It is said that a man with my theories of sweetness and light is full of antipathy against the rougher or coarser movements going on around him, that he will not lend a hand to the humble operation of uprooting evil by their means, and that therefore the believers in action grow impatient with them.  But what if rough and coarse action, ill-calculated action, action with insufficient light, is, and has for a long time been, our bane?  What if our urgent want now is, not to act at any price, but rather to lay in a stock of light for our difficulties?  In that case, to refuse to lend a hand to the rougher and coarser movements going on round us, to make the primary need, both for oneself and others, to consist in enlightening ourselves and qualifying ourselves [54] to act less at random, is surely the best, and in real truth the most practical line, our endeavours can take.  So that if I can show what my opponents call rough or coarse action, but what I would rather call random and ill-regulated action,—­action with insufficient light, action pursued because we like to be doing something and doing it as we please, and do not like the trouble of thinking, and the severe constraint of any kind of rule,—­if I can show this to be, at the present moment, a practical mischief and danger to us, then I have found a practical use for light in correcting this state of things, and have only to exemplify how, in cases which fall under everybody’s observation, it may deal with it.

When I began to speak of culture, I insisted on our bondage to machinery, on our proneness to value machinery as an end in itself, without looking beyond it to the end for which alone, in truth, it is valuable.  Freedom, I said, was one of those things which we thus worshipped in itself, without enough regarding the ends for which freedom is to be desired.  In our common notions and talk about freedom, we eminently show our idolatry of machinery.  Our prevalent notion is,—­and I quoted a [55] number of instances to prove it,—­ that it is a most happy and important thing for a man merely to be able to do as he likes.  On what he is to do when he is thus free to do as he likes, we do not lay so much stress.  Our familiar praise of the British Constitution under which we live, is that it is a system of checks,—­a system which stops and paralyses any power in interfering with the free action of individuals.  To this effect Mr. Bright, who loves to walk in the old ways of the Constitution, said forcibly in one of his great speeches, what many other people are every day saying less forcibly, that the central idea of English life and politics is the assertion of personal liberty.  Evidently this is so; but evidently, also, as feudalism, which with its ideas and habits of subordination was for many centuries silently behind the British Constitution, dies out, and we are left with nothing but our system of checks, and our notion of its being the great right and happiness of an Englishman to do as far as possible