The curious influence of the country, pulling one down, pulling one down. She had heard an old American, who had been forty years in the Republic, saying to Owen: “No man who hasn’t a strong moral backbone should try to settle in Mexico. If he does, he’ll go to pieces, morally and physically, as I’ve seen hundreds of young Americans do.”
To pull one down. It was what the country wanted to do all the time, with a slow, reptilian insistence, to pull one down. To prevent the spirit from soaring. To take away the free, soaring sense of liberty.
“There is no such thing as liberty,” she heard the quiet, deep, dangerous voice of Don Ramón repeating. “There is no such thing as liberty. The greatest liberators are usually slaves of an idea. The freest people are slaves to convention and public opinion, and more still, slaves to the industrial machine. There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.”
“But surely that is liberty—for the mass of people.”
“They don’t choose. They are tricked into a new form of servility, no more. They go from bad to worse.”
“You yourself—aren’t you free?” she asked.
“I?” he laughed. “I spent a long time trying to pretend. I thought I could have my own way. Till I realised that having my own way meant only running about smelling all the things in the street, like a dog that will pick up something. Of myself, I have no way. No man has any way in himself. Every man who goes along a way is led by one of three things: by an appetite—and I class ambition among appetite; or by an idea; or by an inspiration.”
“I used to think my husband was inspired about Ireland,” said Kate doubtfully.
“And now?”
“Yes! Perhaps he put his wine in old, rotten bottles that wouldn’t hold it. No!—Liberty is a rotten old wine-skin. It won’t hold one’s wine of inspiration or passion any more,” she said.