to observe that the men who cry out most loudly against what
they call radicalism are the men who find that their private game in
politics is being spoiled. Who are the arch-conservatives nowadays? Who
are the men who utter the most fervid praise of the Constitution of the
United States and the constitutions of the states? They are the gentlemen
who used to get behind those documents to play hide-and-seek with the
people whom they pretended to serve. They are the men who entrenched
themselves in the laws which they misinterpreted and misused. If now they
are afraid that "radicalism" will sweep them away,--and I believe it
will,--they have only themselves to thank.

Yet how absurd is the charge that we who are demanding that our government
be made representative of the people and responsive to their demands,--how
fictitious and hypocritical is the charge that we are attacking the
fundamental principles of republican institutions! These very men who
hysterically profess their alarm would declaim loudly enough on the Fourth
of July of the Declaration of Independence; they would go on and talk of
those splendid utterances in our earliest state constitutions, which have
been copied in all our later ones, taken from the Petition of Rights, or
the Declaration of Rights, those great fundamental documents of the
struggle for liberty in England; and yet in these very documents we read
such uncompromising statements as this: that, when at any time the people
of a commonwealth find that their government is not suitable to the
circumstances of their lives or the promotion of their liberties, it is
their privilege to alter it at their pleasure, and alter it in any
degree. That is the foundation, that is the very central doctrine, that is
the ground principle, of American institutions.

I want you to read a passage from the Virginia Bill of Rights, that
immortal document which has been a model for declarations of liberty
throughout the rest of the continent:

That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the
people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all
times amenable to them.

That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit,
protection, and security of the people, nation, or community; of all
the various modes and forms of government, that is the best which is
capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety, and
is most eff