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… is from a January 1775 speech, delivered in Pennsylvania, by James Wilson [2] (who in 1789 became one of the first Associate Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court), as quoted on page 150 of Liberty Fund’s 1998 reissue of Trevor Colbourn’s 1965 volume, The Lamp of Experience [3]:
The British liberties, sir, and the means and the right of defending them, are not the grants of princes; and of what our princes never granted they surely can never deprive us.