Great rights / edited by Edmond Cahn

THIS is a book about our original purpose as a nation and the way it stands today. At the start of our history, there were good patriots to whom the purpose was uncongenial. They saw no need for the new country to adopt new political aspirations. As far as they could see, the conflict that broke out in 1775 was no more than a War of American Independence, the stakes in the war were only the traditional rights of Englishmen, and the im portant passages in the Declaration which some of them signed in 1776 were those that listed their grievances against George III and the British Parliament. All the aims of men like these were good and fair, but far too narrow, too small. The world of the Founding Fathers felt ripe for something bolder than one more England in approximate replica on the westem shores of the Atlantic.

Something daring and novel was in the wind which caught the finest minds of the time and inflamed them. To men like James Madison, the war against Britain was only the military aspect of an all-pervasive American Revolution' and the question to be decided was not whether Americans should regain the rights that Englishmen had considered customary but whether for the first time in human history any men anywhere could enjoy the full political dignity to which all men were born. Though English notions of liberty were obviously useful, they were inadequate. What America promised must be nothing less than a new kind of society-fresh, equal, just, open, free, and forever respectful of conscience.