But what is freedom? Freedom from what?
There is nothing to take a man's freedom away
from him, save other men. To be free,
a man must be free of his brothers.
That is freedom. That and nothing else.
At first, man was enslaved by the gods.
But he broke their chains. Then he was
enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains.
He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin,
by his race. But he broke their chains.
He declared to all his brothers that
a man has rights which neither god nor
king nor other men can take away from him,
no matter what their number, for his is
the right of man, and there is no right
on earth above this right. And he stood on
the threshold of the freedom for which the
blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.
But then he gave up all he had won,
and fell lower than his savage beginning.
What brought it to pass? What disaster took
their reason away from men? What whip
lashed them to their knees in shame and
submission? The worship of the word
"We."
When men accepted that worship,
the structure of centuries collaped
about them, the structure whose every beam
had come from the thought of some one man,
each in his day down the ages, from the depth
of some one spirit, such spirit as existed
but for its own sake.
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