John Q. Adams on 4th of July, 1821 said it well, comparing the US to the compliant British subjects:
"The people of Britain, through long ages of civil war, had extorted from their tyrants not acknowledgements, but grants, of right. With this concession they had been content to stop in the progress of human improvement."
I.e., the ruling powers have no intention of "liking our freedoms". What they like, is tyranny, unless you can force them otherwise through constant vigilance and occasional revolt. It's the nature of the beast, regardless of who is in power. There is no such thing as a benevolent philosopher-king who operates in secret and remains honest. We now have a secretive, dishonest dictatorship brewing in this country.
"They received their freedom as a donation from their sovereigns; they appealed for their privileges to a sign manual and a seal; they held their title to liberty, like their title to lands, from the bounty of a man; and in their moral and political chronology, the great charter of Runny Mead was the beginning of the world . . . the fabric of their institutions . . . had been founded in conquest; it had been cemented in servitude . . . instead of solving civil society into its first elements in search of their rights, they looked back only to conquest as the origin of their liberties, and claimed their rights but as donations from their kings. This faltering assertion of freedom is not chargeable indeed upon the whole nation. There were spirits capable of tracing civil government to its foundation in the moral and physical nature of man; but conquest and servitude were so mingled up in every particle of the social existence of the nation, that they had become vitally necessary to them . . ."
True even today.
Yet you say, "I believe them unless they give me reason to do otherwise."
That's the path to a loss of liberty that can't be regained except by revolt. |
