The Washington Examiner observes, rightly, that what the founders did two hundred and fifty years ago was rare. They did not merely complain. They gathered facts, named specific abuses, and built a public record — a kind of audit of power conducted in plain sight and published to the world. I know something of that work. I was in the room for parts of it, and I had spent years before that sending pamphlets through the post precisely because I believed an informed citizenry is the only audit committee that never adjourns.

Consider what an audit actually requires. It requires someone willing to count what is actually there, not what the ledger-keeper claims is there. It requires the courage to sign your name to an unflattering finding. And it requires an audience literate enough to read the result and angry enough to act on it. The founders had all three conditions in 1776. The question worth asking on this anniversary is whether we are maintaining them in 2026.

I have always held that industry and frugality are virtues with public consequences — that the citizen who manages her own household honestly trains herself for the larger task of managing the Republic's affairs. The habit of the audit is precisely that: a discipline of honest accounting applied outward from the household to the state. A government that will not submit to scrutiny is like a merchant who refuses to show his books. You already know what he is hiding.

The Examiner's lead notes that the founders concluded government is legitimate only when it answers to the people. That conclusion was not reached by rhetoric alone — it was reached by evidence. They listed the specific charges. They counted the offenses. I would add, from inference rather than recollection, that the danger in our present moment is not that citizens lack passion for accountability but that the sheer volume of information flowing through our modern postal roads — the platforms and feeds and notifications — makes the patient work of counting and verifying feel old-fashioned. Outrage travels faster than arithmetic. It always did. The founders chose arithmetic anyway.

An anniversary of this kind is only useful if it issues in a practical counsel. Here is mine: find one public ledger in your community — a municipal budget, a school-board expenditure report, a federal agency's inspector-general finding — and read it. Not the summary. The actual numbers. Ask who received what, and whether the service rendered was worth what the public paid. That is the founders' method, stripped to its core. It cost them everything to establish the habit. The least we owe them is to practice it.