Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 87.djvu/1174

 1142 -'\ 86 Stat. 757.

PROCLAMATION 4173-DEC. 9, 1972

[87 STAT.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICHARD NIXON, President of the United States of America, in consonance with House Joint Resolution 135, do hereby proclaim the week beginning Sunday, November 19, 1972, as National Family Week. I invite the Governors of the several States, the chief officials of local governments, and all the people of the United States to mark this week with appropriate ceremonies and activities. IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this eighteenth day of November, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred seventy-two, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred ninety-seventh.

PROCLAMATION

4173

Bill of Rights Day and Human Rights Day and Week December 9, 1972

ffy

ffig President of the United States of America

A Proclamation The ink was barely dry on the Constitution of the United States of America in the autumn of 1787 when leading patriots and statesmen of the young Republic took up the cry for amendments affording written guarantees of basic human freedoms under the proposed national government. "A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth..." Thomas Jefferson wrote, "and what no just government should refuse or rest on inference."

1.

u s e prec. title

The idea that every individual was endowed by his Creator with rights no sovereign or majority could take away was thought dangerous and radical over much of the globe in those days, but it ran deep in the American grain even then. The very first Congress prof>osed a Bill of Rights, and by 1791 its proposals had become the first ten amendments to our Constitution. Since that time, exactly as James Madison predicted to Jefferson that they would do, "the political truths declared in that solemn manner (have acquired) by degrees the character of fundamental maxims of free government." They have inspired our own Nation's accelerating efforts to assure every American full equality and dignity before the

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