ce and which was passed back to France in turn when her
own great bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, however, are
inconsistent with this picturesque theory of contemporary reactionists.
It is true that the word "liberty" has been full of temptation for
generations of American orators, that it has become an idol of the
forum, and often a source of heat rather than of light. But to treat
American Liberty as if she habitually wore the red cap is to nourish a
Francophobia as absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth is that the
American working theory of Liberty is singularly like St. Paul's. "Ye
have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to
the flesh." A few sentences from John Winthrop, written in 1645, are
significant: "There is a twofold liberty, natural ... and civil or
federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By
this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do
what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty
is incompatible and inconsistent with authority.... The other kind of
liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral.... This
liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist
without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and
honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of
your goods, but) of your lives, if need be.... This liberty is
maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of
the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free."

There speaks the governor, the man of affairs, the typical citizen of
the future republic. The liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of
the Renaissance; but out of dreamland it does not work. Nobody, even in
revolutionary France, imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is
popularly supposed to derive his notion of liberty from French
theorists, is to all practical purposes nearer to John Winthrop than he
is to Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his "Declaration" are sometimes
characterized as abstractions. They are really generalizations from
past political experience. An arbitrary king, assuming a liberty to do
as he liked, had encroached upon the long-standing customs and
authority of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the
Continental Congress, served notice of the royal trespass, and
incidentally produced (as Lincoln said) a "standard maxim for free
society