“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.”