At the end of the eighteenth century there prevailed two notions
of liberty, each of them very different from what we have in
mind today referring to liberty and freedom. The first of these
conceptions was purely academic and without any application to
the conduct of political affairs. It was an idea derived from
the books of the ancient authors, the study of which was then
the sum and substance of higher education. [TAPE BEGINS] In the
eyes of these Greek and Roman writers, freedom was not something
that had to be granted to all men. It was a privilege of the
minority, to be withheld from the majority. What the Greeks
called democracy was, in the light of present-day terminology,
not what Lincoln called government by the people, but oligarchy,
the sovereignty of full-right citizens in a community in which
the masses were meteques or slaves. Even this rather limited
freedom after the fourth century before Christ was not dealt
with by the philosophers, historians, and orators as a practical
constitutional inst