It is the liberty, Lords and Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased us, liberty which is the nurse Liberty is the nurse of all great wits. of all great wits; this is that which hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged and lifted up our apprehensions, degrees above themselves.
Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made us so, less the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formal and slavish, as ye found us; but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye cannot suppress that, unless ye reinforce an abrogated
and merciless law, that fathers may dispatch at will their own
children2. And who shall then stick closest to ye, and excite
others？ not he who takes up arms for coat and conduct3, and his
1 bushel: a unit for measuring grain, equal to 8 gallons or 36.4 litres.
2 this law had fallen into disuse before its abolition in 318.
3 coat and conduct: the name of a military tax.
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