Professor Paul Lucas has described Edmund Burke's theory of prescription as his “idea about the way in which an adverse possession of property and authority may be legitimated by virtue of use and enjoyment during a long passage of time.” The description is accurate so far as it goes. Burke certainly maintained that if one had held uncontested possession as the owner of a piece of property for a sufficiently long period of time, no earlier title to the property, however valid, could be revived and made to prevail against the occupant's title. Through the passage of time the occupant had acquired a title by prescription, and this in Burke's eyes was “the soundest, the most general, and the most recognized title … a title, which … is rooted in its principle, in the law of nature itself, and is indeed the original ground of all known property.” Burke also said: “Prescription is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but, which is to secure that property, to Government.”

In this paper I propose to examine and compare certain contemporary American conceptions of the central idea in American political thought—freedom and its synonym, liberty.

I should like to begin by recalling to your minds the Puritan Father John Winthrop's twofold definition of liberty as:

1) natural liberty, “the liberty to do as [one] lists”;

2) moral liberty, the liberty to do “only that which is good, just and honest.”

Conservatives and liberals have been living together these past two centuries in the intellectual house which Edmund Burke built. It ought to give conservatives pause that Burke's most intelligent admirer in recent times was Harold Laski. Indeed, Laski thinking to hand Burke the ultimate encomium called him the father of the welfare state. One suspects in reading Laski on the subject of Burke that Laski imagines himself to be what Burke might have become had he had the insights of Marx and the advantages of a Fabian education available to him.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, British imperial policy developed from two antithetical and mutually exclusive concepts. It aimed simultaneously at extending British trade and culture under the paternal authoritarianism of crown-colony rule, and it sought the progressive realization of colonial self-government through the spread and adaptation of British institutions. The first concept sprang from the utilitarian criterion of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” and emphasized law rather than liberty as the great instrument of human improvement. The second derived from the utilitarian doctrine of liberty, the claim for a sphere of activity within which the individual was sovereign and free from external interference. In practice, the first was deemed appropriate for the tropical parts of Britain's mercantile empire, the second for colonies of British settlers overseas. With the outbreak of war in South Africa in 1899 these two concepts came into signal opposition, and the Fabians, intellectual heirs of utilitarianism, encountered difficulty in reconciling them. One faction, led by Ramsay MacDonald, held the issue to be one of freedom and maintained that good government was no substitute for self-government. The majority, under the influence of Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, rejected the idea that Britain must educate subject peoples towards self-government and advanced an intellectual justification for autocratic control in the dependent empire. So far as the empire was concerned, Webb and Shaw aimed less at reconstructing political institutions than at making existing institutions work more effectively. In its Fabian metamorphosis, the utilitarian idea of empire thus displayed a zeal for order and centralization, and its dominant theme was greater efficiency.

Historians are fond of looking back over the panorama of the past and writing about periods of cultural change that altered the continuity of history. The age of discovery and the rise of the city are phrases that describe such pivotal epochs. These are not Madison Avenue-inspired book titles, but legitimate interpretative descriptions of past ages that provide a key to understanding the development of American civilization. Although the history of American Catholicism does not lend itself to such epochal descriptions, interpretative concepts are applicable in this area of study as well and they can provide useful keys to the analysis of the past.

During the Commercial Revolution, as European powers became deeply involved in Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade, there developed a lively debate about whether a country could claim and exercise legal sovereignty over the sea. The great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), in his work Mare Liberum (1609), argued against such notions. An English lawyer and polymath John Selden (1584–1654), espousing British interests, took the affirmative side of the debate in Mare Clausum (1936). The issues had been discussed long before Grotius and Selden had written their works, but the debate intensified as the competition both for worldwide markets and for access to offshore fishing banks became sharper.