My fellow Americans: This weekend, we celebrate our country’s independence and pay homage to the founders. As we glory in America, however, we tend to overlook the second part of the equation: Great Britain.

In declaring independence, we broke from British rule while inventing a nation inspired by British ideas. It was Thomas Paine, an antimonarchical Englishman, who urged the Americans to sever ties with Britain in his 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense.”

Just seven months before the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson, its principal author, wrote to an English friend, “Believe me, dear Sir: there is not in the British Empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do. But by the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose; and, in this, I think I speak the sentiments of America.”

Jefferson’s love of Britain and passion for American independence sprang from the same sources. The works of English political philosopher John Locke supplied Jefferson with the arguments for inalienable natural rights, including the right to rebel against overreaching governments. Jefferson modified Locke’s phrase “life, liberty, and property” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It was Scottish philosopher Henry Home from whom Jefferson lifted the “pursuit of happiness.” Free markets? Thank Adam Smith, another Scot. Limited government? first established in the Magna Carta (1215), English common law and the English Bill of Rights (1689). Be grateful Jefferson was a voracious reader.

The true revolution was not the Colonies’ insurrection against the Mother Country, but one of the ideas shipped over from Britain and brilliantly hybridized by the Founding Fathers. Our country’s core values — democracy, individual freedom, a free press, a constitution — were English imports, just like the infamous tea. Had the Brits imposed duties on political thought, the Colonists would have staged The Boston Idea Party.

This July 4th, twelve score and ten years after the Declaration of Independence, I propose that the United States join the Commonwealth of Nations, the federation of former and current Crown territories.

You may not know the Commonwealth. It’s not a military juggernaut like NATO; an exclusive club based on economic clout like the G7; nor a bureaucratic behemoth of democracies, dictatorships and everything in-between like the United Nations.

The Commonwealth is a “country club” we should belong to. The alliance of 56 sovereign nations — small, medium, large, rich and poor — is united by the ideals we share: democracy, liberty, the rule of law, equality and free trade.

Itself a democracy, the Commonwealth’s policies are created by consensus: no nation is more equal than any other. Their deliberations are conducted in English, the common language of the former British colonies. With members on all six inhabited continents, the sun never sets on the Commonwealth of Nations or its ideals.

As a plant breeder, I am keenly aware of the extraordinary outcomes that arise from crossing widely different strains. A successful hybrid plant demonstrates “hybrid vigor”: it’s healthier, hardier and more productive. The acclaimed Nobelist Norman Borlaug hybridized hundreds of wheat grasses and saved the lives of over a billion starving people.

The same phenomenon is evident in culture, a word with roots in agriculture. But since 1776, we have gradually lost the receptivity to foreign ideas that helped inspire our country’s founders. Just as Jefferson, a plant breeder himself, selected and adapted ideas from British philosophers and applied them to the Colonies, we can absorb and integrate the insights and ideas of our Commonwealth friends, and they ours.

For instance, throughout the former British Empire, people use the English language with fluency, clarity and flair. Whether in Parliament, the press or the pub, Brits relish the sparky give-and-take of debate, repartee, and battle of wits, as do others in the Commonwealth states.

So let’s brush up our Shakespeare, sharpen our wits and join the scrum of liberal democracies that is the Commonwealth of Nations.

Jefferson would surely approve.

George Ball is executive chairman of W. Atlee Burpee Company and past president of the American Horticultural Society.