Independence Day

No free government tor the blessings of liberty can be preserved to any people but by firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by the frequent recurrence to fundamental Principles – Patrick Henry.

Tomorrow, July 4th is independence Day. It is a most opportune time for a “recurrence to fundamental principles,” which has been neglected, discouraged and disparaged by those who would life the “ark of the Covenant” from its firm foundation and place it on the shifting sands of experiment and expediency. They would lull the people into a feeling of safety and security while they tinker with every anchor of the ship of state.

After reviewing the accomplishments of America in this inaugural address, President Coolidge said: “These results have not occurred by mere chance. They have been secured by a constant and enlightened effort marked by many sacrifices and extending over many generations. We can not continue these brilliant successes in the future, unless we continue to learn from the past. It is necessary to keep the former experiences of our country both at home and abroad continually before us, if we are to have any science of government. If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations. We must realize that human nature is about the most constant thing in the universe and that the essentials of human relationship do not change. We must frequently take our bearings from these fixed stars of our political firmament if we expect to hold a true course. If we examine carefully what we have done, we can determine the more accurately what we can do.” – ( Inaugural Address | The American Presidency Project)

The American system of government was founded on the fundamental principles enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. The one and only purpose therein stated for which governments are instituted among men, is a secure and God-given, inalienable rights of the individual citizen and it was further declared, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” (Declaration of Independence)

Even a casual examination of the constitutional debates and the discussions that followed in the various colonial conventions which ratified the Federal Constitution proves conclusively that the first concern and the greatest anxiety of the founding fathers was for the preservation of the inalienable rights of the individual citizen.

The framers of the Federal Constitution studiously avoided invading any of these natural rights, but that we not sufficient to satisfy the people of the various colonies. They wanted positive guarantees that not only their own personal rights would be protected, but that the rights of succeeding generations should be made secure. In response to that popular demand the first eight amendments enumerated certain rights with the Federal government was forbidden to violate, and then to prevent the possible invasion of other rights not specified, the ninth amendment said: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Nor were they willing to stop there, but in order to doubly secure all of their rights and be absolutely certain that they surrender none, the tenth amendment further limited the authority of the Federal government by reserving the States respectively, or to the people, the power not delegated to the United States by the Constitution.

Thus the Constitution of the United States, for the first time in the history of governments, set aside a domain within which the individual citizens might exercise his inalienable rights to live, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and across the line for that domain the government was forbidden to trespass. Within that domain each individual citizen was guaranteed the right to live his own life in his own way, circumscribed and limited only by the equal rights of others.

That was the first time in all the history of governments that an instrument had been given power and authority which recognized in the individual citizen rights upon which the government must not infringe – personal rights which are paramount to all civil authority.

Ah these men were wise beyond their day. They were not ignorant of the proper functions of government nor of the sphere to which its activities should be confined. They knew then, and apparently we do not know now that the greatest danger to the freedom of any people is government itself. They were familiar with the history of governments that had gone before. They knew that from Babylon down to the then last Dutch republic that wherever and whenever, in the history of any government, away had been found and adopted whereby it was possible for the people to legislate the hates, the passions, the racial traits and religious prejudice for years; or the excitements, contentions, fallacies, and sophistries of a passing day, into laws and statutes, that government soon vanished from among the nations of this earth. That was history then and is history now. They also knew that the tyranny of the majority in popular government was more to be dreaded than the tyranny of despots in monarchies. And the primary purpose of this constitution was to protect the minority against the tyranny of the majority during periods of hysteria such as we are passing through today.

Personal liberty was the only kind of liberty known to the founders of this republic. It was for personal liberty that they pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. It is the only kind of liberty know to us today; and our love of that liberty constitutes our greatest bulwark of national safety and independence. Our defense is not a frowning battlement and bristling seacoasts, nor in our army and our navy; but, in the language of Lincoln, “Our defense is in the spirit which prices liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourself with the chains of bondage, and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lot the genius of your own independence and became the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.”

The day any government is inaugurated, that moment the irrepressible conflict beings – the government seeking to enlarge its scope and extend its powers – the people at, first strongly combating every such advance, then feebly protesting, then meekly submitting and finally, fondly embracing the doctrine of centralized power. The history of our nation is no exception to this rule.

The once proud American citizen who hotly resented the invasion of any personal right, now too often is willing to humbly subscribe himself as a dutiful ward of the state, to which he looks to correct and ameliorate his own deficiencies. Indeed, this draft toward state socialism cannot be contemplated by any thoughtful person without grave alarm.

We know now, as we have always know, that it is not the function of sound government to fashion men’s morals or to conduct their business. But before a hysteria whose regenerating influences promise prosperity and happiness here, if indeed not a harp and crown across The Great Divide, the courage of the people quail. Their sound common sense yet realized that you cannot make the farmer right by having the government guarantee the price of core; that we cannot convert the drunkard into an elder by an act of the legislature, nor produce super-men by having the estimable spinsters of the Children’s Bureau at Washington preside over the birth of our babies. They know that no government in the world ever did and will perform the miracles these dreamers, theorist and visionaries promise, and yet before this grand onslaught upon our rights and liberties we meekly surrender the very principles, without which the federated republic of the fathers cannot and will not endure.

How much longer we may yet bend the knee before the later to these strange gods, without destroying the ancient faith upon which rests all of our greatness, is a question. We have already gone far afield. The powers of government have nbeen so recklessly delegated that we now find ourselves regulated, and directed, and the revenues of the nation squandered by strange tribunals unknow to the constitution.

More than 250 commissions are trying to function I Washington, ranging in their re-generating and uplifting purposes for guiding immoral souls up the steep and thorny path to heaven, to leading the docile jackass to browse by the still waters of a higher and nobler eugenic destiny.

More than 8,000 commissions are at work throughout the country grinding out salvation and grinding up the taxpayer’s money. The business man can no longer turn around without finding some kind of inspector at his elvow, to tell him how he must conduct his private affairs. In tis worst days the secret police of Russia might have been more corrupt but never more numerous.

In an impassioned speech in the senate the great Ohian, Joseph Benson Foraker, pointed to the fact that ten years before there were but 17 of these official busy-bodies operating out of Washington. That was in 1908 and the 17 that then increased to 3,000. We can only imagion the feeling would be of that splendid American could be once more visit Washington and behold the number now augmented to more than 40,000.

The fragmentary picture here presented is not a pleasant one to contemplate. But in order to apply the right remedy we must first correctly diagnose the disease. We do not agree with the late attorney general who said that personal liberty in this country had become academic. We do not agree with the senator who said that there are no rights in the republic inconsistent with the will of the majority. But we will agree that all this may speedily become true if the American people have so far forgotten the ideals of our founding fathers as to let such heresies go unchallenged. In the centralizing process we had already drifted far out upon the dangerous waters beneath with lie the wrecks of many other dead nations. The storm of war drove us still future out but we are not yet a derelict and it rests with us – the plain people – and not the dreamers and schemers and shifty politicians to say what our ultimate fate shall be. It is for us to turn back to the ways of simplicity and economy in our public affairs. It is for us to impress with every increasing instance upon our public servants that we set up her a government which shall devote its energy to strictly governmental functions – that it shall neither engage in business itself, nor dictate to the citizens how he shall conduct his own affairs, and above all that every right guaranteed to the citizens of this country must be scrupulously represented by the government itself.

No meteor emblazoned the heavens at our birth. No wise men of the East came to pay homage to our humble cradle. There was nothing supernatural about our origin. But there was in it something eminently sound, sensible and piratical. And if we will only bear in mind that fact and will only return to first principles, we shall justify our existence, and voucher safe to endless posterity such as a country as the world has never seen since the morning starts sung together over the hills of Judea.

• Source: “Independence Day.” The Republican-Record (Carrollton, Missouri), June 26, 1925, p. 1.