, come or go,
without reason shewn. True; from all men thou art emancipated:
but from Thyself and from the Devil--? No man, wiser, unwiser,
can make thee come or go: but thy own futilities, bewilderments,
thy false appetites for Money, Windsor Georges and such like? No
man oppresses thee, O free and independent Franchiser: but does
not this stupid Porter-pot oppress thee? No Son of Adam can bid
thee come or go; but this absurd Pot of Heavy-wet, this can and
does! Thou art the thrall not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy
own brutal appetites, and this scoured dish of liquor. And thou
pratest of thy liberty? Thou entire blockhead!

Heavy-wet and gin: alas, these are not the only kinds of
thraldom. Thou who walkest in a vain shew, looking out with
ornamental dilettante sniff and serene supremacy at all Life and
all Death; and amblest jauntily; perking up thy poor talk into
crotchets, thy poor conduct into fatuous somnambulisms;--and art
as an 'enchanted Ape' under God's sky, where thou mightest have
been a man, had proper Schoolmasters and Conquerors, and
Constables with cat-o'-nine tails, been vouchsafed thee: dost
thou call that 'liberty?' Or your unreposing Mammon-worshipper,
again, driven, as if by Galvanisms, by Devils and Fixed-Ideas,
who rises early and sits late, chasing the impossible; straining
every faculty 'to fill himself with the east wind '--how merciful
were it, could you, by mild persuasion or by the severest tyranny
so-called, check him in his mad path, turn him into a wiser one!
All painful tyranny, in that case again, were but mild 'surgery;'
the pain of it cheap, as health and life, instead of galvanism
and fixed-idea, are cheap at any price.

Sure enough, of all paths a man could strike into, there is, at
any given moment, a _best path_ for every man; a thing which,
here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do;--which
could he be but led or driven to do, he were then doing 'like a
man,' as we phrase it; all men and gods agreeing with him, the
whole Universe virtually exclaiming Well-done to him! His
success, in such case, were complete; his felicity a maximum.
This path, to find this path and walk in it, is the one thing
needful for him. Whatsoever forwards him in that, let it come to
him even in the shape of blows and spurnings, is liberty:
whatsoever hinders him, were it wardmotes, open-vestries,
pollbooths, tremendous cheers, rivers of heavy-wet, is slavery.