to the ferocity and ignorance of the people; and the ferocity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to live.  Thus it was in our civil war.  The rulers in the church and state reaped only what they had sown.  They had prohibited free discussion—­they had done their best to keep the people unacquainted with their duties and their rights.  The retribution was just and natural.  If they suffered from popular ignorance, it was because they had themselves taken away the key to knowledge.  If they were assailed with blind fury, it was because they had exacted an equally blind submission.

“It is the character of such revolutions that we always see the worst of them at first.  Till men have been for some time free, they know not how to use their freedom.  The natives of wine-countries are always sober.  In climates where wine is a rarity, intemperance abounds.  A newly-liberated people may be compared to a northern army encamped on the Rhine or the Xeres.  It is said that when soldiers in such a situation first find themselves able to indulge without restraint in such a rare and expensive luxury, nothing is to be seen but intoxication.  Soon, however, plenty teaches discretion; and after wine has been for a few months their daily fare, they become more temperate than they had ever been in their own country.  In the same manner, the final and permanent fruits of liberty are wisdom, moderation, and mercy.  Its immediate effects are often atrocious crimes, conflicting errors, skepticism on points the most clear, dogmatism on points the most mysterious.  It is just at this crisis that its enemies love to exhibit it.  They pull down the scaffolding from the half-finished edifice; they point to the flying dust, the falling bricks, the comfortless rooms, the frightful irregularity of the whole appearance; and then ask in scorn where the promised splendour and comfort are to be found?  If such miserable sophisms were to prevail, there never would be a good house or a good government in the world....  There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces—­and that cure is freedom.  When a prisoner leaves his cell, he cannot bear the light of day—­he is unable to discriminate colours or to recognise faces.  But the remedy is not to remand him into his dungeon, but to accustom him to the rays of the sun.  The blaze of truth and liberty may at first dazzle and bewilder nations which have become half-blind in the house of bondage.  But let them gaze on, and they will soon be able to bear it.  In a few years men learn to reason.  The extreme violence of opinion subsides.  Hostile theories correct each other.  The scattered elements of truth cease to conflict, and begin to coalesce.  And at length a system of justice and order is educed out of the chaos.

“Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom.  The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim.  If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.”