Henry, supporting the resolutions to resist the Stamp Act, at one point
exclaimed, “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell,
and George the Third--” “Treason! treason!” shouted the Speaker of
the Assembly. “Treason! treason!” shouted the members--“and,” Henry
continued, “George the Third may profit by their example. If this be
treason, make the most of it!”]
Here we have at last a cradle of liberty; for the personal rights
exacted by the nobles passed over to freemen, and in course of time all
Englishmen became freemen. It was centuries before the kings at last
gave way to the principle that the people through their representatives
in Parliament ruled even the Crown; and in the process King Charles
I lost his head, and King James II lost his throne. In the end, all
the men and women of the realm were recognized as having the personal
rights expressed in royal charters and acts of Parliament, which set
them free from arbitrary taxes, arbitrary arrests, and arbitrary
punishments.
They were entitled also to a tradition of common law, based on ideas of
freedom, enforced for their benefit by independent courts and protected
by trial by jury. Hence the England of the seventeenth century, from
which the first colonists proceeded to North America, was that part
of the globe in which law-abiding men and women had the largest
opportunity of living their own lives, enjoying the fruits of their own
labor, and dwelling under their own government.
_Colonial Liberty_
[Illustration: HISTORIC BRIDGE, CONCORD, MASS.
Showing battleground, and, across the bridge, the statue of the Minute
Man by the sculptor, Daniel Chester French]
Writers often speak of our present American system of government as
founded upon the British practices of personal liberty and local self
government and a free parliament. This is not accurate: Both our
state and federal governments have borrowed little directly from the
British parliamentary governing system. We have made our constitutions
while Great Britain had none; we have organized a system of cabinet
government, very different from that of parliamentary responsibility;
we expanded our suffrage, and England slowly followed on that highway
of liberty.
[Illustration: BUNKER HILL MONUMENT
Charlestown, Mass. A granite obelisk, 221 feet high, erected 1825-42 to
commemorate the Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775]
The truth is that the present government of Great Britain and the
present government of the United States of America, with their personal
liberties, both go back to a common source--the English government of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is a great mistake for
us to think of Queen Elizabeth as a sovereign of a foreign country;
or of the King James version of the Scriptures as something outside
the United States; or of Shakespeare and Milton simply as “British
poets.” We Americans have the same heritage in everything that was
great and glorious in the British Isles, previous to colonization, as
those that remained upon the soil, and in many respects we have made
more improvement on those old models than our kin across the sea.
The English had to struggle for nearly a century, from 1604 to 1688,
against their kings, who wanted to turn the clock backward and take
government out of the hands of the people. At that time the Colonies
were very nearly independent little republics, who loved their English
kings in proportion as those sovereigns kept their hands off. Except
for the curse of negro slavery, which was allowed to get a firm grip on
the body politic, the Colonies down to Revolutionary times were freer,
happier and more prosperous than the mother country, and that was
the main reason for the Revolution. Why should people who were doing
so well in managing themselves continue in the leading strings of a
government that saved its democracy in England for the higher classes?
The Colonies were not little political heavens. Their ideas of liberty
did not extend to Indians, or Negroes, or Quakers. Nevertheless, in the
main, they stood stoutly for freedom of person, freedom of judicial
trial, freedom of legislative bodies; and they were about half a
century earlier than England in establishing (in the famous Zenger
case of 1734) the priceless right publicly to criticize their own
governments. John Wise, who was one of them, had a right to say that
they “hate an arbitrary power (politically considered) as they hate the
devil.”
_Hartford, the “Birthplace of American Democracy”_
The first written constitution in history that was adopted by a people
and that also organized a government, “The Fundamental Orders of
Connecticut,” was drawn up in 1639 by freemen of Windsor, Hartford
and Wethersfield. Under this law the people of Connecticut lived for
nearly two centuries. The twelve articles it comprised expressed
“pure democracy acting through representation, and imposing organic
limitations.”
“Here is the first practical assertion of the right of the people, not
only to choose, but to limit the powers of their rulers--an assertion
that lies at the foundation of the American system. It is on the banks
of the Connecticut, under the mighty preaching of Thomas Hooker, and
in the constitution to which he gave life, if not form, that we draw
the first breath of that atmosphere which is now so familiar to us. The
birthplace of American Democracy is Hartford.”
[Illustration: PAUL REVERE]
[Illustration: READING THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE FROM THE STATE
HOUSE, BOSTON]
By common consent, the period when these principles of liberty of
person and of government were first clearly impressed on the world was
in the American Revolution, which deserves to be called the cradle
of modern liberty. When things grew squally in the Colonies, our
forefathers insisted that their brand of liberty was better than the
British kind, and they began to draw up lists of rights and grievances,
especially in the Stamp Act Congress of 1765. The new states of the
American Union, as they were organized, bound themselves to observe
Bills of Rights containing such stirring principles as that, “All
power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people.”
“All elections ought to be free, and that all men having sufficient
evidence of permanent interest with, and attached to the community,
have the right of suffrage.”--“The freedom of the press is one of the
great bulwarks of liberty.”--“All men are equally entitled to the free
exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”
By far the most renowned statement of the noble rights of liberty
was the Declaration of Independence. At the time, people were most
interested in the classified indictment of the king of Great Britain
for interfering with American liberty. The world, however, has long
agreed that the big memorable, permanent thing in that Declaration is
found in the three magnificent sentences that fulfill the injunction
of the Liberty Bell, to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land, to
all the inhabitants thereof.” Those imperishable sentences are: “We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,--That
to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed,--That whenever
any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its
powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their
Safety and Happiness.”
[Illustration: ORIGINAL INDEPENDENCE HALL]
[Illustration: INDEPENDENCE HALL TODAY