worldly-minded, those who lived in the industrial sections of the North as well as the plantation-owners of the South who profited, or thought they profited, thereby. But the clash between ideal and practice was inevitable; personal liberty could not forever be worshipped as the highest good and at the same time denied to a large section of the population. One by one conscientious men awoke to the inconsistency. In 1830 Garrison wrote, "I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population. . . . On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. I am in earnest -I will not equivocate-I will not retreat a single inch-and I will be heard!" Later, when the South demanded its independence in order to ensure the perpetuation of slavery, Lincoln said the final word: "They who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."

The Civil War decided the issue, and removed for all time this blot from our escutcheon. The great hymn that fired the hearts of the Union soldiers made its appeal to this elemental passion:

"As He died to make men holy, let us die to make them free."

Freedom, in this case, required a long and terrible war to secure. It often requires elaborate and sometimes apparently tyrannical laws to maintain. The old naïve notion that if the government would but keep its hands off, every one would have the greatest amount of liberty has long been known to be fallacious; bitter experience has shown that such a laissezfaire policy allows the strong and unscrupulous to prey upon the conscientious and the weak. We must have a considerable body of law in order to have the greatest attainable amount of liberty for all. As

President Wilson recently wrote, "If Jefferson had lived in our day he would see what we see, that the individual is caught in a great confused mix-up 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."

Many people suppose that because a man has legal freedom he is really free. But, in the words of a great English jurist, "Necessitous men are not free men." In the pioneer days, a laissez-faire policy was far less inadequate than now. The transition from smallscale to large-scale industry, from personal direction of business to corporate control, the crowding of great masses of people in cities, the complexification of our social and political order, have forced all sorts of new relationships upon us that require legislative control if they are not to be allowed to curtail seriously the liberty of many.

The British Labor Party has advertised the phrase, "effective personal freedom," meaning thereby such freedom as can actually be taken advantage of. A recent American writer elaborates this conception as follows: "If you drive a man up a tree and station a bear at the foot of it, it does not gratify him to be told that he is now free to do as he chooses. If you dismiss your son from your door without food, money or education, and tell him that the whole wide world is now open to him, you have not given him 'effective personal freedom.' Circumstances may compel him to accept your terms, hard and dictatorial though they may be. Freedom in such a sense is a threat and not a promise. Similarly if you rear a man in a low social station, in the midst of poverty and ignorance, with the necessity of livelihood forced upon him from an early age, and then tell him that he may rise even

to be President of the United States, he is to be forgiven if he does not appear enthusiastic and grateful. If you throw a man into stormy waters far from land, and then tell him that there is nothing to prevent his swimming to shore and making a nice dry warm place for himself there, you do not confer a boon on him. For first he has got to keep his head above water. Even if by great and prolonged exertions he can do that, there is little chance of his living to achieve more. The man who demands 'effective personal freedom' wants to be put on shore to start with. He understands that there is a tyranny of circumstance more fatal than that of man."

Our love of liberty, our hatred of the regulation of our conduct by any authority other than God and our individual conscience, has made it difficult for any form of socialism to win favor with us. We distrust a bureaucracy, we dread paternalism; our forefathers deliberately sought to restrict the powers of the government, to allow the widest possible scope for private initiative. As Professor Mecklin says, "The measure of an efficient government at the beginning of the national life was the least possible interference with the affairs of the individual, in fact, just enough of government to facilitate individual ends. Government was at best merely the policeman to keep order and protect property." Doubtless a great many of our immigrants came to these shores to get away from the restrictions upon their personal liberty in their homelands; and we must continue our vigilance in preventing the growth of needless impediments to freedom in our own land.

But on the other hand, we have learned that one man or group of men may abuse their liberty in such a way as to interfere with the liberty of others. As

Mr. H. G. Wells says of his country, "We must get rid of these spendthrift liberties that waste liberty." Liberty and law are not contradictories; law is the servant of liberty, the means to its attainment. We may well fear a corrupt government, oppose class legislation, fight the many bills offered to further this or that special interest. But a genuinely democratic government is simply the expression of the common will-our will. For we, after all, are the State; and what we collectively decide upon as best for the general welfare is not tyranny but self-expression.

Those who fare well under existing conditions usually raise the cry "Hands off!" when legislation is proposed that would restrain their conduct in any way. They fail to realize that restraint upon unsocial conduct is necessary precisely in the interests of liberty-the liberty of the greatest number. A manufacturer resents a law restricting child-labor; his liberty to employ whom he will is infringed. But that liberty was a predatory liberty; it lived at the expense of the far more precious liberty of those children to have their playtime, their schooling, their health. Or a group of mill-owners may insist upon their liberty to shut down their mills in order to lessen production and raise the price of their product, ignoring the fact that they thereby would deprive thousands of men of the liberty to work and earn their living, and their families of all the liberty that a decent income alone makes possible.

In general, we have been far too blind to the true implications of the ideal of Liberty, which we so highly prize in the abstract. We have been too tolerant of the exploiters, the grafters, those whose cleverness or good fortune has enabled them to grab for

themselves rights and privileges which ought to have been our common inheritance. The old notion that if everybody "looks after number one" the general good will automatically be attained must give way to the verdict of bitter experience, that to preserve the rights and liberties of everybody, clever and stupid, fortunate and unfortunate, requires the unceasing watchfulness of the law.

In pursuance of this wiser view we now forbid householders to empty their refuse into the streets, as was done in some of our cities a generation ago; we no longer tolerate the existence of private tollgates upon the highways; we interfere in a hundred ways with the conduct of private business, with the erection of private homes, with personal habits, such as gambling, drinking intoxicating beverages, and using narcotic drugs. Now and then, of course, an unwarrantable law is passed. But in general, this extension of legislative vigilance is in the interests of true liberty. And the average man of today is far freer from dangers, from fears, from the encroachments and aggressions of other men, and from the fatal effects of his own shortsightedness, selfishness or passion, than was the man of older days.

The ideal of Liberty is that every one should be unhampered in his conduct except as that conduct would interfere with the welfare of others; or rather, that every man should be helped to make his conduct a positive contribution to the common welfare. We need to think of Liberty in terms of the group. We do not want the docility and blind obedience to a State ruled by an upper-class, of pre-war Germany; we want to preserve the individual initiative and energy for which we are famous. But we want to exercise our collective intelligence in guiding that initiative and