Read the whole thing. It gives a real perspective on where America is yet again in the big scheme of things. Here is a short excerpt:
"As early as 1775 Edmund Burke had noted in the House of Commons that the colonists’ intensive study of law and politics had made them acutely inquisitive and sensitive about their liberties. Where the people of other countries had invoked principles only after they had endured “an actual grievance,” the Americans, said Burke, were anticipating their grievances and resorting to principles even before they actually suffered. “They augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.” The crucial questions in the colonists’ minds, wrote John Dickinson in 1768, was “not, what evil HAS ACTUALLY ATTENDED particular measures -- but, what evil, in the nature of things, IS LIKELY TO ATTEND THEM.” Because “nations, in general, are not apt to THINK until they FEEL, . . . Therefore nations in general have lost their liberty.” But not the Americans, as the Abbe Raynal observed. They were an “enlightened people” who knew their rights and the limits of power and who, unlike any people before them, aimed to think before they felt. -- Gordon S. Woods, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776 - 1787, Chapter One, “The Whig Science of Politics,” pp. 3-5."
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