ruition of his sense of honest manhood, would there be one of a great
body of brothers, not seeking to defraud and deceive one another, but
seeking to accomplish the general good!

What was in the writings of the men who founded America,--to serve the
selfish interests of America? Do you find that in their writings? No; to
serve the cause of humanity, to bring liberty to mankind. They set up
their standards here in America in the tenet of hope, as a beacon of
encouragement to all the nations of the world; and men came thronging to
these shores with an expectancy that never existed before, with a
confidence they never dared feel before, and found here for generations
together a haven of peace, of opportunity, of equality.

God send that in the complicated state of modern affairs we may recover
the standards and repeat the achievements of that heroic age!

For life is no longer the comparatively simple thing it was. Our relations
one with another have been profoundly modified by the new agencies of
rapid communication and transportation, tending swiftly to concentrate
life, widen communities, fuse interests, and complicate all the processes
of living. The individual is dizzily swept about in a thousand new
whirlpools of activities. Tyranny has become more subtle, and has learned
to wear the guise of mere industry, and even of benevolence. Freedom has
become a somewhat different matter. It cannot,--eternal principle that it
is,--it cannot have altered, yet it shows itself in new aspects. Perhaps
it is only revealing its deeper meaning.

* * * * *

What is liberty?

I have long had an image in my mind of what constitutes liberty. Suppose
that I were building a great piece of powerful machinery, and suppose that
I should so awkwardly and unskilfully assemble the parts of it that every
time one part tried to move it would be interfered with by the others, and
the whole thing would buckle up and be checked. Liberty for the several
parts would consist in the best possible assembling and adjustment of them
all, would it not? If you want the great piston of the engine to run with
absolute freedom, give it absolutely perfect alignment and adjustment
with the other parts of the machine, so that it is free, not because it is
let alone or isolated, but because it has been associated most skilfully
and carefully with the other parts of the great structure.

What it liberty? You say of the locomotiv