Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but where it falls short of this it is not. So far as children are ill-nurtured or ill-taught, as family training is bad, the schools inefficient, the local government ill-administered, public libraries lacking, or private associations for various sorts of culture deficient, in so far the people are unfree. A child born in a slum, brought up in a demoralized family, and put at some confining and mentally deadening work when ten or twelve years old, is no more free to be healthy, wise, and moral than a Chinese child is free to read Shakespeare. Every social ill involves the enslavement of individuals. This idea of freedom is quite in accord with a general, though vague, sentiment among us; it is an idea of fair play, of giving everyone a chance; and nothing arouses more general and active indignation among our people than the belief that someone or some class is not getting a fair chance. There seems, however, to be too great complacency in the way in which the present state of things is interpreted, a tendency to assume that freedom has been achieved once for all by the Declaration of Independence and popular suffrage, and that little remains but to let each person realize the general blessing to the best of his ability. It is well to recognize that the freedom which we nominally worship is never more than partly achieved, and is every day threatened by new encroachments, that the right to vote is only one phase of it, and possibly, under present conditions, not the most important phase, and that we can maintain and increase it only by a sober and determined application of our best thought and endeavor. Those lines of Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode” are always applicable: “—the soft Ideal that we wooed Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, And cries reproachful: Was it then my praise, And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth. I claim of thee the promise of thy youth.”