Fore score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation, so conceived can long endure…
Abraham Lincoln November 19, 1863
The question posed before all Americans in the first half of the 21st Century is whether or not to preserve the Union spoken of by Lincoln. To make perfectly clear what that Union consisted of Lincoln clarified in the Gettysburg Address that the Union of consisted of a Constitutional Republic under the democratically empowered direction and control of an independent and self reliant people.
Such a vision was at odds with the slave society Lincoln and the Union Army fought against as it was with the monarchy’s and feudal societies of the centuries proceeding it, and is still at odds with the central-control top down government so attractive to a large percentage of the US population.
American’s are again in an era where there are those who demand No Limits on their use and abuse of power.
They will use people, manipulate elections, corrupt institutions, promote lawlessness and as we are experiencing, use any force available to suppress their political opposition.
This cannot stand…
Speech on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
July 5, 1926
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful.
It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern.
But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final.
If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final.
If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.
No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.
Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress.
They are reactionary.
Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
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