ABSTRACT
Liberty, therefore, is a product of rights. A State built upon the conditions essential to the full development of our faculties will confer freedom upon its citizens. To minds so ardent for liberty as Tocqueville and Lord Acton liberty and equality were antithetic things. But it turns, in the case of both men, upon a misunderstanding of what equality implies. The provision of adequate opportunity is, therefore, one of the basic conditions of equality, and it is mainly founded upon the training we offer to citizens. Freedoms are therefore opportunities which history has shown to be essential to the development of personality. And freedoms are inseparable from rights because, otherwise, their realisation is hedged about with an uncertainty which destroys their quality. Liberty, therefore, is never real unless the government can be called to account ; and it should always be called to account when it invades rights.
