Not the business of our day, for the
matter with which it deals is past, but the business of that first
revolution by which the Nation was set up, the business of 1776. Its
general statements, its general declarations cannot mean anything to us
unless we append to it a similar specific body of particulars as to what
we consider the essential business of our own day.
Liberty does not consist, my fellow-citizens, in mere general
declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of
those declarations into definite action. Therefore, standing here where
the declaration was adopted, reading its businesslike sentences, we
ought to ask ourselves what there is in it for us. There is nothing in
it for us unless we can translate it into the terms of our own
conditions and of our own lives. We must reduce it to what the lawyers
call a bill of particulars. It contains a bill of particulars, but the
bill of particulars of 1776. If we would keep it alive, we must fill it
with a bill of particulars of the year 1914.
The task to which we have constantly to readdress ourselves is the task
of proving that we are worthy of the men who drew this great declaration
and know what they would have done in our circumstances.
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