Update: Excert from FDR's "4 Freedoms" Speech
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we lookMore of my own thoughts about today later, but here is John Quincy Adams' speech to the supreme court in 1841 (He was 74) regarding the Amistad case:
forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in
the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own
way - everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want - which, translated into world
terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every
nation a healthy peace time life for its inhabitants -everywhere
in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear - which, translated into world
terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point
and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a
position to commit an act of physical aggression against any
neighbor - anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite
basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and
generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the
so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to
create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception - the moral
order. A good society is able to face schemes of world
domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged
in change - in a perpetual peaceful revolution - a revolution
which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing
conditions - without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in
the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of
free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized
society.
This nation has place its destiny in the hands and heads and
hearts of its million of free men and women; and its faith in
freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy
of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who
struggle to gain those right or keep them. Our strength is in
our unity of purpose.
To that high concept there can be no end save victory.
____________________________
"Yet, if the South is right, what are we to do with that embarrassing, annoying document, "The Declaration of Independence?" What of its conceits? "All men...created equal," "inalienable rights," "life," "liberty," and so on and so forth? What on earth are we to do with this?
I have a modest suggestion. . . (He tears up a copy of the DOI)
. . . James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams: We've long resisted asking you for guidance. Perhaps we have feared in doing so we might acknowledge that our individuality which we so revere is not entirely our own. Perhaps we've feared an appeal to you might be taken for weakness. But, we've come to understand, finally, that this is not so. We understand now, we've been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding that who we are is who we were.
We desperately need your strength and wisdom to triumph over our fears, our prejudices, ourselves. Give us the courage to do what is right. And if it means civil war, then let it come. And when it does, may it be, finally, the last battle of the American Revolution."
-PTS
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