would
betray you. ... In order to prove that Americans have no right to
their liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims
which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that
the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the
value of freedom itself; and we never gain a paltry advantage over
them in debate without attacking some of those principles, or deriding
some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood.
. . . As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority
of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple
consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of
England worship freedom they will turn their faces towards you. The
more ardently they love liberty the more perfect will be their
obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere--it is a weed that grows in
every soil. They can have it from Spain; they may have it from
Prussia. But until you become lost to all feeling of your true
interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but
you."

So, too, in the speeches of Chatham, the great Commoner, whose
eloquence has never been surpassed, an intense spirit of liberty,
the animating principle of his life, shines out above all things
else. Though opposed to the independence of the colonies, he could
not restrain his admiration for the spirit they manifested:--

"The Americans contending for their rights against arbitrary
exactions I love and admire. It is the struggle of free and virtuous
patriots. ... My Lords, you cannot conquer America. You may swell
every expense and every effort still more extravagantly; pile and
accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and
barter with every pitiful little German prince that sells and sends
his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are
forever vain and impotent If I were an American as I am an
Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I would
never lay down my arms--never--never--never!"

Wherever the principle of Anglo-Saxon freedom and the rights of man
have been at stake, the all-animating voice of the orator has kept
alive the sacred flame. In the witenagemote of the earlier tongs, in
the parliament of the later kings, in the Massachusetts town-meeting
and in the Virginia House of Burgesses, in the legislature of every
State, and in the Congress of the United States, wherever in
An