By
this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing
and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors.
It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of
portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, and
titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the
principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men: on
account of their age and on account of those from whom they are
descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better
adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course
that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our
speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great
conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.
YOU MIGHT, IF YOU PLEASED, have profited of our example and have
given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your
privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your
constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession,
suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the
walls and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable castle.
You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old
foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was
perfected, but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as
good as could be wished.
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