General Douglas MacArthur told West Point cadets, May 1962:"The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training - sacrifice. In battle and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those Divine attributes which his Maker gave when He created man in His own image ..."
Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, 1776: "The Spaniards ... claimed all America as their own, and ... such was ... the terror of their name, that the greater part of the other nations of Europe were afraid to establish themselves in any other part of that great continent ... But ... the defeat ... of their Invincible Armada ... put it out of their power to obstruct any longer the settlements of the other European nations."
British Statesman Edmund Burke addressed Parliament, 1775: "All Protestantism ... is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion."
Though the secret hearings started with the intention of cutting through the red tape of bureaucracy, Britain's Court of Star Chamber proceeded to usurp power.It became a political weapon for auditing, intimidating and punishing opponents to the King's policies, similar to modern-day IRS audits or partisan secret special counsel investigations.
