These men were not servants, but masters; not the agents of community, but seekers after divine love and wisdom. They undertook their work with high … - Russell Kirk

Liberty, prescriptive freedom as we Americans know it, cannot endure without order. Our constitutions were established that order might make true freedom possible. For all our American talk of private judgment, dissent, and individualism, still our national character has the stamp of a respectful order almost superstitious in its power: respect for the moral traditions inculcated by our religion, and for the prescriptive political forms which we, more than any other people in the world, have maintained little altered in this time when Whirl is King of most of the universe. I think that we would do a most terrible mischief to our freedoms if we ceased to respect our established order and began, instead, to run after an abstract Jacobin liberté — in this age of the triumph of technology, of all times.

A thorough survey of Randolph's reading defeats such an effort. The Virginian had, certainly, a lively interest in the writers of his day, but his admiration for the Romantics was strictly qualified, as his correspondence with Francis Walker Gilmer, Brockenbrough, Francis Scott Key, and Josiah Quincy shows.

It is quite possible for man, in ancient or modern times, to be materially prosperous, and freed from the necessity of choice, and yet servile. It is also possible that he may suffer no outrageous oppression. But he must always lack one thing, this servile man, and that is true manhood, the dignity of man. He remains a child; he never comes into man's birthright, which is the pleasure and the pain of making one's own choices.