Page:The Responsibilities of the American Youth.pdf/4

 responsibilities—it will be necessary to present to you, first, those subjects which have created those responsibilities, which now, in all the weight and force of a high and mighty moral obligation, the obligation of the Most High God, rest upon the American people in general, and upon the American youth in particular.

We beg leave, however, in the first place, to make a few remarks on the term responsibility, in its moral and ethical sense. There was a time when this term and its adjuncts, like many others which contain great and most important truths, had little or no meaning affixed to it, except what was of a strictly conventional and arbitrary character; and then the idea of human responsibility, duty and obligation, rising higher or extending father than the dictate of the king and the mandate of the priest, was regarded as the most impudent and impious act of rebellion that an individual or a people could commit. And yet, somehow or another, it always happened that by the discharge of all these duties, obligations and responsibilities on the part of the people towards their lords and masters, spiritual and temporal, the welfare and selfish interests of the king and the priest were alone promoted and secured. This was the rule that controlled, the line that measured, and the limit that bounded the responsibility and duty of the people; who, when they complained, as sometimes overtaxed and overburdened humanity will complain, were gravely told that the king did this by divine right, and the priest by divine command. This quieted all complaints for a time; and the poor people, like the poor donkey between two bundles of hay, were compelled to jog on submissively and humbly, without permission to taste of the burdens they carried, showing their respect to divine authority, as they thought, like good and patient donkeys.

But almost every evil in our world has its antidote, at least it was so in the case before us; for by hard kicks and heavy blows, redoubled in quantity and increased in quality, sufficient to make even a donkey think, the idea of divine rights was at least, after many centuries, beaten into the heads of the people; who began to think and enquire: Have the people no divine rights, as well as the priest and the king? A most eventful day it was and still is to the world when this idea was first suggested; for it is the