“Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed,” he told guests at the White House, including King Charles III and Queen Camilla.
“For nearly two centuries before the Revolution, this land was settled and forged by men and women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British.”
Every Briton was flattered, including this one. Among this column’s perennial themes is that the distinctive features of the American republic — representative government, localism, and, above all, the primacy of the individual — had originated on the far side of the Atlantic.
Finding themselves in a sparse land, with neither an aristocracy nor an episcopacy to trouble them, the settlers were able to give their habits freer rein than in their ancestral archipelago. French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville thought that Americans were Englishmen left to themselves. Or,
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