THE Fourth of July is a national birthday. On that day in 1776 a new nation came into existence. While that nation was, in the providence of God, a product of the ages, it was wholly unlike anything that had existed throughout all ages.
And so the meaning of the Fourth of July intrinsically depends upon the meaning of that act, those circumstances, the motives and purposes, culminating on that day in the Declaration of Independence — throwing aside old responsibilities as unworthy, accepting new responsibilities as ennobling and full of hope.
Says the historian, if we “be asked to select from the annals of the world that period in which man appeared to the best advantage, we must, with little hesitation, name the last quarter of the eighteenth century. At no other epoch in the history of mankind has the human race emerged so rapidly from its old condition. It was an age in which tradition suffered, ancient tyrannies were startled from the throne, and the fallow ground, long soaked with the cold drippings of the Middle Ages, was torn up and turned to the sun and air with the terrible plow-share of radicalism. Long strides were made in the direction of the emancipation of mankind from the thralldom of the past. The time at last came when men perceived that it was better to fight and die than to endure any longer the domination of other men no better, no wiser, than themselves. That artificial reverence — that half worship — which prostrate man and society had shown to the powers by which they were governed, was replaced by a manly courage, a dignity, a defiance which went far to redeem the race from bondage, and to make future slavery impossible.”
For centuries man had blindly followed precedent. Unthinkingly he had done what his fathers before him had done, simply by force of their example. He accepted tradition as the law of right. Practise, if only old enough, was the rule of justice. Thus man for centuries, for all those weary years we call the Dark Ages, had ceased to think against or about custom, and his present was bound with more than chains of steel to all the unbearable, unthinkable past.
What caused such an intolerable condition of humanity? The question is natural, it arises logically, indited by a contrast between these times and those.
And what caused man to think, to see the illogical, to oppose the follies of tradition and practise? This question also is as natural as the other. But we can not answer it until we have considered the first.
And when we have answered the two, we will have grasped something of the meaning of the Fourth of July.
First the intolerable conditions of man and government brought the Dark Ages.
Monarchy, the form of government prevailing, was in those days a huge septipod. And if we consider each of these seven feet on which it stood for support, we find the following:
First, there was the king, a feudal chieftain on a grand and colossal scale. He was lifted immeasurably above his subjects. Below him by implication necessarily was a people without political rights, dependent for life and liberty upon the pleasure of the king. They were but peasants and serfs, whose property might be taken at will, and whose lives might be exposed in lawless, ambitious wars; whose bodies might be used or abused, and whose minds might be rightfully kept in the darkness of perpetual night.
Second, this monarchy was but the embodiment of ecclesiastical domination over secular society. The king was either the head of the church or its obedient servant. “The bishops, for their own good, told the monarch that his right to be king came down out of the skies; that he was by the will of Heaven born a prince; that his authority was by the grace of God, and that his person was sacred both by the fact of his royal birth, and by the manipulation of the priest on the day of coronation.” Thus the whole monarchial scheme was a devising of the church for the glory and prosperity of its functionaries to the absolute humiliation and beggary of the common people.
Third, another support to the established order of things was the graduated order of nobility, — dukes in touch with the king; marquises in touch with the dukes; knights in touch with the marquises; lords in touch with the knights; esquires in touch with the lords.
Fourth, as a support to the graduated order of the nobility, stood the principle of primogeniture. The royal blood must not be allowed to diffuse itself and spread into a multitude of vulgar kinsmen.
Fifth, to support primogeniture was the law of entails, by which properties should tend to concentrate in certain lines of descent, and thus be maintained in perpetual solidarity.
Sixth, the king was not to be hampered by constitutional limitations. Popular assemblies were hotbeds of sedition and impediments to government, a menace to civil authority. Ministers and parliaments existed merely to carry out the king’s will.
Seventh, the people existed for the king’s pleasure. Society was the king’s institution. The state was, in essential, the king’s property.
In all these seven propositions we see there is but one cardinal principle. A few individuals are to be glorified to the disadvantage of the many. The many exist to give pleasure and wealth to the few.
It was a scandalously selfish view of the world-order of government. And illogical and untrue to facts as it was, the church of the times — the Catholic Church — was the mighty cement that held the institutions of monarchy together.
It is true that in England the church was divorced in a measure from the pope of Rome. But it was merely a change of head; the system was essentially the same.
Then came a change. Printing from movable types, the dissemination of literature, the truth of the Bible that all humanity are brethren and equal in rights and privileges before God, shed a flood of light upon the world. Countless ones who would not accept the gospel salvation, accepted this great truth of human fraternity and equality, with the result that every principle of government was examined and tested by the most inexorable logic of the new light.
And so when King George of England, too autocratic for his time, sought to wreak his own stubborn will upon his American subjects, they in turn began to ask, “By what right, under what principle of law or justice?”
The old sentimentality of divine right of the king to live at the expense of the wealth, health, and lives of his subjects failed. The king could fume about his right to rule, and rail at the preposterous conduct of his subjects, who must be taught a lesson of loyalty and obedience.
The stubborn old king thought to succeed by the old order of events. But already in his own home kingdom of England a better view of government was prevailing. What King George sought to do against his American subjects, he did amidst great opposition on the part of his still loyal subjects in England.
It was therefore on the principle that all humanity has equal rights, privileges, and immunities before the law, that the Declaration of Independence was drafted and sent forth on that memorable day we still celebrate in these United States.
And by that battle fought and won we have learned that no minority, tho headed by the king, is right when it seeks to subject the majority to a condition of serfdom. And no majority can be right that does not give to the minority — nay, more, the individual — the rights that it claims for itself — the inalienable rights, to all alike, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And this is some token of the meaning that vitalized that first Fourth of July in seventeen hundred and seventy-six! So long as that day remains and these true principles prevail, that must still be the meaning of the Fourth of July.5
God forbid that it should ever mean anything less!
And may our flag be draped in mourning folds, when the day becomes an idle celebration, whenever, in this glorious land, our meanest subjects lose any portion whatsoever of those equal rights,—“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Neither a majority nor a minority can, by the laws of the very foundation of this government, interfere with those “inalienable rights.”
For this is our blood-bought, immortal inheritance through the Declaration of Independence of 1776!
And this is the significance of that day which keeps it yearly in perpetual memorial!