This, then, we may take as the practical starting point in the notion of freedom. It is what, with reference to a formed society, we may call a status; the position of a freeman as opposed to a slave; that is, of one who, whatever oppression he may meet with _de facto_ from time to time, or whatever specified services he may be bound to render, normally regards himself and is regarded by others as, on the whole, at his own disposal, and not the mere instrument of another mind. Thus the juristic meaning of the term liberty, based on the normal distinction between one self-determining person and another, we may set down as its literal meaning, and so far the English writers, of whom Seeley is the latest type, are on solid ground when they define liberty as the absence of restraint, or perfect liberty as the absence of all government (in the sense of habitual constraint by others). _(b)_ It is obvious that the above definition would be wholly inadequate to the simplest facts respecting the demands which have through all history been asserted and achieved under the name of political {136} liberty. A man may be a long way more than a slave and yet a long way less than a citizen. If, as Seeley says, the English writer of the verses, “Ah, Freedom is a noble thing,” only meant by Freedom, being out of prison, it is certain that he meant much less than the Greek historian who two thousand years before used almost the same words. “The right of equal speech,” he wrote, “demonstrates itself in every way as a noble thing.” [1] By this, as his words and their occasion make plain, he meant a certain determinate security for the positive exercise of activities affecting the welfare of the social whole, and some such security is always understood to be involved in the notion of political liberty. But we will content ourselves at this point with noting the distinction and connection between the negative or juristic, and the varyingly positive or political conception of liberty. For the latter is, in its degree, a case of that fuller freedom which we are about to trace to its embodiment in the state; and the phenomena of political liberty are covered, of course, by the point of view which we shall take in indicating the state as the main organ and condition of the fuller liberty. [1] Hdt., v. 78.