A Bicentennial note — an inalienable right to liberty
The American colonists demanded liberty because they knew there was no life with good quality about it apart from genuine freedom. Nor could a people seek the blessings of true happiness while laboring under the constraints of tyrannical government. The kind of liberty that was real enough to be felt, breathed, cherished, and defended, if need be, was necessary to both. Mere existence was a mockery to life with quality and an unsubtle denial of the very ability to pursue happiness. They set their sights upon the real thing. The thing they had was only a poor copy. They sought political liberty because they knew that it was the presupposition of every citizen's pe rsonal liberty. Not that having the first is a guarantee of the second. Many an American citizen is still clamoring for the personal freedoms he knows to be firmly embedded in the guarantees of the Constitution of the United States. Nevertheless, there's hope for justice there, if only ''ultimate justice.'' Governments that do not even assure their people of such freedoms furnish them no hope at all.