it.  The freedom of American speech and thought has not been essentially different from the freedom of speech which a group of prisoners might enjoy during the term of their imprisonment.  The prisoners could, of course, think and talk much as they pleased, but there was nobody but themselves to hear; and in the absence both of an adequate material, discipline, and audience, both the words and thoughts were without avail.  The truth is, of course, that intellectual individuality and independence were sacrificed for the benefit of social homogeneity and the quickest possible development of American economic opportunities; and in this way a vital relation has been established for Americans between the assertion of intellectual independence or moral individuality and the adoption of a nationalized economic and political system.

During the Middle Period American individual intelligence did, indeed, struggle gallantly to attain freedom.  The intellectual ferment at that time was more active and more general than it is to-day.  During the three decades before the war, a remarkable outbreak of heresy occurred all over the East and middle West.  Every convention of American life was questioned, except those unconscious conventions of feeling and thought which pervaded the intellectual and moral atmosphere.  The Abolitionist agitation was the one practical political result of this ferment, but many of these free-thinkers wished to emancipate the whites as well as the blacks.  They fearlessly challenged substantially all the established institutions of society.  The institutions of marriage and the state fared frequently as ill as did property and the church.  Radical, however, as they were in thought, they were by no means revolutionary in action.  The several brands of heresy differed too completely one from another to be melted into a single political agitation and programme.  The need for action spent itself in the formation of socialistic communities of the most varied kind, the great majority of which were soon either disbanded or transformed.  But whatever its limitations the ferment was symptomatic of a genuine revolt of the American spirit against the oppressive servitude of the individual intelligence to the social will, demanded by the popular democratic system and tradition.

The revolt, however, with all the sincere enthusiasm it inspired, was condemned to sterility.  It accomplished nothing and could accomplish nothing for society, because it sought by individual or unofficial associated action results which demanded official collective action; and it accomplished little even for the individual, because it was not the outcome of any fruitful individual discipline.  The emancipated idea was usually defined by seeking the opposite of the conventional idea.  Individuality was considered to be a matter of being somehow and anyhow different from other people.  There was no authentic intellectual discipline behind the agitation.  The pioneer democrat with all his