Let us now take up the first article of the Declaration—“All men are created equal”—and see what it means, and what it does not mean. It surely does not mean that all men are created equal in worldly possessions or natural advantages, in physical strength, personal beauty, moral sense or mental power, as it is notorious that mankind differ unavoidably and universally in all these conditions. But it clearly does mean that all men are created equal in a moral, legal and governmental sense, equal as members of society or citizens of the State, no matter how much they may differ in inherent or acquired advantages. It means that one man shall count no more than any other man before the law or in the State by reason of worldly possessions or personal advantages, but that each man shall count alike and equal, no matter how rich or poor, strong or weak, smart or dull, handsome or plain he may be. It means also that the “Creator” has not arbitrarily picked out any particular person, group, family, or race, as His special favorites, to rule or lord it over any other person or mass of persons; and, particularly, that the Creator has not specially “ordained” any favorite person to rule over any part of mankind without their selection and consent. It does mean that the Creator has no “favorites,” but that all men are “equal” before Him, and, hence, that barbarous and oppressive fallacy of “Divine-Right-Monarchism” is emphatically repudiated in this first Article. It means that all “one-man-rule” or “one-race-rule,” and all vile Germanism of the “Gott-Mit-Uns” or “Germans-Over-All” type, is flatly condemned. But, per contra, this Article does plainly mean that the Creator has divinely ordained each and every human individual to be an equal “sovereign” in his own right and that all government depends on the selection and consent of these individual and equal sovereigns who are “endowed” with the “divine right” of collectively forming their own government and selecting their own rulers, instead of having a rule and a ruler forced on them by alleged “divine” command, and without their selection or consent. In other words, this Article obviously means, pure and simple, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Now if each individual American is divinely ordained as an equalized sovereign in his own right—and this is surely a grand distinction of the American Institution and the American citizen—he obviously has a sovereign right to his own body and all his natural possessions; and the most sacred and essential of these rights and possessions is, obviously, the right to his own physical body, the sanctity of his own person, and the right to decide how it shall be treated or taken care of in health or disease; and if he has not this sacred and sovereign right to his own body he has practically no right at all and might as well be wiped out and would be better dead. Therefore, if any doctor or other person claims the right to possess the body of any man, to experiment or operate upon it, to medicate, cut, inoculate, or treat his body as he might see fit, without the free choice, consent or approval of that man, it is obvious that the man is no longer a sovereign or the owner of his own body, but is a mere “slave” or domestic animal and that the doctor really owns his body and is his “master” as much as if he were a pig or dog; so that, therefore, all “equality” and “sovereignty” of the individual is destroyed by this medical “hoggery” and we have not a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” but a government of the doctors, by the doctors, for the doctors,—which in fact we now have to a very dangerous extent. And, indeed, medical organization, compulsion, dictation and domination have now got to such a stage that it is one of the most dangerous powers in our body politic and must be curbed, as I will show later on.
It therefore follows that all compulsory or dictatorial medicine is an absolute violation of the first or basic principle of Americanism as expressed in our great Declaration of Rights, and our first or Pre-Constitution, and therefore must be abolished if we would be true to basic human right and fundamental American principles.
We will now take up the second Article of the Declaration and study its meaning. This Article, with a slight variation of the official words, is as follows:
“All men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Now the great keynote-words in this clause, “unalienable rights,” mean “inseparable rights,” rights which the citizen cannot be separated from, rights which cannot be removed or taken away from the people or denied or invaded by any government or power whatever, but which all governments must respect and defend.
This second article from the Declaration of Rights is, I think, the wisest, most important and significant statement in a political, legal and moral sense that was ever written by human hand or human mind, because it is the essence of the essential paragraph of the Declaration and clearly expresses the basis of Democratic Government, Rational Ethics, and Civic Religion, in one simple clause or sentence! This basis is simply the inherent and “unalienable” rights of our fellow men necessary for human life, liberty and happiness, which are naturally or divinely conferred upon all men, equally, and cannot be ignored or violated by individuals or governments. And it is obvious that the honest and general recognition of these rights will at once establish true justice and righteousness among men and nations, and the disregard and violation of these rights is now, and ever has been, the cause of all wrongdoing, war, and other evils between men and nations the world over.
This simple and potent statement of basic human rights is therefore equal in ethical and legal force to the bulk of the Decalogue itself and to the Golden Rule of Humanity, Honesty and Justice in its three best versions from the world’s greatest moral teachers, Confucius, Plato and Christ; so that in this simple sentence from the essential paragraph of our first great national document we have a code of Democratic Government and of Human Ethics in one sentence, which, as before suggested, should be taught in all our schools as the basis of Americanism.
THE GOLDEN RULE AND THE DECLARATION OF RIGHTS COMPARED
It may be worth while to consider here for a moment what is perhaps the best version of the “Golden Rule,” viz., the version of Plato in Plato’s Laws, Book XI, Prof. Jowett’s translation, which is in these words, dated about 360 B.C.: