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Lectures - June 2008
The Magna Carta and the Great Experiment
In June 2008, Wayne was a keynote speaker at Lincoln Cathedral’s Magna Carta week, Lincoln, England. In his speech, The Magna Carta and the Great Experiment, Wayne examines the impact of King John’s 1215 Magna Carta on the original thirteen colonies. He points out that Magna Carta, the bedrock of political system was not ceremoniously dispelled upon the colonists.
“No, Magna Carta was not given to us in a beautiful drawing room or in a throne room over high tea.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The English have been a bloodthirsty, warlike, violent, passionate, acquisitive, domineering race. The British Empire was the result of fiendishly brilliant planning and diplomacy, and the absolutely ruthless employment of economic and military force.
How did America get Magna Carta and our principles of government? It was not a British gift to their benighted colonials. “Blood, toil, tears and sweat” was the recipe.”
Political figures, including William Penn, John Adams, George Mason and Benjamin Franklin, used the rhetoric of the Great Charter when forming our nation’s treatises. But even the brilliance of these founding father’s could not create a perfect a perfect political system. Our institutions have suffered through grave imperfections including slavery and segregation.
From Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King through Barbara Jordan, Bill
Cosby, Colin Powell, Oprah Winfrey, Condoleezza Rice, Tiger Woods, Reg
Weaver and now to Barack Obama, change has occurred and is still occurring.
Otto Von Bismark famously said that the most important political fact of the 19th
century was that Great Britain and America both spoke the same language. He
was wrong.
The most important political fact of the last three centuries is that Great Britain and America both share the same values regarding the human condition and the nature of humanity.”
In the past decade, we have been confronted with the great challenge of terrorism, which itself has threatened our democratic ideology. The presidential elections of 2008 will be one of the most exciting in our nation’s history. In November, our nation will once again participate in a process, rooted in the ideals of the Magna Carta.
“We feel the thrill of Americanism in out bones: the blessing of freedom and civil rights and personal dignity. And this thrill, this visceral sense of human rights, stretches back though time, coming from a candle – lit in the dim past on the green grasses of Runnymede where a group of barons proclaimed that the law transcends even a king.
The wave of liberty that burst forth from that moment still washes the sands of the present. And or great American experiment continues.”
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