ANCIENT GREECE . .

PERICLES

speaks:

The leader of a nation which founded
a mighty civilisation, addressing the
people of Athens.

“To famous men all the earth is a
sepulchre ; and their virtues shall be
testified not only by the inscription
on stone at home but, in all lands
wheresoever, in the unwritten record
of the mind, which far beyond any
monument will remain with all men
everlastingly. Be zealous therefore to
emulate them, and judging that
HAPPINESS IS FREEDOM AND FREEDOM

is valour, be forward to encounter
the dangers of War.”

Funeral Oration over the Athenians
who perished in defence of their City.

BURKE speaks :

A great English statesman of two
centuries ago addressing the House of
Commons on the subject of the British
Colonies.

“ Slavery they can have anywhere.
It is a weed which grows in every
soil. They may have it from Spain,
they may have it from Prussia. But
freedom they can have from none
but you. This is the commodity of
price of which you have the monopoly.
It is the spirit of the English
t Constitution.”i 8 6 3 . . .

LINCOLN speaks :

A great American President, leader and
uniter of his country in the war to
end slavery.

“ Four score and seven years ago our
fathers brought forth upon this
Continent a new nation, conceived
in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created
equal ... It is for us to be dedicated
here to the great task remaining before
us, that from these honoured dead we
take increased devotion to that cause
for which they gave the last full
measure of devotion; that we here
highly resolve that these dead shall not
have died in vain; that this nation,
under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the
people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

On the Battlefield of Gettysburg.

1 his freedom is the heritage of Britain : One of England’s
poets said . . . “We must be free or die, who speak the
tongue that Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold
that Milton held.” Whence was the English heritage of
liberty derived ? From a thousand years of struggle !On June lg in the year I 2 I C

the English nation at last secured from its King a charter of
freedom and justice. It is known as the Great Charter. It
is the foundation stone of English Liberty. Upon that
foundation has been built the majestic edifice of British freedom
—slowly but very surely. Other nations have striven to achieve
a like freedom. Not all have completely succeeded because
not all have been fighting the fight for a thousand years. Some
have abandoned the struggle, to relapse into barbarous despot-
ism. To-day, Britain fights their fight, too, because in taking
up arms in defence of freedom, against dictatorship and
oppression, Britain and her Allies fight for the freedom of all
peoples, everywhere.

Fifty years after the signing of the Great Charter, the English
Parliament accepted the Commons as part of the law-making
body of the Kingdom. Parliament now consists of the House
of Lords and the House of Commons, and after nearly seven
hundred years the freely-elected Commons have established
themselves as the makers of Britain’s laws. For British freedom
to-day rests on the Rule of Law. Law is an accepted code
which, although it limits the freedom of any one man to do
just as he likes because he might by so doing interfere with
the liberties of others, yet protects every man’s freedom to do
as he likes within reason.Freedom of worship is one of the cardinal British freedoms.
Every man, in every part of Britain, and of the Empire and
Commonwealth, is free to worship as his conscience moves
him. Four hundred years ago this right was asserted by the
English, when a law was passed enabling the Christian Bible
to be printed in English, instead of in Latin—a tongue which
only the priests could understand. The fight for freedom of
conscience was waged up to the seventeenth century, when it
was resolved once and for all.

At the climax of England’s glorious Elizabethan period, (the
period of her great naval exploits, the period when she led the
world in scientific discoveries, the period of Shakespeare,
Bacon, Drake and Raleigh), Parliament became supreme over
Church and State. The will of the people had struggled
successfully to govern the nation. Neither Priest, nor Peer,
nor Monarch could henceforth rule the English except by
consent of the people. Law was enthroned in absolute
supremacy. All men were equal before it, and the law of the
Constitution became the consequence of the people’s rights, not
the source of them. The rights of the people (defined by the
Courts and by Parliament) make up the British Constitution
to-day.Despotic kings have often sought to use the machinery of
Lords and Commons to impose their will upon the English
people. Hampden, an ordinary member of the House of
Commons, led a crusade against illegal taxes Collected for the
King. Hampden’s crusade helped to establish another
freedom, the freedom of the sovereign people to decide upon
the gathering and spending of taxes. The maxim of English
Law which says “ The King can do no wrong ” means that as
the King may only act on the advice of his Ministers, they, not
the Crown, are responsible before the Law.

Freedom from illegal arrest and the right to be judged by a
jury of peers had been secured to the English under the Great
Charter. Any man who has been wrongfully arrested can
secure the punishment of the wrongdoer .and get compensation.
But his release, or his immediate trial, is often a more urgent
and important necessity. The Act of Habeas Corpus enables
anyone who believes a friend to have been wrongfully im-
prisoned to secure his release—as a right, and not as a privilege.
From this right comes directly the confidence of Britons in
the laws they live under.1689

The Declaration of Rights was the coping-stone on the
triumphal arch of British liberty. It limited the powers of
the King and helped to make England a constitutional monarchy.
Freedom of speech and freedom of meeting—two important
British liberties—have flowed from this source. Both these
freedoms are the assertion of the rights of all men to do as they
please provided they do not break the Law, and do not invade
the like freedom of other men. Over long years of struggle,
England has succeeded, step by step, in creating the maximum
of freedom for everybody.

I782

One of the many and gradual extensions of the power of the
vote to further masses of the English people, occurred in 1782.
It made government ever more representative, until to-day
every man and woman over 21 years of age can directly engage
in the election of members of the House of Commons. The
increasing current of popular opinion has mounted gradually
through the years. It stands now majestically at full flood.
It is capable of error, as are its elected representatives, but it is
also capable of asserting its unmistakable power to set right
the mistakes of the past. It is the proved instrument of true
justice. It is the final hope for mankind.1807

Slavery had existed since the earliest beginnings of mankind,
sanctioned by great civilisations of the remote past. Man’s
ingratitude to man ” was finally renounced by the British
Parliament and people, who have outlawed it ever since. That
all men shall be truly free has always been the British aim, and
the history of Britain shows more martyrs to that single cause
than does the history of any other nation on earth. Injustices
and oppressions may have been done by the British—what
other nation has been entirely innocent ? But Englishmen have
died, at the hands of Englishmen, for freedom. And English-
men fight to-day, more joyously united than ever before, for
freedom.

Slowly the long scroll of English history unrolls, marking at
every fresh place a fresh advance for democracy, despite all
setbacks. The free education of every child has produced
an adult population able to read and learn, able to exercise its
vote with knowledge of the issues before it, able to advance the
cause of democratic liberty at ever-increasing speed. The
struggle has been long, often it has been hard, sometimes it
has been bitter. But it bore worthy fruit, when the British
people faced, alone, the mighty issue of freedom or slavery,
for themselves and the world. Now, freedom-loving peoples
everywhere stand at Britain’s side, rejecting alike Hitler’s
threats and Hitler’s promises.1909

The right to lawful combination by work-people, or by any
others with a common interest, is one of Britain’s freedoms,
circumscribed only by the refusal to allow the freedom of all
to be subordinated to the interests of a group. This is the
basis in Law of Trade Union rights. Now, in the greatest
crusade for liberty the world has ever witnessed, Britain’s great
Trade Unions, representing millions of British workers, stand
in the van of the fight, determined to do all, dare all, suffer all,
in defence of the freedom they and their fathers have so
arduously won. The freedom of workers is thus guaranteed in
Britain by their individual rights and by their rights as a group.

The Statute of Westminster, executed in the shadow of the
famous buildings which house the Mother of Parliaments, and
fitly bearing their name, enacted that five great overseas
territories of the British Empire should henceforth be entirely
free. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the
Irish Free State, and Newfoundland were then free to stay,
free to go, free to fight, free to remain at peace, free in word
and deed and fact. Thus does freedom flower and fruit, once
its seed has been planted in kindly ground. During this war
the same freedom has been guaranteed to India, whose very
love and desire for freedom blossomed under British rule.TO-DAY,

freedom is the heritage of all mankind. This freedom,
praised in by-gone ages, hymned in the recent past,
triumphantly vindicated to-day by the warring arms of
the United Nations, is the world’s freedom! Britain and
her Empire and Commonwealth, the United States of
America, the Soviet Union, free China, the Dutch, the
Yugoslavs, the Belgians, the French, the Poles, the
Czechs, the Greeks, the Norwegians, and the Luxem-
bourgers, fight for it to the finish. To those who have
. known freedom and lost it, life .itself seems less in
value. Those who know freedom and see how it might
be lost if the Germans and the Italians and the Japanese
came to divide and govern the world, are ready to die
in its defence. But freedom cannot die. It is a part
of man. So long as man looks upwards, towards the
light, so long must freedom live. Let all men of good-
will love freedom, work for it as they may, fight for it
if they must, until the world is rid of those evil forces
which would make men slaves or serfs.