It is well with men, Mr. Mill said, moreover, in proportion as they respect truth.  Now they at once prove and strengthen their respect for truth, by having an open mind to all its possibilities, while at the same time they hold firmly to their own proved convictions, until they hear better evidence to the contrary.  There is no anarchy, nor uncertainty, nor paralysing air of provisionalness in such a frame of mind.  So far is it from being fatal to loyalty or reverence, that it is an indispensable part of the groundwork of the only loyalty that a wise ruler or teacher would care to inspire—­the loyalty springing from a rational conviction that, in a field open to all comers, he is the best man they can find.  Only on condition of liberty without limit is the ablest and most helpful of ‘heroes’ sure to be found; and only on condition of liberty without limit are his followers sure to be worthy of him.  You must have authority, and yet must have obedience.  The noblest and deepest and most beneficent kind of authority is that which rests on an obedience that is rational and spontaneous.

The same futile impatience which animates the political utterances of Mr. Carlyle and his more weak-voiced imitators, takes another form in men of a different training or temperament.  They insist that if the majority has the means of preventing vice by law, it is folly and weakness not to resort to those means.  The superficial attractiveness of such a doctrine is obvious.  The doctrine of liberty implies a broader and a more patient view.  It says:—­Even if you could be sure that what you take for vice is so—­and the history of persecution shows how careful you should be in this preliminary point—­even then it is an undoubted and, indeed, a necessary tendency of this facile repressive legislation, to make those who resort to it neglect the more effective, humane, and durable kinds of preventive legislation.  You pass a law (if you can) putting down drunkenness; there is a neatness in such a method very attractive to fervid and impatient natures.  Would you not have done better to leave that law unpassed, and apply yourselves sedulously instead to the improvement of the dwellings of the more drunken class, to the provision of amusements that might compete with the ale-house, to the extension and elevation of instruction, and so on?  You may say that this should be done, and yet the other should not be left undone; but, as matter of fact and history, the doing of the one has always gone with the neglect of the other, and ascetic law-making in the interests of virtue has never been accompanied either by law-making or any other kinds of activity for making virtue easier or more attractive.  It is the recognition how little punishment can do, that leaves men free to see how much social prevention can do.  I believe, then, that what seems to the criminal lawyers and passionate philanthropists self-evident, is in truth an illusion, springing from a very shallow kind of impatience, heated in some of them by the addition of a cynical contempt for human nature and the worth of human existence.