more in touch with reality—a voluntary association of citizens with equal rights. What they expected of it was not so transcendent of the limits of the possible—protection in the enjoyment of those rights. In the Declaration of Independence, so much sneered at and yet so deeply rooted in the truths of social science, they announced that all men were "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted, . . . deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." "All men," said one of the Bills of Rights to be found in the State Constitutions that followed in the wake of the Declaration, "are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they can not by any compact deprive or divest their posterity—namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."[1] No state socialism here; no feudal regulation of industry or morals: only devotion to a freedom, indispensable to happiness and social development, and a demand for its protection.
Upon the meeting of the convention called to frame a government for the territory wrested from British despotism, there was no purpose in the minds of the delegates more distinct than to insure this protection. Indeed, it was paramount; it dominated every other thought. To "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity"—such is the simple but noble and adequate motive they ascribed to themselves, a motive hitherto absent from the world of political thought and action. As if apprehensive that these patriots and statesmen had not been sufficiently explicit to guard against despotism, as odious in the government of the many as of the one, the people demanded the amendment that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." Later, the apprehension still existing that the provision made to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity "was still imperfect, another amendment was added. "No State," it says, putting a restraint upon a despot that has exercised a power far more destructive of freedom than that feared by the fiercest opponent of the Federal Government, "shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property
- ↑ Virginia Constitution of 1776
