It Is Seldom That Liberty Of

From "Of the Liberty of the Press," first published in Hume's Essays, Moral and Political (1741). Hume is discussing the unusual degree of press freedom enjoyed in Britain and argues that most liberties erode gradually — slavery must "disguise itself in a thousand shapes" to be accepted by a free people. He treats this incremental character of oppression as a general political truth, and scholars have identified it as one of the earliest formal articulations of the slippery-slope dynamic in political philosophy. The essay itself is foundational: it was cited in the American founders' constitutional debates and appears in The Founders' Constitution published by the University of Chicago Press.