Take an example of unlicensed liberty from the bumblebees, who have their own way, though unloved, while the honey-bees are citizens of a state, everyone going armed, as becomes a race renowned for its preparedness. The bees, however, are monarchists, who will fight and die for a sovereign queen whom they have never seen. So, at the opposite pole from the care-free, house-free--and often food-free savage, we may find a mass of individuals clustered in an empire, and obedient to the scepter or the nod of a personal sovereign. Why do men with minds and wills accept personal sovereigns? Many times for safety. The beginning of kings is the soldier-chief, that “man on horseback,” who has been the destruction of commonwealths, and yet has founded many states,--first conqueror and then despot. As Daddy Smith said in the Massachusetts ratifying convention of 1788, in describing the social disturbances of Shays’ Rebellion, “Our distress was so great that we should have been glad to catch at anything that looked like a government for protection. Had any person that was able to protect us come and set up his standard, we should all have flocked to it, even if it had been a _monarch_, and that monarch might have proved a tyrant, so that you see that anarchy leads to tyranny, and better have _one_ tyrant than so many at once.” [Illustration: FANEUIL HALL IN 1789 The second Faneuil Hall. As rebuilt after the fire of 1761] [Illustration: INTERIOR OF FANEUIL HALL] _Ancient Despotism_ One would expect to find the cradle of liberty in the cradle of the civilized human race, that is in that once wealthy valley of Mesopotamia. Whatever the previous organization of family or tribe or clan, the earliest organized states of which we have a record were the mighty empires of Babylon and Assyria, the closest-knit monarchies of history, whose kings compared themselves with divinities and were worshiped as gods. What opportunity was there for the individual? The Great King lived in one world and all his subjects in another. The Assyrian sculptures tell how Sargon and Assurbanipal relieved the oppressed that ventured to strive for home rule! Shattered, pierced, impaled, these aspirants for liberty served to illustrate the absolute power of their masters. Yet despotism proved then, as it will in future prove, that when liberty is strangled, power departs; for all those vast empires fell before the armies of other invaders and conquerors. [Illustration: OLD STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, MASS. Erected in 1748, and now under the guardianship of the Bostonian Society]