Character First--Always

John Adams writing in 1765, more than a decade before Philadelpiam, 1776: "Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people who have a right to that knowledge and desire to know. But besides this, they have a right, an indistinguishable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge--I mean of the character and conduct of their rulers".