at and small, who know, from
having personally verified it, lived it and obeyed it, this truth
without which a people is incapable of governing itself? Liberty?--it is
respect; liberty?--it is obedience to the inner law; and this law is
neither the good pleasure of the mighty, nor the caprice of the crowd,
but the high and impersonal rule before which those who govern are the
first to bow the head. Shall liberty, then, be proscribed? No; but men
must be made capable and worthy of it, otherwise public life becomes
impossible, and the nation, undisciplined and unrestrained, goes on
through license into the inextricable tangles of demagoguery.

* * * * *

When one passes in review the individual causes that disturb and
complicate our social life, by whatever names they are designated, and
their list would be long, they all lead back to one general cause, which
is this: _the confusion of the secondary with the essential_. Material
comfort, education, liberty, the whole of civilization--these things
constitute the frame of the picture; but the frame no more makes the
picture than the frock the monk or the uniform the soldier. Here the
picture is man, and man with his most intimate possessions--namely, his
conscience, his character and his will. And while we have been
elaborating and garnishing the frame, we have forgotten, neglected,
disfigured the picture. Thus are we loaded with external good, and
miserable in spiritual life; we have in abundance that which, if must
be, we can go without, and are infinitely poor in the one thing needful.
And when the depth of our being is stirred, with its need of loving,
aspiring, fulfilling its destiny, it feels the anguish of one buried
alive--is smothered under the mass of secondary things that weigh it
down and deprive it of light and air.

We must search out, set free, restore to honor the true life, assign
things to their proper places, and remember that the center of human
progress is moral growth. What is a good lamp? It is not the most
elaborate, the finest wrought, that of the most precious metal. A good
lamp is a lamp that gives good light. And so also we are men and
citizens, not by reason of the number of our goods and the pleasures we
procure for ourselves, not through our intellectual and artistic
culture, nor because of the honors and independence we enjoy; but by
virtue of the strength of our moral fibre. And this is not a truth of
to-day but a