Thomas Day Quotes
But let her remember, that it is in Britain alone, that laws are equally favourable to liberty and humanity; that it is in Britain the sacred rights of nature have received their most awful ratification.
Day, Thomas. Fragment of an Original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes, Written in the Year 1776. John Stockdale, 1784.
Cochrane became the Admiral in Chief of 2 Different South American Nations—Peru and Brazil—fighting for their independence. Incredibly enough, he was able to form idealistic freedom fighters with no naval experience into navies which defeated both the Spanish and Portuguese fleets at a time when those countries had world class navies. His achievements on behalf of the South Americans are often regarded as the most remarkable naval achievements in history.
Note the use of the phrase “against the government.” One of the unique aspects of the American Constitution and The Bill of Rights is that the government is considered a potential and even probable infringer on the liberties of the people. It is almost as though the government was the potential enemy. Modern libertarians state this very explicitly and it is ever present in the views of both the right and left wings of American politics. Most centrists recoil at the thought that some citizens see the government as the enemy, but even in America there have been times where the government has infringed on the rights of citizens only to have the courts or future administrations and Congresses correct the error.
The call for individual liberty and the right of personal property by clergy is surprising to many. This Cahier was the consensus of the Clergy of Blois in 1789. There were cahiers of several provinces of France—some by the clergy, some by the nobles. What is fascinating is the emergence of many of the pre-Revolutionary French concepts. The example of the American revolution and its principles was known throughout the educated classes of France.
This is a remarkable quotation. Because of the issue of plural marriage, many Americans regarded the early Mormons as having no respect for the country or its laws. However, as this quotation shows, the Mormon leader, prophet and founder specifically commanded his people to not only support the United States law but specifically mentions The Constitution. He told his followers that God approves of the United States constitution and states that it is in a sense universal, belonging to all mankind. There is no other religious founder who so thoroughly validated a national constitution and system in the history of the world. Yet he was assassinated and after his death, the United States Government was almost in a full scale war with the Mormons. There is still a vestige of anti-Mormonism in the United States among some Christian Fundamentalists. Yet the Mormon church has been a thoroughly American church, historically, conceptually, and philosophically It has even shared some of the American historical errors such as its sexism and discriminatory rules and view of Blacks. The latter has been remedied {625268} as the rest of America has changed, and the discriminatory role of women is very traditional and is shared with most other Christian fundamentalists and orthodox Jews.
Thomas Day was a British author and abolitionist. He was well known for the book The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–1789) which emphasized Rousseauvian educational ideals.
