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control, that its action can not be anticipated, and hence provided for. Now liberty is limited to the alternatives before it. It can not choose anything, but only one of two things; and it is unsafe to give the opportunity of choice, when we are not ready for the acceptance of either of the things offered. Liberty is simply a larger field of activity, the opening of two lines of effort instead of one, and this is often found very easy even for a man in his control and management of his fellows. It does, indeed, make of government a higher art, but does not in skillful hands take away its perfect efficiency, all the efficiency contemplated.

Liberty provides for less, recognizes less of a certain sort of control than does slavery. The inevitable, mechanical movement of necessary forces is, indeed, lost; but there is substituted a nobler movement, because it is a freer one, manageable in a different measure, and on different principles. Those who prefer the clang and ceaseless on-going of machinery may not be pleased; but the product itself, nevertheless, is every way superior.

Moreover, will is constantly declaring itself under its own liberty, establishing a movement and revealing a character more and more manifest to those who have to deal with it. The virtue of a virtuous man does not cease to be free, nor the vice of a vicious man, because the choice of each is not momentarily altered. A free action remains free, no matter how far pursued, and those impulses of the rational life once revealed become more and more declared and fixed in their directions. The conduct of a perfectly virtuous being is among the most calculable forces in the whole universe, and this without the least loss of freedom. We manage events readily which turn on moral evidence, yet the connections are not absolute, are not seen by us to be certain. There is the same difference between causation and liberty as between demonstration and evidence, proof