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… is from page 298 the great Frank Chodorov [2]’s September 1945 essay “George Mason of Virginia [3]” as this essay is reprinted in Liberty Fund’s splendid 1980 collection, Fugitive Essays [4], 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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