And today our beloved country, in the fulness of her achievement, with the memories of one hundred and forty-seven years, one hundred and forty-seven golden years, lived only that her children might grow, as from eternity the Creator had destined them to grow, in the full security of rights that are inalienable.
Today our beloved country turns to us children of a later generation and pleads that we follow this generous impulse of nature, and tarry for the moment, while she lives over again the thoughts and emotions and heroic sacrifices that gave her birth.
They were not new thoughts or unknown emotions. As John Quincy Adams so well remarked in his scholarly discourse on the Jubilee of the Constitution: “The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are parts of one constant whole, founded upon one and the same theory of government, then new not as a theory, for it had been working itself into the mind of man for many ages, but it had never before been adopted by a great nation.”
Moses, as narrated in Deuteronomy, had charged the judges in Israel: “There shall be no difference of persons; you shall hear the little as well as the great; neither shall you respect any man’s person, because it is the judgment of God.”
Aristotle had taught that, “the State is not merely an institution for repressing vice, but a necessary formation for the full development of humanity.”
In the Magna Charter the germ of true liberty and equality is seen in the pledges of the king to his people: “We will not set forth against any freeman, nor send against him, unless by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land; to no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay right or justice.”
The mediæval councils, the military orders, the guilds, followed centuries after by the contract of the Pilgrim Fathers made in the cabin of the “Mayflower” in which they “covenanted and combined themselves into a civil body politic for their better order and preservation,” as well as the charters of the Providence Plantations, of Virginia, and of Maryland, had accustomed the people to joint action of mutual compact and deliberate agreement in defense of liberty and justice which, after all, is the mother of democracy.
While the schoolmen, with scarcely an exception, as Sidwick tells us, taught that, “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
“Every constitution,” says Nicholas of Cusa, three and a half centuries before the Declaration of Independence, “is rooted in natural law and cannot be valid if it contradicts it.”
“Since all are free by nature,” he continues, “all government, whether by written law or a prince, is based solely on the agreement and consent of the subject. For if by nature men are equally powerful and free, true and ordered power in the hands of one can be established only by the election and consent of the others, just as law also is established by consent.”