话说美利坚 [屏蔽][屏蔽]

Every day in Moscow, the Russians and the tourists troop past the guards at the tomb of Lenin and pause to look down on the corpse of the Father of the Revolution. Presumably they do so without a shudder, for the body has been preserved by a special chemical process for nearly half a century. These people, however, are not in Moscow. They're in Washington. And they are looking at something which to Americans is an equally sacred icon. It is the birth certificate of the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence.

Like Lenin, the Declaration of Independence is guarded day and night and it also is preserved under a special glass and coated with a chemically treated film which for two centuries has defied the ravages of time. The first signature might well have defied them anyway. It's that of a man from Massachusetts, John Hancock, who escaped capture in the first battle of the War of Independence, then had his ship confiscated and burntby the British. He wrote his signature in this large way, he said, "so that the King of England can read it without his glasses". Even today, an American handing you, for instance, a contract is apt to say, "And now if you will just give us your John Hancock."

After him, the Declaration was signed by the five who drafted it. Benjamin Franklin, the 70-year-old sage of Philadelphia. John Adams, a Massachusetts lawyer, who was to become the second President of the United States. Roger Sherman of Connecticut, once an apprentice shoemaker and now also a lawyer. Robert Livingston, a New York owner of iron mines. And the 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, who wrote practically the whole document. The rest of the signers were a variety of lawyers, merchants, shippers, planters, 56 in all, who signed this birth certificate which was also a declaration of war and of revolution. Offhand, they wouldn't strike us today as revolutionary types.

At the end of the 18th century, the very idea of revolution itself was strange. And there were two sentences written by Thomas Jefferson in that document you’ve just seen that were literally world-shaking. The first one was the idea that all men are created equal and have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now, there was an awful lot of argument about that phrase and, in the end, most of the men who signed the Declaration sulkily agreed to let "happiness" stand. But then they went home and they wrote in their state constitutions, "Life, liberty and the acquisition and protection of property." This was not because they were tycoons. Property was no dowry. It was the very means of life that they'd had to wrench out of wilderness. But now look at this. This was the stick of dynamite. "To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Well... the idea that if you didn't like the way you were governed, you being the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, that you had some right to overthrow the parliament, the king, the tribal chieftain, this was a firebrand that was to blow up France and the German Republic and Imperial Russia and, eventually, the whole idea of empire. But, I think it's fair to say that Americans take a much simpler view of their revolution as a straightforward, heroic break with a tyrannical king and parliament an ocean away.