has it in its grip: within a few days the parent must register it and
give a biography of its ancestors to a registrar; then it ordains that
it be inoculated. At five years of age the child is deprived of
liberty, for he is shut up in barracks and then made a prisoner for ten
years, compelled to learn things that will never be of any value in all
the after years. After he has escaped from that prison-house, there
comes an interval of illusory liberty. He comes and goes as he likes
after the hours of toil. Then comes an emotional crisis and he
marries--and what is there left of his liberty? Every family is
established on this--the restriction of liberty. The traffic in the
street and the narcotic in the shop are alike in the grasp of law.
From the cradle to the grave a man is surrounded with restrictions of
liberty. There is no base liberty left to-day but the liberty to get
drunk. In the name of freedom there must come an end to that liberty.

III

And yet the horizon glows with these placarded appeals to leave things
as they are in the name of liberty. There is a true feeling behind
these appeals--the feeling that above all things Scotsmen love freedom.
And so they do. There is no race under the sun that have hazarded
their lives so much and so frequently for freedom as we have done. How
it stirs our blood to read the words in which our ancestors in the year
1320 defied the Pope when his Holiness sided with England against King
Robert Bruce. 'The wrongs which we have suffered under the tyranny of
Edward are beyond description,' wrote the nobility and commonalty of
Scotland in Parliament assembled, '... while a hundred of us exist we
will never submit to England. We fight not for glory, wealth, or
honour, but for that liberty without which no virtuous man can
survive.' We know the end of that and of every fight our fathers
fought for liberty. It was the moorsmen and cottars of Scotland, who
defied three kingdoms, and fought on with the Bible in one hand and the
sword in the other, that saved the liberties of nations. But what
liberty was it they fought for? The liberty to get drunk! The liberty
to establish at every street corner a centre for the spreading of
disease, misery, and pauperism! Those who make such appeals surely
underrate the intelligence of a generation who have not yet quite
forgotten the exploits and the sacrifices of their sires. The freedom
they achieved was the freedom to worshi