erated all that appeared beyond its immediate intent. The existing order was to be determined in the momentary action of the individual. It was not a freedom which presumed the existence of the nation in its organic and moral being, a freedom which had a moral content, but it was assumed to consist in the absence of all limitation and restraint. Then when all the institutions of the past were swept away, and no apparent barrier was before men to check their advance, and there was nothing in the wide blank of the horizon to debar them, there was a painful discovery that they were not yet free. It was the rejection of the moral relations which subsist in the nation, and the striving after freedom in mere vacancy, that opened the way to any influence from without that might take possession of the empty domain. In the denial of all organic and moral relations there arose everywhere the distrust and crimination of men, and there followed what was called the reign of terror, when those who never were bidden, came to the room all swept and garnished, and men became the slaves of fear and of dread, and the way was open to the entrance of an imperial power.

The action which is simply momentary is not free. The will in its freedom has elements of continuity and identity, which subsist in personality and are reflected in character. It is not merely the capacity to vault hither and thither, and to pass and repass from the one side to the other. The power of choice certainly is involved in freedom, and therefore it is to be recognized as existent in it, and it is not to be obstructed nor confined by that which allows no room for individuality to act, and no sphere in which it may have its sweep; but the choice in which freedom is realized is the choice which is in accordance with personality, it is the realization of personality. The active choice between good and evil in man is brought forward in the contradiction of his nature, and in the issue of the conflict of life, and it appears in his being influenced by a

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power against himself and by a presence alien to his true and real self; and in this there is manifest, not the freedom of man, but the defect of freedom. The error in the popular apprehension of freedom in the schools of theology, and as it goes out from them in politics, is in representing it as consisting only in a power of choice, only an empty formal possibility in the life of man, but having no determinate moral content. The freedom of man is not simply in this momentary choice, and the realization of freedom is not in the broader road opened before it and the wider scope of possibility in its action. It is not found in the larger alternative between right and wrong, or the longer balance with the more even play between them. It is not found in the perfect suspense between the opposite forces, and it is not won by the people that stand on neutral ground. On the contrary, in the higher freedom of man there is the less choice between the good and the evil, and there is the less possibility of a decision unworthy of one's real and true self, that is an ignoble decision.

When the will is represented as only in identity with the power of choice, which when thus emptied of all moral content is the merely willful, that is, the arbitrary, then the assertion of this power is not freedom, and the maintenance of this power is not among the rights of men. The nation is to realize the freedom of man, and to guard it in the institution of rights, but it is not in any conception to establish the wider province, and to open the more unlimited scope for this power to act, and to guard the exercise of it, and to remove all restrictions from its way, and to keep it from all hindrance and molestation, in the indefinite sweep of its arbitrations. The freedom of the citizen is not defined in the power to turn a traitor, nor is all restraint upon the power of turning to be forbidden. That people would not be the more free, in which the larger choice was left open to its soldiers to desert, and which

made such action a principle of rights, as it must become if it be the real freedom of man; but the people is the more free when there is in the spirit of its soldiers no possibility of desertion, and the soldier is the more free to whom even the suggestion of such action does not come, who is beyond its suspicion, and who knows only and determines only to meet and fight the enemy. The soldier who even deliberates, or allows the choice to pass before him, is the less free-the more exposed to subjection to impulse and fear. This assertion of the mere power of choice is not freedom, and its maintenance is not among the rights of men, and its extension does not constitute the progress of the people. In the choice and the assertion of the right, man acts in accordance with his real and innermost being, his own true self, and with the exclusion of all that is alien as external to that being, but in the opposite, man chooses that which subverts personality and subjects him to evil, that which does not belong to his being, which comes out in the contradiction of his nature; but in freedom and the realization of freedom there is no contradiction, there is in it alone the act and the unfolding of the true being of man.

Freedom is not attained in the negation, in which man without personality, as if all before was a blank, momentarily determines whether to be this or that, whether to do or not to do. In the determination which is in the right, there is alone in the individual and the nation the realization of freedom and the attainment of the being and end of each.

The nation is the realization of the freedom of the people. The freedom of the people subsists in the being of the nation as a moral person.

If the nation be regarded as only a formal organization, an exposition of a barren system of rights and a miscellany of institutions, then only a formal freedom can be

predicated of it as also the postulate of a formal freedom has its sequence in an empty and formal conception of the nation. But the real freedom of the nation in which it works out its end as a power in history, the freedom in the attainment of the vocation of the people, in the manifestation of its own character, in the strength and endurance of its own will in the divine will, in whose purpose is the development of history in the moral order of the world, this freedom can have no ground in a merely formal conception.

The defect in the popular definitions of the schools, of the freedom of the nation or political freedom, is consequent on their proceeding from this formal conception, and while only a formal conception has been assumed, and a formal definition has been allowed, it is not singular that the latter has been, as Mr. Hurd calls it, the problem of publicists. Thus the subject which is central in politics and formative of its whole course, has obtained in this premise no clear definition. Dr. Lieber, in a treatise concerned exclusively with national and political freedom, represents it as "that liberty which results from the application of the general idea of freedom to the civil state of man." In this reference to "the general idea of freedom," the subject is left undefined, and one is sent in quest of the "general idea." And the freedom of the people in its organic and moral being, that is, national freedom, is avoided in these abstractions. It does not exist thus complete in an abstract form, which a people is then to adopt

1

1 Lieber's Civil Liberty, etc., vol. i. p. 34.

Dr. Lieber, in attaching so great weight to certain institutions of freedom, allows no corresponding weight to the fact that these institutions have their only ground in the organic unity of the people in the nation. This leads to the application of certain institutions of a certain type to all nations, and thus all are to be made to conform to an Anglican type. But while recognizing the worth of these institutions, in themselves, to civilization, the condition of freedom is the national spirit of the people, which will mould institutions in its own strong individuality. While the United States has in its history a lineal relation to some of these institutions, and they are an inheritance of inestima ble value, yet work is to be done in new conditions, and in a life which is neither Anglican nor Gallican.

and apply by some induction, and when thus apprehended it can result only in the construction of a formal system. or a collocation of institutions. It would be as consistent to represent the freedom of the individual person, as the assumption and application of the "general idea."

The freedom of the people, or political freedom, subsists in the nation in its organic and moral unity. It is the self-determination of the people, in the nation, as a moral person. It is formed in the conscious life, and its process is in the conscious vocation of the organic people.1

Freedom has, apart from the nation, no positive existence. Thus among the vast populations of Asia, there is no political freedom, but only the natural freedom of man, and the term freedom can be applied to those peoples only negatively as denoting the absence of a positive system of slavery. Thus, also, in the loss or the destruction of the national unity, that is, the organic and moral being of the

1 Milton's whole argument rests on the identity of political and moral freedom, and the utter rejection of any conception which does not presume this. He says of the formal representation, -"The way to freedom is without intricacies, without the introducement of new or absolute forms or terms, or exotic models, ideas that would effect nothing." - Milton's Works, ii. 127. It is "a real and substantial freedom, which is rather to be sought from within than from without, and whose existence depends not so much on the terror of the sword as on sobriety of conduct and integrity of life." Works, i. 208. "Unless that liberty which is of such a kind as arms can neither procure nor take away, which alone is the fruit of piety, of justice, of temperance, and unadulterated virtue, shall have taken deep root in your minds and hearts, there will not be long wanting one who will snatch from you by treachery what you have acquired by arms; unless by the means of piety, not frothy and loquacious, but operative, unadulterated and sincere, you clear the horizon of the mind from those mists of superstition which arise from the ignorance of true religion, you will always have those, who will bend your necks to the yoke, as if you were brutes, who notwithstanding all your triumphs, will put you up to the highest bidder, as if you were mere booty made in war; and will find an exuberant source of wealth in your ignorance and superstition. You, therefore, who wish to be free, either instantly be wise, or as soon as possible cease to be fools; if you think slavery an intolerable evil, learn obedience to reason, and the government of yourselves; and finally bid adieu to your dissensions, your jealousies, your superstitions, your outrages, your lusts. Unless you will spare no pains to effect this, you must be judged unfit both by God and mankind to be intrusted with the possession of liberty and the administration of government, but will rather, like a nation in a state of pupilage, want some active and courageous guardian to undertake the management of your affairs." - Works, ii. 295.