For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world--the
difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern social
ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It is that human
beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an
inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their
faculties, and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may
appear to them most desirable. Human society of old was constituted on a very
different principle. All were born to a fixed social position and were mostly
kept in it by law. -- John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women(1869)
