Loving private liberty, yet finding that it could not exist without public order, the English devoted themselves to making the two compatible. Freedo… - Arthur Bryant

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Loving private liberty, yet finding that it could not exist without public order, the English devoted themselves to making the two compatible. Freedom within a framework of discipline became their ideal. They achieved it through the sovereignty of the law. "All our struggles for liberty," wrote Disraeli, "smack of law." And by law the English meant an enforceable compact between themselves and their rulers, deriving not from unilaterally imposed force, but from assent freely given. Both they and their American descendants constituted such law, rather than the Executive, their ultimate sovereign.

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About Arthur Bryant

Sir Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant CH CBE (18 February 1899 – 22 January 1985) was an English historian, columnist for The Illustrated London News and man of affairs. His books included studies of Samuel Pepys, accounts of English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, and a life of George V. Whilst his scholarly reputation has declined somewhat since his death, he continues to be read and to be the subject of detailed historical studies. He moved in high government circles, where his works were influential, being the favourite historian of three prime ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Wilson.

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Alternative Names: Sir Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant
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During the last four centuries, the most important things that had happened were the extension of the Anglo-Saxon race into every corner of the world and the growth of the American Republic and the view of life it stood for... That ideal was born four centuries ago when a few bold persons believed it would be possible to find on the other side of the Atlantic a land in which they could make for themselves a new home, with a freer and better life than they had hitherto enjoyed. Hence gradually developed the founding of small English colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America.

It is hard to see how any assured peace can exist in Europe so long as Herr Hitler—that incalculable man of temperament—continues to direct the external policy of a nation as powerful as Germany, though it must not be forgotten that the advance of the Russian frontiers has already put a check to German capacity for future aggression. But we ought to make it plain that by "Hitlerism" we mean Hitler's fatal method of conducting foreign affairs, and not the right of the German people to choose their own governors.

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The key to a nation's future is in her past. A nation that loses it has no future. For men's deepest desires—the instrument by which a continuing society moulds its destiny—spring from their own inherited experience. We cannot recreate the past, but we cannot escape it. It is in our blood and bone. To understand the temperament of a people, a statesman has first to know its history.

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