e dangers of class rule. The problem which the advocates of
political reform had to solve was how to secure the largest measure of
individual liberty compatible with an irresponsible government. They
were right in believing that this could be accomplished only by building
up an elaborate system of constitutional restraints which would narrowly
limit the exercise of irresponsible authority. Individual liberty as
they understood the term was immunity from unjust interference at the
hands of a minority.

This was a purely negative conception. It involved nothing more than the
idea of protection against the evils of irresponsible government. It
was a view of liberty adapted, however, to the needs of the time and
served a useful purpose in aiding the movement to curb without
destroying the power of the ruling class. Any attempt to push the
doctrine of liberty farther than this and make it include more than mere
immunity from governmental interference would have been revolutionary.
The seventeenth and eighteenth century demand was not for the abolition,
but for the limitation of irresponsible authority. It was not for
popular government based upon universal suffrage, but for such
modifications of the system as would give to the commercial and
industrial classes the power to resist all encroachments upon their
rights at the hands of the hereditary branches of the government. The
basis and guarantee of individual liberty, as the term was then
understood, was the popular veto such as was exercised through the House
of Commons. This conception of liberty was realized for those
represented in any coordinate branch of the government wherever the
check and balance stage of political development had been reached.

The American revolution, which supplanted hereditary by popular rule,
worked a fundamental change in the relation of the individual to the
government. So far at least as the voters were concerned the government
was no longer an alien institution--an authority imposed upon them from
above, but an organization emanating from them--one in which they had
and felt a direct proprietary interest. It was no longer a government in
which the active principle was irresponsible authority, but one which
rested upon the safe and trustworthy basis of popular control.

The overthrow of monarchy and aristocracy necessitated a corresponding
change in the idea of liberty to make it fit the new political
conditions which had emerged. In so f