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their decisions for them. There are some who seem to prefer security to
liberty. What is the solution? The establishment of voter qualification
tests to determine an individual’s knowledge of the system, in the hope
of encouraging a better informed electorate? Improved teaching of civics
in the schools?
These are difficult questions that offer no easy solutions. Yet it behooves us as a free people to reexamine and continually reinvigorate our
political institutions; to be alert to the first transgressions before dangerous precedents are set; to jealously protect the fundamental principles
which support our form of government and not to compromise them for
the sake of convenience. It was this intense love of liberty that compelled
the American patriots, pledging their lives, their personal freedom, and
their fortunes, to take up arms against the British. Would the American
people today make the same personal sacrifices as their forebears for the
causes that led to the American Revolution?
Relations with Great Britain
In retrospect, it would seem that the American colonies were destined to
gain independence at some point in time; and in many ways they were
already independent before the Revolution. From the day the first settlers landed, the colonies governed themselves in most matters. They
had their own charters of government, which served as written constitutions of a sort, and their own provincial assemblies, which exercised a
considerable degree of autonomy.
The colonies were part of Britain’s vastly expanding empire, but the
British empire was commercial in nature, not imperial. The King’s ministers were not interested in political control of the colonies for its own
sake, for military purposes, or as a tax base. They viewed the colonies
instead as a great commercial reservoir that contributed to the economic
prosperity of the mother country by supplying England with raw materials and by providing markets for the sale of English-made goods. Consequently, neither Parliament nor the King’s ministers troubled themselves much with American affairs. They were content if the Thirteen
Colonies continued to ship to Britain their tobacco, furs, dried fish, grain,
and lumber, and the colonies were content to be ruled from Westminster