ous understatement of the case to omit
the most direct benefit of all, the unspeakable gain in private
happiness to the liberated half of the species; the difference to
them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life
of rational freedom. After the primary necessities of food and
raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.
While mankind are lawless, their desire is for lawless freedom. When
they have learnt to understand the meaning of duty and the value of
reason, they incline more and more to be guided and restrained by
these in the exercise of their freedom; but they do not therefore
desire freedom less; they do not become disposed to accept the will
of other people as the representative and interpreter of those
guiding principles. On the contrary, the communities in which the
reason has been most cultivated, and in which the idea of social duty
has been most powerful, are those which have most strongly asserted
the freedom of action of the individual--the liberty of each to
govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, and by such laws and
social restraints as his own conscience can subscribe to.

He who would rightly appreciate the worth of personal independence as
an element of happiness, should consider the value he himself puts
upon it as an ingredient of his own. There is no subject on which
there is a greater habitual difference of judgment between a man
judging for himself, and the same man judging for other people. When
he hears others complaining that they are not allowed freedom of
action--that their own will has not sufficient influence in the
regulation of their affairs--his inclination is, to ask, what are
their grievances? what positive damage they sustain? and in what
respect they consider their affairs to be mismanaged? and if they
fail to make out, in answer to these questions, what appears to him a
sufficient case, he turns a deaf ear, and regards their complaint as
the fanciful querulousness of people whom nothing reasonable will
satisfy. But he has a quite different standard of judgment when he is
deciding for himself. Then, the most unexceptionable administration
of his interests by a tutor set over him, does not satisfy his
feelings: his personal exclusion from the deciding authority appears
itself the greatest grievance of all, rendering it superfluous even
to enter into the question of mismanagement. It is the same with
nations. What citizen of a fr