and progression.  Thus, by preserving the method of Nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new, in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.  By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided, not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy.  In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood:  binding up the Constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

Through the same plan of a conformity to Nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance.  Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.  This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction.  By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom.  It carries an imposing and majestic aspect.  It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors.  It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial.  It has its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, and titles.  We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere individual men:  on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended.  All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.

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You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity.  Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory.  Your Constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations, of a noble and venerable castle.  You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations.  Your Constitution was suspended before it was perfected; but you had the elements of a Constitution very nearly as good as could be wished.  In your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with