We have been taught to think that the institutions of freedom in this country are so secure that we may go about our business and our play, and leave them to take care of themselves. And yet, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” is the motto our ancestors left us. For the forms of tyranny change from generation to generation, and it is always out of the old freedom that the new slavery is made. You think that you can stay free by clinging to the good old ways, by repeating the good old formulas, by standing by the good old faiths; but you cannot, for freedom is not a thing of institutions, but of the soul. It has always been under the forms of spirituality that men have been chained by priestcraft; and it is with the very pennons and banners of liberty that this land is bound to-day. It always has been so, and it always will be so—that the despot asks nothing save that things should stay as they are. What was it that the slave-holder wanted, but that things should stay as they were? That men should hold by the Constitution as it was, while America was made into a Slave Empire? What is it that our masters want to-day, save that we should stand by the good old traditions of American individualism, freedom of contract and the right of every man to manage his own business as he pleases—the while the Republic of Jefferson and Lincoln is forged into a weapon for the enslaving of mankind? There is not one single tradition of the early times that is not being used to-day for the betraying of liberty. Take the Monroe Doctrine, for instance. We shout for it every Fourth of July, and we are rushing to completion a score or two of battleships to defend it; whenever it is in peril, our most rabid anti-trust editors and politicians drop everything and take to singing Yankee Doodle. And yet, has never the least suspicion about it come to you? Has it never occurred to you to look who it is that is leading you upon this crusade of freedom—this strange propaganda of civilisation and republican institutions by battleship and rapid-firing gun? This zeal of our captains of industry for the spread of American institutions among the Filipinos and Hawaiians and Porto Ricans and Panamanians and Venezuelans, the while they are so busy crushing American institutions in Rhode Island and Colorado!