Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.

The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred.

That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident.

At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.

The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.

Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.

Everyone knew that democracy - direct rule by all the people - required such spartan, soul-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race.