The Free Man

The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why men find
it so easy to die for and so difficult to define. It refers finally to
the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to save their lives
by law, man has to save his soul by choice. Ruskin rebuked Coleridge for
praising freedom, and said that no man would wish the sun to be free. It
seems enough to answer that no man would wish to be the sun. Speaking as
a Liberal, I have much more sympathy with the idea of Joshua stopping the
sun in heaven than with the idea of Ruskin trotting his daily round in
imitation of its regularity. Joshua was a Radical, and his astronomical
act was distinctly revolutionary. For all revolution is the mastering of
matter by the spirit of man, the emergence of that human authority within
us which, in the noble words of Sir Thomas Browne, "owes no homage unto
the sun."

Generally, the moral substance of liberty is this: that man is not meant
merely to receive good laws, good food or good conditions, like a tree in
a garden, but is meant to take a certain princely pleasure in selecting
and shaping like the gardener. Perhaps that is the meaning of the trade
of Adam. And the best popular words for rendering the real idea of
liberty are those which speak of man as a creator. We use the word "make"
about most of the things in which freedom is essential, as a country walk
or a friendship or a love affair. When a man "makes his way" through a
wood he has really created, he has built a road, like the Romans. When a
man "makes a friend," he makes a man. And in the third case we talk of a
man "making love," as if he were (as, indeed, he is) creating new masses
and colours of that flaming material an awful form of manufacture. In its
primary spiritual sense, liberty is the god in man, or, if you like the
word, the artist.

In its secondary political sense liberty is the living influence of the
citizen on the State in the direction of moulding or deflecting it. Men
are the only creatures that evidently possess it. On the one hand, the
eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness. On the other hand, ants,
bees, and beavers exhibit the highest miracle of the State influencing the
citizen; but no perceptible trace of the citizen influencing the State.
You may, if you like, call the ants a democracy as you may call the bees a
despotism. But I fancy that the architectural ant who attempted to
introduce an art nouveau style of ant-hill would have a career as curt and
fruitless as the celebrated bee who wanted to swarm alone. The isolation
of this idea in humanity is akin to its religious character; but it is not
even in humanity by any means equally distributed. The idea that the