Page:Frank David Ely -Why defend the nation? Sound Americanism... (1924).pdf/24

20 With business chained, threatened, constantly railed against, capital in very self-protection withholds that which it has, awaiting a more opportune day for release. Cities and States, seizing the opportunity in unemployed capital desirous of some safe return, are becoming increasingly burdened with debt through the ceaseless issue of tax-exempt securities to secure funds for local improvements, thus defeating the Federal aim for income to meet the national budget and throwing the burden of the load upon the merely well-to-do and the poorer class, as against the rich, upon whom Congress intended it to lie.

Thus the fact stands clear that the time is at hand when we must take inventory, separate truth from fallacy, and discard the latter.

It was John Ruskin, a man far ahead of his day, who said that if we would see a thing correctly we must see the whole of it. Any correct view of the needs and duties of government in America must, then, start with its beginning—with the Constitution or framework of the government in which we live. Better yet, it should go into Colonial history and note the facts which led our forefathers to the adoption of that Constitution, after trying weaker and unsatisfactory measures; study the failures of the Continental Congress and its successor, the Articles of Confederation; and when that is done any fair-minded American will concede that the purposes of government, so clearly enunciated in the preamble to the Great Document, are on and all as vital and essential today as when so decreed by those high-minded patriots who, with clear brains and stout hearts in rugged bodies, builded for themselves and for all posterity the very highest “place in the sun” known to the nations of the world.

Those basic purposes for forming this government, enunciated in the preamble to the constitution, are broad and vital: A more perfect Union, for union was found essential to strength and sovereignty; the establishment of justice, since justice was the demand of every colony from its very birth; domestic peace, so essential to happy internal relations and development; to provide for the common defense, a lesson thoroughly learned throughout Colonial history and in the dark