osen friends, my fellow-builders, shall
write the first chapter in the new history of man.

These are the last things before me. And as I stand here at the door of
glory, I look behind me for the last time. I look upon the history of
men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long
story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man's freedom.
But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's
freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of
his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then
he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved
by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He
declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor
king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number,
for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this
right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of
the centuries behind him had been spilled.

But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage
beginning.

What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from
men? What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The
worship of the word "We."

When men accepted that worship, the structure of centuries collapsed
about them, the structure whose every beam had come from the thought of
some one man, each in his day down the ages, from the depth of some
one spirit, such as spirit existed but for its own sake. Those men who
survived--those eager to obey, eager to live for one another, since they
had nothing else to vindicate them--those men could neither carry on,
nor preserve what they had received. Thus did all thought, all science,
all wisdom perish on earth. Thus did men--men with nothing to offer save
their great numbers--lose the steel towers, the flying ships, the
power wires, all the things they had not created and could never keep.
Perhaps, later, some men had been born with the mind and the courage to
recover these things which were lost; perhaps these men came before the
Councils of Scholars. They answered as I have been answered--and for the
same reasons.

But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of
transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and
went on, in bli