Sailors' delights

Usage examples of liberties.

If you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an electronic civil liberties activist, you are the target audience for this book.

One observer noted that customs collectors “dare not exercise their office for fear of the fury and unruliness of the people” and that Virginians as well as New Englanders were “haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior power.

Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments, but the original rights, conditions of original con­tracts, coequal with prerogative and coeval with government.

Most of the delegates were moderates and “speculative” men (to use Washington’s term), but they were adamant and angry enough to assert “that it is inseparable to the freedom of a people, and the un­doubted right of Englishmen, that no taxes should be imposed upon them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their represen­tatives” and that the Stamp Act had “a manifest tendency to subvert the rights and liberties of the colonists.

This Ameri­can parliament, with jurisdiction over all colonial legislation, would exer­cise “all the like rights, liberties and privileges as are held and exercised by and in the House of Commons of Great Britain” but still be “an inferior and distinct branch of the British legislature, united and incorpo­rated with each having a veto power over the acts of the other.

In New York, rebels paraded through the streets “with drums beating and colours flying (attended by a mob of negroes, boys, sailors, and pickpockets), inviting all mankind to take up arms in defence of the „ ‘injured rights and liberties of America,’ according to Judge Thomas Jones, a staunch loyalist from Long Island.

May you long enjoy the love, esteem, and veneration of these states, whose liberties you have asserted by your virtues.

The providential train of circum­stances which led to it affords the most convincing proofs that the liberties of America are the object of divine protection.

The liberties of America, and the honor of the Allied Arms are in our hands.

Let me conjure you, in the name of our common country, as you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man who wishes, under any specious pretenses, to overturn the liberties of our coun­try and who wickedly attempts to open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.

On the prospect of a total failure of issue from King William, and from the Princess, afterwards Queen Anne, the consideration of the settlement of the crown and of a further security for the liberties of the people again came before the legislature.

This act also incorporated, by the same policy, our liberties and an hereditary succession in the same act.

This limitation was made by parliament, that through the Princess Sophia an inheritable line not only was to be continued in future, but (what they thought very material) that through her it was to be connected with the old stock of inheritance in King James the First, in order that the monarchy might preserve an unbroken unity through all ages and might be preserved (with safety to our religion) in the old approved mode by descent, in which, if our liberties had been once endangered, they had often, through all storms and struggles of prerogative and privilege, been preserved.

You will see that their whole care was to secure the religion, laws, and liberties that had been long possessed, and had been lately endangered.

We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors.