ment, by contemplation, entitle themselves to read another page in the clasped and awful volume? Sparing and inadequate as their supply of liberty was, it was all the while in danger from the Crown and Parliament of England, and the whole ante-revolutionary period was one unintermitted struggle to preserve it, and to wrest it away. You sometimes hear the Stamp Act spoken of as the first invasion of the rights of the colonists by the mother-country. In truth, it was about the last; the most flagrant, perhaps, the most dreadful and startling to an Englishman’s idea of liberty, but not the first,—no, by a hundred and fifty years not the first. From the day that the Pilgrims on board The Mayflower at Plymouth, before they landed, drew up that simple, but pregnant and comprehensive, form of democracy, and subscribed their names, and came out a colony of republicans, to the battle of Lexington, there were not ten years together,—I hardly exempt the Protectorate of Cromwell,—in which some right—some great and sacred right, as the colonists regarded it—was not assailed or menaced by the government of England, in one form or another. From the first, the mother-country complained that we had brought from England, or had found here, too much liberty,—liberty inconsistent with prerogatives of the Crown, inconsistent with supremacy of Parliament, inconsistent with the immemorial relations of all colonies to the country they sprang from,—and she set herself to abridge it. We answered with great submission that we did not honestly think that we had brought or had found much more than half liberty enough; and we braced ourselves to keep what we had, and obtain more when we could;—and so, with one kind of weapon or another, on one field or another, on one class of questions or another, a struggle was kept up from the landing at Plymouth to the surrender at Yorktown. It was all one single struggle from beginning to end; the parties, the objects, the principles, are the same;—one sharp, long, glorious, triumphant struggle for liberty. The topics, the heads of dispute, various from reign to reign; but though the subjects were various, the question was one,'— shall the colonists be free, or shall they be slaves? And that question was pronounced by everybody, understood by everybody, debated by everybody,—in the colonial 9
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