k up the quarrel of liberty in those dark days of civil
strife. Men they were who inherited the blood of the saintly Langton and
of his lordly Barons. Five centuries of heroic strife against oppression
had sanctified the name of Liberty. They were mad with the hatred of
tyranny, and centuries of bitter, heart-rending experience had made them
wise and valorous for the fray. Liberty is now about to win on Saxon
soil, but not there alone, for those of her yeomanry, who were hardiest
for the fight and cherished the broadest liberty, transplanted
themselves now upon this new soil of America and laid the foundation of
a new Empire, which then and forever should be untrammeled by the
conservation of princes and unabashed by the sneers of monarchs. They
rejected primogeniture and the other institutions of the Middle Ages,
and adopted the anti-feudal custom of equal inheritance. They brought
with them the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights; they threw around
themselves the safeguard of Anglo-Saxon liberty purified and burned by
those years of oppression. They transplanted Saxon England freed from
the dross of Norman rule and feudal aristocracy. Liberty and law are
henceforth to work out the destinies of men. And who contemplating the
manner of men and whence they derived their faith, their hopes and
fears, can quibble about the aims and purposes of the founders of this
Republic? The fathers did not borrow their political ideals from the
juriscounsuls of Rome; not from the free democracy of Greece; nor did
they fuse into their system the feudal aristocratic imperialism of
Europe.

To govern themselves by law, and secure therewith the largest liberty
with the greatest security of individual rights and property, was their
ideal of statecraft, and this idea, inseparable from the principles they
laid down, must endure while the fabric lasts.

I have told you that the government the fathers planted was Anglo-Saxon
in law; but it was Anglo-Saxon too in religion and spirit. Nothing has
been so conquering in its influence as the Anglo-Saxon spirit; it has
assimilated wherever it has gone, and like the leaven that leaveneth the
whole, homogeneity has followed in its fierce wake of progress with not
a whit lost of its great and fearless impulse of law and freedom.

No race has been so domineering, none stronger and with a more exclusive
spirit of caste, none with a more contemptuous dislike of inferiority,
none more violent in prejudice