one can read Mill's Essay "On Liberty" at the present moment
without feeling that even during the short period of the last twenty years
the cause which he advocated so strongly and passionately, the cause of
individual freedom, has made rapid progress--aye, has carried the day. In
no country _may_ a man be so entirely himself, so true to himself, and yet
loyal to society, as in England.

But, although the enemy whose encroachments Mill feared most and resented
most has been driven back and forced to keep within his own bounds--though
such names as Dissenter and Nonconformist, which were formerly used in
society as fatal darts, seem to have lost all the poison which they once
contained--Mill's principal fears have nevertheless not been belied, and
the blight of uniformity which he saw approaching with its attendant evils
of feebleness, indifference, and sequacity, has been spreading more widely
than ever.

It has ever been maintained that the very freedom which every individual
now enjoys has been detrimental to the growth of individuality; that you
must have an Inquisition if you want to see martyrs, that you must have
despotism and tyranny to call forth heroes. The very measures which the
friends of individual development advocated so warmly, compulsory
education and competitive examinations, are pointed out as having chiefly
contributed to produce that large array of pass-men, that dead level of
uninteresting excellence, which is the _beau ideal_ of a Chinese Mandarin,
while it frightened and disheartened such men as Humboldt, Tocqueville,
and John Stuart Mill himself.

There may be some truth in all this, but it is ce