Eastern Europe.  And touching the pure idea of the individual being free to speak and act within limits, the assertion of this idea, we may fairly say, has been the peculiar honour of our own country.  For my part I greatly prefer the Jingoism of Rule Britannia to the Imperialism of The Recessional.  I have no objection to Britannia ruling the waves.  I draw the line when she begins to rule the dry land—­and such damnably dry land too—­as in Africa.  And there was a real old English sincerity in the vulgar chorus that “Britons never shall be slaves.”  We had no equality and hardly any justice; but freedom we were really fond of.  And I think just now it is worth while to draw attention to the old optimistic prophecy that “Britons never shall be slaves.”

The mere love of liberty has never been at a lower ebb in England than it has been for the last twenty years.  Never before has it been so easy to slip small Bills through Parliament for the purpose of locking people up.  Never was it so easy to silence awkward questions, or to protect highplaced officials.  Two hundred years ago we turned out the Stuarts rather than endanger the Habeas Corpus Act.  Two years ago we abolished the Habeas Corpus Act rather than turn out the Home Secretary.  We passed a law (which is now in force) that an Englishman’s punishment shall not depend upon judge and jury, but upon the governors and jailers who have got hold of him.  But this is not the only case.  The scorn of liberty is in the air.  A newspaper is seized by the police in Trafalgar Square without a word of accusation or explanation.  The Home Secretary says that in his opinion the police are very nice people, and there is an end of the matter.  A Member of Parliament attempts to criticise a peerage.  The Speaker says he must not criticise a peerage, and there the matter drops.

Political liberty, let us repeat, consists in the power of criticising those flexible parts of the State which constantly require reconsideration, not the basis, but the machinery.  In plainer words, it means the power of saying the sort of things that a decent but discontented citizen wants to say.  He does not want to spit on the Bible, or to run about without clothes, or to read the worst page in Zola from the pulpit of St. Paul’s.  Therefore the forbidding of these things (whether just or not) is only tyranny in a secondary and special sense.  It restrains the abnormal, not the normal man.  But the normal man, the decent discontented citizen, does want to protest against unfair law courts.  He does want to expose brutalities of the police.  He does want to make game of a vulgar pawnbroker who is made a Peer.  He does want publicly to warn people against unscrupulous capitalists and suspicious finance.  If he is run in for doing this (as he will be) he does want to proclaim the character or known prejudices of the magistrate who tries him.  If he is sent to prison (as he will be) he does want