The principles under the inspiration of which this government had its
birth, are set forth in the Declaration of Independence. They were when
realized by the people, when incorporated into the organic law, to give
them independence; and they were thought to be of so much importance
that the people fought a long and bloody war to acquire a right to their
possession and enjoyment. Who can think of Bunker Hill, of Brandy-wine,
of Princeton, of Valley Forge, of Yorktown, think of those long eight
years of alternate hope and despair, and not feel that the price paid
for independence was too great to have it limited to a mere minority of
the people, when it was purchased for the whole; was too great a price
to pay for principles that were to be restricted to fewer than half of
the descendants of those who paid it. Our fathers would have never
fought for the liberty to have a King or an aristocratic ruler of their
own. They endured the hardships and privations of that war for
independence for themselves and their posterity. Nothing less than this
was the inspiration of those years of suffering, nothing less than this
could have given them inspiration to gain their independence.
But this was scarcely more than won, before those from whom this
inspiration came were doomed to see their work robbed of half its value.
At the convention that met to frame a government, there were men whose
minds were too narrow to grasp the significance of the truths which had
been the inspiration of the people; and which had sustained them through
the war. They were men bred and born in English customs. They were not
willing to make a complete departure from the established legal forms of
the mother country, and make the Declaration, the inspiration of the
Constitution, as it had been of the revolution. That inspiration came
from these truths, and they were declared to be self-evident, “that all
men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are
instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed.” No trace of any single one of these truths is to be found in
the Constitution as then adopted; nor in any of the Amendments that have
since been added, save in Sec. I., Art. XIV., which the self-constituted
citizens have rendered nugatory.