Colonial Literature I X

not only during the rest of the voyage but during the rest of his
life, and which is a treasure beyond price among our early
historic memorials,The History of New England. His plan
was to jot down significant experiences in the daily life of his
company, not only while at sea but after their arrival in
America. For almost twenty years the story went forward, from
1630 until a few weeks before the writers death in 1649. It is
quite evident that Winthrop wrote what he did with the full
purpose of having it published as a history; but he wrote it
amid the hurry and weariness of his unloitering life, with no
anxiety about style, with no other purpose than to tell the truth
in plain and honest fashion. There is one portion of this History
that has acquired great celebrity: it is the one embodying
Winthrops speech, in 1645, in the general court, on his being
acquitted of the charge of having exceeded his authority as
deputy-governor. One passage of it, contain-ng Winthrops
statement of the nature of liberty, is of preeminent merit,
worthy of being placed by the side of the weightiest and most
magnanimous sentences of John Locke or Algernon Sidney. A
distinguished American publicist has declared that this is the
best definition of liberty in the English language, and that in
comparison with it what Blackstone says about liberty seems
puerile.
1

There is a twofold liberty, natural, and civil or federal. The first
is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as he
stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a
liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and
inconsistent with authority, and cannot endure the least restraint of the
most just authority. The exercise and maintaining of this liberty makes
men grow more evil, and in time to be worse than brute beasts. This is
that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all the
ordinances of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue it. The
other kind of liberty I call civil or federal; it may also be termed
moral, in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the
moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions amongst men
themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and
cannot subsist without it;