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Changing the Constitution
fundamental of civil rights is the right to walk the streets in safety. If the
cities become places of ugliness, drug abuse, and terror, is not talk about
extending the rights of the accused absurd?
(7) Over the past half-century there has grown in the United States,
with alarming speed, that class of people the old Romans (and the modern Marxists) called a proletariat: that is, people who perform no duties,
give nothing to the community but their children, and exist at public expense. America’s leading men of 1787 saw a good many people who
were poor enough, but they did not have to deal with a true proletariat.
Such a class, apathetic but potentially dangerous, has been produced,
ironically enough, by America’s technological and economic triumph.
The hope of the Framers of the Constitution was that a vigorous and conscientious American people would cherish and refresh that Constitution.
A nation of proletarians would require a very different sort of constitution, far less free. Has America today sufficient imagination and intelligence to redeem ‘‘the lonely crowd’’ from proletarian life?
(8) The generation of Americans that framed the Constitution were
humanely schooled in classical literature and English literature, history,
the sciences of the time, political theory, and religion. It was understood
in the early republic that a principal aim of formal education was the
building of good character. But today’s public instruction neglects moral
knowledge, actually forbids religious teaching, reduces historical studies
to a minimum, discards great books in favor of ‘‘current awareness,’’ and
shrinks from the task of forming a philosophical habit of mind. From kindergarten up through graduate school, American education nowadays is
weighed in the balance and found wanting, by official commissions and
foundations’ studies. Study of the Constitution, for one thing, has been
shabbily neglected in the typical school, public or private. A people whose
schooling has been reduced to a vague familiarity with current events or
the mastering of money-making skills may not understand how to keep a
good constitution, or even understand its benefits. Can our democratic republic survive if our educational system fails to encourage such values
as an informed and virtuous citizenry and an understanding and appreciation of the American constitutional system?
(9) A grim destructive power in the modern world is ideology, or political fanaticism, bent upon the destruction of all existing political, social,