The struggle has been successful, by abridging the enormous power of the nobility. On reviewing the English history, we observe a progress similar to that in Rome-an incessant struggle for liberty from the date of Magna Charta, in John’s reign, to the revolution. We have not to struggle against a monarch or an aristocracy-power is lodged in the mass of the people. In America, we begin our empire with more popular privileges than the Romans ever enjoyed. Selected byĪssociate Professor of History at Stanford University Document Excerpt Webster wrote at once confident and wary that Americans possessed the character and society necessary to sustain republicanism. His deeper point was simply that constitutions rested on broader foundations. Webster was no leveler and could write with elitist disdain. Instead, as he argued forcefully in An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, under the pseudonym, “An American Citizen,” constitutional freedom rested on the relatively equal distribution of property and, to a lesser extent, a general diffusion of knowledge. However, he wrote frequently on politics and constitutionalism as well, often combining his interests, such as when he quipped in a 1788 essay that “a bill of rights, a perpetual constitution on parchment guaranteeing that right, was a useless form of words.” Despite his deep interest in reforming the way Americans used language, Webster did not believe that constitutions endured or failed based on what was written into them. Noah Webster is best known as the leading lexicographer and linguistic reformer who published Americans’ first dictionary in 1828.
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