Texas Drifter: July Fourth Speech For Conservatives
Marshall’s Law Dateline – Recall last writing exercise: “Time for Texas Drifter to check out for now; need too start searching for better words honoring July Fourth, than I could ever offer reader.” Moving on the present, selection Texas Drifter made was: “The Americanism of Washington” by Henry Van Dyke from an address on Washington’s Birthday at the University of Pennsylvania in 1906.
Welcome,
What, must we say of the Americanism of Washington? … It arises from the modern theory of what true Americanism really is – a theory which goes back, indeed for its inspiration to Dr. Samuel Johnson’s somewhat crudely expressed opinion that “ the Americans were a race whom no other mortals could wish to resemble,” but which, in the later form, takes counsel with those English connoisseurs who demand of their typical American not depravity of morals, but deprivation of manners; not vice of heart, but vulgarity of speech; not badness, but bumptiousness; and at least enough eccentricity to make him amusing to cultivated people.
What is true Americanism? And where does it reside? Not in the tongue, not in the clothes, nor among transient social forms, refined or crude, which mottle the surface of human life. Its dwelling is in the heart. It speaks a score of dialects, but one language; follows a hundred paths to the same goal, performs a thousand kinds of service in loyalty to the same ideal which is life.
True Americanism is this:
* To believe that the inalienable rights of man to, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are given by God.
* To believe that any form of power that tramples on these rights is unjust.
* To believe that taxation without representation is tyranny, that government must rest upon the consent of the governed, and that the people should choose their own rulers.
* To believe that freedom must be safeguarded by law and order, and that the end of freedom is fair play for all.
* To believe not in forced equality of conditions and estates, but in a true equalizations of burdens, privileges, and opportunities.
* To believe that the selfish interests of persons, classes, and corporations must be subordinated to the welfare of the Commonwealth.
* To believe that union is as much a human necessity as liberty is a divine gift.
* To believe not that all people are good, but that the way to make them better is to trust the whole people.
* To believe that a free state should offer an asylum to the oppressed and an example of virtue, sobriety, and fair dealing to all nations.
* To believe that for the existence and perpetuity of such a state a man should be willing to give his whole service his whole in property, in labor, and in life.
That is Americanism; an ideal embodying itself in a people; a breed heated white hot in the furnace of conviction and hammered into shape on the anvil of life; a vision commanding men to follow it whithersoever it may lead them. And it was the subordination of the personal self to that ideal, to that that creed, to that vision, which gave eminence and glory to Washington and the men who stood with him.
Men tell us that the age of ideals is past, and that we are now come to the age of expediency, of polite indifference to moral standards, of careful attention to the bearing of different policies upon our own personal interests. It is past, indeed for those who proclaim or whisper, or in their hearts believe or their lives obey the black gospel …
But not for us who learned the meaning of manhood beneath the shelter of liberty. We believe that the liberties which heroes of old won with blood and sacrifice are ours to keep with labor and service.
“All that our fathers wrought,
With true prophetic thought,
Must be defended”
No privilege that encroaches upon those is to be endured. No lawless disorder that imperils them is to be sanctioned. No class that disregards or invades them is to be tolerated.
There is a life that is worth living, now as it was worth living in former days, and that is the honest life. There is a battle worth fighting now, as it was worth fighting then, and that is the battle of the rights of the people.
To make our country and states free in fact as in name; to break the rings that strangle free liberty, and to keep them broken; to cleanse, so far as in our power lies, the fountain of our national life free from political, commercial, and social corruptions; to teach our sons and daughters by precept and example, the honor of serving such a country as America – that is work of the finest manhood and womanhood.
End excerpts "The Americanism of Washington'
Selfish and oppressive governments, indeed, as Christ observes, must “hate the light, and fear to come to it, because their deeds are evil”. Perhaps it is an apolitical fact that big government is the anti-Christ?
Recall Francis Marion’s words “Ambitious demagogues will rise, and the people through love of ignorance and change will follow them. Among a free people who fear God, their knowledge of duty is the same as doing it. When war finally broke out, they rose up against the enemy, firm and united, and gave glorious proof how men will fight when they know all is at stake.”
Reader’s assignment question: reader’s children and grandchildren may not know how to rise up against Marxist-fascist and or corporate fascist tyrants preventing them from returning to America, their promise which was abandoned by their parents and grandparents; especially if no examples of courage defending liberty were left by their parents or grandparents. TRUE or FALSE
