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.

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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 locomotive 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.