you are enjoying. The period we live in, our country's position and youth, our abundance of land, our descent, and our freedom-all call upon us, and warn us. If this work then aid, in ever so slight a degree, in the discharge of these high duties; if it help to show that the political and national Know Thyself is as important as the individual; if it impress more forcibly upon your minds the advice of Pliny: Habe ante oculos hanc esse terram quæ nobis miserit jura, and give it a meaning far wider than that which the Roman could give to it; if it prove an additional incentive to hold fast to our liberty and to cultivate it with fresh purity of purpose; if it increase our love of sterling action and disdain of self-praise; if it tend to confirm civil fortitude, that virtue which is acquired by the habit of at once, obeying and insisting upon the laws of a free country, and shows itself most elevated when it resists alluring excitement; if, in some measure, it serve to restrain us from exaggeration and judging by plausibility-two faults that are rifer in our age than they have been almost at any other period; if it steady the reader against that enthusiasm which Wesley designates as "the looking to the end without the means;"* if it * General Minutes, appended to his edition of the Book of Common Prayer, for the American Methodists. deepen our abhorrence of all absolutism, whether it be individual or collective, and by whatever name it may be called; and if it strengthen our conviction of the dignity of man, too feeble to wield unlimited power and too noble to submit to it-then indeed I shall be richly rewarded, and shall not consider myself too bold if I point to you as Epaminondas, in his dying hour, pointed to Leuctra and Mantinea.* COLUMBIA, S. C., July, 1853. * Diodor. Sic. L. xv. c. 87, 6. L. 1 ON CIVIL LIBERTY AND SELF-GOVERNMENT. BY FRANCIS LIEBER, LL. D., C. M. FRENCH INSTITUTE, ETC. AUTHOR OF "POLITICAL ETHICS;" "PRINCIPLES OF LEGAL AND POLITICAL INTERPRETATION;" "ESSAYS ON LABOR AND PROPERTY;" "ON CRIMINAL LAW;" "REMINISCENCES OF NIEBUHR;" EDITOR OF "PENITENTIARY SYSTEM IN THE UNITED STATES BY DE BEAUMONT AND DE TOCQUEVILLE," ETC. ETC. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. PHILADELPHIA, LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO AND CO. MDCCCLIII. |
