U.S., Canada share a lineage of liberty
National Post, 4 July 2026
In his July 4th speech of 1918, Churchill traced the origin of political liberty and limited government to Britain's Magna Carta
Canadians of goodwill toward the United States — and in the normal course of events that ought to be everyone — nevertheless come to the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence from a unique point of view. If the Founding Fathers had got their way — in the Revolutionary War and then again in 1812 — Canada would not exist as it does today. In 1776 the newly-formed Continental Army, under the command of George Washington, was laying (unsuccessful) siege to Quebec City.
The genius of the Declaration is that even those who opposed its particular political project can admire its account of human rights and aspirations of liberty. How then should Canadians think about America’s 250th birthday?
On America’s 142nd birthday in 1918, Winston Churchill gave an address in Central Hall, Westminster, marking a high point in Anglo-American co-operation during the last months of the Great War. Churchill was then minister of munitions and had recovered politically from the military failure at Gallipoli two years earlier.
He spoke of the entire “English-speaking family united in a brotherhood of arms.” The achievements of America were an occasion of pride in the imperial capital. As to the Declaration itself, “a great harmony exists between (its) spirit and language and all we are fighting for now.”
“A similar harmony exists between the principles of that Declaration and all that the British people have wished to stand for,” Churchill continued, stretching history to his rhetorical purposes, and including Canada as well. “And have in fact achieved at last both here at home and in the self-governing Dominions of the Crown.”
The core of Churchill’s argument is that “the Declaration is not only an American document. It follows on Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights (1688) as the third great title-deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking people are founded.”
Churchill traces the origin of political liberty and limited government to Magna Carta (1215). Four centuries later, in the standard British telling, the king was no longer observing those limits and thus the Glorious Revolution of 1688 dethroned him in favour of a new king and a new affirmation of the rights of Parliament as against the king.
Some 90 years later, the Americans, in listing their grievances against the king, echoed the Bill of Rights. Sometimes a revolution is needed — Glorious or American — to keep things the same. Thus Churchill saw the thread of continuity, with Britain adding an empire of ideas to its traditional empire of lands.
“We lost an Empire, but by it we also preserved an Empire,” Churchill said. “By applying the Declaration’s principles and learning its lesson we have maintained our communion with the powerful Commonwealths our children have established beyond the seas.”
Canadian liberty is thus part of the same story, which admittedly would have been something of a surprise to the French-Canadians who refused to join the American Revolution, and the United Empire Loyalists who came north afterward.
Churchill’s audacious claim is that “wherever men seek to frame politics or constitutions which safeguard the citizen … (and) which combine personal freedom with respect for law and love of country, it is to the inspiration which originally sprang from the English soil and from the Anglo-Saxon mind that they will inevitably recur.”
Liberty thus has a British lineage, whether it be American, or Canadian, or otherwise. And in 1918 that story of liberty was ongoing, now including partnership in fighting off European tyrants.
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