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275 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vii (1951)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0275 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD THE preservation of civil liberty is clearly one of the great issues confronting the American people in mid-twentieth century. We are discovering day by day, as we try to adjust and adapt ourselves to a world we never made, that it is not an easy business to preserve the freedom of the individual in a society that demands the existence of very large measures of power, organization, and order as the price of its survival. In one sense this discovery should not cause surprise, for it merely brings us face to face with the oldest of all political problems: the achievement of a satisfactory balance between liberty and authority in an organized society. In particular, this is the central problem that has always confronted a society which has had as its goal the establishment of a democratic, constitutional order. Charles and Mary Beard have said that the most fundamental problem that faced the makers of our own Constitution was How to set up a government strong enough to serve the purposes of the Union and still not too strong for the maintenance of the liberties of the People? That problem is still with us, and can, indeed, in the very nature of things, never be finally solved. As we go about the task of trying to preserve a free way of life in a world in which authoritarianism manifests itself on every side in ever new and constantly more threatening forms, we are learning and relearning many important truths about civil liberty. First, we are becoming increasingly aware of the truth that liberty is always rela- tive, never absolute, and that accordingly the task of defining and protecting spe- cific civil rights is doubly difficult because of their very relativity. One cannot re- peat too often Justice 'Holmes's famous aphorism that freedom of speech does not include the right falsely to shout Fire in a crowded theater; for it remains one of the most perceptive observations ever made about the nature of freedom. The task of spelling out a particular right, such as freedom of speech, and of subjecting it to those modifications and exceptions that are essential to an ordered society is a difficult problem of statecraft. But the fact that we have become aware of the difficulties of the task and are bringing to it all of the ingenuity and sophistication that we possess as a politically experienced people is itself a hopeful sign. Second, we are discovering that civil liberty, like such concepts as democracy, justice, and welfare which give expression to the highest aspirations and goals of a people, must be constantly adapted to the needs of changing times and condi- tions if it is to have meaning and reality at any given moment. Someone has said that the trouble with all bills of rights is that they become obsolete the moment they are written, because they tend to look to the evils of the past and the present, rather than to those of the future. This is not to say that the particular formula- tion of civil liberty which our founding fathers made in 1789 is no longer significant or useful. Neither is it to say that efforts to give expression to high ideals of free- dom in noble and inspiring language are not worth while. But we do need to rec- ognize, and are recognizing, that the task of implementing these ideals is never done, that they are not self-enforcing, that they do not apply themselves to the facts of new and changed conditions automatically. In this respect, it is significant that a large proportion of the social engineering that this nation has done in the field of civil liberty is the product of the last third of a century. Nineteenth-cen- tury America had its problems of freedom and left us a valuable heritage of positive vii

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