Daily Inspiration Quote by John Lothrop Motley

“Waxed” is the sly engine of Motley’s line: an old, almost biblical verb that makes political change feel organic, inevitable, and just a little providential. Liberty doesn’t get negotiated here; it grows. By choosing that diction, Motley smuggles in a philosophy of history where the moral arc isn’t merely bending but thickening, day by day, into something you can’t easily prune back.

The intent is celebratory but not naïve. Holland and Flanders are not abstract ideals; they’re contested territories in the long, brutal struggle of the Dutch Revolt against Habsburg Spain. Motley, writing in the 19th century with a liberal Protestant American sensibility, turns that conflict into a usable origin story for modern constitutionalism: commerce, civic institutions, and stubborn local autonomy as antidotes to imperial absolutism. “Daily” matters as much as “stronger.” It frames liberty as cumulative labor rather than a single heroic rupture, the kind of incremental fortification that makes later reversals feel like violations of nature.

Subtext: he’s flattering his own era’s faith in progress. Motley’s histories helped Anglo-American readers see the Low Countries as prototypes of a modern, plural, bourgeois society - a mirror held up to contemporary battles over nationhood and self-rule. The sentence’s calm, almost inevitable rhythm performs the political argument. Freedom, it implies, is not a romantic lightning strike. It’s a steady weather system building over a coastline that has learned how to hold back the sea.