5000 Year Leap (25 page)

   Political power automatically gravitates toward the center, and the purpose of the Constitution is to prevent that from happening. The centralization of political power always destroys liberty by removing the decision-making function from the people on the local level and transferring it to the officers of the central government. This process gradually benumbs the spirit of "voluntarism" among the people, and they lose the will to solve their own problems. They also cease to be involved in community affairs. They seek the anonymity of oblivion in the seething crowds of the city and often degenerate into faceless automatons who have neither a voice nor a vote.

   How different from the New England town spirit, where every person had a voice and a vote. How different from the Anglo-Saxon tribal meetings, where the people were considered sovereign and every man took pride in participating. And how different from ancient Israel, where the families of the people were governed in multiples of tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands, and where problems were solved on the level where those problems originated. All of those societies had strong local self-government. This is what the Founding Fathers considered the golden key to preserving freedom.

   Thomas Jefferson saw the advantages of the close-knit New England town over the aristocratic rural life of Virginia. Said he:

   "These wards, called townships in New England, are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self government, and for its preservation."
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   Jefferson was anxious to have all the English colonists in America revive the customs of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors, including strong local self-government. As historian Richard Frothingham points out:

   "In ancient England, local self-government is found in connection with the political and territorial divisions of tythings, hundreds, burghs, counties, and shires, in which the body of inhabitants had a voice in managing their own affairs. Hence it was the germinal idea of the Anglo-Saxon polity.

   "In the course of events, the Crown deprived the body of the people of this power of local rule, and vested it in a small number of persons in each locality, who were called municipal councils, were clothed with the power of filling vacancies in their number, and were thus self-perpetuating bodies. In this way, the ancient freedom of the municipalities was undermined, and the power of the ruling classes was installed in its place. Such was the nature of the local self-government in England, not merely during the period of the planting of her American colonies (1607 to 1732), but for a century later.... It was a noble form robbed of its life-giving spirit."
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   Nevertheless, Frothingham points out that these ancient institutions were not entirely forgotten by the people. He quotes the French historian and statesman Francois Guizot as saying:

   "When there scarcely remained traces of popular assemblies, the remembrance of them, of the right of freemen to deliberate and transact their business together, resided in the minds of men as a primitive tradition, and a thing which might come about again."
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   Frothingham says this is exactly what happened as Englishmen pulled away from the mother country and migrated to America. He says that in the colonies, "These assemblies reappeared, and old rights were again enjoyed, when the emigrants to the soil now the United States began to frame the laws under which they were to live."
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   As the Founders wrote their laws, they were determined to protect the freedom of the individual and provide a vigorous climate of healthy, local self-government. Only those things which related to the interest of the entire commonwealth were to be delegated to the central government. Thomas Jefferson probably said it better than anyone when he wrote:

   "The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to [perform best]. Let the national government be entrusted with the defense of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police, and administration of what concerns the State generally; the counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each ward [township] direct the interests within itself. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics, from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man's farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate."
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   James Madison, who is sometimes described as "the father of the Constitution," emphasized the necessity to reserve all possible authority in the states and the people. The Constitution delegates to the federal government only that which involves the whole people as a nation. He wrote:

   "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former [federal powers] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce.... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State."
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   Thomas Jefferson emphasized that if the oncoming generations perpetuated the Constitutional pattern, the federal government would be small and cohesive and would serve as an inexpensive operation because of the limited problems which would be assigned to it. He wrote:

   "The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants."
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   One of the greatest American historians of the last generation was John Fiske. He caught the spirit of the Founders and studied their writings. He knew the secret to the 5,000 year leap which was then well on its way. He also saw some dangerous trends away from the Founders' basic formula of sound government. He therefore wrote a prophecy which Americans of our own day might ponder with profit:

   "If the day should ever arrive (which God forbid!) when the people of the different parts of our country shall allow their local affairs to be administered by prefects sent from Washington, and when the self government of the states shall have been so far lost as that of the departments of France, or even so closely limited as that of the counties of England -- on that day the political career of the American people will have been robbed of its most interesting and valuable features, and the usefulness of this nation will be lamentably impaired."
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   To be governed by the whims of men is to be subject to the ever-changing capriciousness of those in power. This is ruler's law at its worst. In such a society nothing is dependable. No rights are secure. Things established in the present are in a constant state of flux. Nothing becomes fixed and predictable for the future.

   The American Founders and their Anglo-Saxon forebears had an entirely different point of view. They defined law as a "rule of action" which was intended to be as binding on the ruler as it was upon the people. It was designed to give society a stable frame of reference so the people could feel secure in making plans for the future. As John Locke said:

   "Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to everyone of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it."
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   Under established law every person's rights and duties are defined. Anglo-Saxon common law provided a framework of relative security and a sense of well-being for people and things, both present and future. This is the security which is designed to provide a high degree of freedom from fear and therefore freedom to act. Such a society gives its people a sense of liberty -- liberty under law. The American Founders believed that without the protection of law there can be no liberty.

   John Locke pointed out that unless a society can provide a person with a code of fixed and enforceable laws, he might as well have stayed in the jungle:

   "To this end it is that men give up all their natural power to the society they enter into, and the community put the legislative power into such hands as they think fit, with this trust, that they shall be governed by declared laws, or else their peace, quiet, and property will still be at the same uncertainty as it was in the state of Nature."
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   John Adams expressed the same tenor of thought when he said:

   "No man will contend that a nation can be free that is not governed by fixed laws. All other government than that of permanent known laws is the government of mere will and pleasure."
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   Human experience has taught mankind this same principle down through the ages. Here are the words of Aristotle in his
Politics
:

   "Even the best of men in authority are liable to be corrupted by passion. We may conclude then that the law is reason without passion, and it is therefore preferable to any individual."
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   We deduct from this that Aristotle had concluded that the teachings of his mentor, Plato, were wrong. Plato believed that in the ideal society the people should be governed "by the few" who would rule according to "scientific principles" and make on-the-spot decisions to force the people to do what is good for them.
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Plato argued that these men must not be restricted by written laws but should govern the people in whatever manner they felt was for the best. He said: