MARSHALL'S LETTER
January 1999
The precepts and spirit of Magna Charta are always with us, and to this end it is fitting that this last year of the 20th Century leads us to reaffirm the thrust of history’s greatest achievement of "the freedom of man under the rule of law" - America.
America is the newest of great nations, and by many standards, the most interesting. It recapitulates the history of its people, telescopes the development of social, economic and political institutions. Upon it have played most of those great historical forces and factors which have molded previous civilizations : imperialism, nationalism, immigration, industrialism, science, religion, democracy, and liberty, the impact of which forces upon society are more clearly revealed in its history than in the history of other nations. It is, notwithstanding its youth, the oldest democracy, the oldest republic under the oldest written constitution in the world. From its earliest beginnings, its people have been conscious of a special destiny, upon which have been fastened the hopes and aspirations of the human race, and it has not failed to fulfill that destiny or justify those hopes.
America skipped the first 6,000 years of history and emerged upon the historical scene bold and mature. But the New World was not just an extension of the Old. It was what the first settlers anticipated and its founding fathers planned - something new in history. America became the most ambitious experiment ever undertaken in the intermingling of peoples, in religious toleration, social equity, economic opportunity, and political democracy, thus validating "the freedom of man under the rule of law".
There is no parallel in history to the drama of the swift expansion of a small and feeble people across a continent, the growth of a few straggling colonies into the most powerful of nations.
To each generation engaged in a mighty struggle for liberty and democracy, there is something exhilarating in the story of the tenacious exaltation of liberty and the steady growth of democracy in America.
From our mountain passes as feudal castles to our town meetings as majestic royal courts, our hereditary responsibility dictates that we hold fast our hard won principles of freedom, opportunity, integrity, and responsibility.
