Only a few bits of the story can be given here. You will read something about Scotland’s struggle for the right to be governed by her own people, not by the tyrannical kings who then ruled England and who looked upon Scotland as a mere province fit only to supply money for their selfish desires. Next you will read several selections which show that the tyranny against which Wallace and Bruce fought, like the tyranny against which Warren and Washington and Patrick Henry fought, did not spring from the English spirit, but from kings who tried to keep even Englishmen in slavery. It is all one story—at one time the action takes place in Scotland, at another in England, at still another time in America; but the story is the story of our inheritance of freedom.
“We must be free or die”—these words express the spirit of all who speak the English tongue. The stories of Wallace and Bruce tell it. The story of the last fight of the Revenge tells it—a story written by the man who first began to plant English colonies in America, and who helped defend England against the tyranny which King Philip of Spain tried to establish. The stories of the Gray Champion, and of Warren at Bunker Hill, and of Patrick Henry of Virginia, and of Washington and Marion, are also a part of the great story of our inheritance of freedom.
You should keep this always in mind: the heroes who made good the Declaration of Independence and set up a new and freer government in America were men whose ideals of freedom came to them from England. They did not fight against the English people. Their spirit was also the fundamental English spirit. Many of the greatest Englishmen of that period used every effort to win fair treatment for the colonies, sympathized with their struggle for independence and rejoiced when at last George III and his ministers were told that America would no longer submit to oppression.
One of the greatest of these Englishmen was Edmund Burke, who lived in the time of George III and took the part of the colonies in their struggle against the King’s tyranny. He worked for the repeal of the taxation laws that so offended the Americans. He made many speeches in Parliament and elsewhere pleading with Englishmen not to drive their fellow Englishmen into civil war. And when at last war came, Burke still sought to bring about reconciliation. He wrote the King a letter in which he said that the British government was not representing the British spirit of freedom in its dealings with the colonies. He wrote a letter to the colonies in which he begged them not to believe that they were at war with England. “Do not think,” he said, “that the whole or even the majority of Englishmen in the island are enemies to their own blood on the American continent.” And a little later he said, “But still a large, and we trust the largest and soundest part of this kingdom perseveres in the most perfect unity of sentiments, principles, and affections with you. It spreads out a large and liberal platform of common liberty upon which we may all unite forever.” The whole matter he sums up by saying that the spirit of England loves not conquest or vast empire for the sake of wealth, but “this is the peculiar glory of England: those who have and who hold to that foundation of common liberty, whether on this or on your side of the ocean, we consider as the true, and the only true, Englishmen.”
All Americans need to remember these words written by a great friend of the colonies during the Revolutionary War, a man who also explained more clearly and more eloquently than any other Englishman in any time the principles on which our inheritance of freedom rests. His interest in the American cause was not merely the interest of a sympathetic friend; over and over again he pointed out that the colonies, and not the King’s ministry, represented the true English spirit. To him the mode of self-government set up in Massachusetts and Virginia represented the very ideal for which patriotic Englishmen had struggled for centuries. The British parliament, in Burke’s time, was not made up of representatives from all the population; only a small part of the population could vote, and many districts had no representation at all. Complete control of the government by the people was what Burke and thousands of other Englishmen had been trying to win. In America such a form of popular government had developed freely, because the British King paid little attention to the colonies until they became wealthy enough to be a source of riches. It was this fact that made the American revolution not merely a war for the establishment of a new nation, but quite as much a war for the development of free government in England itself. Burke realized this fact, and expressed it by saying, “We view the establishment of the English colonies on principles of liberty as that which is to render this kingdom venerable to future ages.”
The prophecy has been fulfilled. Britain still has a king, but he is king in name only; the real power rests in the people. The struggle in which the American colonists bore a part has resulted not only in a free America, but also in a free England and in freedom for the great dominions—Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—which have much the same form of government. The inheritance of freedom belongs to all English-speaking peoples, and the spread of these ideals means freedom for the world.
These ideals center around the brotherhood of man. In our Revolutionary period Robert Burns sang of the coming of a time when these ideals should be acknowledged:
“It’s coming yet, for a’ that,
That man to man, the world o’er,
Shall brothers be, for a’ that.”