NDERS

From 'Work and Play'

There is a class of writers and critics in our country, who imagine it
is quite clear that our fathers cannot have been the proper founders of
our American liberties, because it is in proof that they were so
intolerant and so clearly unrepublican often in their avowed sentiments.
They suppose the world to be a kind of professor's chair, and expect
events to transpire logically in it. They see not that casual opinions,
or conventional and traditional prejudices, are one thing, and that
principles and morally dynamic forces are often quite another; that the
former are the connectives only of history, the latter its springs of
life; and that if the former serve well enough as providential guards
and moderating weights overlying the deep geologic fires and
subterranean heavings of the new moral instincts below, these latter
will assuredly burst up at last in strong mountains of rock, to crest
the world. Unable to conceive such a truth, they cast about them
accordingly to find the paternity of our American institutions in purely
accidental causes. We are clear of aristocratic orders, they say,
because there was no blood of which to make an aristocracy; independent
of king and parliament, because we grew into independence under the
natural effects of distance and the exercise of a legislative power;
republican, because our constitutions were cast in the molds of British
law; a wonder of growth in riches, enterprise, and population, because
of the hard necessities laid upon us, and our simple modes of life.

There is yet another view of this question, that has a far higher
significance. We do not understand, as it seems to me, the real
greatness of our institutions when we look simply at the forms under
which we hold our liberties. It consists not in these, but in the
magnificent possibilities that underlie these forms as their fundamental
supports and conditions. In these we have the true paternity and spring
of our institutions; and these, beyond a question, are the gift of our
founders.

We see this, first of all, in the fixed relation between freedom and
intelligence, and the remarkable care they had of popular education. It
was not their plan to raise up a body of republicans. But they believed
in mind as in God. Their religion was the choice of mind. The gospel
they preached must have minds to hear it; and hence the solemn care they
had, even from the first day of their settlement, of the