We’re conditioned to accept the prevailing ideas of society, and most people inculcated with an inherent moderation and deference in the way that we act towards the authorities.  As a result of that deference in actuality, legend and popular folklore often tell us as much about our understanding of justice and freedom from tyranny as actions do.  The tale of William Tell is one such story.

In the 14th century, Switzerland was a very different place to the one known to us toward.  Yes, it still had the Alpine peaks and valleys and it was still back then known for its agricultural output (although chocolate may have been pushing it).  However, it was most certainly not neutral, but held firmly under the control of the Habsburgs, then a major dynasty, although not yet the preeminents that they would become, in the Holy Roman Empire.

Three Swiss cantons had signed the Federal Charter in 1291, affirming their sovereignty and independence from external forces.  The Habsburg governor of Uri, Hermann Gessler, eager to prove his dominance of the area, raised a pole in the centre of the capital, Altdorf, crowned by his hat, and ordered that all locals bow down before it, and, by it, show allegiance to the Habsburg regime and his own arbitrary rule.

Tell had other ideas, and refused.  Angered, Gessler ordered Tell to shoot an apple off the head of his son, Walter, with a crossbow, on punishment (of refusal or failure) of both being executed.  Fortunately, as that legend records, Tell proved himself to be an expert marksman, and, on 18th November 1307, 700 years ago today, successful took the apple from his son’s head.

When Gessler asked Tell why he carried a second bolt in his quiver, when Tell was clearly so talented, Tell replied that he intended to shoot Gessler if he had accidentally killed his son.  Enraged even more, Gessler had Tell locked up in a nearby castle, but, escaping thanks to a storm during transit, Tell returned to Altdorf, and killed the governor with his remaining bolt.  This sparked the people of the three cantons to rise up, and forever cast off the shackles of the Austrian regime.

Like the tale of Prometheus and that of John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, Tell defied the illogic of his overlords, and cast off his chains through righteous action against arbitrary tyranny.  All three legends, whilst none of them historically accurate, tell a similar story.  All three heroic individuals refused to bow to the absolute and unjustified rule to which they were subjected, and fought back, using both their brains and brawn.  If we judge the people by the tales that they tell, we can tell that freedom, whether in Ancient Greece, in 14th century Switzerland, or in the 20th Century, is an eternal desire, and one that cannot be denied.

The existence of the state can only be justified in defending the rights of its people: using its monopoly on the initiation of force to protect civilians’ indisputable rights from the threats posed against them. Most people incorrectly insist that a degree of enforcing a uniform and disputable morality is the responsibility of the state. The form of government best-suited to enforcing its own morality upon the individual is that guided by the immaterial, and ill-designed for tolerating dissent.

On 20 September 1870, the forces of the Kingdom of Italy, led by General Raffaele Cadorna, breached the Aurelian Walls that encircle the ancient city of Rome: home of the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. The capture of the city on that day completed the Risorgimento, and put an end to the temporal power of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope was given a rump state, the Vatican City in 1929 (by that nice fellow Mussolini), but one that is pathetically small: at under half a square kilometre, it’s smaller than Fitzrovia, and a quarter of the size of Regent’s Park.

Seeing the tiny scale of the Vatican, it’s easy to forget that, for over a millennium, the Roman Catholic Church held dominion of vast swathes of Italy, and, in league with the allied Holy Roman Empire and the French and Spanish rulers, held all of Europe under fear. Their two main weapons were fear, ruthless efficiency, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope. (Damn, their three main weapons were…)

When we hear of news of theocracies on the news, it’s almost always of Iran or Saudi Arabia, and always in unfavourable terms (except when it’s on Channel 4 or BBC, when it’s obviously laudatory: which proves that it’s a bad thing). But that belies for how long we, or, rather, our European neighbours, were in thrall to the same phenomenon: oppression at the hands of unthinking and unyielding dictators, enforcing their morality on others without earthly justification. Of all forms of government, the theocracy is the greatest of threats to liberty. On this day in 1870, the world was rid of one of the gravest of all time.

For this one day of the year, no introduction is needed. Few dates stick in the memory as solidly as that September 11th, which will go down as one of the darkest days in modern human history. 2,974 innocent people, along with their 19 barbaric murderers, died in the attacks on New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, changing fundamentally the way that we live our lives.

11 September 1609 was a far quieter day, but no less significant in the history of New York City. On that day, the English sea explorer Henry Hudson sailed his ship, the Halve Maen, into what is now New York harbour, discovering it for the Dutch East India Company. Five years later, the colony of New Netherland was founded, followed by the foundation of New Amsterdam - now New York City - in 1625.

Like the Dutch homeland, then fighting for its independence from the theocratic Habsburgs, the city was a beacon of liberty in an otherwise deeply oppressive world. The settlers were bound by the colony’s charter to respect freedom of religion and conscience, to a tolerable degree of taxation and government intrusion into the people’s lives.

The importance of this tradition was proven in 1664, when King Charles II invaded New Netherland, home to thousands of dissidents that had fled from religious persecution at the hands of the Stuarts and the Cromwells alike, seeking to annex it into New England. The Dutch company directors refused to defend the colony, arguing to the (conservative) Director-General Pieter Stuyvesant:

We are in hopes that as the English (in New Netherland) have removed mostly from old England for the causes aforesaid, they will not give us henceforth so much trouble, but prefer to live free under us at peace with their consciences than to risk getting rid of our authority and then falling again under a government from which they had formerly fled.

The English commander recognised the Dutch administrators’ resolution, and promised the Dutch commander that the people could “keep and enjoy the liberty of their consciences in religion”, which Stuyvesant accepted without argument. And thus did what would become the world’s second-greatest city pass into the hands of England, and afterwards Great Britain, in whose hands it remained until its independence as part of the United States a century later.

The inhabitants refused to bow to authoritarian demands by the new administration, but equally had refused to grant their previous Dutch masters the right to ride rough-shod over the rights, which they had won from the Spanish only after eighty years of war. In true reflection of their status as servants of the people, and defenders of their rights, the government acquiesced. The actions of the Dutch government in the 17th century were nothing short of heroic, showing restraint and poise in crisis to best serve their citizens’ interests, even if it meant losing national pride.

The same principles can just as readily be applied today. Our governments, in their haste to ‘defend’ us from future terrorist atrocities, commit atrocious crimes against their own people’s civil liberties. They arrest us without cause, and detain us without trial. They try us behind open doors, and do so without a jury of our peers. They force us to bear identity cards, and track us with a national database. If the government truly wished to do justice to the memories of the 2,974 innocent innocents that died in 2001, they would should the same respect, and the same decorous and liberal principle that were displayed by the Dutch governors of New Amsterdam.

Libertarians occupy an awkward position in the political landscape. A lot of my friends try to pass themselves off as libertarians, bragging about their belief in low taxation, only to trail off and leave an unnerving silence when it comes to social issues. However, to be a libertarian, one must unite both creeds, under the one intellectually consistent ideology. One must believe that not only does the state not have any role to play in the boardroom, but in the bedroom, too.

On 26 August 1969, the Canadian Criminal Law Amendment Act came into effect, changing forever how much the Canadian state would involve itself in affairs in the bedroom. It decriminalised homosexuality, the contraceptive pill, and abortion. So great an impact did it have that, when passing through the House of Commons, it was known as the ‘Omnibus Bill’, although still bearing the more dour name of Bill C-150.

The bill was proposed by Pierre Trudeau in 1967. Trudeau was then the Justice Minister, and responsible for sweeping away all the outdated and outmoded laws of state. In this capacity, he made it quite clear that laws that impinged upon sexual rights would be first to go, declaring, “There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” As it happens, Trudeau was elected leader of the Liberal Party, and therefore Prime Minister, at the marathon 1968 party convention, allowing him to get his bill passed and to dominate Canadian politics for the next two decades.

To claim that Trudeau as a libertarian idol would be just as false as my conservative friends to claim their own libertarian credentials. Trudeau never understood economic liberalism, and, as time went on, his sence of righteous justice, his intolerance of intolerance, declined. In 1970, he even declared war on Canada (really, he did). However, thanks to his force of character, on this day 38 years ago, the face of Canada changed, and the frontiers of the state rolled back, so that they could never threaten the bedroom again.

Were the average person to look at one of this year’s new £20 Bank of England banknotes, it may seem a tad confusing for him or her to find a reference to a factory manufacturing pins. In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, describes the economic concept of division of labour, by which each person specialised in a particular task and several people combined these respective products to increase efficiency, in terms of what he saw at the time: pin-making.

Nowadays, we find the example risible not because it doesn’t hold the same basic economic fact that it did when Smith wrote it in 1776, but because it seems so trivial, so small-scale. Today, we would see the smallest examples of division of labour all around us, but nowhere more so than on the production line. So much do we take the awesome productive power of the production line for granted, that we forget that there was once a time where no such innovation existed.

In the early summer of 1903, there were few more nervous men in Detroit, nay the whole of the United States, than Henry Ford, the majority proprietor and name-bearer of a small automobile-building factory. Ford had sunk his entire fortune into the enterprise: an enterprise that was down to its last few dollars. No-one had yet ordered one of his ‘Model A’s, and the company was going under.

However, salvation for the company came on 23 July 1903, in the form of a German doctor in Chicago, Dr Ernst Pfenning, who took a chance on Ford, and ordered one (out of self-interest, mind!). It would be the first of 1,750 produced over the following year. From then on, it was to bigger and better things that Ford aspired to and attained, culminating in the dominance of the Ford Model T. Ford introduced a style of industrialism based on the large-scale division of labour, centred on the production line that had been pioneered by Eli Whitney, that bears his name: Fordism.

If the sum of man’s accomplishments can be measured by the sum of his products, there can be few men that have ever achieved more than Ford. The cornerstone of the new Fordist economic order, the production line, unleashed the capacity of people to produce in a way never seen before. Had Ford’s factories been around in 1776, there can be no doubt that it would be the car factory, and not the pin factory, that would be recorded as Adam Smith’s archetypal division of labour, and the mainstay of the new economic order.

Rarely is the most down-trodden man the most angry.  No matter what ideology they espoused, of history’s best-remembered revolutionaries - from Maximillien Robespierre to Sir Roger Casement, from George Washington to Che Guevara - a great many have actually sprouted from the ruling class that they sought to overthrow.  Disenfranchised even of their ability to fight back, rarely do the most abused rise up against their oppressors.  However, once in a blue moon, they do.

In 1839, one such group of disenfranchised and down-trodden did throw off their chains.  They were a group of trans-Atlantic passengers on a Spanish ferry, heading to the United States for a new life: a life of imprisonment, slavery, and inhumanity.  La Amistad carried a cargo of enslaved Africans, who had been illegally brought into the Americas despite a 20-year-old ban on the slave trade.

However, on the 2nd July of that year, the captives, led by Joseph Cinqué, rose up in revolt, killed the captain, took control of the Amistad, and ordered its return to Africa.  Due to deception by the ship’s navigator, the ship instead headed for New York, where they were captured by the US Navy and sold as slaves.  Only due to the Constitutional oversight of a free and independent legislature were the slaves declared as they legally always had been: free men.

The Amistad case is one of the most famous steps in the history of the abolition of slavery in the United States, and thereafter those parts of the world that still practised the barbarity.  Those that fought back on 2nd July 1839 were down-trodden and disenfranchised, the lowest of the low, but fought back because their slavery was so explicit and so complete.

However, all those oppressed by the power of the state, small and mighty alike, are enslaved as if held in chattel.  Just as the deprival of life by force is murder and the deprival of property by force is theft, so the deprival of liberty by force, always and everywhere, is slavery.

If the readers of BBC History magazine had their way, everyone in the country would be enjoying a day off work today. In a 2006 poll, their readership chose the 15th June as the date they would like to see dedicated to a new national holiday to celebrate British values. Winning out over more auspicious rivals, such as VE Day, Armistice Day, Trafalgar Day, the 15th June doesn’t seem to have much going for it. That is, except that it was the day the first blow in the fight against tyranny hit home.

On 15 June 1215, the marshland of Runnymede, in Berkshire, was home to one of history’s rarest spectacles: an autocratic ruler giving away his power and his asserted right to rule by force alone. That day, King John of England signed Magna Carta, ending the absolute monarchy and guaranteeing basic liberties of all free men.

Beyond the intricate balancing institutions between the King and his Barons, Magna Carta guaranteed many of the rights that are protected today. It outlawed imprisonment without trial, false imprisonment, and disproportionate punishment; and guaranteed the right to self-defence, the separation of executive and judiciary, and trial by jury.

In short, it enshrined the rule of law and the mechanisms by which our inalienable fundamental rights - to life, liberty, and property - have been protected for the past eight centuries years. Without it, the people would be left as they were, prostrate in front of the state. Whilst Magna Carta did not, as no law thus far has, allowed man to live free of all tyranny, it was inarguably the first step, and, for that reason, ought to be commemorated as heartily as any day before or since.

It is fitting that our inaugural This Day in Liberty is taken from the darkest chapter in human history, at a time when liberty, and therefore all of civilisation, came closest to being extinguished. Into that darkness, light was cast by the forces of freedom, who fought - and won - in North Africa, in the Pacific, in Burma, and in the skies over Europe. However, none was shed on the oppression of the human spirit more than by a single Jewish girl in Amsterdam.

On 12th June 1942, Anne Frank was given a small black and red book as a birthday present from her father. From that moment, she kept it as a diary, adding entries compulsively. At first, she discussed relatively ‘normal’ events, but, as the family was forced into hiding, and the occupation became more intolerable, Anne moved to more moving matters: the role of God, the nature of liberty, and the insurmountability of the human spirit.

On 4th August 1944, Anne and her family were arrested, the SS having been tipped off of their whereabouts by an unknown informant. In a fate to be shared by six million fellow Jews, they were murdered in the Nazi death camps. However, long after her death, her tale, and that of her yearn for freedom, lives on. We owe it to her memory to advance its cause, and never to endanger it allowing ourselves to be ruled by tyranny.