Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by

FRANCIS LIEBER,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the

Southern District of New York.

ΤΟ

HIS FORMER PUPILS,

THIS VOLUME

IS

INSCRIBED

IN KIND REMEMBRANCE

BY THE AUTHOR.

TO MY FORMER PUPILS.

GENTLEMEN,

There are now in different portions of this country not far from a thousand citizens in the formation of whose minds I have had some share as a teacher. Many of you are in places of authority, and I consider myself more fortunate than the great founder of political science in this, that Aristotle taught a royal youth and future conqueror, and Athenians indeed, but at a period when the sun of Greece was setting, while my lot has been to instruct the future law-makers of a vast and growing commonwealth in the noblest branches that can be imparted to the minds of youths preparing themselves for the citizenship of a great republic. I have taught you in the early part of our history which God has destined to fill a fair page in the annals of man if we do our arduous duty. If not, our shame will be proportionate. He never holds out high rewards without corresponding penalties.

When you were members of this institution, I led you through the history of man, of rising and of ebbing civilization, of freedom, despotism and anarchy. I have taught you how men are destined to be producers and exchangers, how wealth is gathered and lost; and how without it, there can be no progress and no culture. I have studied with many of you, the ethics of states and of political man. You can bear me witness that I have endeavored to convince you of man's inextinguishable individuality and of the organic nature of society; that there is no right without a parallel duty, no honor without justice; no liberty without the supremacy of the law; no glory without freedom, and no high destiny without ear

nest perseverance-that there can be no greatness of man and no grandeur of nations without self-denial.1

Through you my life and name are linked to the republic, and it seems natural that I should dedicate to you a work intended to complete that part of my Political Ethics which touches more especially on liberty. You will take it as the gift of a friend, and will allow it kindly to remind you of that room where you were accustomed to sit before your teacher with the busts of Washington, Socrates, Shakspeare, and other laborers in the vineyard of humanity, looking down upon us.

The suffrages of your fellow-citizens have carried many of you into the legislative halls of our confederated states; a few of you are clothed with their chief authority, or have risen to the bench; others have seats in our congress; some have become teachers of the young; some labor in the church. Many of you are at home, and near at hand; some are on the shores of the Pacific, or in foreign lands. Wherever this book may reach you, in whatever sphere of duty it may find you occupied, receive it as a work earnestly intended to draw increased attention to the great argument of our times.

Our age has added new and startling commentaries to many subjects discussed in the Political Ethics, and things there spoken of as probably past all recurrence have since burst upon an

1 For other readers it may be mentioned that the writer is professor of History and of Political Philosophy and Economy in the State College of South Carolina.—So far the note, which was written in the year 1853. In the year 1857, he was appointed Professor of History and Political Science in Columbia College, in the city of New York, and the number of his former pupils, both in the South and the North, has increased much beyond the limits indicated at the beginning of these dedicatory pages. He affectionately includes in this address to his former pupils all those, who, since it was written, have passed from his tuition into the practical life of the citizen. Much has happened, in our own country and abroad, since the first writing of these pages, that makes the author address the sentiments contained in them and throughout the work with still warmer earnestness; and with an increased consciousness of their claim to an honest attention, and of their importance to the country whose welfare, in part, lies in the hands of the author's former pupils-the country for which they will have to give an account before that tribunal where acts and omissions are not judged of by the standard of party, passion, vanity or success, and where the prava negligentia stands recorded as a deed, as much so as the prava deligentia.