CHAPTER THREE THE IDEAS AS EXPRESSED IN OR BY THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE FEDERAL AND STATE CONSTI TUTIONS. The Second Contribution of America- We have sought to ascertain the nature of some of the essential ideas underlying the most characteristic American activities and institutions; we have sought to trace the origin of these ideas and to point out the distinctive American conditions which caused them to be generally accepted to a degree never before known. We have sought to show the opinion concerning these ideas held by the political thought of 1925. The relation of these ideas to the Declaration of Independence and the Federal and State Constitutions will now be considered. The second contribution of America-the new organs of government designed to perfect the functioning of representative democracy-will be studied. A knowledge of the external facts of American history is assumed but comment upon certain phases of the relationship of the essential American ideas to some of those facts appears necessary. The excerpts given in the body of this book have been selected largely because they throw light upon this relationship. As we have pointed out, few historians now believe the American Revolution to have been any such popular uprising of great masses seeking liberty, as many American school books have caused the average American to believe. The whole situation was complicated (62) and the Revolution grew from many mixed motives, not all of which were unselfish or idealistic. Many of the other colonies of Great Britain have contentedly remained parts of the empire, although composed of men much like those who settled the American colonies. Five generations after the American Revolution Canada still remains a part of the British Commonwealth. The American Revolution was, historically, probably brought about by the unwise activities of the British ministry at the time. An English mercantile oligarchy was beginning to dominate the English government, and sought to prevent the development in America of powerful groups, (63) which might reap from the colonies the profits which certain English elements desired for themselves. Canada, and the other British possessions, had not yet developed a large wealthy mercantile class which could be sufficiently angered by this tendency to develop an insurrectionary spirit in response to it. But there were about four million people already in the thirteen colonies and many powerful groups of merchants. The ruling dynasty, severely limited by the British commonalty, began, moreover, to see in the British possessions a new source of revenue and power. While the English ministers representing the oligarchy were seeking to interfere with the growth of American wealth, the ministers close to the crown were seeking revenue from the American population in general. (64) The irritation resulting from these combined attempts at exploitation (65) probably caused the political rupture resulting from the American Revolutionary war. It was the lesson taught England by this rupture which forced such a change in her policy as has prevented the subsequent growth of such conditions as might have resulted in other ruptures within the Empire. The general situation in the years immediately preceding the Revolution has been touched upon and the manner in which abstract political ideas were injected into the germinating revolutionary movement briefly considered. The Ideas Enduringly Injected Into the Formal When the final break came and Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, (66) he put into it only the ideas which were current throughout the colonies, (67) the ideas which had been expounded and debated in thousands of gatherings of every sort, from the time they were first advanced in America by such men as Otis, Henry, Dickinson, the Adams, Paine, and others. Many of the very phrases used had become common. (68) Yet Jefferson might well have launched directly into a recital of actual grievances. Lincoln points out (see page 159) the infinitely important consequences of the fact that Jefferson saw fit to preface this recital with the abstract ideas which he believed to be universally applicable. Had he not given such a preface in his draft of the Declaration of Independence it is quite possible that his associates on the committee (69) might have issued a merely temporary political document flaunting no philosophical conceptions in the face of a monarchial age. In which case the history of the United States and of the whole world might conceivably have been different. For while the philosophical conceptions were current they probably only slightly influenced the Revolution which was political and not social. Being given this striking official character by the Continental Congress, these abstract ideas were advertised to a degree which could never otherwise have been approximated. They became distinctive American ideas which have ever since been kept continuously before each generation of American citizens. The accident that an ardent and eager social philosopher of thirty-three years was, because of his peculiar literary ability, entrusted with the writing of such a document, has probably helped to change the history of mankind. This point is stressed because we are here dealing not so much with facts as with the ideas developing from facts or shaping facts; we are concerned with showing that the abstract ideas which-as expressed and endorsedare claimed as essentially American, were and are opposed to the realistic economic and political motives which have governed the ruling classes of mankind. The Revolution Did Not Enduringly Once expressed and given official sanction, these ideas were fought for by the American Revolutionists. But the winning of the Revolution did not enduringly entrench them. To the degree to which they are valid, desirable, and adaptable to a developing world they must be fought for today and always. The essential American tradition seeks to apply them continuously to the changing conditions of human society, not to rest contentedly on the false assumption that they have been realised. The original American tradition was a dynamic continuing attempt at realisation of great ideals, not static content with achievements, however great. Within six months of the signing of the Declaration of Independence it is quite possible that some of the men who had put their signatures to that document found cause to regret their endorsement of the abstract principles which Jefferson had written into it. With the actual winning of the Revolutionary War it is almost certain that many of the wealthy men of the colonies would have given much to have been able to expunge these ideas from the document which by the successful outcome of that war inevitably and inexorably became a national creed and tradition, to which lip-service must necessarily be given. Little did some of them desire or foresee, when using the inflammatory ideas of agitators for their own purposes, that these ideas would be given so permanent a place in the primary documents of the embryonic nation which some of them had doubtless hoped to dominate or to shape by conservative ideas much opposed to the "excessive democracy" of the agitators. The thoughts of theorists and dreamers and idealists of endless nations down two or more thousand years had-by what must be admitted to have been partly an accident-been brought out of the study, of the library, of the debating room and used for the practical and actual political purposes of men cut free from much of the dust and filth of the past and afforded opportunity to develop, in a fresh new world, a state so ardently idealistic in its proclaimed purposes that men of all nations were forced to look upon it as a radiant new portent which might, as it has done, alter the ways of thought and life of all the generations to come. Woodrow Wilson declared: "Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is a practical document for the use of practical men. It is not a thesis for philosophers but a whip for tyrants. It is not a theory of government but a program of action." Antagonism to the Ideas. Antagonism to these purposes and ideas existed not only outside of America. It exists not only in that part of the America of today which believes in government by a "superior minority" and every year brings forth historical and political books insidiously designed to attack the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and of those who thought like him. Those ideas were probably distrusted and disliked by certain elements in the America of 1776 almost as much as they have ever been distrusted or disliked elsewhere or at any other time. To fail to understand that fact is to miss the reality of the American experiment and true tradition-a great attempt to mould society by idealism and aspiration, tempered by race wisdom on the one hand and ruling class caution or wisdom on the other hand. An increasingly able and numerous school of historians is producing well documented volumes, showing in minutest detail the actual economic and social conditions of early America, and the actual conservative or reactionary opinions of some of the men whom early generations of Americans believed to be passionate lovers of liberty. The work of these historians cannot be lightly dismissed. For, after all, they tell us only what daily experience everywhere shows us that ideals of social justice and noble polity are, like all abstractions remote from immediate selfishness, relatively rare among men, and that personal interest and ambition more largely and potently actuate men than unselfish, altruistic ideas and ideals. Any man sincerely desirous of understanding the truth about America and its traditions, must read the books of these writers and consider the implications of the facts they bring forth. But in reading them it must be remembered that occasionally these close students fail to see the forest for the trees. In seeking to correct the prevalent romantic conceptions of the Revolutionary period they sometimes fall on the other side and do not sufficiently remember that-when the most is said-vital new examples of human polity were given the world by America, and the whole course of human development unquestionably changed by those examples. There was an honest and wise conservatism in early America as well as a selfish and narrow conservatism. An Opportunity to Plan a Nation as Throughout the documents of this period there is found even in the writings of the most reactionary, a sense that-for |