Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on February 24, 2021
… is from page 298 the great Frank Chodorov’s September 1945 essay “George Mason of Virginia” as this essay is reprinted in Liberty Fund’s splendid 1980 collection, Fugitive Essays, of Chodorov’s writings, edited by Chuck Hamilton:
To be sure, the question of rights – or natural rights, as it was called – had been the subject matter of philosophic speculation for several centuries before America became a political entity, and it had also been the battle cry of a few rebellious undertakings in Europe; but never and nowhere was its content equivalent to that which it attained in the freak republic carved out of the western wilderness. Here it became a formula for the guidance of organized life, a standard by which to measure the correctness of political institutions. It was a principle, not a handout.
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