ares to have a new idea is to be arrested and imprisoned?
The very most fatal objection to this universal supervision and
control of all individual action by the governing power, which
nationalism contemplates and which is of its very essence, is that it
would become the tyranny of mediocrity, and would stand in the way of
growth.

Two forces, at work freely, are necessary to evolution: heredity and
the tendency to vary. The one conserves all the valuable attainments
of the past; and the other, like the new sprouts and twigs on a
growing tree, has in it all the promise of the future. Such a control
of life as nationalism contemplates would suppress the new twigs as
"bumptiousness," or would--while breaking them off as fast as they
appeared--ask them to accumulate "sufficient data to convince an
intelligent public opinion."

The "intelligent public opinion" of Europe thought Copernicus, and
Bruno, and Galileo, and Luther very bumptious sorts of persons. With
"an intelligent public opinion," such as existed in England and
America thirty years ago, on the subject of the origin of species,
what would have become of Darwin--provided that, at that time, the
governing power had assumed and exercised the right to put him to some
"useful" occupation, or to suppress ideas popularly believed to be
dangerous?

The plain fact of the matter is, that all the persecutions of the past
have grown out of just this idea, which Mr. Bellamy endorses, that an
"intelligent public opinion" has the right to tell certain individuals
what they shall believe and teach. And _all_ the growth of human
civilization thus far has been in the direction of the rise of the
individual as over against the claim of the majority to control. And
there is no safety for the individual, and no sure and swift promise
of human advance, until "intelligent public opinion" is taught to mind
its own business.

While, then, Mr. Bellamy denies that there is any danger of
"governmentalism" or "paternalism" under nationalistic control, he
himself admits and defends the principle. This he does while loudly
claiming to be tolerant. What, then, may we expect on the part of the
great mass of the people whose equal (?) tolerance he does not
undertake to guarantee? Is it just possible that his nationalism,
which is not of the military type even, is already manifesting some
symptoms of the incipient disease?

Five cases of the tyranny of the majority, that had been adduced b