Page 2 THE BATTALION
WEDNESDAY, JULY 7, 1976
American success worth celebrating
► WASHINGTON — The officials
-who arranged the display of the
Magna Charta in the rotunda of the
,Capitol as part of the nation’s Bicen
tennial celebration have unwittingly
^provided a splendid guide to the
>-character of the government and so-
Iciety whose birthday we mark.
As one stands beneath the great
' dome, looking at the Latin script in
which the British sovereign was lim
ited in his exercise of absolute
power (the pale letters somehow
t seeming more fragile when sur-
'' rounded by all the burnished gold of
their case), one notices the reflec-
- tions of two statues across the way.
* Looking up from this charter of
t rights, one sees, across the rotunda,
" the statues of two Presidents — Ab-
‘ raham Lincoln and Ulysses S.
Grant.
! What a fine reminder, in this
time of national back-patting, that
J just as our people and our politics
; are fully capable of producing men
•of sublime genius and saintly
-character, so also they produce men
of surpassing mediocrity and moral
) obtuseness. And both kinds become
President.
It recalled the line of H. L.
> Mencken’s, quoted in a recent
' book: “For all I know,” he wrote,
: “democracy is a self-limiting dis
ease . ... There are thumping
paradoxes in its philosophy, and
some of them have a suicidal smack. ”
David S.
B voder
That quotation opens a book by
William Lee Miller of Indiana Uni
versity that is fine reading for a
Bicentennial summer. Its title, in
fact, sums up my own feelings about
America this day: “Of Thee, Never
theless, I Sing.”
There is, to be honest, a bit of
embarrassment about composing a
hymn of praise while walking
through a Capitol where the two
main objects of tourist curiosity are:
first, the Magna Charta and, sec
ond, the office where Elizabeth Ray
did or did not do whatever it was
she was doing for Wayne Hays.
Fortunately, the Founding
Fathers framed the government on
the principle that there are more
Grants and Hayses in any genera
tion than there are Lincolns. Jimmy
Carter may think that all we need is
a government “as good as our
people, ” but the men who wrote the
Constitution knew better.
They knew that rather than rely
ing on the virtue of mankind to pro
duce a virtuous government, they
had better design a system of self-
government where the interests of
each citizen were served by the
preservation of liberty for all.
“It is of great importance in a Re
public,” the Federalist papers re
mind us, “not only to guard the so
ciety against the oppression of its
rulers, but to guard one part of the
society against the injustice of the
other part. Different interests
necessarily exist in different classes
of citizens ... In a society under the
forms of which the stronger can
readily unite and oppress the
weaker, anarchy may. . . truly be
said to reign.... (But) in the ex
tended republic of the United
States, and among the great variety
of interests, parties and sects whicb
it embraces, a coalition of a majority
of the whole society could seldom
take place on any other principles
than those of justice and the general
good.”
That last sentence was an ex
traordinarily bold assertion to make
in 1788, when Hamilton or Madison
submitted that essay to The New
York Packet. But it has not turned
out to be such an idle boast.
True, the people and government
of the United States defended the
unjust institution of slavery for al
most a hundred years. And today, a
century after its abolition, we are
still rebelling at righting the conse
quences of that ancient wrong.
True, in both domestic and foreign
policy, on issues from Teapot Dome
to Vietnam, “justice and the com
mon good have not always been
recognized.
But we have corrected most of
our errors and we have learned from
our experiences. And we have not
— for all the ways we have changed
— lost our grip on the fundamen
tals.
Death pen
barbaric
Premeditated murder is once
again legal in Texas.
The state now has 43 men on its
blacklist who are scheduled to die.
The U.S. Supreme Court has up
held the constitutionality of Texas’
death sentence, and our state offi
cials say they are pleased.
The assumptions about human
nature made by those who support
the death penalty must be laid bare.
They would argue that a man who
has taken a wrong step is evil and
can never be rehabilitated.
Their assumption is that man is
inherently evil, and the only way to
keep him from committing a crime
is to threaten him with death.
A society that grants a license to
anyone, especially the state, to
commit premeditated murder will
have a hard time convincing the so
ciety’s violent elements that murder
and violent crime is not acceptable.
Such barbaric behavior would not
be tolerated by a truly great civiliza
tion.
Those who argue that the death
penalty is a strong deterrent to
premeditated violent crime have no
proof.
An alternative to the death pen
alty is a life prison sentence without
parole.
The real possibility of a lifetime of
confinement would also serve as a
strong deterrent without undermin
ing the moral character of a whole
society.
— Jerry Needham
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Just two years ago, we saw dem
onstrated again that the idea of the
rule of law — the fundamental idea
of the Constitution — exerts as
strong a hold on the minds and
hearts of Americans of this genera
tion as it did 200 years ago. The
American people showed that once
they had the facts, they were pre
pared to render a judgment against
a Chief Executive who had over
stepped the bounds on his power
and force him to yield the office
which they had but recently and by
large majority entrusted to him.
That says something. It says Mr.
Jefferson was not wrong when he
wrote, “Every government degen
erates when trusted to the rulers of
the people alone. The people them
selves are its only safe depositories. ”
We have not forgotten that. We
have operated on that principle and,
for 200 years, we have made it
work.
Faith in government has been se
verely tested in this generation.
Both men and institutions have
failed us. But nothing I have seen as
a journalist has made me doubt
either the capacity or the desire of
this generation of Americans to sus
tain the burden this great experi
ment in self-government imposes.
And that is worth celebrating.
c QFe cjurquoise^Sliopl
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(c) 1976, The Washington Post
Represented nationally by National Educational Advertising Servic
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Mail subscriptions are $16.75 per semester; $33.25 per school year;
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Editor Jerry Needham
Managing Editor Richard Chamberlain
Sports Editor Paul McGrath
Campus Editor Lisa Junod
Photographer Steve Goble
Layout , LeAnn Roby, Susan Brown
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