Here we have at last a cradle of liberty; for the personal rights exacted by the nobles passed over to freemen, and in course of time all Englishmen became freemen. It was centuries before the kings at last gave way to the principle that the people through their representatives in Parliament ruled even the Crown; and in the process King Charles I lost his head, and King James II lost his throne. In the end, all the men and women of the realm were recognized as having the personal rights expressed in royal charters and acts of Parliament, which set them free from arbitrary taxes, arbitrary arrests, and arbitrary punishments.
They were entitled also to a tradition of common law, based on ideas of freedom, enforced for their benefit by independent courts and protected by trial by jury. Hence the England of the seventeenth century, from which the first colonists proceeded to North America, was that part of the globe in which law-abiding men and women had the largest opportunity of living their own lives, enjoying the fruits of their own labor, and dwelling under their own government.
Colonial Liberty
HISTORIC BRIDGE, CONCORD, MASS.
Showing battleground, and, across the bridge, the statue of the Minute Man by the sculptor, Daniel Chester French
Writers often speak of our present American system of government as founded upon the British practices of personal liberty and local self government and a free parliament. This is not accurate: Both our state and federal governments have borrowed little directly from the British parliamentary governing system. We have made our constitutions while Great Britain had none; we have organized a system of cabinet government, very different from that of parliamentary responsibility; we expanded our suffrage, and England slowly followed on that highway of liberty.
BUNKER HILL MONUMENT
Charlestown, Mass. A granite obelisk, 221 feet high, erected 1825-42 to commemorate the Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775