this further. The principle is plain
that, though these better and higher graces of humanity are impediments
and encumbrances in the early fighting period, yet that in the later
era they are among the greatest helps and benefits, and that as soon as
governments by discussion have become strong enough to secure a stable
existence, and as soon as they have broken the fixed rule of old
custom, and have awakened the dormant inventiveness of men, then, for
the first time, almost every part of human nature begins to spring
forward, and begins to contribute its quota even to the narrowest, even
to 'verifiable' progress. And this is the true reason of all those
panegyrics on liberty which are often so measured in expression but are
in essence so true to life and nature. Liberty is the strengthening and
developing power--the light and heat of political nature; and when some
'Caesarism' exhibits as it sometimes will an originality of mind, it is
only because it has managed to make its own the products of past free
times or neighbouring free countries; and even that originality is only
brief and frail, and after a little while, when tested by a generation
or two, in time of need it falls away.

In a complete investigation of all the conditions of 'verifiable
progress,' much else would have to be set out; for example, science has
secrets of her own. Nature does not wear her most useful lessons on her
sleeve; she only yields her most productive secrets, those which yield
the most wealth and the most 'fruit,' to those who have gone through a
long process of preliminary abstraction. To make a person really
understand the 'laws of motion' is not easy, and to solve even simple
problems in abstract dynamics is to most people exceedingly hard. And
yet it is on these out-of-the-way investigations, so to speak, that the
art of navigation, all physical astronomy, and all the theory of
physical movements at least depend. But no nation would beforehand have
thought that in so curious a manner such great secrets were to be
discovered. And many nations, therefore, which get on the wrong track,
may be distanced--supposing there to be no communication by some nation
not better than any of them which happens to stumble on the right
track. If there were no 'Bradshaw' and no one knew the time at which
trains started, a man who caught the express would not be a wiser or a
more business-like man than he who missed it, and yet he would arrive
whole hour