The Theodore Roosevelt Centennial CD-ROM

FREEDOM—NEGATION OF. No person should by

contract be permitted to impose substantial restraints

upon his liberty. Freedom to impose these restraints, if

given to weak and needy people, simply amounts to

defeating the very end of freedom. Academic freedom

is the absolute negation of real freedom. Academic

individualism defeats itself, whereas freedom in the fact

makes for a rational individualism. (Outlook , March 11,

1911.) Mem. Ed. XIX, I33; Nat. Ed. XVII, 94.

FREEDOM—PRESERVATION OF. If freedom is

worth having, if the right of self-government is a

valuable right, then the one and the other must be

retained exactly as our forefathers acquired them, by

labor, and especially by labor in organiation; that is, in

combination with our fellows who have the same

interests and the same principles. (Before the Liberal

Club, Buffalo, N. Y., January 26, 1893.) Mem. Ed. XV,

65; Nat. Ed. XIII, 282.

FREEDOM, INDIVIDUAL. The distinguishing

feature of our American governmental system is the

freedom of the individual; it is quite as important to

prevent his being oppressed by many men as it is to

save him from the tyranny of one. (1887.) Mem. Ed.

VIII, 92; Nat. Ed. VII, 80.

____________. The one great reason for our having

succeeded as no other people ever has, is to be found in

that common sense which has enabled us to preserve

the largest possible individual freedom on the one hand,

while showing an equally remarkable capacity for

combination on the other. We have committed plenty of

faults, but we have seen and remedied them. Our very

doctrinaires have usually acted much more practically

than they have talked. (1888.) Mem. Ed. VIII, 373; Nat.

Ed. VII, 323.

FREEDOM AND EQUALITY. Fundamentally, our

chief problem may be summed up as the effort to make

men, as nearly as they can be made, both free and

equal; the freedom and equality necessarily resting on a

basis of justice and brotherhood. It is not possible, with

the imperfections of mankind, ever wholly to achieve

such an ideal, if only for the reason that the

shortcomings of men are such that complete and

unrestricted individual liberty would mean the negation

of even approximate equality, while a rigid and

absolute equality would imply the destruction of every

shred of liberty. Our business is to secure a practical

working combination between the two. Outlook ,

September 3, 1910, p. 21.

FRENCH REVOLUTION. The French Revolution

was in its essence a struggle for the abolition of

privilege, and for equality in civil rights. . . . To the

downtrodden masses of Continental Europe, the gift of

civil rights and the removal of the tyranny of the

privileged classes, even though accompanied by the

rule of a directory, a consul, or an emperor, represented

an immense political advance; but to the free people of

England, and to the freer people of America, the change

would have been wholly for the worse. (1888.) Mem.

Ed. VIII, 403; Nat. Ed. VII, 347-348.

____________. There was never another great struggle,

in the end productive of good to mankind, where the

tools and methods by which that end was won were so

wholly vile as in the French Revolution. Alone among

movements of the kind, it brought forth no leaders

entitled to our respect; none who were both great and

good; none even who were very great, save, at its

beginning, strange, strong, crooked Mirabeau, and at its

close the towering world-genius who sprang to power

by its means, wielded it for his own selfish purposes,

and dazzled all nations over the wide earth by the glory

of his strength and splendor. (1888.) Mem. Ed. VIII,

404-405; Nat. Ed. VII, 349.

____________. The excesses of the French Revolution

were not only hideous in themselves, but were fraught

with a menace to civilization which has lasted until our

time and which has found its most vicious expression in

the Paris Commune of 1871 and its would-be imitators

here and in other lands. Nevertheless, there was hope

for mankind in the French Revolution, and there was

none in the system against which it was a protest, a

system which had reached its highest development in

Spain. Better the terrible flame of the French

Revolution than the worse than Stygian hopelessness of

the tyranny—physical, intellectual, spiritual—which

brooded over the Spain of that day. (Outlook, December

2, 1911.) Mem. Ed. XIV, 422; Nat. Ed. XII, 116.

FRENCH REVOLUTION. See also MORRIS,

GOUVERNEUR.

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