The flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time.”
Reply of Senator Geo. P. Hoar.
Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, replied to Senator Miller, and presented the supposed view of the Eastern States in a masterly manner. The speech covered twenty-eight pamphlet pages, and was referred to by the newspaper as an effort equal to some of the best by Charles Sumner. We make liberal extracts from the text, as follows:
“Mr. President: A hundred years ago the American people founded a nation upon the moral law. They overthrew by force the authority of their sovereign, and separated themselves from the country which had planted them, alleging as their justification to mankind certain propositions which they held to be self-evident.
“They declared—and that declaration is the one foremost action of human history—that all men equally derive from their Creator the right to the pursuit of happiness; that equality in the right to that pursuit is the fundamental rule of the divine justice in its application to mankind; that its security is the end for which governments are formed, and its destruction good cause why governments should be overthrown. For a hundred years this principle has been held in honor. Under its beneficent operation we have grown almost twenty-fold. Thirteen States have become thirty-eight; three million have become fifty million; wealth and comfort and education and art have flourished in still larger proportion. Every twenty years there is added to the valuation of this country a wealth enough to buy the whole German Empire, with its buildings and its ships and its invested property. This has been the magnet that has drawn immigration hither. The human stream, hemmed in by banks invisible but impassable, does not turn toward Mexico, which can feed and clothe a world, or South America, which can feed and clothe a hundred worlds, but seeks only that belt of States where it finds this law in operation. The marvels of comfort and happiness it has wrought for us scarcely surpass what it has done for other countries. The immigrant sends back the message to those he has left behind. There is scarcely a nation in Europe west of Russia which has not felt the force of our example and whose institutions are not more or less slowly approximating to our own.
“Every new State as it takes its place in the great family binds this declaration as a frontlet upon its forehead. Twenty-four of the States, including California herself, declare it in the very opening sentence of their constitutions. The insertion of the phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ in the enumeration of the natural rights for securing which government is ordained, and the denial of which constitutes just cause for its overthrow, was intended as an explicit affirmation that the right of every human being who obeys the equal laws to go everywhere on the surface of the earth that his welfare may require is beyond the rightful control of government. It is a birthright derived immediately from him who ‘made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation.’ He made, so our fathers held, of one blood all the nations of men. He gave them the whole face of the earth whereon to dwell. He reserved for himself by his agents heat and cold, and climate, and soil, and water, and land to determine the bounds of their habitation. It has long been the fashion in some quarters, when honor, justice, good faith, human rights are appealed to, and especially when the truths declared in the opening sentences of the Declaration of Independence are invoked as guides in legislation to stigmatize those who make the appeal as sentimentalists, incapable of dealing with practical affairs. It would be easy to demonstrate the falsehood of this notion. The men who erected the structure of this Government were good, practical builders and knew well the quality of the corner-stone when they laid it. When they put forth for the consideration of their contemporaries and of posterity the declaration which they thought a decent respect for the opinions of mankind required of them, they weighed carefully the fundamental proposition on which their immortal argument rested. Lord Chatham’s famous sentence will bear repeating again:
When your lordships look at the papers transmitted to us from America, when you consider their decency, firmness, and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause and wish to make it your own. For myself I must declare and avow that in all my reading and observation—and it has been my favorite study, I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master states of the world—that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the general Congress assembled at Philadelphia.
The doctrine that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right with which men are endowed by their Creator, asserted by as religious a people as ever lived at the most religious period of their history, propounded by as wise, practical, and far-sighted statesmen as ever lived as the vindication for the most momentous public act of their generation, was intended to commit the American people in the most solemn manner to the assertion that the right to change their homes at their pleasure is a natural right of all men. The doctrine that free institutions are a monopoly of the favored races, the doctrine that oppressed people may sever their old allegiance at will, but have no right to find a new one, that the bird may fly but may never light, is of quite recent origin.