"WHAT'S FREEDOM?" IT PROLOGUE HOW "FREEDOM" BECAME A PLAY T was bed-time, but not sleep-time, and the hour was big with rumors. For there had been thrilling (unofficial) warnews that day, and the two children,—a town boy, and a boy from a remote state-wakeful in their cots, were talking child-mind strategy. They differed as children will; they wrangled concerning the merits of Foch and Pershing, but as sleep closed in upon them, their partisanship became fainter and fickler. Suddenly, the elder boy, as if ending all argument, and in a voice charged with exultation, cried-"My daddy died for Freedom." To which the other replied: "What's Freedom?" Sometimes, it happens, that a chance remark, heard or read, assumes instant and paramount im portance. Thus it was with that artless question -"What's Freedom?" I returned to my room brooding, and quickly realized that I should do nothing else, think little else, until I had answered in the simplest way, in the clearest language, that boy's question"What's Freedom?" He is provincial and pathetically ignorant; to him the world outside the remote town where he lives is as unreal as the world of giants and fairies; to him the Freedom, civil and religious, of his parental home is merely natural; his unquestioned birthright; as customary and expected as his morning meal. He must be shown that the Freedom which he enjoys, and will continue to enjoy when he grows up, as a citizen of the American Republic, is his possession only because of the long, hard fight made through centuries and centuries for Freedom by men and women, his forerunners, speaking his tongue, who suffered and soared that the world might in the long end be made wholly free. Step by step they fought the hard fight, backwards and forwards, here gaining, there losing, dying for Freedom, dying happy, because they knew that others would continue the struggle; on, on, to what everybody hopes and prays is the last great blow for Freedom -the present war, in which the daddy of the little town boy died. I will tell him, (so ran my plan) that there have been good kings, as well as bad kings; good commoners as well as bad commoners; that no government, and no religion, is stainless from the stain of crime, cruelty and bloodshed; that our ancestors fought not so much against kings, popes and governments as against principalities and powers of evil, the lust for dominion, earth-grab, gain and greed. I will show him that it is only by following the gleam, only by being on God's side-that is, on Love's side-that the Day can ever arrive for which the great army of free and blessed dead longed. I will show him that no one is too small and insignificant to take his share in the fight for Freedom; that it is quite true, as Tolstoy said: "There is only one way of saving mankind, that is to become better yourself"; that our acts have incalculable consequences; that all fine and great deeds are bound together by chains of gold, growing stronger and brighter as the centuries groan past; that the effect of America enjoying to-day perfect religious freedom may be traced |