vage state, and to be surrendered, piece for piece,
with every acknowledgment of social obligation. Seldom was ever so
plausible a doctrine equally false. Law is properly _the public
definition of freedom and the affirmation of its sacredness and
inviolability as so defined_; and only in the presence of it, either
express or implicit, does man become free. Duty and privilege are one
and the same, however men may set up a false antagonism between them;
and accordingly social obligation can subtract nothing from the
privilege and prerogative of liberty. Consequently, the freedom which is
defined as the negation of social duty and obligation is not true regal
freedom, but is that worst and basest of all tyrannies, the tyranny of
pure egotism, masked in the semblance of its divine contrary. That,
be it observed, is the freest society, in which the noblest and most
delicate human powers find room and secure respect,--wherein the
loftiest and costliest spiritualities are most invited abroad by
sympathetic attraction. Now among savages little obtains appreciation,
save physical force and its immediate allies: the divine fledglings of
the human soul, instead of being sweetly drawn and tempted forth, are
savagely menaced, rudely repelled; whatsoever is finest in the man,
together with the entire nature of woman, lies, in that low temperature,
enchained and repressed, like seeds in a frozen soil. The harsh,
perpetual contest with want and lawless rivalry, to which all
uncivilized nations are doomed, permits only a few low powers, and those
much the same in all,--lichens, mosses, rude grasses, and other coarse
cryptogamous growths,--to develop themselves; since these alone can
endure the severities of season and treatment to which all that would
clothe the fields of the soul must remain exposed. Meanwhile the utmost
of that wicked and calamitous suppression of faculty, which constitutes
the essence and makes the tragedy of human slavery, is equally effected
by the inevitable isolation and wakeful trampling and consequent
barrenness of savage life. Liberty without law is not liberty; and the
converse may be asserted with like confidence.

Where, then, the fixed term, State, or Law, and the progressive term,
Person, or Freewill, are in relations of reciprocal support and mutual
reproduction, there alone is freedom, there alone public order. We were
able to command this truth from the height of our general proposition,
and closer ins