… is from page 47 of Bernard Bailyn’s penetrating 1967 book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution:
They [the early 18th-century British writers who so inspired America’s founders] refused to believe that the transfer of sovereignty from the crown to Parliament provided a perfect guarantee that the individual would be protected from the power of the state.
DBx: And as Bailyn explains, no writers influenced America’s revolutionary generation more than did John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, authors of Cato’s Letters.