From Philadelphia to Philadelphia

Extract

From Philadelphia in 1787 to Philadelphia in 1937 our minds turn back and forth tonight, to pay tribute to the constitutional contributions of the Fathers and to inquire into the constitutional conduct of some of their sons. If we praise the Fathers as hard-headed realists, we may invoke their example to justify a propensity for realism among ourselves. They were creators. We seek to be scholars. Their aim was to build; ours is to understand and to evaluate. Toward them and their building we may bow in deep piety, but without obligation to let awe or reverence obscure our glance at the work of their successors.

Happily, too, our piety need not dim our eyes in looking at the work of the Fathers. Without falsity of fact or of sentiment, we may appraise their achievement. We need not think of them as demigods or as men who met to lay their fortunes on the altar of their country. We can accept to the full the view that their design was to create a government that would serve the interests they had most at heart. If they assumed that what would be best for themselves would be best also for the general good, in this they were not unique. Even today, men sometimes fuse the special and the general, as perhaps some papers on our program may prove.

Man need not be noble to be wise, unwise as it may be in the long run not to be noble. The advancement of special interests may at a given time conduce greatly to a wide general interest. The wisdom of the achievement of 1787 may be assessed by an evaluation of results without inquiring whether it was the fruit of sacrifice. The results, of course, may be overestimated.