[Illustration: LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD
The Statue of Liberty is 151 feet high, standing on a granite pedestal
155 feet high. It was designed by the French sculptor, Frédéric
Auguste Bartholdi. The cost, over a million francs, was subscribed by
the people of France. The pedestal cost $250,000, raised by popular
subscription in the United States. The statue was unveiled on October
28, 1886.]
Entered as second-class matter March 10, 1913, at the
postoffice at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879.
Copyright, 1918, by The Mentor Association, Inc.
Singularly enough, the freest people on earth are not the happiest
(using the word “free” in the broadest sense). The Esquimaux and the
Australian “black fellows” know no hours of labor, no restriction on
their movements, no courts to punish offences; yet, by all accounts,
their lives are filled with danger, disease, and famine. Real liberty
comes into being only when men feel the contact of freemen with
freemen. Liberty flourishes where men are gathered into communities,
because every man must accept some abridging of that perfect freedom
which the lowest savages enjoy. The essence of liberty is to recognize
other people’s liberty--and that means some restrictions all around;
thus arises the system of balance and elastic government which we call
democracy.
[Illustration: PLYMOUTH ROCK
The granite boulder enclosed by this memorial shrine is a fragment
(broken off in 1774) of the large flat rock where the Pilgrims
landed--which lies near the sea and is now covered by a wharf]
Take an example of unlicensed liberty from the bumblebees, who have
their own way, though unloved, while the honey-bees are citizens of
a state, everyone going armed, as becomes a race renowned for its
preparedness. The bees, however, are monarchists, who will fight
and die for a sovereign queen whom they have never seen. So, at the
opposite pole from the care-free, house-free--and often food-free
savage, we may find a mass of individuals clustered in an empire, and
obedient to the scepter or the nod of a personal sovereign.
Why do men with minds and wills accept personal sovereigns? Many times
for safety. The beginning of kings is the soldier-chief, that “man on
horseback,” who has been the destruction of commonwealths, and yet has
founded many states,--first conqueror and then despot. As Daddy Smith
said in the Massachusetts ratifying convention of 1788, in describing
the social disturbances of Shays’ Rebellion, “Our distress was so great
that we should have been glad to catch at anything that looked like a
government for protection. Had any person that was able to protect us
come and set up his standard, we should all have flocked to it, even if
it had been a _monarch_, and that monarch might have proved a tyrant,
so that you see that anarchy leads to tyranny, and better have _one_
tyrant than so many at once.”
[Illustration: FANEUIL HALL IN 1789