LIBERTY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XII, Issue 4123, 30 January 1875, Page 5 (Supplement)

LIBERTY.

Tweke is no word in human language which so charms the ear as liberty. There is no word which so little pains have been taken to define, or which is used to express ideas more opposite. There is a liberty which is tho liberty of a child or a savage, the liberty of animals, the vagrant liberty, which obeys no restraint, for it is conscious of no obligation. There is a liberty which arises from the subjugation of self aud the control of circumstances, which consists in knowledge of what ought to bo done, and a power to do it obtained by patient labour and discipline. The artisan or the artist learns in an apprenticeship under the guidance of others to conquer the difficulties of his profession. When the conquest is complete he is free. He has liberty—he commands his tools, lie commands his own faculties. He lias become a master. It is with life as a whole, as with the occupations into which life is divided. Those only are free men who have had patience to learn the conditions of a useful and honourable existence, who have overcome their own ignorance and their own selfishness, who have become masters of themselves. Tho first liberty is the liberty of anarchy, which to a man should be the supremo object of detestation. The second liberty is the liberty of law, which has made the name the symbol of honour, and has made the thing the supreme object of desire. But the enthusiasm for true liberty has in these modern times been transferred to its opposite. With a singular inversion of cause and effect, men have seen in liberty not tho exercise and the reward of virtues which have been acquired under restraint, but some natural fountain, a draught from which is to operate as a spell for tho regeneration of our nature. Freedom as they picture it to themselves is like air and light, a conditiou in which the seeds of excellence are alone able to germinate. Who is free'! asked the ancient sage, and he answered his own question. The wise man who is master of himself. Who is free ? asks tho modern liberal politician, aud lie answers, the man who has a voice in making tho laws which he is expected to obey. Does the freedom of a painter consist iu his having himself consented to the laws of perspective, and light and shade'! That nation is tho most free wliero tho laws, by whomsoever framed, correspond most nearly to the will of the Maker of the Universe, by whom and not by human suff rage, the code of rules is laid down for our obedience. That nation is most a slave which has ceased to believe that such divinely appointed laws exist, and will only bo bound ■by 1 tlie 'Acts wliich it place* on its statutO' bwk"—Froude's The English in Ireland.