Note (in a note) — Chapter XXVI

[401] It was the plea then, as it had and has always been in all tyranny, whether wielded by an individual or an oligarchy or a committee, whether under the pretext of liberty or of order, to persecute all dissenting parties, under profession of preventing division and promoting unity. But the true friends of liberty, even in perilous times, have always relied upon the justice of their principles and excellence of their policy and measures for support and success, and not upon the prison, the gallows, and the impoverishment of the dissenters by plunder. The Congress itself had declared to England that the "colonists were a unit" in behalf of liberty; but their own enactments and proceedings against the Loyalists refuted their own statements. Even in England, tyrannical and corrupt as was the Government at the time, and divided as were both Parliament and people, and assailed by foreign and domestic enemies, the proceedings of both Houses of Parliament were open to the public; every member was not only free to express his opinions, but those opinions were forthwith published to the world, and every man throughout the kingdom enjoyed freedom of opinion. It was reserved for the American Congress, while professing to found liberty, to conduct its proceedings in secret for eleven years, to suppress the freedom of the press and individual freedom of opinion, and to treat as criminals those who dissented from its acts of policy. The private biography and letters of the principal actors in the American revolution, published during the present century, show (with the exception of Washington and very few others) that individual ambition had quite as much to do in the contest of separation from the mother country as patriotic love of constitutional liberty, which, even at this day, in the United States, is not comparable with that of Great Britain—some of the ablest American writers being judges.