Читать книгу Education of an American Liberal - Lucille LLC Milner - Страница 4

This book is simply an informal history of civil liberties in practice based upon my personal experiences of over a quarter of a century. It is written in the hope that it will enable young Americans to measure the present against the recent past, and strengthen in them a determination to rediscover the value of our freedoms.

Civil liberty at bottom rests upon the spirit of the people. "Protection against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough," John Stuart Mill warned a hundred years ago, "there needs (to be) protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them."

Although Mill's epoch-making essay on Liberty is almost a century old, it is full of living interest for us today. Our salvation-the maintenance of our traditions of freedom-lies in his central idea.