“Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should.”

That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident.

Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments.

Everyone knew that democracy – direct rule by all the people – required such spartan, soul-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race.

Instantly available without continuous presence is probably the best role a mother can play.

Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.

The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous.

Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the “left” opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts.

What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament’s constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any.

The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin’s Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.

In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.

At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.

The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760’s was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640’s, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.

Emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the “country” mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.

What were once felt to be defects-isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weaknesses in the authority of the state-could now be seen as virtues.

Not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal and hope wherever they may be-in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes.

The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.

Secluded waters of some pool or lakelet, are the crown and summit of the floral expeditions of summer.

Four things are laid upon me: to drive out the English; to bring you to be crowned and anointed at Reims; to rescue the Duke of Orléans from the hands of the English; and to raise the siege of Orleans.

We are all making a crown for Jesus out of these daily lives of ours, either a crown of golden, divine love, studded with gems of sacrifice and adoration, or a thorny crown, filled with the cruel briars of unbelief, or selfishness, and sin.

Sometimes life, will get you down, break your heart, steal your crown.

They become nothing more than the kiss of Judas, pressing a crown of thorns into your flesh.

They become nothing more than the kiss of Judas, pressing a crown of thorns into your flesh.

And finally, there’s the seventh doorway, the Doorway of Oneness, which corresponds to the crown center, located at the top of the head. This doorway has to do with feeling whole and connected to all of life, connected to spirit.

Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature’s unpredictable creatures.