LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD
The Statue of Liberty is 151 feet high, standing on a granite pedestal 155 feet high. It was designed by the French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. The cost, over a million francs, was subscribed by the people of France. The pedestal cost $250,000, raised by popular subscription in the United States. The statue was unveiled on October 28, 1886.
Entered as second-class matter March 10, 1913, at the postoffice at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1918, by The Mentor Association, Inc.
Singularly enough, the freest people on earth are not the happiest (using the word “free” in the broadest sense). The Esquimaux and the Australian “black fellows” know no hours of labor, no restriction on their movements, no courts to punish offences; yet, by all accounts, their lives are filled with danger, disease, and famine. Real liberty comes into being only when men feel the contact of freemen with freemen. Liberty flourishes where men are gathered into communities, because every man must accept some abridging of that perfect freedom which the lowest savages enjoy. The essence of liberty is to recognize other people’s liberty—and that means some restrictions all around; thus arises the system of balance and elastic government which we call democracy.
PLYMOUTH ROCK
The granite boulder enclosed by this memorial shrine is a fragment (broken off in 1774) of the large flat rock where the Pilgrims landed—which lies near the sea and is now covered by a wharf
Take an example of unlicensed liberty from the bumblebees, who have their own way, though unloved, while the honey-bees are citizens of a state, everyone going armed, as becomes a race renowned for its preparedness. The bees, however, are monarchists, who will fight and die for a sovereign queen whom they have never seen. So, at the opposite pole from the care-free, house-free—and often food-free savage, we may find a mass of individuals clustered in an empire, and obedient to the scepter or the nod of a personal sovereign.