The Declaration of
Independence was, indeed, the first audible breath of liberty, but the
substance of liberty is written in such documents as the declaration of
rights attached, for example, to the first constitution of Virginia,
which was a model for the similar documents read elsewhere into our
great fundamental charters. That document speaks in very plain terms.
The men of that generation did not hesitate to say that every people has
a right to choose its own forms of government--not once, but as often as
it pleases--and to accommodate those forms of government to its existing
interests and circumstances. Not only to establish but to alter is the
fundamental principle of self-government.
We are just as much under compulsion to study the particular
circumstances of our own day as the gentlemen were who sat in this hall
and set us precedents, not of what to do but of how to do it. Liberty
inheres in the circumstances of the day. Human happiness consists in the
life which human beings are leading at the time that they live. I can
feed my memory as happily upon the circumstances of the revolutionary
and constitutional period as you can, but I cannot feed all my purposes
with them in Washington now.
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