Known sourcecanonical
"There was a state without king or nobles; there was a church without a bishop; there was a people governed by grave magistrates which it had selected, and by equal laws which it had framed."
Rufus Choate / Speech before the New England Society, Dec. 22, 1843.
Speech before the New England Society, Dec. 22, 1843.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 9th ed. (Little, Brown, 1905), public domain