Runnymede

They call this the Royal Highway.

The route of the river from Greenwich all the way through to Windsor Castle and all the key historic moments along the way, like the Magna Carta being signed at Runnymede.

And there's Hampton Court and Strawberry Hill and Marble Hill that we passed, Ham House, Scion House, Richmond Palace, Kew Palace.

I mean, it's amazing.

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This is John Bailey at Runnymede, England.

The hour has come and gone this 19th day of June, 1215, the hour when King John agreed to sign the Magna Carta.

But the king has still not left Windsor Castle, seven miles away for the Council Meadows here on the Thames.

The patience of the barons gathered here at Runnymede is at the breaking point.

After three days of haggling with the king's emissaries, the 49 articles of the Magna Carta still remain the barons' unconditional terms of peace to end the war which has been raging up and down this English Isle for more than a year.

If John does not arrive, and that shortly, there is the strongest possibility that the barons will take to the sword once again, march on Windsor Castle and once more plunge England in civil war.

This is the dread thought that strikes fear into the hearts of thousands upon thousands of people who have gathered here from all over England.

Langton and the barons were encamped on the other side.

In a wide meadow whose name of Runnymede has been famous since that day in the history of political liberty.

There John signed the great charter, Magna Carta.

And after he had signed it, back he went to his palace and there rolled upon the floor in a rage for which he had no words, gnawing the sticks and straws.

If this is correct, perhaps it can be said with equal truth that the great tree of American liberty possesses, buried in the remote and distant past, as many roots and rootlets as its beautiful structure of branches exhibits to our admiring gaze.

We sometimes think of liberty’s roots in the Swiss mountains where William Tell slew the tyrant Gessler, and we often refer to the English plains of Runnymede where the barons compelled King John to assent to England’s Magna Charta.

But the branches of our own tree of American liberty have been nourished by many very deep-growing roots concerning which history is sometimes entirely silent or to which it has been given but niggardly praise, and we can, perhaps, spend a few moments profitably in tracing one rootlet of our liberty tree which has not been exactly overlooked by history but which from the present generation of Americans has attracted little or no general attention.

I was born in Ipswich, Essex County, Massachusetts, in the very school district where the leader in the events I am about to describe was the settled pastor in the Congregational church, in what was then called Chebacco Parish and which is now, since 1819, the little town of Essex.

Denunciation, ridicule and misrepresentation have been employed in order to prove that the Finns are impudent impostors when they claim to have a constitution.

It is sufficient to ask any intelligent European or American reader, regardless of his previous prejudices, to examine this series of documents of indisputable validity and to say whether in all history or any place from Runnymede to Philadelphia there is a clearer or more emphatic assertion of constitutional liberty and self-government than was accepted and confirmed at Borgo in 1809.

One is almost ashamed to discuss the pretensions that have recently been so laboriously manufactured in Russia against all this.

Writers who base a grave constitutional argument on a discrepancy between sujet and habitant, or between constitution and constitutions, when as a matter of fact both words are used differently in the documents before them.

Denunciation, ridicule and misrepresentation have been employed in order to prove that the Finns are impudent impostors when they claim to have a constitution.

It is sufficient to ask any intelligent European or American reader, regardless of his previous prejudices, to examine this series of documents of indisputable validity, and to say whether in all history or any place from Runnymede to Philadelphia there is a clearer or more emphatic assertion of constitutional liberty and self-government than was accepted and confirmed at Borgo in 1809.

One is almost ashamed to discuss the pretensions that have recently been so laboriously manufactured in Russia against all this.

Writers who base a grave constitutional argument on a discrepancy between sujet and habitant, or between constitution and constitutions, when as a matter of fact both words are used differently in the documents before them, or who assert that when Alexander promised to maintain your religion he meant my religion, and when he said your country he meant my country, can have little respect for the intelligence of their readers.