Constitutional history -- United States; United States -- Politics and government; United States. Constitution. 18th Amendment
Being educated “citizens” and not “subjects,” we ourselves will no
longer, as _our_ leaders have done for five years, mistake the only
correct and legal answer to the indignant outburst of Madison, who
wrote this Fifth Article at Philadelphia. “Was, then, the American
Revolution effected, was the American Confederacy formed, was the
precious blood of thousands spilt, and the hard-earned substance of
millions lavished, not that the people of America should enjoy peace,
liberty, and safety, but that the governments of the individual states,
that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent
of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of
sovereignty? We have heard of the impious doctrine in the Old World,
that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the
same doctrine to be revived in the New, in another shape--that the
solid happiness of the people is to be sacrificed to the views of
political institutions of a different form?” (_Fed._ No. 45.)
The American answer, from the people of America assembled in the
conventions that ratified that Fifth Article, was a clear and emphatic
“No.” The Tory answer of the last five years, from _our_ leaders and
our governments, has been an insistent “Yes.”
No one, however, with any considerable degree of truthfulness, can
assert that there has come from the American people themselves, during
the last five years, any very audible “Yes.” To whatever extent
individual opinions may differ as to the wisdom or legality of the
new constitution of government of men, made entirely by governments,
no unbiased observer has failed to note one striking fact. By a very
extensive number of Americans otherwise law-abiding, Americans in all
classes of society, the new government edict, the government command to
“subjects,” has been greeted with a respect and obedience strikingly
similar to the respect and obedience with which an earlier generation
of Americans received the Stamp Act and the other government edicts
between 1765 and 1776.
When the Americans of that earlier generation were denounced by the
government which had issued those edicts to its “subjects,” one of
the latter, five years before Americans ceased to be “subjects” of
that government, stated: “Is it a time for us to sleep when our free
government is essentially changed, and a new one is forming upon a
quite different system--a government without the least dependence upon
the people?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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