Hearken not to the voice which petulantly tells you that the form of government recommended for your adoption is a novelty in the political world; that it has never yet had a place in the theories of the wildest projectors; that it rashly attempts what it is impossible to accomplish.
No, my countrymen, shut your ears against this unhallowed language. Shut your hearts against the poison which it conveys; the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their Union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies.
And if novelties are to be shunned, believe me, the most alarming of all novelties, the most wild of all projects, the most rash of all attempts, is that of rendering us in pieces, in order to preserve our liberties and promote our happiness.
But why is the experiment of an extended republic to be rejected, merely because it may comprise what is new? Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?
To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness.
Had no important step been taken by the leaders of the Revolution for which a precedent could not be discovered, no government established of which an exact model did not present itself, the people of the United States might, at this moment have been numbered among the melancholy victims of misguided councils, must at best have been laboring under the weight of some of those forms which have crushed the liberties of the rest of mankind.
Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe. They formed the design of a great Confederacy, which it is incumbent on their successors to improve and perpetuate.
If their works betray imperfections, we wonder at the fewness of them. If they erred most in the structure of the Union, this was the work most difficult to be executed; this is the work which has been new modelled by the act of your convention, and it is that act on which you are now to deliberate and to decide.America was, of course, born imperfect. It became tragically more imperfect from Lincoln's administration forward. Yet, for all its imperfections, show me something better—morally as well as practically.
I mean that. Show me. I'll happily embrace it. For example, acknowledging America's imperfections does mean something fatalistic such as "That's life. That's the way it'll always be. Deal with it." No. Hell no.
Acknowledging an imperfection is not a license to indulge and continue it. Acknowledging it implies a moral obligation to correct it.
More significantly, something else ought to be acknowledged—i.e., moral perfection is possible: mine, yours, even an entire nation's.
The question is not really the possibility of perfection but the standard by which you measure it.
If your standard is some kind of unreal notion like infallibility or omniscience, then, of course, perfection is impossible. But that is a transparent straw man position. It also happens to be a handy excuse for slackers of every kind. More importantly, it's an unfair weight on too many wonderfully moral souls who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.
The standard of moral perfection is that which is possible to man qua rational animal. More on this in a future post.
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