The Future of the Experiment

The Declaration of American Independence is both an end and a beginning. For the Colonists there is now only one road to be followed, with many dangers at every turning. For King George III, who predicted last week's action last year--and who has labored, in his own perverse, indefatigable way to bring it about --the course is equally clear. "The die is now cast," he has rightly said. "The Colonies must either submit or triumph."

Which will it be? The British armada now invading New York must fill even the redoubtable General Washington with foreboding. If the Howe brothers succeed in driving Washington out of New York, they can probably seize the whole Hudson Valley and cut America in half. Will Americans then have the courage and stamina to fight on? Yet even an American triumph, as miraculous as it now seems to many skeptics, will bring new problems. Britain can survive without its American Colonies, but the outcome for America, despite its vast riches and its ingenious people, is by no means clear.

To begin with, there is the obstacle of space itself. The distance from New Hampshire to Georgia is 1,300 miles--approximately the distance from London to St. Petersburg--and a message can go from Boston to London just about as fast as it can from Boston to Savannah. Few western rulers since the Roman emperors have ever been able to keep together such a vast territory for very long. The new states are separated, moreover, not only by miles but also by religion, customs, habits and temperaments. Because of such differences, some Loyalists to the Crown are already raising the specter of civil war--or wars --if the British presence is removed.

Adding to the fear of anarchy is the fact that there are some Americans who oppose all central governments, even their own, and who view the Declaration of Independence as a declaration not against Britain alone but against all large governments. Unity, for them, is a means and not an end. There should be a clear warning to Americans in the failure of Benjamin Franklin's plan for a colonial union against the French just before the French and Indian War. "Everyone cries a union is absolutely necessary," he complained, "but when it comes to the manner and form of the union, their weak noodles are perfectly distracted."

Aside from all the military, political and economic problems, Americans must ask an equally important question: Is independence really justified? Are the principles, the view of man, underlying last week's Declaration valid, and can a commonwealth based on them endure? Even now, many Americans are probably more committed to the principle of governmental legitimacy than most Europeans are. While the Americans' experience in a strange and unspoiled new world has liberated them from many outworn European ideas, it has at the same time made them cling for protection to basic European concepts of government and the rule of law.

Through most of history, the king has been thought to be an essential link in God's ordering of the universe, not necessarily divine himself but part of a divine system. Strongly influenced by modern European scientists and philosophers, as well as their own inherent practicality, Americans accept the divine system, but they believe that the ruling force in that divine chain is not a single man called king but man's own reason, as expressed through the will of the people. Whereas their ancestors of 100 or 150 years ago mistrusted man's rationality and relied instead on the revelations of the Scriptures, modern American leaders believe that reason, at its best, is the voice of truth and God made manifest. Far from destroying legitimate government in the current Revolt, the authors of the Declaration believe that they are restoring it, returning to Americans the rights guaranteed them under the British Constitution, that "mirror of liberty" as Montesquieu has called it. "God himself does not govern in an absolutely arbitrary and despotic manner," said the late Boston divine Jonathan Mayhew.

This trust in reason is an audacious concept, and never before has a people deliberately set out to establish its political life on a principle so pure. Some argue that it is too pure a principle for fallible men. George III may be wrongheaded, they acknowledge, but the British monarchy is all that stands between the Americans and discord, disunity, and that brutish world of brutish men that the English Philosopher Thomas Hobbes envisioned more than a century ago. These skeptics dismiss as naive optimism the arguments of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau that natural man is good and is corrupted only by society. Nor, they go on, is equality, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, a feasible goal for any people. Man may be created equal, even as the Declaration avers, but he soon creates his own inequalities as he strives for power. In a state of absolute liberty, the strong man will always be more equal than the weak man. By curbing liberties, a monarch, ironically, may be expanding equality, protecting the weak against the strong and ensuring that both have their time in the sun. Perhaps the greatest peril to the future of the American experiment is that contending groups, properly encouraged to strive for their selfinterest, will do so with such heedless vehemence that the needs of society as a whole will be forgotten.

So far in man's still uncompleted story, those who distrust reason have had the better of the argument. Given total liberty, men seem too often to steer toward the state of savagery as if that were their true, natural home. There is also the possibility that reason in time will lose the religious and moral grounding it has today and turn into a mere mechanical instrument, unable to guide man through his most difficult problems. The Americans, however, may yet write a new, brighter chapter to man's story. While trusting in reason as no other men in government have before them, the representatives to Congress seem determined to hedge that trust by creating a government or governments that check one man's reason against the reason of his fellows--and to check both against the law, the collective wisdom of generations. Is independence justified? And will it work? The delegates in Philadelphia, and most of their fellow citizens, would answer yes--if man is indeed the rational, moral creature, capable of self-control for the greater good, that the Americans of 1776 believe him to be.

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