In other words, what is the condition politically, industrially,
socially, religiously? Is it such as will make us rejoice in its review?
Are our centennial fruits such as He would pronounce good, so that we
may rest upon the seventh day from all our labours?
In the first place, what have we done politically? It is to government
that people largely owe their prosperity or adversity—a good government
meaning continuous prosperity; a bad one continuous adversity, or else
alternate seasons of each, in which the latter consume the fruits of the
former; in which the people see-saw, up and down each decade; in which,
like the Israelites, the people journey in the wilderness “forty years”
in search of the promised land, to which God would bring them suddenly,
if they would keep all His commandments, and neither worship nor
sacrifice to the “Golden Calf.”
The last estimates are, that there are forty-four million people now in
the United States. It is by no means, however, to be inferred that these
are all citizens who constitute the “sovereignty;” from whom the
Government has its source, and upon whom it sheds its benignant rays.
For, although the constitution declares that “all persons born or
naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens;” and although there are unreversed decisions of
the Supreme Court, which declare that every person in the country
“constitutes a part of the political sovereignty,” and that every such
person is entitled to every right, civil and political, enjoyed by
anyone in the State,—notwithstanding all this authority and law upon the
subject, only a minority of the 44,000,000 are really citizens. For, in
the Dred Scott decision, the law of citizenship was declared to be this:
“To be a citizen is to have the actual possession and enjoyment, or the
perfect right to the acquisition and enjoyment, of an entire equality of
privileges, civil and political.” Dred Scott did not possess or enjoy
these rights; therefore the court held that he was not a citizen. As
this is the law of citizenship now, we must conclude that only those are
citizens who have “the actual possession and enjoyment, or the perfect
right of acquisition and enjoyment, of an entire equality of privileges,
civil and political,” the Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding.
The Constitution in the hands of “the few” is a mere toy with the plain
language of which they play, making it to mean anything or nothing as it
suits them now and then. Later we shall see that this was what it was
intended to be; that it was a fraud, a cheat, from the beginning, into
which neither the letter nor spirit of the Declaration of Independence
ever entered.