The following pages have been written for the purpose of tracing the gradual but sure growth of our civil liberty, from historic times, downward to our own day, and of investigating the great principles which inspired our ancestors, in their efforts to secure that great inheritance to us, their posterity. A further object that I have had in view—and perhaps this latter may be regarded as the more important—is to show the symptoms, which are gathering  fast and  thick around us, of a new order of things—of, in fact, a distinct surrender of the traditional safeguards of that civil liberty—the ‘cornerstone’ of our great and deservedly enviable constitution.

I have endeavoured to prove that the invaluable principle of individual freedom—which, from the Norman Conquest downward, if red the most noble-minded of our ancestors to rebel against the tyranny of those who won, or inherited, the rights of that conquest—is in imminent danger of being lost to us, at the very hour of its consummation. And I have, I think, further demonstrated that so sure as we depart from those traditional lines, in the endeavour to realise a condition of society, which can only exist in the imagination—viz., a community of people, enjoying equal social conditions — we shall, when it is too late, find that we have lost the substance, in grasping at the shadow.

In order to realise the above perhaps somewhat ambitious purposes, I have enumerated instances to show that the term ‘Liberalism,’ which in its original and true interpretation was synonymous with ‘freedom,’ has, in our own day, lost that genuine meaning, and is, instead, carrying with it, to the minds of most men, other and quite erroneous significations; and further, that political party-titles, generally, have now ceased to carry with them any clear conception of political principles: having become so inextricably mixed and confused in the meanings which they convey, that it is impossible to deduce, from the fact of their being professed by any individual, any distinct conclusion as to that individual’s political creed. . . . . .

But I have ventured to say what I have said, because I believe it to be true; and I have sufficient faith in the spirit of manliness and fair play, which, at least, has always characterised our race, to hope that the unpalatableness of my remarks may be forgiven, on the score of their sincerity and good intent.

Bruce Smith, June, 1887