One hundred and fifty-six years ago, fifty-six rather ordinary men—farmers, merchants and lawyers for the most part—met in Philadelphia and signed their names to a document which, but for the character of Washington and the devious diplomacy of the King of France, might easily have been their death-warrant. Public authorities have a habit of hanging you by the neck until you are dead, if you guess wrong when you sign a document like the Declaration of Independence. Its ideas and rhetoric were rather florid —they were the work of a young Virginian slave-owner named Tom Jefferson who was up on the ideas of the French intelligentsia of the day, a godless crew who had notions about the inalienable rights of mankind to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. However, a respectable catalogue of abuses —all of which were quite real—convinced the hard-headed practical politicians who signed that they were on the right track, and the document was delivered to a world which took it all calmly. It was not until men had fought and died for it, that the Declaration of Independence became anything more than a clever piece of propaganda designed to convince the American colonists that they were badly treated, to win the military and diplomatic support of France and to enlist the sympathy of the Whig Opposition in the British Parliament. When the Declaration had successfully survived the baptism in human blood and suffering which is the test of all great political documents, it became a force so potent in our national affairs that even today street-corner radicals read it in public to annoy the police and to bewilder those nice people who cannot understand that political principles have any place in human affairs outside of office hours, as it were.

For when Yankee Doodle came of age, he bought himself a Buick, stuck a piece of chewing gum in his mouth and proceeded to go Babbitt. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the idea of liberty and independence began to narrow down to a series of unimportant personal choices: whether to buy a Ford or a Chevrolet, whether to see Garbo or Menjou, whether to be teetotal or to buy from a bootlegger, whether to doctor the income tax return or not, whether to vote for "A", "B" or nobody, whether to yell for a bonus or a tariff rate, whether to buy General Motors or Anaconda Copper, whether the pea was under the middle thimble. Letting George do it became the guiding principle of American political life, and the result was an almost religious reverence for printed pieces of paper, such as the Declaration of Independence or the Federal Constitution, coupled with an imbecile indifference to the conduct of our public life. Dry-rot set in and to-day we awake to find that Al Capone means a good deal more in our young life than do George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, all rolled into one; that we have wasted our national resources and have squandered our national income, that the graft and corruption of Prohibition is bolstered by the forces of organized religion; that service in a war fought fourteen years ago is regarded as a license to loot the treasury; that our cities are in the grip of machine politicians who have complete atrophy of the sense of financial self-control; that Congress is leaderless and chaotic; and that everybody is waiting for somebody else to do something about it.

If there were abuses in 1776 which were so serious as to justify revolt against our then lawful Sovereign, King George III, and resistance to the laws duly enacted by the Parliament of Great Britain, what shall we say of to-day? The Spirit of 1776 seems to have lost its potency or else Americans have lost the spirit of their ancestors, for the miseries inflicted upon us by King George are nothing compared to those which we have brought upon ourselves. Where is the group of men who will pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to a new Declaration of Independence? Playing golf. Contributing to the campaign funds of both Parties. Summering in Europe. Donating carillons. Playing safe with their jobs and their reputations. Unwilling to risk hardship or criticism in the face of the ugly abuses which have swapped the charter of American liberty for a sucker list and have turned the political institutions of this country into a cash register.

Our ancestors felt annoyed because the King had loosed the Indian savages upon their settlements. What about our homicide rate? our hung juries? the Lindbergh Baby? the Ala Moana rape case? the machine-guns of the beer-barons? the enormous toll levied by organized crime? So long as we lead the civilized world in our record of unpunished murders, so long as our lawyers, court procedure and prison system are more preoccupied with making the law safe for lawyers and criminals, than with giving the people swift and substantial justice, we have nothing to be proud about. With ten thousand homicides a year, the memory of the war-whoop and the scalping party grows dim.

The signers of the Declaration accused the King of having "erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance." What the King did in that way pales into insignificance before the million and a quarter of public officials—city, county, state and national—who have sent the cost of government in the United States climbing until it has reached the alarming figure of fourteen billion dollars a year: a sum which eats up nearly a third of our present national income. With our cities spending money as though it were water, with our States squabbling with the Federal government for sources of taxation, and with the national government unable to conceive of any substantial economy other than a slash in the already low official salaries which will yield only enough to stop the deficit for two days, with the national domain squandered and our great natural resources in timber and oil being wasted recklessly, where is the statesman who has the courage to take his career into his hands and risk political defeat in order to put an end to the waste, loot and extravagance of public finance in America? Who will budge our budget blasters and cow our political cowards?

Poor old King George III was accused of having refused his consent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good, for which refusal he was termed a tyrant. What is that compared with the nerveless refusal of our legislative bodies to give us relief from a short-sighted and arbitrary measure of Prohibition, which has corrupted the agencies of law, which has riddled the police and Coast Guard with graft, which has cost the lives of hundreds and thousands of our citizens, from poisoned alcohol, from the bullets of the police and the machine-guns of the bootleggers, and which has permeated the entire enforcement of the law with arbitrary judicial actions, with espionage, wire-tapping and deliberate entrapment? So long as we have a law which stands between the government and a tax yield of a billion dollars a year, and which gives to organized crime revenues sufficient to support a great State, and so long as the fanatical drys support this measure and the will of thirteen of our gopher-ridden and sheep-ranch States can balk the will of the majority of our citizens to change this law, we need take no particular pride in the idea that our system of government represents a marked improvement over that to which we objected when we were royal colonies.

Another crime committed by King George III was that "he has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies . . ." and "affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power". At his worst, however, he did not devote to the support of these armies, one quarter of all the colonial revenue. He did not contend that every veteran of the Seven Years War was entitled to a bonus, to free hospitalization for injuries and ailments incurred in civil life, or that the wife and children of that veteran should be entitled to a pension after the veteran had passed from this vale of tears and taxes. The bonus grabbers of 1932 are a home-grown product. When the veterans themselves admit that $450,000,000 out of the billion dollars a year which is lavished on the veterans of the World War, is virtually graft, dirty money, a racket in patriotism, and when one fourth of the entire national budget is devoted to meeting the legalized demands of the veterans lobbies, we wonder whether it would not be better to get back the standing armies. When, moreover, our patriotic veterans start off the Federal deficit with a bang in 1931, by demanding and getting a billion dollars bonus and propose to follow it in 1932 with a further grab of two and a half billions, it is time to send for the "foreign Mercenaries" of whom the Signers complained. They at least were Hessians and hired to fight. When the mercenaries who are wrecking the Treasury are the very men who should defend the nation and its institutions, there is a dirty smear across the face of our illusion that it is a man's duty to serve his country in time of need, and that his service does not entitle him to be supported at public expense for the rest of his life or to have his wife and children pensioned by the Government after he has gone.

The Signers of the Declaration of Independence said a good many hard things about the way in which King George shuffled and dealt the political cards so as to assure the continuance of the King's Government and authority in spite of colonial ideas that the consent of the governed and representation of the tax-payer entered into the picture. What consent do the governed give to our political machines, with their Tammany tin boxes, their kowtowing to minority blackmailers, their paying campaign promises with public jobs and contracts, their ruthless snuffing out of political independence and their utter indifference to unorganized voters? Government by political parties in America has degenerated into government by political contractors. Machines fight clear of ideas and issues, and cling to passions and prejudices. For a generation after the Civil War the Republicans kept themselves in office on the strength of that war and nothing else. To-day, the heart and soul of the Democratic Party is the solid South, with its fear of liberal ideas, its consciousness of the Negro and its hallowed memories of Marse Robert and the Confederacy. Our States, our counties and, above all, our cities are in the grip of political machines—the Vares, the Tammanys, the Big Bill Thompsons—which have reduced the ballot to a mathematical science which can deliver any majority, anywhere, at any time, to anybody who will pay the price. So firmly are these machines entrenched and so blind is their confidence in the apathy of the voters, so absolute their reliance on the intricacies of the primary, the party convention and the long ballot, that it will take a political revolution to dislodge them.

One thing alone, the Signers left out of their catalogue of abuses: Congress. In their innocence, they thought that self-government would cure all things. They could not foresee that the inevitable trend of American history would produce a representative body deprived of leadership, muddle-headed to a degree which has brought American self-government into disrepute. The way it works out is appallingly simple. A Congressman has a pretty good job, as jobs go these days; $10,000 a year and mileage are not to be sniffed at in this the year 3 A. D. (After the Depression); he does not want to lose it. He knows that back in his district there is, normally speaking, a safe majority of 600 votes for him and that the same applies to the primaries in the rockbound districts of the North and South. He knows moreover that only about a third of the voters in his district will bother to go to the polls. The machine will deliver the machine vote, but what about the other two-thirds? There are, perhaps, eight hundred Veterans in his district. Their representatives say they must have a bonus or else . . . There is a big manufacturer of knotholes in the district, employing a thousand men. The manufacturer says that he wants a high tariff on knot-holes or else . . . The Congressman sees the point. There are twelve thousand Methodists in his district. The bishop says that they must have a bigger appropriation for Prohibition enforcement or else . . . There are several thousand farmers in his district and the Grange says they must have the export debenture or free loans to farmers, or else . . . The Congressman sees the point. There is only one millionaire in his district and everybody else thinks that all the taxes should be paid by millionaires, or else . . . The system of government by blocs, by blackmail and by bullying has reached a degree where, faced with the most serious crisis in our history, Congress is impotent, bewildered and trying to please everybody at once and to hold on to its jobs. This is a time when any real patriot in office would not give a damn whether he were reelected, if his defeat were caused by an action designed to promote the public good. The function of a Congressman is to serve the nation first and his district second. His defeat or reelection is a matter of no importance whatsoever. If Congress has the right to send our men to war, we have the right to insist that Congress take a few risks in time of national emergency. The men who play safe in war-time are called by an ugly name; the politicians who play safe deserve at least the name of coward.

Such are the abuses which have made a mockery of American Independence in 1932. They are abuses which strike at the foundations of our social life and political institutions. Bad as they are, they are only the symptoms of a deeper evil: the evil of our own political indifference. The man who said that nations have the sort of government which they deserve flattered the American people. We have a much better government than we deserve. For generations we have been sending our best brains and biggest men into business, for private profit, rather than into government, for the public good. Whenever we have, by accident, a really first-rate man in the White House, we practically tear him limb from limb. Our treatment of our greater Presidents is a disgrace to human nature. We have, at the same time, let representative government go by default. Only about half of the electorate bother to vote in a national election; the proportion is much lower in State and city elections; as a result we get second-rate men in Congress, third-rate men in our State Legislatures, and fourth, fifth and sixth-rate men in our cities, counties and villages, and then we complain because they do not give us first-rate government. The wonder is that we don't get tenth-rate government.

The time has come to change all this. The old political parties are powerless, fettered to the corpse of dead geographical and economic allegiances; the process of government has become so ingeniously complicated that it is a paradise for lawyers and the nursery of crooks. Only a new political spirit, a new American Revolution which will carry us back to first principles and will express itself in a new political organization, can save us from the tyrannies which we are inflicting upon ourselves, from our bonus grabbers and our budget blasters, from minority blackmailers and political cowardice, from the fanaticism of our professional reformers and the muddling of our representatives. Where are there fifty-six—or even six—leaders who will grasp the demand of the people that these intolerable abuses shall end and who will take their political and economic lives in their hands to subscribe to a new declaration of independence from organized crime, governmental waste, prohibition graft, veterans rackets, machine politics and congressional chaos? If the will to action can be found, the withered arm of citizenship will find the power to tear the bloody hand of criminal demagogy and entrenched corruption from the charter of our liberties. Let there be but ten men, so long as they are strong, determined and know their own mind, who can break with past allegiances and form a new center of political action in national affairs, and the future will be theirs.