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The boot and shoe makers, either as shoemakers or “cordwainers,” have been the earliest and the most strenuous of American industrialists in their economic struggles. A highly skilled and intelligent class of tradesmen, widely scattered, easily menaced by commercial and industrial changes, they have resorted with determination at each new menace to the refuge of protective organizations.

— John R. Commons

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Liberty, as such, is only the negative of duty, the absence of restraint or compulsion.

Legally, the term liberty means absence of duty, or rather the limit of duty.

The binding power of custom is its security of expectations. What has happened before may be expected to happen again, and he who arbitrarily disappoints expectations must be restrained or punished.

Other races of immigrants, by contact with our institutions, have been civilized—the negro has only been domesticated.

Liberty is absence of restraint. Freedom is participation in government.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John R. Commons (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.