Excerpt from Principles of the Revolution: Showing the Perversion of Them and the Consequent Failure of Their Accomplishment

And in all this there is no degeneracy. On the contrary, as a people, in our individual and social relations, we are improved. Since our Revolution, religion, literature, science, have spread over our land their healing wings extending commerce has bound us to our race in a humanizing chain of brotherhood, and the new born spirit of reform, searching through the dark caverns of moral corruption, is bringing their hideous forms of evil into day, and preparing to light up the flame of charity with their consuming remains. Those who look back to the birth of our nation, as the Saturnian age of purity, cherish a misdirecting illusion. Our revolutionary fathers saw but obscurely the forms of the liber ty and justice their language proclaimed. It is true, the Declara tion of Independence held these truths to be self-evident that, all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Crea tor with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, lib erty, and the pursuit of happiness but the Constitutions pro fessed to be formed on the basis of this declaration, and still more the laws and actual practice under them, exhibit but little departure from the usages of the mother land. There is still the same unlimited power in the States - so far as not granted to the Union - to regulate every commercial and social relation in private life; still the same authority in the voluminous and perplexing decisions of courts the same predominance given to the domination of government, or the majority of the people, over the interests and rights of individuals; still the same 0p pressive power in judicial oficers; the same exclusive reliance on physical force, and the menace of personal or pecuniary punishment for the maintenance of order, and still the same compulsion to civil and military service; and these ungranted usurpations were deliberately re-enacted by our patriot fath. Ers, in the face of their self-evident truths, with strangely inconsistent blindness. These self-evident truths were never understood, and the experiment of political liberty and equal rights, so loudly announced, has never yet been made.

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