Page:Earle, Does Price Fixing Destroy Liberty, 1920, 173.jpg

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CHAPTER X.


Final Summary.


The foregoing detailed discussion has failed of useful purpose, if we have not reached a result that can be clearly and succinctly stated for ascertained truth must always tend to succinctness and simplicity of statement.

The "discovered" constitutional truths, may, therefore, be condensed to the following propositions, now fully established by the Supreme Court:

1st. That "Liberty is the greatest of all rights," and that it cannot exist without "Life," "the pursuit of happiness," and its resulting private property, and its legitimate fruits and profits. These have, consequently, always been "unalienable" constitutional rights of every free man living under and helping to govern our free Republican nation. That property, to this extent, at least, becomes and is a synonym for "Liberty," so that wherever arbitrary governmental impairment of the "value" of private property is found, by "price fixing" or other despotic ukase or decree, property and constitutional liberty have been invaded—and Communistic slavery has, to that extent, been substituted for the Republican Government of free men under constitutional protection.

2nd. That all men naturally love freedom, however ignorant they may be of that eternal vigilance and the necessary measures to preserve it, and where their folly has caused them to lose it, always try to return to it. Liberty destroying price fixing, of necessity, an invasion of property and thus of its synonym "Liberty," never can long con-

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