In any case, the bloodthirsty tree remains part of the revolutionary and terrorist traditions in the twentieth century. Yeats was probably not aware of the Jeffersonian origins of his metaphor. But I have heard the Jeffersonian passage about the tree correctly quoted, and properly attributed, by people who were interested in legitimizing the terror offensive of the Provisional IRA, which began in 1971, was suspended in 1994, and again resumed in February of this year. But they have something in common. Both belong to the large and heterogeneous family of the devotees of freedom.
Freedom is the most powerful and the most ambiguous of abstract ideas.
There are two main divisions within the massive ambiguities. There is freedom combined with order and limited by law. This is the freedom of England's Glorious Revolution and of the American Constitution. This is the freedom of the mainstream liberal tradition in the English-speaking world. And it is also the freedom of the mainstream conservative tradition in the same world.