THE AMERICAN C011MONWEALTH 587
su peri or to the citizen. E very law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case. \"1 e may make as good; we may make better." More to the present point is the language of Se\vard: "The rights asserted by our forefathers \vere not peculiar to themselves, they \vere the common rights of mankind. The basis of the constitution was laid broader by far than the super- structure which the conflicting interests and prejudices of the day suffered to be erected. The constitution and la\vs of the federal government did not practical1y extend those principles throughout the new system of government; but they were plainly promulgated in the declaration of independence. Their complete development and reduction to practical operation constitute the progress which all liberal statesmen desire to promote, and the end of that progress \vill be complete political equality among our- selves, and the extension and perfection of institutions similar to our own throughout the \vorld." A passage \vhich Hamilton's editor selects as the keynote of his system expresses \vell enough the spirit of the Revolution: "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power. I consider civil liberty, in a genuine, unadulterated sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am convinced that the whole human race is entitled to it, and that it can be wrested from no part of them without the blackest and most aggravated guilt." Those \vere the days \vhen a philosopher divided governments into two kinds, the bad and the good, that is, those \vhich exist and those which do not exist; and \vhen Burke, in the fervour of early liberalism, proclaÏ1ned that a revolution was the only thing that cou]d do the world any good: "Nothing less than a convulsion that will shake the globe to its centre can ever restore the European nations to that liberty by which they \vere once so much distinguished."
