In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.

Each undervalues that part of the materials of thought with which he is not familiar.

Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.

The despotism of custom is on the wane. We are not content to know that things are; we ask whether they ought to be.

Trade is a social act.

The natural tendency of representative government, as of modern civilisation, is towards collective mediocrity: and this tendency is increased by all reductions and extensions of the franchise, their effect being to place the principal power in the hands of classes more and more below the highest level of instruction in the community.

So much barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their inconvenience and that of their neighbors, a peculiar currency of their own.