THE BIRTHPLACE OF OLD GLORY
The Betsy Ross House, on Arch Street, Philadelphia, where the first American flag was made
What Is Liberty Today?
What is this liberty for which the statesman labors and the soldier gives his life? How comes it that the United States of America is the cradle of the principle, and that the success of this great republic is the admiration of mankind? The sages and patriots of Revolutionary times strove to explain and define it without much success. Edmund Burke, the friend of the Colonies, found six “capital sources” from which “a fierce spirit of liberty has grown up.” Most of these have long ceased to operate, yet the spirit of liberty is still fierce. We all understand that liberty means personal freedom, liberty to express one’s thoughts in speech and press and religious observance; the right to be tried by impartial public courts, including a jury; the right to a government founded on the expression of the will of the people, through votes; the right to change a government that has ceased to meet the needs of the people; the right to education; an opportunity to test one’s powers;—especially the right to take the voice of the many, instead of a few, on the great questions of national life.
Liberty, however, is more than a kind of government, or a rule of action; it is a political religion, a worship, an inspiration. Statesmen strove to express it in terms of reverence and affection. Thus the Continental Congress sounded its trumpet call:
“Honour, Justice, and Humanity forbid us to surrender that freedom which we received from our ancestors, and which our posterity have a right to receive from us.”
A great poet, Emerson, later sought to set forth this passionate devotion to liberty: “What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as a grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.” So all the ideals of Liberty, like seed in the souls of mankind, take root and bear fruit in good time.
FAC-SIMILE OF THE ORIGINAL RESOLUTION AS OFFERED BY MR. RICHARD HENRY LEE