The Fourth of July – The Spirit of American Liberty

1895

The Spirit of American Liberty

I believe the Declaration of Independence valuable not alone because it drove from our shores a foreign invasion, not alone because it established a government by a written constitution, but because it gave to the spirit of American liberty and American virtue the opportunity to erect a broad home of constitutional liberty through which prosperity was attained and no tyrant could breathe its atmosphere.

Wise as were the fathers who framed our constitution, deeply laid in political wisdom as were its foundations, it would not be worth the paper on which it is written but for the fact that it gave to us the spirit of liberty that has never died in the bosoms of Americans. — Bourke Cockran.


Every One Should Celebrate

Make the Fourth a gala day, as we have ever done, and let us celebrate it with the largest liberty practicable inside the lines of law, safety and rectitude, I do hope that in some way through all the public schools the meaning of Independence day may be brought to all the children in the land, and that to all of them it shall be so marked and so happy in its celebration that it will ever be a brightly shining star in the coronet of liberty. — General O. O. Howard.

—Newark Daily Advocate, Newark, Ohio, June 29, 1895, page 3.