Aging & Wisdom Quote by Caleb Cushing

Cushing reaches for the oldest trick in liberal governance: make a procedural right feel like ancestry. Calling petition an "old undoubted household right" doesn’t just bless it with history; it domesticates it. A petition isn’t framed as agitation or pressure politics but as something you inherit the way you inherit manners, recipes, and surnames. The phrase "household right" is canny cultural positioning: it smuggles dissent into the home, into the supposedly apolitical space of family and tradition, where authority is least inclined to treat it as rebellion.

Then he leans harder: "of the blood of England, which runs in our veins". The bloodstream metaphor turns civic participation into physiology. You don’t argue for petition; you embody it. That’s also the subtextual threat. If rulers restrict petition, they’re not merely limiting a mechanism, they’re violating identity itself. It’s a claim designed to shame power: to refuse petitions is to act un-English, and by extension un-American in the Anglophone political imagination.

Context matters. Cushing, a 19th-century diplomat and legal mind, is speaking from a world where legitimacy is constantly negotiated between order and popular demands - abolitionist pressure, labor unrest, territorial expansion, and the early machinery of mass politics. By rooting petition in "the blood of England", he sidesteps newer, more divisive theories of rights and plants his flag in inherited constitutionalism: not radical innovation, but continuity. It’s an argument tailored to persuade cautious elites while giving ordinary people a dignified vocabulary for insistence.