The Short Constitution Part 32

FOOTNOTES

1 Boys and girls often do not realize the value of an education as a preparation for success in life. The following figures from an educational authority show what education does for a boy or a girl.

(a) Less than three per cent of the people of the United States have a college education, but this three per cent furnishes fifty-nine per cent of the men and women called successful. Fourteen per cent come from those having had some college training. This shows that nearly three-fourths of all men and women in the United States called successful have had some college training.

(b) During the past ten years Ma.s.sachusetts has given all her children a minimum of seven years of schooling, while Tennessee has given her children but three years. The Ma.s.sachusetts citizens produce per capita $260 per year, while the Tennessee citizens produce per capita $116 per year.

(c) Of the fifty-five members attending the Federal convention that made the Const.i.tution of the United States in 1787, thirty had attended college, and twenty-six had college degrees. Of the forty State officers in Iowa in 1918, thirty were college graduates, seven were graduates of high schools, and only three had less than a high school education.

(d) The child with no schooling has one chance in 150,000 of performing distinguished services; with elementary education he has four times the chance; with high school education he has eighty-seven times the chance; with college education he has eight hundred times the chance.

(e) Every boy and every girl should stick to his school work until he at least graduates from a fully accredited high school.

2 "Law can do nothing without morals."-Benjamin Franklin.

"Through the whole of life and the whole system of duties, much the strongest moral obligations are such as were never the results of our option."-Edmund Burke.

"To do evil that good may come of it, is for the bungler in politics as well as in morals."-Benjamin Franklin.

"Duty is not collective; it is personal."-Calvin Coolidge.

3 "Ignorance of the law excuses no man."-Selected.

"Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."-George Was.h.i.+ngton.

4 "The thorough education of all cla.s.ses of people is the most efficacious means of promoting the prosperity of the Nation. The material interests of its citizens, as well as their moral and intellectual culture, depend upon its accomplishment."-Robert E.

Lee.

"In a Republic education is indispensable. A Republic without education is like the creature of imagination, a human being without a soul, living and moving blindly, with no just sense of the present or the future."-Charles Sumner.

"Without popular education, no government which rests upon popular action can long endure. The people must be schooled in the knowledge, and if possible in the virtues, upon which the maintenance and success of free inst.i.tutions depend."-Woodrow Wilson.

5 "Where the State has bestowed education, the man who accepts it must be content to accept it merely as charity, unless he returns it to the State in full in the shape of good citizens.h.i.+p."-Theodore Roosevelt.

6 "_Government_-_Liberty_-_Authority_-_Law_-the man or the woman who fails to appreciate the true meaning of these terms, lacks the training necessary to be a good citizen in a Republic."-Abraham Lincoln.

"We need more of the office desk and less of the show-window in politics. Let men in office subst.i.tute the midnight oil for the lime-light."-Calvin Coolidge.

7 "Government is the aggregate of authorities which rule a society."

"Government is that inst.i.tution or aggregate of inst.i.tutions by which society makes and carries out those rules of action which are necessary to enable men to live in a social state, or which are imposed upon the people forming that society by those who possess the power or authority of prescribing them."-Bouvier's _Law Dictionary_, Vol. I, p. 891.

8 Government is the organized means and power that a State or Nation employs for the purpose of securing the rights of the people, and of perpetuating its own existence.

The real aim and purpose is well stated in the preamble to our Const.i.tution when it says: "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity".

Government can never rise higher than the ideals of the people who compose the government. Good governments are the products of good people. Good governments can only exist where the people are intelligent and upright in character, and where each citizen is willing to guard the rights and privileges of others as well as those of himself.

"This government _of the people_, _by the people_, and _for the people_, shall not perish from the earth."-Abraham Lincoln.

9 The object of government is to protect the citizens of a country and to promote their general welfare, and it is composed of the officials who care for the public interests of the citizens.

Under republican government, the weakest citizen enjoys the same rights and privileges as do the strongest citizens, the poorest have the same protection given to the richest, the most humble man or woman has a chance to become the head of his or her government and to lead the Nation among the most powerful Nations in the world.

"Brains and character rule the world. There were scores of men a hundred years ago who had more intellect than Was.h.i.+ngton. He outlives and overrides them all by the influence of his character."-Wendell Phillips.

"The true greatness of nations is in those qualities which const.i.tute the greatness of the individual."-Charles Sumner.

10 "There is always hope in a man that actually and honestly works. In idleness alone is there perpetual despair."-Thomas Carlyle.

"He that hath a trade hath an estate, and he that hath a calling hath an office of profit and honor."-Benjamin Franklin.

"If you have the great talents, industry will improve them; if moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiencies."-Joshua Reynolds.

"Other nations have received their laws from conquerors; some are indebted for a const.i.tution to the suffering of their ancestors through revolving centuries. The people of this country, alone, have formally and deliberately chosen a government for themselves, and with open and uninfluenced consent bound themselves into a social compact. Here no man proclaims his birth or wealth as a t.i.tle to honorable distinction, or to sanctify ignorance and vice with the name of hereditary authority. He who has most zeal and ability to promote public felicity, let him be the servant of the public."-John Adams.

"The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make or alter their const.i.tution of government."-George Was.h.i.+ngton.

"Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind and labor for the welfare of the country."-Thomas Jefferson.

"The Declaration of Independence and the Const.i.tution of the United States are parts of one consistent whole, founded upon one and the same theory of government,-that the people are the only legitimate source of power, and that all just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed."-John Quincy Adams.

11 This description almost perfectly fits the making of the Mayflower Compact in the cabin of the s.h.i.+p Mayflower on November 11, 1620.

Those Pilgrim Fathers drew up an agreement which was the first attempt at a written const.i.tution in the New World. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, of 1638, are generally conceded to be the oldest real const.i.tution in America.

12 When Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal", he did not mean that all infant children have equal capacities for learning or accomplishment, but that all children ought to be given equal opportunities by the government of a republic. He meant that in a republic all children, whether rich or poor, whether of the aristocracy or of the common people, had great opportunities to be good and great men and women. He meant that a poor boy born in the Kentucky mountains and a rail splitter in the woods of Illinois had the opportunity to become President of the United States.

"The Declaration of Independence was not a mere temporary expedient, but is an enunciation of fundamental truths intended for all time."-William J. Bryan.

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, _conceived in liberty_, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."-Abraham Lincoln.

"Where slavery is, there _liberty_ cannot be and where _liberty_ is, slavery cannot be."-Abraham Lincoln.

"Respect for its (the government's) authority, compliance with its laws, acquiesence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true Liberty."-George Was.h.i.+ngton.

"Liberty-on its positive side, denotes the fulness of individual existence; on its negative side it denotes the necessary restraint on all, which is needed to promote the greatest possible amount of liberty for each."-Bouvier's _Law Dictionary_, Vol. I. p. 217.

13 "Other nations have received their laws from conquerors; some are indebted for a const.i.tution to the sufferings of their ancestors through revolving centuries. The people of this country, alone have formally and deliberately chosen a government for themselves, and with open and uninfluenced consent bound themselves into a social compact. Here no man proclaims his birth or wealth as a t.i.tle to honorable distinction, or to sanctify ignorance and vice with the name of hereditary authority."-John Adams.

14 "Liberty means freedom in the enjoyment of all one's faculties in all lawful ways, the liberty to earn a livelihood by any lawful calling, the liberty to live and work where one wills."-_Allgeyer vs. Louisiana, 165 U. S. 578._

15 "Civil liberty is the liberty belonging to men in organized society.

It is liberty defined, regulated and protected by positive law of the State or recognized as existing under customary law."-_Cyclopedia of American Government_, Vol. II, p. 347.

The American people are a peculiar people. They are peculiar in their origin, peculiar in their make-up, and due to their sufferings, their persecutions, and their enduring perseverance, they are still a peculiar people. From the first white man to steer his little wooden s.h.i.+p westward across the great Atlantic ocean to the latest arrival among the most recent immigrants, the people coming to America have been different from those people remaining in their European homes. The conditions surrounding the lives of those people in Europe who left their homes and first settled in America were not materially different from the conditions surrounding the lives of thousands of other people who were satisfied and content to remain on their European sh.o.r.es. Many men thought the earth was round long before Christopher Columbus sailed away from that little seaport town in Spain to test his own ideas of finding a shorter route to India. Many people believed in religious liberty long before the Pilgrims and Puritans landed on the bleak New England sh.o.r.es and suffered the hards.h.i.+ps of first settlers in a new country in order to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d as they pleased. Many people seriously and intelligently doubted the divine right of kings, and believed in the rights of the people to govern themselves long before the American colonists adopted the Declaration of Independence. But it was left for these people-these coming Americans-to demonstrate to all the world that America was to be peopled by men and women of different ideals, different hopes, and different ambitions from all the other nations of the world.