There were added to this assertion of the inalienable rights of the individual in opposition to the sovereign power the deeper sense of the importance of the individual gained in the Reformation, and the insistence upon the right and duty of exercising private judgment which came with the rationalism of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century, with its “appeal to reason” in opposition to the authority of priest and Bible, was in fact an intellectual declaration of independence which became for educated minds an essential part of the liberal tradition. Liberalism owes much to the Deists and men like Hume. It is not a mere coincidence that a large number of the leaders of the American Revolution were “freethinkers.” Thus liberalism became something more than a political movement. It became a philosophy of personal liberty, of independence of authority, of tolerance. The rights which the liberal claimed for himself he was--at least in theory--willing to grant to others. He took the side of the “under dog.” The tradition is best represented in England by such men as Priestley, Martineau, Kingsley, Cobden, Bright, Morley, J. S. Mill, Huxley, and in America by Paine, Jefferson, Channing, Emerson, Theodore Parker, Lincoln, and Ingersoll. The decline of liberalism to the level of Bryanism, the betrayal by “One Hundred Percent Americanism” of the spirit in which the Republic was founded, the spread of bigotry among the masses, the prevailing partisan spirit and the illiberalism of professed “liberals,” the changing of our constitution from a guarantee of personal liberty to the authorization of Federal interference with the daily habits and customs of the individual--these are not matters for which we may hold recent immigrants responsible. They are, I regret to say, symptomatic of tendencies which are most commonly manifest among Americans of British descent. They show how far the spirit of a nation may drift in one hundred and fifty years when it renounces its intellectual leadership. Liberalism as a political movement was early divorced from liberalism as an intellectual movement. The former became Andrew Jacksonism, “shirt-sleeve democracy,” free-soil-ism, abolitionism, populism, the Single Tax movement, opposition to big business, Progressiveism. Ever since the time of the settlement of New England the pioneer and frontiersman, the “debtor class,” the town laborer and the farmer, have had to carry on a struggle against the “money powers” of the large industrial centers. The conflict of “the poor against the rich”--generally characterized by a demand for governmental regulation of industry and cheap money--reached its culmination in the “Free Silver” issue of 1896. Of this “battle for humanity,” the author of “Our Times” quotes William Allen White.