| 摘要 | Lecturer: Martin Diamond, Professor of political science, Northern Illinois University
Lecture delivered at Independence Square, Philadelphia, in the House of Representatives Chamber, Congress Hall
Host: Vermont C. Royster
Editor’s Note: Precisely how did the American institutions of government spring from the principle of the Declaration of Independence? How and to what extent were they generated by the Declaration of Independence? And what more had to be added actually to frame those institutions? Martin Diamond explores these questions in a Bicentennial lecture.
“I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live.” Those lovely words, I am sorry to say, are not my own. They were uttered by Abraham Lincoln in February 1861, only days before he assumed the terrible burdens of his presidency. But I cannot possibly find words better to express my own deep emotion at having the opportunity to share with you, in this hallowed place, my recollections as these are occasioned by the impending bicentennial of our national birth.
Because of the struggle then tormenting and dividing the Union, Lincoln was obliged to look back upon the origins of the American republic to find the wisdom, patriotism, and devotion to principle that might save the Union and reinspirit its republican institutions. We are under no such compelling necessity tonight. Our occasion is only inspired by the happy imminence of our bicentennial. And yet, for us too the backward glance remains a necessity. Lincoln was obliged to look back to the men who met in Independence Hall in 1776 because it was their thoughts and words expressed immortally in the Declaration of Independence “from which sprang the institutions under which we live.” We live still to an amazing extent under those same institutions. And like Lincoln, if we wish to understand those institutions, then we too must return to the thoughts of the Founding Fathers. We too must look to the architects for the plan of the house in which we still reside. No task could be more agreeable to me here, the child of immigrant grandparents whose grateful patriotism in structed my youth.
There is a fascinating ambiguity in those words of Lincoln which I have quoted. We must remember that there were two great happenings here at Independence Square, the first in 1776 when independence was proclaimed in the Declaration, and the second eleven years later when the Federal Convention met for four long months and drafted the Constitution. When we look back to our origins we look to the same place, here in Philadelphia, but to two different times and events — to 1776 and 1787, to the Declaration and the Constitution.
They are the two springs of our existence. To understand their relationship is to understand the political core of our being, and hence to understand what it is that we are soon to celebrate the bicentennial of. It is to this never-to-be-severed relationship of the Declaration and the Constitution that I address my remarks. In doing so I simply follow the lead of Lincoln. Let me repeat his words.
I am filled with deep emotion at nding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live.
Notice how neatly Lincoln blends in this single sentence both 1776 and 1787, both Declaration and Constitution. By the “institutions under which we live,” he refers of course to the institutions devised by the framers of the Constitution. But these institutions, Lincoln reminds us in the same breath, sprang from a “devotion to principle,” to the principle of the Declaration. Only in the unity of the Declaration’s principle and the Constitution’s institutions does the American Republic achieve its complete being, and Lincoln never ceased from the effort to sustain or restore that unity. We must do no less.
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