Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Washington and the Principles of the Revolution: An Oration Delivered Before the Municipal Authorities of the City of Boston, at the Celebration of the Declaration of American Independence, July 4, 1850
Liberty, considered as an element of human nature, would naturally, if unchecked, follow an ideal law of de velopment, appearing first as a dim but potent senti ment; then as an intelligent sentiment, or idea; then as an organized idea, or body of institutions, recognizing mutual rights and enforcing mutual duties. But, in its historical development, we find that the unselfish nature of liberty is strangely intermixed with its selfish perver sion; that in struggling with outward oppression it de velops inward hatreds that the sentiment is apt to fester into a malignant passion, the idea to dwindle into a barren Opinion, and this passionate opinion to issue in anarchy, which is despotism disorganized, but as selfish, wolfish and ravenous under its thousand wills as under its one. These hostile elements which make up the com plex historical fact of liberty, -one positive, the other negative, - one organizing, the other destructive, - are al ways at work in human affairs with beneficent or baleful energy but as society advances, the baser elements give way by degrees to the nobler, and liberty ever tends to realize itself in law. The most genial operation of its.
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