Unforeseen Contingencies

Happy American Independence Day!  As is my usual practice, I have spent the morning rereading the Declaration of Independence and various meditations on it.  Today Law and Liberty had two that are particularly good.  250 Years of Jeffersonian Constitutionalism, by my friend Hans Eicholz, is a deep and careful analysis of Jefferson's "Summary View of the Rights of British America" and its implications for the Constitution as well as the Declaration.  It is worthwhile.

The second is Professor Paul Seaton's The Declaration's Timely Teaching on Immigration.  Seaton notes how the Declaration carefully distinguishes between the natural rights of each individual, a universal principle, and the political rights of a particular people to protect and defend their political order.  The Declaration applies this to immigration by noting George III had blocked laws facilitating immigration and naturalization.  Today our Federal government instead blocks these laws to facilitate mass invasion by unvetted, unaccountable, often hostile foreigners who are not to be naturalized.  Seaton points out how the Founders' understanding offers a rational alternative to bad ideas from leftists and national conservatives.  

Related to this theme, Scott Johnson has posted on the Powerline blog an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln's speech of 10 July 1858, in his annual "The Eternal Meaning of Independence Day" post, in which Lincoln makes clear that it is the moral principle of equal individual rights in the Declaration that makes America what it is and the binds Americans together, and also that this is a universal principle that can and ought to connect all men.  In The Eternal Meaning of Independence Day (2) Johnson quotes Calvin Coolidge on the Declaration.  An excerpt: 

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. 

Finally, in the last letter he ever wrote in his life, the great Thomas Jefferson reflected on the Declaration and its importance: May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.

Hillsdale College has made a very nice short film dramatizing this, Last Days of a Revolutionary.

American Independence Day -- all people, everywhere, who love liberty, should study it, celebrate it, and live it.

// posted by Charles N. Steele @ 14:45