."

It is true, no doubt, that the word "liberty" became in Jefferson's
day, and later, a mere partisan or national shibboleth, standing for no
reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of antagonism to Great
Britain. In the political debates and the impressive prose and verse of
the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once more charged with vital
meaning; it glowed under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards the
end of the nineteenth century it went temporarily out of fashion. The
late Colonel Higginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an "1848"
man, attended at the close of the century some sessions of the American
Historical Association. In his own address, at the closing dinner, he
remarked that there was one word for which he had listened in vain
during the reading of the papers by the younger men. It was the word
"liberty." One of the younger school retorted promptly that since we
had the thing liberty, we had no need to glorify the word. But Colonel
Higginson, stanch adherent as he was of the "good old cause," was not
convinced. Like many another lover of American letters, he thought that
William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" deserved a place by
the side of Lowell's "Commemoration Ode," and that when the ultimate
day of reckoning comes for the whole muddled Imperialistic business,
the standard of reckoning must be "liberty" as Winthrop and Jefferson
and Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody understood the word.

In the mean time we must confess that the history of our literature,
with a few noble exceptions, shows a surprising defect in the passion
for freedom. Tennyson's famous lines about "Freedom broadening slowly
down from precedent to precedent" are perfectly American in their
conservative tone; while it is Englishmen like Byron and Landor and
Shelley and Swinburne who have written the most magnificent republican
poetry. The "land of the free" turns to the monarchic mother country,
after all, for the glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry of
freedom. It is one of the most curious phenomena in the history of
literature. Shall we enter the preoccupation plea once more? Enjoying
the thing liberty, have we been therefore less concerned with the idea?
Or is it simply another illustration of the defective passion of
American literature?

Yet there is one phase of political loyalty which has been cherished by
the imagination of Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy oratory
and