On the seventh day of June, 1776, in the assembly chamber of the State House in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress of the United Colonies was in session. The long quarrel between George III and his American subjects had reached its climax. We need not repeat here the details of that quarrel about a long list of grievances affecting trade, taxes, invasions of legislative rights, imposition of controlled judges, military abuses and other crimes against the liberties of the people.
Two years had passed since this Congress had first met. It had not convened then to make war on England, which its members looked on as their mother country. They wished merely to combine their strength to force those reforms which a foolish monarch and his compliant ministers would not grant willingly.
But actual warfare had broken out. The battle of Lexington had been fought. Ticonderoga, Bunker Hill, Quebec, the evacuation of Boston, a whole train of events gave to the situation but one meaning, that these colonies were at war.
Nevertheless they still clung to the hope that the king would listen to reason. They sent a delegate to London to present a last appeal for justice and kindness from the British government. The king refused even to receive him.
Blood had been shed. An American army was in the field under command of Washington. North Carolina had declared in favor of a separation. Colony after colony followed until all but New York had proclaimed their willingness to make the break.
And now in Philadelphia the representatives of the colonies were in session. On June 7, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, in a clear voice, read a resolution:
“That these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”
John Adams seconded the resolution. It was debated on July 1 and adopted July 2. Meantime a committee had been named to prepare the form which the declaration should take. Its members were Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston.
Jefferson was made chairman of the committee. He went to work at once to write a statement to be issued to the world in support of the coming break.
Immediately after voting independence of Britain, the Congress took up the report of Jefferson’s committee and the resolution which he had drawn. He was, of all men in the colonies, best fitted for the task and the draft read to the Congress was his, subject to only a few minor verbal changes by other members of the committee. After three days’ debate, it was adopted on July 4,1776. In every respect it is the noblest document in the history of the great struggle for human freedom. Its opening phrases remain as a sort of scripture for true liberals the world over:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
It is these few lines which mark this great instrument as the farthest point yet reached by civilized man as a basis for the government he was about to launch.
These ideas were not new. The philosopher John Locke had maintained that men have natural rights and that governments were instituted with only such specific powers as might be granted them by the governed.
Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government,” written in 1690, were widely read and well known to the thinking men of America. And it must be remembered that the largest element in America was made up of the spiritual and political descendants of the old Puritans who had once deposed a king.
But in all truth this was a natural step for the Americans. Their fathers already asserted and established the doctrine that authority inheres somewhere among the people and can be invoked to dethrone a king when he imposes on their freedom. They had established the proposition that the people have a right to govern and that the king must rule through ministers which they can approve.
This theory was at the moment in eclipse in England. But only for the moment. Of course the English had divided the people into classes: the élite, the landowners and the masses. This élite had an equal share with the others, indeed a greater than equal share. And the masses were largely excluded, not irrevocably but subject to the acquisition of property. The Americans were ready for the next step—one of the most momentous in human history.
Some years ago a lady spinner of detective yarns departed from her trade long enough to have a good sneer at the Declaration of Independence. Of course, she observed, all men are not equal. That is too obvious. Look at them—tall and short, strong and weak, intelligent and stupid, industrious and lazy.
It did not occur to her that such observant men as old Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson had not failed to note these differences. The meaning of the Declaration is clear—all men are created equal before the law—they have the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and governments must get their powers from them. That is the rock on which American freedom is built.
Seven years of war, sacrifice and valor made the American colonies free of England. After seven more years of dissension and civil strife, it was now clear the colonists must set up a government for themselves that would assure them the freedoms they had proclaimed and fought for. On May 14, 1787, delegates from all the states met in Philadelphia in convention. When, four months later, they had finished their task they had, as Gladstone phrased it, produced “the most wonderful work ever struck at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”
If ever an American can feel in any shrine the living presence of the venerated dead, it is in the chamber of that building in Philadelphia where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and where the Constitution of the United States was framed.
It has seemed to many that there must have been some divine intervention in an arrangement that brought together so many extraordinary men in so critical a moment of history. One may, without any false emotion, admit that he stands in awe of the grandeur of the edifice which they reared.
It is said that as the convention adjourned the members themselves were suddenly touched with a sense of awe at what they had done. Washington sat with bowed head in the President’s chair.
The aged Franklin, amidst the prevailing silence, rose. A half sun with its gilded rays was carved on the back of the chair occupied by George Washington. Franklin said: “As I have been sitting here all these weeks, I have often wondered whether yonder sun is rising or setting. But now I know that it is a rising sun.” As Franklin, with others, left the building, someone in the crowd outside asked him what kind of government they had set up. He replied: “A republic—if we can keep it so.”
However, we must be careful not to ascribe to these great men more than is just. They did not invent all the parts of this system. Thirteen hundred years of English history looked down on them and they knew that history. They knew of those institutions and laws which, through the centuries, had been forged by their fathers in blood and suffering.
They proposed to build a government upon the theory that man had a right to be free and that the chief purpose of government was to protect him in that freedom. They did not think they were organizing a super-welfare agency which would act as guide, philosopher, planning agency, loan broker and moral policeman of the common man.
As the center of their system they took the mighty instrument of parliamentary government. They built on that.
They knew the reliance their fathers had placed upon law—law settled and explicit, founded in the mores and consent of the people—law rather than the good will of a prince or some supposedly benevolent autocrat.
They knew well that power can corrupt a good man and make a devil of a bad one. And they knew that, in government as at a barn dance, he who pays the piper calls the tune, and that the most powerful weapon in the hands of a free people is the secure possession of the purse strings.
They knew that the chief weakness in every government ever set up anywhere was the executive and that nothing had yet been found to prevent an executive from working incessantly to extend his power.
They determined to limit the powers of government, to give it no more powers than were necessary to ensure the safety and freedom of the people—freedom from an external enemy, freedom from rapacious and aggressive individuals and freedom from the government itself.
I have said this structure was not wholly new. By that I mean that many of its component parts were old and tried. But it is not true to say that the government setup in Philadelphia was a modified form of the British system. It was a distinctly new kind of government. What they established may well be called the American system.
Their plan was simple. In fact the conditions of the country’s existing institutions providentially made it almost mandatory. It began with the assumption that all sovereignty resided in the people. Out of this sovereignty the people would give to the government only such powers as were essential to its great objective. However, it would not entrust these powers to any one agency.
The great bulk of governmental power would be localized in the several communities—the states—each to govern its people in accordance with their differing tastes and conditions. The central or federal government would have only such powers as were needed for dealing with foreign nations, national defense, the currency and the control of such matters as were interstate in nature and were the common concern of all the states.
But to be sure that this central government, which rightly was the agency that all feared, could not build itself into a despotism, the functions of this government were divided among three separate and independent functionaries—the Congress to make the laws, the President to administer them with a supervisory interest in the law-making, and a Judicial system to interpret the laws.
The founders of this system understood that there would be occasions when such a government might find itself a little clumsy. This they preferred to the danger of the government having too much power, including the power to oppress their fellow men.
But, unlike any other government that ever existed, the founders withheld from all of these agencies certain great powers of government which were retained in the hands of the people.
Beyond a doubt no government that has ever existed was ever so well designed to achieve the purpose in the minds of its builders—namely the protection of the freedom of its citizens. It was not designed to manage the citizen’s affairs, to be his partner in business, to be his banker, his doctor, his lawyer, his economic counsellor.
It was designed to be the protector of his freedom. And in no other land in history has man enjoyed such wide freedom as in the country which has lived under this beneficent system. This, the American Constitution, was the greatest charter of all.
As it is impossible to understand or discuss the American Republic without a clear understanding of the Constitution itself, the full text of that instrument, with all of its amendments, is printed here.