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.” Long before the time of Burns, John Milton, a great poet, who worked throughout his life for freedom, and who held the same ideals as those held by the founders of Plymouth Colony, wrote of the same thing: “Who knows not that there is a mutual bond of brotherhood between man and man over all the world?”