Posted on 05/04/2016 12:01:12 PM PDT by fella
For the first time in two generations the American people are faced with the primary issue of humanity and all government - the issue of human liberty.
Not only in the United States but throughout the world, the whole philosophy of individual liberty is under attack. In haste to bring under control the sweeping social forces unleashed by the political and economic dislocations of the World War, by the tremendous advances in productive technology during the last quarter-century, by the failure to march with a growing sense of justice, peoples and governments are blindly wounding, even destroying, those fundamental human liberties which have been the foundation and the inspiration of progress since the Middle Ages.
The great question before the American people is, not whether these dislocations can be mastered and these new and powerful forces organized and directed to human welfare, but whether they can be organized by free men. We have to determine now whether, under the pressures of the hour, we must cripple or abandon the heritage of liberty for some new philosophy which must mark the passing of freedom.
Who may define liberty? It is far more than independence of a nation. It is not a catalog of political "rights." Liberty is a thing of the spirit - to be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, and to speak without fear free to challenge wrong and oppression with surety of justice. Liberty conceives that the mind and spirit of men can be free only if the individual is free to choose his own calling, to develop his talents, to win and keep a home sacred from intrusion, to rear children in ordered security. It hold he must be free to earn, to spend, to save, honestly to accumulate property that may give protection in old age and to loved ones.
It holds, both in principle and in world experience, that these intellectual and spiritual freedoms cannot thrive except where there are also these economic freedoms. It insists equally upon protections to all these freedoms, or these is no liberty. It therefore holds that no man, no group, may infringe upon the liberties of others. It demands freedom from barriers of class, and equal opportunity for every boy and girl to win that place in the community to which their abilities and character entitle them. It holds that these liberties and securities to constructive initiative and enterprise alone assure the immense sum of material, moral and spiritual achievements of men.
There are stern obligations upon those who would hold these liberties - self-restraint, insistence upon truth, order and justice, vigilance of opinion, and cooperation in the common welfare.
In every generation men and women of many nations have died that the human spirit might thus be free. In our race, at Plymouth Rock, at Lexington, at Valley Forge, at Yorktown, at New Orleans, at every step of the Western frontier, at Appomattox, at San Juan Hill, in the Argonne, are the graves of Americans who died for this purpose.
From these sacrifices and in the consummation of these liberties there arose a great philosophy of society Liberalism. The high tenet of this philosophy is an endowment from the Creator to every individual man and woman upon which no power, whether economic or political, can encroach, and not even the Government may deny. And herein it challenges all other philosophies of society and government; for all others, both before and since, insists that the individual has no such inalienable rights, that he is but the servant of the state. Their insistence is that liberty is not a God-given right; that the state is the master of the man. Liberalism holds that man is master of the state, not the servant; that the sole purpose of government is to nurture and assure these liberties. Herein is the widest divergence of social and governmental concepts known to mankind. No man long holds his freedom under a government which is the master of men's liberties, and that government cannot exist or continue unless it be of despotic powers. The whole of human experience has shown that.
And this devotion to freedom is not an abstraction, for Liberalism holds that it is solely through the release of the constructive instincts and aspirations of man that society may move forward to its primary purpose. That high purpose is human betterment. Its distinction in American life is its ideal for betterment of all people.
Out of our philosophy grew the American Constitutional system, where the obligation to promote the common welfare was mandatory and could be made effective; wherein was embodied in its very framework the denial of the right of the Government itself or of any group, any business, or any class to infringe upon inalienable rights; wherein the majority was to rule; wherein government was to be "of laws and not of men"; whereby the individual was guaranteed the just protection of these rights by its tribunals - the structure of American Democracy.
The rise of our race under it marks the high tide of a thousand years of human struggle. Upon it our country has grown to greatness and has led the world in the emancipation of men. When these boundaries are overstepped, America will cease to be American.
From the creativeness of mankind's liberated mind and spirit has come the host of ideas, discoveries and inventions with their freight of comforts and opportunities. And with all of them has come a burden of difficult problems. Today, these complexities, added to the aftermath of war, loom large, and the voices of discouragement join with the voices of other social faiths to assert that an irreconcilable conflict has arisen in which liberty must be sacrificed upon the altar of the Machine Age. But liberty is a living force, expanding to every new vision of humanity, and from its very dynamic freedom of mind and thought comes the conquest of its ceaseless problems.
Our system has at all times had to contend with internal encroachments upon liberty. Greed in economic agencies invades it from the right, and greed for power in bureaucracy and government infringes it from the left. It battles against betrayal of trust, business exploitation, and all forms of economic tyranny have long demonstrated that it was no system of laissez faire. Its battles against the spoils system, or the expansion of bureaucracy, have long demonstrated its live sense of opposition to the subtle approach of political tyranny.
I should indeed be glad to find a short cut to end the struggle with the immensities of human problems. I have no word of criticism but rather great sympathy with those who honestly search human experience and human thought for some new way out, where human selfishness has no opportunities, where freedom requires no safeguards, where justice requires no striving, where bread comes without contention and little sweat. Such dreams are not without value, and one could join in them with satisfaction but for the mind troubled by recollection of human frailty, the painful human advance through history, the long road which humanity still has to travel to economic and social perfections, and but for the woeful confirmations which the world has given of the failure of idealism alone, without the compass of experience.
The problems are pretty much the same only more intense in our interesting times.
Interesting read. Has a couple typos.
Not sure how he figures that liberty is at odds with laissez fair. Perhaps he expand upon that in the main text.
“There are stern obligations upon those who would hold these liberties - self-restraint, insistence upon truth, order and justice, vigilance of opinion, and cooperation in the common welfare,” seems to be the sum of his proposition. I would be interested to hear how the FR Libertarians respond to that.
“Liberalism holds that man is master of the state, not the servant; that the sole purpose of government is to nurture and assure these liberties.” The exact opposite of what modern “liberals” hold.
Typos? I wonder if the spellings of words have changed in the last 80 years. Mrs. Fella and myself are of an age where we were both taught that potato was also spelled potatoe And the same with tomatoe. But that was all changed in a political attack.
The enemy of liberty is personal incorporation. Corporations are not businesses. Incorporation is a pact, a deal, a contract, with the government to trade freedom for limited indemnification. Once that happens, people become legal wards of the state, and freedom is literally, legally, lost, traded for “privileges” decided by committees, enforced brutally without any recourse to rights. Nothing will truly change until this is clearly understood by The People. And as it is a sin against God, because it is an attempt by people to avoid responsibility for their actions, I don’t believe God will intervene until it is specifically, deliberately repented.
“hold” instead of “holds” and “these” instead of “there”
It is so minor I probably shouldn’t have even mentioned it.
I’ll check ‘em out. I’ve a copy of the book but the cited web source is an extract by The Saturday Evening Post. Whose banner claims it was founded by Benjamin Franklin.
Hoover knew how to sound like a conservative. But he was a progressive busybody, who kept the Depression going so FDR could keep it going until 1946.
(WWII did not “end” the Depression; it took place DURING the Depression.)
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