The liberty I mean is _social_ freedom.
It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by equality of restraint.

This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice.

_Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is in my opinion safe_." The weightiest and most important of all political truths, and worth half the fine things that poets have sung about freedom--if it could only have been respected, how different the course of the Revolution! But the engineer who attempts to deal with the abysmal rush of the falls of Niagara, must put aside the tools that constructed the Bridgewater Canal and the Chelsea Waterworks.

Nobody recognised so early as Burke that France had really embarked among cataracts and boiling gulfs, and the pith of all his first criticisms, including the _Reflections_, was the proposition that to separate freedom from justice was nothing else than to steer the ship of state direct into the Maelstrom.

It is impossible to deny that this was true.