our own days is designed to increase and not to fetter liberty, and its
greater complexity is necessitated by the greater complexity and the
more numerous interrelationships of modern society. Laws, of course, may
be unwise or excessively minute or deliberately enslaving; yet this does
not affect the point that for all that Laws are necessary to the
preservation of Liberty. Merchants, women and children, and citizens
generally, can only enjoy rightful liberty if they are protected by
laws. Only that man is free, then, who is most carefully guarded.

In the same manner Scientific Liberty does not consist in the absence of
knowledge, or of scientific dogmas, but in their presence. We are
surrounded by innumerable facts of nature, and that man is free who is
fully aware of those which affect his own life. It is true, for example,
that two and two make four, and that heavy bodies tend to fall towards
the centre of the earth; and it can only be a very superficial thinker
who considers that to be ignorant of these facts is to be free from the
enslaving dogmas of them. If I am ignorant of them I am, of course, in a
sense at liberty to believe that two and two make five, and to jump off
the roof of my house; yet this is not Liberty at all in the sense in
which reasonable people use the word, since my knowledge of the laws
enables me to be effective and, in fact, to survive in the midst of a
world where they happen to be true. That man, then, is more truly "free"
whose intellect is informed of and submits to these laws, than is the
man whose intellect is unaware of them. Marconi's intellect submits to
the laws of lightning and he is thereby enabled to avail himself of
them. Ajax is unaware of them and is accordingly destroyed by their
action.

_The Truth_, then, _makes us free_. The State which controls men's
actions and educates their intellects, which, in a word, enforces the