Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Roman, Greek, English and American Conceptions of Liberty: A Lecture Delivered Before the Canadian Club of Toronto on Monday, April 20th, 1903
Modern progress in political studies has destroyed the old antithesis of man versus the State. We are unconscious ly working back to Greek principles. We now can see that man is fashioned by society and realizes himself only in society, that freedom and sovereignty are complementary parts of national life, and spring from the same source, the instinct for self-preservation. The isolated animal is free only to perish, but man is a political animal, and instinctively organizes societies' for self-defence. The State begins, says Greek philosophy (and how exquisite ly l), for the sake of living, and is con tinned for the sake of living well. Self-preservation is the origin, noble life the end. The Greeks have time with them. At every step toward that goal of noble living, so distant yet, if something has been acquired for the individual, something also has been surrendered to the whole. Some thing of personal freedom is continu ally surrendered for the sake of noble living, and something will continue to be surrendered to the end. Liberty and the power of the State are not incompatible, but how to hold the balance just between State and citizen is the master problem of government, more difficult in the immediate future than ever before in history.
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