By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom.
It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and
illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It
has its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records,
evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on
the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere individual men: on
account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are
descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to
preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have
pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our
breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and
magazines of our rights and privileges.
* * * * *
You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given
to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges,
though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your Constitution, it is
true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and
dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the
foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired
those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your
Constitution was suspended before it was perfected; but you had the
elements of a Constitution very nearly as good as could be wished.
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