FIRST: All men are created equal.
SECOND: All men are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.
THIRD: Governments are instituted among men to secure these
unalienable rights.
FOURTH: Governments derive their just powers from the consent
of the governed.
FIFTH: Whenever any form of government becomes destructive
of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to
abolish it.
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.