Daniel Hannan: "English-speaking peoples invented freedom"

Lovely little piece of prose from the always good to read Daniel Hannan.  For a politician, he's not such a bad guy. However, with regard to his very first sentence, many of us have to feel some sadness ... because, although the "English-speaking peoples invented freedom" they seem to have have gotten tired of it pretty quickly. Now they clamor for Shariah and enslavement to islam.

Daniel Hannan at TelegraphBlogs:
....With due respect to the ancients, the English-speaking peoples invented freedom.

The English-speaking peoples didn’t invent democracy. The Athenians were casting pebbles into voting urns when the remote fathers of the English were grubbing about alongside their swine in the cold soil of northern Germany. Nor did they invent the concept of the law: the Egyptians, Sumerians and Babylonians had chambers full of legal scrolls even before Moses climbed down from the summit of Sinai. The Anglosphere miracle lies in something more specific and more transformative: the invention of constitutional freedom.

Parliamentary government, in the common law tradition, is a guarantor of the rights of the individual, not a licence for the majority to override the minority. Power is divided, dispersed, delineated. If you want an encapsulation of Anglosphere exceptionalism, you could do worse than John Adams’s summary of the first Massachusetts state constitution: “A government of laws, not of men.” (Actually, that phrase was not Adams’s: he was quoting a seventeenth-century English Whig called James Harrington – yet another manifestation of the shared origins of Anglo-American liberty.)

Ah, you say, but what about the Romans? Didn’t the patriarchs of the United States look back in awe at the Roman Republic? Didn’t they consciously mimic classical architecture and name their official buildings senates and capitols? Didn’t they write their tracts and pamphlets under such pseudonyms as Brutus, Cincinnatus and Cato?
They did. Yet I largely excluded the original bearers of these names from my history, How we Invented Freedom, to the puzzlement and annoyance of some critics. Why didn’t I give the Romans a couple of chapters?
Two main reasons, other than considerations of space. First, because mimicry is not the same as unbroken descent; and second, because Roman liberties – like so many that came after – tended to be more theoretical than actual.
There was a mania for ancient authors during the eighteenth century. The late Roman republic is an unusually richly documented period, chronicled by Appian, Plutarch, Sallust and Dio Cassius, recalled by Tacitus and Suetonius and recorded by two .........