Are We Still This Man?

"And when at last this rebellion compelled the British Government to use the only power that any Government has -- force, used with general consent -- and British troops moved into Boston to restore order, Americans did not consent. They stood up and fought the British Regulars.

"One man began that war. And who knows his name?

"He was a farmer, asleep in his bed, when someone pounded on his door and shouted in the night, 'The troops are coming!'

"What could he do against the King's troops? One man. If he had been the King, that would have been different; then he could have done great things. Then he could have set everything to rights, he could have made everyone good and prosperous and happy, he could have changed the course of history. But he was not a King, not a Royal Governor, not a rich man, not even prosperous, not important at all, not even known outside the neighborhood. What could he do? What was the use of his trying to do anything? One man, even a few men, can not stand against the King's troops. He had a wife and children to think of; what would become of them, if he acted like a fool?

"Most men had better sense; most men knew they could do nothing and they stayed in bed, that night in Lexington. But one man got up. He put on his clothes and took his gun and went out to meet the King's troops. He was one man who did not consent to a control which he knew did not exist.

"The fight on the road to Lexington did not defeat the British troops. What that man did was to fire a shot heard around the world, and still heard...

"That shot was the first sound of a common man's voice that the Old World ever heard. For the first time in all history, an individual spoke, an ordinary man, unknown, unimportant, disregarded, without rank, without power, without influence.

"Not acting under orders, not led, but standing on his own feet, acting from his own will, responsible, self-controlling, he fired on the King's troops. He defied a world-empire.

"The sound of that shot said: Government has no power but force; it can not control any man.

"No one knows who began the American Revolution. Only his neighbors ever knew him, and no one now remembers any of them. He was an unknown man, an individual, the only force that can ever defend freedom."


-- from THE DISCOVERY OF FREEDOM: Man's Struggle Against Authority by Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of, and secretary to, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and powerful thinker in her own right THE DISCOVERY OF FREEDOM was voted among the top 100 non-fiction books of the 20th Century in the Modern Library readers' poll, with hundreds of thousands of votes cast, once posted HERE.