Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. —John Adams In the December 2009 issue of Quadrant, Mervyn Bendle drew our attention to the fact that J.S. Mill’s On Liberty is now 150 years old. He also rightly stressed the importance of Mill’s ideas on the subsequent history of Western politics. The very fact that I am free to write and publish an essay critical of some aspects of Mill’s doctrines is itself due in no small part to the successful implementation of Mill’s ideas. We should…