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

Bernard Bailyn

In effect the people were present through their representatives, and were themselves, step by step and point by point, acting in the conduct of public affairs. No longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government.
BERNARD BAILYN

Acting Government People
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.
BERNARD BAILYN

Country Ignorant Men
In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.
BERNARD BAILYN

Obvious Revolution Social
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.
BERNARD BAILYN

Dangerous Develop Liberty Power Speak Use
The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.
BERNARD BAILYN

Foundation Inheritance Social
At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.
BERNARD BAILYN

Firsts Libertarian Slavery
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.
BERNARD BAILYN

English Imprint Speaking Standing World
In England the practice of “virtual” representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection.
BERNARD BAILYN

Country Interest Practice
The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred.
BERNARD BAILYN

Four Struggle Years
What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.
BERNARD BAILYN

Facts Law Liberty
Instantly available without continuous presence is probably the best role a mother can play.
BERNARD BAILYN

Mother Play Roles
Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.
BERNARD BAILYN

Leader May Revolution
The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.
BERNARD BAILYN

Corruption Facts Liberty
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.
BERNARD BAILYN

Constitution Finals Political
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.
BERNARD BAILYN

Country Enlightened Hope Principle Renewal Spokesmen
Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the “left” opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts.
BERNARD BAILYN

Army Country Mind

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

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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