e that it runs free. What do you
mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction
is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a
boat skimming the water with light foot, "How free she runs," when we
mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how
perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her
sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and
stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how
instantly she is "in irons," in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is
free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once
more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.

Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and
human activities and human energies.

Now, the adjustments necessary between individuals, between individuals
and the complex institutions amidst which they live, and between those
institutions and the government, are infinitely more intricate to-day than
ever before. No doubt this is a tiresome and roundabout way of saying the
thing, yet perhaps it is worth while to get somewhat clearly in our mind
what makes all the trouble to-day. Life has become complex; there are many
more elements, more parts, to it than ever before. And, therefore, it is
harder to keep everything adjusted,--and harder to find out where the
trouble lies when the machine gets out of order.

You know that one of the interesting things that Mr. Jefferson said in
those early days of simplicity which marked the beginnings of our
government was that the best government consisted in as little governing
as possible. And there is still a sense in which that is true. It is still
intolerable for the government to interfere with our individual
activities except where it is necessary to interfere with them in order to
free them. But I feel confident that if Jefferson were living in our day
he would see what we see: that the individual is caught in a great
confused nexus of all sorts of complicated circumstances, and that to let
him alone is to leave him helpless as against the obstacles with which he
has to contend; and that, therefore, law in our day must come to the
assistance of the individual. It must come to his assistance to see that
he gets fair play; that is all, but that is much. Without the watchful
interference, the resolute interference, of the govern