Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/250

238 a hundred years of trial, we find ourselves called upon to make report of the net results of our experiment. What and how much have we done to make humanity our debtors? How have we used our opportunities? How much has been gained toward the progress and welfare of man by our experience? The Centennial Celebration should be the suitable occasion to return answers to these questions.

Obviously it will not do merely to carry out John Adams's old programme of bell-ringing, powder-wasting, and hosannas to liberty, by raising the Fourth of July, 1876, to the tenth power of uproar and rhetorical bombast. And, although the event to be commemorated is political, nothing could be more absurd than to go into a paroxysm of political jubilation. If politics alone is to be taken into account, there will be precious little to celebrate, for it is matter of world-wide notoriety that the course of the nation has been downward in this respect from the start. British rule had given us better men in 1776 than a century of republican experience can turn out in 1876. In purity, honor, self-sacrifice, and the triumph of patriotic principle over selfish ambition, the politicians of to-day will bear no comparison with those who founded the government a hundred years ago. If we are to be judged solely by the political fruits of our political system, it would be most appropriate to devote the Centennial to fasting and humiliation, with the accompaniments of sackcloth and ashes.

But, if technical politics has degenerated and fallen in esteem, there has been a noble progress in other directions and in other things, involving the thought and life of the people, which may well be commemorated on our centennial birth-year.

The act of severance which made us an independent people, as we have said, was a measure of government reform in the direction of less government, or a restriction of its powers and offices. There was an increase of self government at the expense of state control, under the theory put forth by the author of the Declaration of Independence, that "the world is governed too much." By declaring at the outset, that the source of power is not in the divine right of hereditary rulers, but among the people themselves; that religion is not a fit matter for the state to deal with, but must be left to individuals; and by organizing a political system, in which the management of their own interest was thrown back upon the people by local and municipal regulations, while the powers of the General Government were strictly limited and defined by a written constitution, a new order of things was theoretically assumed and partially adopted, which, if carried out, could not fail greatly to narrow the sphere of legislation and reduce the pretensions of politics. The preamble to the Constitution, which declares the reasons why our government was established and the principles which should animate and pervade all our legislation and administration, though couched in general terms, if fairly construed and thoroughly executed, would work the most profound and beneficent reform that could be conceived in the conduct of civil affairs. It would strike away half the machinery of political regulation, and raise the other half to a double efficiency and power. The founders of our government declared that it was ordained to "establish justice," and if the state were confined to that great duty, and the whole moral power of the community were concentrated upon the attainment of that result, the thousand other things with which government now meddles might safely be let alone. The practical working of our political system, it must be confessed, has fatally contravened the intentions of its founders; and, in the attempt to attain a multitude