Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.

Now, the adjustments necessary between individuals, between individuals and the complex institutions amidst which they live, and between those institutions and the government, are infinitely more intricate to-day than ever before.  No doubt this is a tiresome and roundabout way of saying the thing, yet perhaps it is worth while to get somewhat clearly in our mind what makes all the trouble to-day.  Life has become complex; there are many more elements, more parts, to it than ever before.  And, therefore, it is harder to keep everything adjusted,—­and harder to find out where the trouble lies when the machine gets out of order.

You know that one of the interesting things that Mr. Jefferson said in those early days of simplicity which marked the beginnings of our government was that the best government consisted in as little governing as possible.  And there is still a sense in which that is true.  It is still intolerable for the government to interfere with our individual activities except where it is necessary to interfere with them in order to free them.  But I feel confident that if Jefferson were living in our day he would see what we see:  that the individual is caught in a great confused nexus of all sorts of complicated circumstances, and that to let him alone is to leave him helpless as against the obstacles with which he has to contend; and that, therefore, law in our day must come to the assistance of the individual.  It must come to his assistance to see that he gets fair play; that is all, but that is much.  Without the watchful interference, the resolute interference, of the government, there can be no fair play between individuals and such powerful institutions as the trusts.  Freedom to-day is something more than being let alone.  The program of a government of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative merely.

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Well, then, in this new sense and meaning of it, are we preserving freedom in this land of ours, the hope of all the earth?

Have we, inheritors of this continent and of the ideals to which the fathers consecrated it,—­have we maintained them, realizing them, as each generation must, anew?  Are we, in the consciousness that the life of man is pledged to higher levels here than elsewhere, striving still to bear aloft the standards of liberty and hope, or, disillusioned and defeated, are we feeling the disgrace of having had a free field in which to do new things and of not having done them?