of them, which he knew must prove futile.  Guizot said of De Tocqueville, that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat.  Mr. Mill was too penetrated by popular sympathies to be an aristocrat in De Tocqueville’s sense, but he likewise was full of ideas and hopes which the unchecked or undirected course of democracy would defeat without chance of reparation.  This fact he accepted, and from this he started.  Mr. Carlyle, and one or two rhetorical imitators, poured malediction on the many-headed populace, and with a rather pitiful impatience insisted that the only hope for men lay in their finding and obeying a strong man, a king, a hero, a dictator.  How he was to be found, neither the master nor his still angrier and more impatient mimics could ever tell us.

Now Mr. Mill’s doctrine laid down the main condition of finding your hero; namely, that all ways should be left open to him, because no man, nor majority of men, could possibly tell by which of these ways their deliverers were from time to time destined to present themselves.  Wits have caricatured all this, by asking us whether by encouraging the tares to grow, you give the wheat a better chance.  This is as misleading as such metaphors usually are.  The doctrine of liberty rests on a faith drawn from the observation of human progress, that though we know wheat to be serviceable and tares to be worthless, yet there are in the great seed-plot of human nature a thousand rudimentary germs, not wheat and not tares, of whose properties we have not had a fair opportunity of assuring ourselves.  If you are too eager to pluck up the tares, you are very likely to pluck up with them these untried possibilities of human excellence, and you are, moreover, very likely to injure the growing wheat as well.  The demonstration of this lies in the recorded experience of mankind.

Nor is this all.  Mr. Mill’s doctrine does not lend the least countenance to the cardinal opinion of some writers in the last century, that the only need of human character and of social institutions is to be let alone.  He never said that we were to leave the ground uncultivated, to bring up whatever might chance to grow.  On the contrary, the ground was to be cultivated with the utmost care and knowledge, with a view to prevent the growth of tares—­but cultivated in a certain manner.  You may take the method of the Inquisition, of the more cruel of the Puritans, of De Maistre, of Mr. Carlyle; or you may take Mr. Mill’s method of cultivation.  According to the doctrine of Liberty, we are to devote ourselves to prevention, as the surest and most wholesome mode of extirpation.  Persuade; argue; cherish virtuous example; bring up the young in habits of right opinion and right motive; shape your social arrangements so as to stimulate the best parts of character.  By these means you will gain all the advantages that could possibly have come of heroes and legislative dragooning, as well as a great many more which neither heroes nor legislative dragooning could ever have secured.