This speech was delivered to the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at Gibbs Hall, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, on September 5, 1986.
The Constitution begins, “We the People of the United States….” But who is really speaking, here? After all, a people can act, but a people cannot speak. Only an individual can speak. If a people want to speak, they must elect representatives to speak for them. It is this principle of representative government based upon a sovereign people that distinguishes our Constitution from all earlier constitutions, and shapes our character as a people.
In this world at least, speech, and the reason that makes speech possible, constitute distinctively human being. By giving them coherent speech, representative government enables a people to preserve the humanity of each individual person through that person’s citizenship as a participant in the regime of popular government. Whereas so many previous governments ‘by the people’—those in ancient Greece, where the people dispensed with representatives and met directly to make decisions on policy—had died of mob violence and tyranny, the American republic has endured for two centuries because representation encourages speech and reason, humanness not savagery. Representative government enables government by the people to remain nonetheless government of the people. Self-government in an individual thrives only if the better part of the ‘self’ or soul in its wisdom rules the soul’s less human parts. A people does not have a soul, but they can have a moral order, a character. By constituting their own government as a representative government, the American people intended to govern themselves with the best part of themselves.
Lincoln said, government of the people, by the people, for people. Speaking in the voices of their assembled representatives, the people of the United States say in the Preamble what they intend the Constitution to be for. They set down six purposes of their Constitution-making, three balanced pairs of intentions.
In the first pair, “a more perfect union” goes with the establishment of justice. Neither could long endure without the other. But notice that the Framers do not call for perfect union, or pure justice, only for a more perfect union and for justice’s establishment, by which they mean principally the rule of law in the service of securing Americans’ unalienable natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The attempt to achieve perfect union and justice simply belongs to the realm of utopian dreaming, not to the real world of a people governing themselves reasonably, and from experience. The history of our own century has demonstrated even more brutally what the American Founders already knew: that attempts to bring Utopia to earth result neither in union nor justice but in war and tyranny.
The people’s representatives would also ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. These purposes too complement one another; the Constitution balances inner and outer. Representative government insures domestic tranquility because it channels the most energetic and ambitious citizens into contests of words and of peaceful deeds, such as commercial transactions. It teaches Americans to persuade their countrymen, not to fight them. The one major exception to this, the Civil War, confirms this point; a representative government could not tolerate forever the unjust denial of representation to persons unjustly excluded from citizenship—slaves. Representative government provides for the common defense—”provide” literally means to foresee and to act on that foresight—because it elevates some citizens to an eminence above day-to-day concerns, an eminence from which they can see into the distance, then speak and act in order to defend the people they represent. Although the first eighty-seven years of our history seemed to show that ensuring domestic tranquility would be representative government’s most formidable challenge, the last (nearly) eight-seven years, the years of this century, have proven the difficulties of providing for the common defense. We have learned that a constitution inclining men to peace among themselves must carefully guard itself against dulling their foresight as regards dangers from without.
Finally, the Framers would “promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” The Constitution is therefore modest about the general welfare—undertaking only to promote it—but ambitious about liberty—undertaking to secure it. Representative government withstands ups and downs in the general welfare, but it must have liberty. Thus we like defenders of our welfare, but we honor defenders of our liberty.
Thanks to the Framers’ considerable prudence, the balanced intentions of the American people at the time of the founding brought forth the balanced government seen in the body of the Constitution. Balance requires moderation, a good order in public and in private life. Such good order opens the eyes of Americans. It enables us to see human equality and unalienable rights as self-evident truths. Conversely, an exceptionally bad order, such as prevailed at the time of our Revolutionary War, our Civil War, and the world wars, will forcibly remind us of these truths. It is rather when our public order is bad but peaceful that these truths appear obscure and dubious. We are here tonight to sharpen our vision, so we too can speak as Americans, live up to the standards set by the first “People of the United States.”
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