Words Worth Noting - July 4, 2023

“There is a straight road which runs from Runnymede to Philadelphia. We did not ‘borrow’ provisions from the British Constitution, which had come from the people; those provisions were ours, paid for with the lives of our ancestors on many a battlefield. I have examined the matter. I tell you our Constitution came up from the body of a self-governing people. But we can lose our capacity to govern by its nonexercise.”

Congressman Hatton Sumners of Texas in 1937, quoted in Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World