“This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth.  The people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen.  England, sir, is a nation which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom.  The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your bands.  They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and our English principles. ...  The temper and character which prevail in our colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art.  We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates.  The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would betray you. ...  In order to prove that Americans have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own.  To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never gain a paltry advantage over them in debate without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood. . . .  As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom they will turn their faces towards you.  The more ardently they love liberty the more perfect will be their obedience.  Slavery they can have anywhere—­it is a weed that grows in every soil.  They can have it from Spain; they may have it from Prussia.  But until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.”

So, too, in the speeches of Chatham, the great Commoner, whose eloquence has never been surpassed, an intense spirit of liberty, the animating principle of his life, shines out above all things else.  Though opposed to the independence of the colonies, he could not restrain his admiration for the spirit they manifested:—­

“The Americans contending for their rights against arbitrary exactions I love and admire.  It is the struggle of free and virtuous patriots. ...  My Lords, you cannot conquer America.  You may swell every expense and every effort still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every pitiful little German prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are forever vain and impotent If I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I would never lay down my arms—­never—­never—­never!”