1705038869 所有形式的文明不仅是在发展的初期和关键阶段，而是在整个发展历程中都在不断受到质疑。若一种文明的成效逊于其他文明，就会平和地或暴力地、逐渐地或骤然地被淘汰于世。对基于自由的文明的检验，是看人们如何利用自己所享有的自由。如果人们不仅利用自由去做错事，还利用自由而无所事事，尽最小的努力但求维持个人的一点点舒适，那么这种文明就是失败的。这种情况在全国是普遍的，在美国大学里尤为典型。一个学生如果对从大学所受到的教育没有恒久的信念，没有坚持必需的自律去获得教育，却利用自由付出不是最大的而是最小的努力，不是去获得而是逃避受到全面的教育，那么他就未能对他自己、对学校、对国家、对他所继承的文明尽到他的责任。与此相反，一个人如果利用自由，在大学及其一生中付出最大的努力，他便不仅尽到了责任，还使自由实现了自身价值。他是为人类进步的一个伟大法则而努力，他是为自由而战，为保证它在人类文明中的胜利而战。

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1705038871 在这战争的日子里，许多前途无量的年轻人在自身责任感的驱使下，放弃自己的人生、他们亲人的切身利益，放弃他们关心的一切。我永远不能理解，在这些时日里更加、更加不能理解，为什么一个人能够安全地站在山坡上，观望下面平原上生命的奋斗，而并不想加入其中；为什么看到世界的迁移，而不想对他的时代留下自己哪怕是很小的痕迹。很多人在国家陷入战争的时刻，会急不可待地投入到解除国难之中，却不能预见或想象到，文明的战争不是在战场上展开的，而应该在研讨会上、书桌旁、实验室和图书馆里。我们知道，在大战之时，士兵们没有充足的弹药就不可能战斗，却看不到，文明的关键在于迎合世界的需要，培养年轻的一代。我们不但要提供充足的、最好的原料，而且要以最好模式打造最高质量的、最完善的产品。这是梦想家不可实现的幻想吗，还是年轻一代可以预见并以极大热忱去实现的愿景？

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1705038873 （苗菊　译）

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1705038878 西南联大英文课（英汉双语版） [:1705033842]

1705038879 西南联大英文课（英汉双语版） 27 THE LIBERATION OF A PEOPLE’S VITAL ENERGIES

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1705038881 By Woodrow Wilson

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1705038883 THE LIBERATION OF A PEOPLE’S VITAL ENERGIES, by Woodrow Wilson, from his The New Freedom , New York, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1913. As reprinted in Maurice Garland Fulton’s National Ideals and Problems , pp. 301-310.

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1705038885 Woodrow Wilson （1856-1924）, American political scientist and historian, president of the United States of America during the World War, prime promoter of the League of Nations.

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1705038887 No matter how often we think of it, the discovery of America must each time make a fresh appeal to our imaginations. For centuries, indeed from the beginning, the face of Europe had been turned toward the east. All the routes of trade, every impulse and energy, ran from west to east. The Atlantic lay at the world’s back door. Then, suddenly, the conquest of Constantinople by the Turk closed the route to the Orient. Europe had either to face about or lack any outlet for her energies; the unknown sea at the west at last was ventured upon, and the earth learned that it was twice as big as it had thought. Columbus did not find, as he had expected, the civilization of Cathay; he found an empty continent. In that part of the world, upon that new-found half of the globe, mankind, late in its history, was thus afforded an opportunity to set up a new civilization; here it was strangely privileged to make a new human experiment.

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1705038889 Never can that moment of unique opportunity fail to excite the emotion of all who consider its strangeness and richness; a thousand fanciful histories of the earth might be contrived without the imagination daring to conceive such a romance as the hiding away of half the globe until the fulness of time had come for a new start in civilization. A mere sea captain’s ambition to trace a new trade route gave way to a moral adventure for humanity. The race was to found a new order here on this delectable land, which no man approached without receiving, as the old voyagers relate, you remember, sweet airs out of woods aflame with flowers and murmurous with the sound of pellucid waters. The hemisphere lay waiting to be touched with life—life from the old centers of living, surely, but cleansed of defilement, and cured of weariness, so as to be fit for the virgin purity of a new bride. The whole thing springs into the imagination like a wonderful vision, an exquisite marvel which once only in all history could be vouchsafed.

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1705038891 One other thing only compares with it; only one other thing touches the springs of emotion as does the picture of the ships of Columbus drawing near the bright shores—and that is the thought of the choke in the throat of the immigrant of to-day as he gazes from the steerage deck at the land where he has been taught to believe he in his turn shall find an earthly paradise, where, a free man, he shall forget the heartaches of the old life, and enter into the fulfilment of the hope of the world. For has not every ship that has pointed her prow westward borne hither the hopes of generation after generation of the oppressed of other lands? How always have men’s hearts beat as they saw the coast of America rise to their view! How it has always seemed to them that the dweller there would at last be rid of kings, of privileged classes, and of all those bonds which had kept men depressed and helpless, and would there realize the full fruition of his sense of honest manhood, would there be one of a great body of brothers, not seeking to defraud and deceive one another, but seeking to accomplish the general good!

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1705038893 What was in the writings of the men who founded America—to serve the selfish interests of America? Do you find that in their writings? No; to serve the cause of humanity, to bring liberty to mankind. They set up their standards here in America in the tenet of hope, as a beacon of encouragement to all the nations of the world; and men came thronging to these shores with an expectancy that never existed before, with a confidence they never dared feel before, and found here for generations together a haven of peace, of opportunity, of equality.

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1705038895 God send that in the complicated state of modern affairs we may recover the standards and repeat the achievements of that heroic age!

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1705038897 For life is no longer the comparatively simple thing it was. Our relations one with another have been profoundly modified by the new agencies of rapid communication and transportation, tending swiftly to concentrate life, widen communities, fuse interests and complicate all the processes of living. The individual is dizzily swept about in a thousand new whirlpools of activities. Tyranny has become more subtle, and has learned to wear the guise of mere industry, and even of benevolence. Freedom has become a somewhat different matter. It cannot, —eternal principle that it is, —it cannot have altered, yet it shows itself in new aspects. Perhaps it is only revealing its deeper meaning.

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1705038899 What is liberty?

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1705038901 I have long had an image in my mind of what constitutes liberty. Suppose that I were building a great piece of powerful machinery, and suppose that I should so awkwardly and unskilfully assemble the parts of it that every time one part tried to move it would be interfered with by the others, and the whole thing would buckle up and be checked. Liberty for the several parts would consist in the best possible assembling and adjustment of them all, would it not? If you want the great piston of the engine to run with absolute freedom, give it absolutely perfect alignment and adjustment with the other parts of the machine, so that it is free, not because it is let alone or isolated, but because it has been associated most skilfully and carefully with the other parts of the great structure.

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1705038903 What is liberty? You say of the locomotive that it runs free. What do you mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a boat skimming the water with light foot. “How free she runs,” when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly she is “in irons,” in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.

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1705038905 Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.

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1705038907 Now, the adjustments necessary between individuals, between individuals and the complex institutions amidst which they live, and between those institutions and the government, are infinitely more intricate to-day than ever before. No doubt this is a tiresome and roundabout way of saying the thing, yet perhaps it is worth while to get somewhat clearly in our mind what makes all the trouble to-day. Life has become complex; there are many more elements, more parts, to it than ever before. And, therefore, it is harder to keep everything adjusted—and harder to find out where the trouble lies when the machine gets out of order.

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1705038909 You know that one of the interesting things that Mr. Jefferson said in those early days of simplicity which marked the beginnings of our government was that the best government consisted in as little governing as possible. And there is still a sense in which that is true. It is still intolerable for the government to interfere with our individual activities except where it is necessary to interfere with them in order to free them. But I feel confident that if Jefferson were living in our day he would see what we see: that the individual is caught in a great confused nexus of all sorts of complicated circumstances, and that to let him alone is to leave him helpless as against the obstacles with which he has to contend; and that, therefore, law in our day must come to the assistance of the individual. It must come to his assistance to see that he gets fair play; that is all, but that is much. Without the watchful interference, the resolute interference, of the government, there can be no fair play between individuals and such powerful institutions as the trusts. Freedom to-day is something more than being let alone. The program of a government of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative merely.

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1705038911 Well, then, in this new sense and meaning of it, are we preserving freedom in this land of ours, the hope of all the earth?

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1705038913 Have we, inheritors of this continent and of the ideals to which the fathers consecrated it—have we maintained them, realizing them, as each generation must, anew? Are we, in the consciousness that the life of man is pledged to higher levels here than elsewhere, striving still to bear aloft the standards of liberty and hope, or, disillusioned and defeated, are we feeling the disgrace of having had a free field in which to do new things and of not having done them?

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1705038915 The answer must be, I am sure, that we have been in a fair way of failure—tragic failure. And we stand in danger of utter failure yet except we fulfil speedily the determination we have reached, to deal with the new and subtle tyrannies according to their deserts. Don’t deceive yourselves for a moment as to the power of the great interests which now dominate our development. They are so great that it is almost an open question whether the government of the United States can dominate them or not. Go one step further, make their organized power permanent, and it may be too late to turn back. The roads diverge at the point where we stand. They stretch their vistas out to regions where they are very far separated from one another; at the end of one is the old tiresome scene of government tied up with special interests;and at the other shines the liberating light of individual initiative, of individual liberty, of individual freedom, the light of untrammeled enterprise. I believe that that light shines out of the heavens itself that God has created. I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance. Monopoly means the atrophy of enterprise. If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it;what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own. We haven’t had free access to it, our minds have not touched it by way of guidance, in half a generation, and now we are engaged in nothing less than the recovery of what was made with our own hands, and acts only by our delegated authority.

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1705038917 I tell you, when you discuss the question of the tariffs and of the trusts, you are discussing the very lives of yourselves and your children. I believe that I am preaching the very cause of some of the gentlemen whom I am opposing when I preach the cause of free industry in the United States, for I think they are slowly girding the tree that bears the inestimable fruits of our life, and that if they are permitted to gird it entirely nature will take her revenge and the tree will die.

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